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Sicilian Culture: News & Views
A Town's Long Road to Recovery
By JR Moehringer, Los Angeles Times
February 16, 2002 (MANHASSET, NY) ...For generations, this small town 17 miles east of Manhattan has straddled two identities. Simple country village, enclave of vast wealth. A cross between "Our Town" and Fat City. Even before F. Scott Fitzgerald romanticized Manhasset and used it as the setting for much of "The Great Gatsby," the town had a reputation as one of those lovely places where the American dream rings true, and often comes true.
Now, Manhasset has a different reputation. Like nearby Garden City and Belle Harbor, Manhasset will always be known as one of those tiny dots on the map that took a disproportionate hit Sept. 11.
Elsewhere in the country, people may be moving forward, gingerly trying to get back to normal. Here, where the loss was so focused, the grief is fading more slowly. In this 350-year-old community,...residents find themselves, in Fitzgerald's words, "borne back ceaselessly into the past." "Everything feels different,"...
Optimists among Manhasset's 18,376 residents like to say the gloom is lifting. They talk with tight smiles about the resilience of residents, the indomitable human spirit, the fresh start that comes with a new year. But each day brings new evidence that things are not normal.
The sadness ebbs for a time; then, like the tide in Manhasset Bay, it returns...
"There's a pall over Manhasset," says Lillian Orofino, owner of Olive Duntley Florist. "People are just going through the motions."
"People who were born here," says her husband, Ray, "who grew up here . . ."
He stops and wipes his eyes with a rough, stained hand.". . . don't live here no more."
The Orofinos' son worked in the World Trade Center. He should have been at his desk the morning of the attacks. But after keeping his staff of 28 computer technicians working late into the night Sept. 10, he gave everyone--himself included--the next morning off.
When the Orofinos first heard that the World Trade Center was in flames, they didn't know their son was safe, sleeping late. They locked up their shop and dashed to his house.
Later, after their relief wore off, dread set in. They began to hear names, an endless roll call of names. People who weren't so lucky. People who hadn't yet stepped safely off one of the trains pulling into Manhasset's station like troop trains limping back from battle...
Among the dead were men the Orofinos knew as boys and watched grow. Their big round faces were as welcome in the shop as new daisies. They may have come to the Orofinos to buy orchids for their mothers, corsages for their prom dates, roses for their wives. Now, the Orofinos were making floral arrangements for their funerals.
In those warm days of late September, there was a sickening false spring in Manhasset as the town bloomed overnight with condolence bouquets.
Along with every other business in town, the Orofinos' flower shop sits on Plandome Road, the only commercial strip. Like a cardboard set for a play about small-town America, Plandome Road is the backdrop and foreground of life in Manhasset.
Beginning at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, the road runs down a gentle hill, past the bars where the men hang out, past the hair salons where the women hang out, past the soda fountains where the teens hang out, all the way to the yacht clubs, where the rich float out on Long Island Sound.
You can always read the mood of the town on Plandome Road, residents say. Especially now, with the stores empty, the bars and churches packed...
Plandome Road is where residents come for an egg sandwich at Manhasset Deli, a scotch and soda at Dunhill's, a slice of pizza at Gino's, a fishing license at Town Hall. Plandome Road is the site of the old-fashioned bandstand, where summer concerts are performed and where the town gathered in September for a wrenching candlelight vigil...
Louie's is where residents stop before boarding their morning trains to Manhattan. Newspapers, cup of coffee, see you tomorrow, Louie. Just after Sept. 11, Lillian Orofino went there to search for faces.
There can't be a perfect list of the dead in Manhasset, because the town claims many who grew up here, or had roots here, but didn't live here at the time of the attacks. So Louie's, Orofino knew, would be the best place to gauge the town's loss: If someone stopped appearing at Louie's, the reasons were likely to be ominous.
After a few weeks, she spotted a man she hadn't seen since the attacks and nearly hugged him. She didn't know the man, but she was overcome with joy, and relief, because she'd presumed he was dead.
"That's what happens in a small town," she says. "You don't know everybody. But you know everybody's face."
Today, the cooks at Louie's still watch the faces, still listen for those special orders no longer ordered. The man who came in every morning--short stack of flapjacks, regular coffee, two sugars--will never come again. On weekends, he would bring his wife and children. Now, when the wife and children stop in without him, it breaks everyone's hearts.
There is a rumor in town that the wife and children of another vanished customer are selling their house, moving away. Hard times, say the people sitting at Louie's counter...
A few steps up Plandome Road, at Phil's Manhasset Sports Shop, Little League players still bound through the door after school, as they have since the store opened in 1947.
Some days, the boys actually spend money on a new mitt or a pair of tube socks. Most days, though, they just spill soda, knock things over, roughhouse, until one of the clerks chases them off.
Same as always. And yet, not the same, because some of the boys have lost coaches, uncles, fathers. So the clerks go easier on them these days...
Phil Ruggiero, the 90-year-old owner of the shop, remembers when Plandome Road was a dirt path. He's seen an endless procession up and down Plandome Road--sons and daughters of Manhasset marching past his window, followed by their sons and daughters, and nothing has ever really changed. Until now.
"This is the worst thing to ever happen to this town," he says.
On Memorial Day, Ruggiero notes, the parade starts at the bottom of Plandome Road and ends at the top. The whole town turns out, there are flags everywhere, and the local newspaper publishes the names of every resident who died in war.
Same thing every year.
But this year, the newspaper also will publish the names of those who died in the World Trade Center--a number that exceeds the town's total dead in the Civil War, World War I, Korea and Vietnam.
www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-021602ourtown.story
Required Reading for
Italian-Americans...
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