Monthly Archives: June 2016

Vapors is located on Main Street in Port Jefferson. Photo by Elana Glowatz

Local governments are cracking down on smoking in all its forms by confining related businesses to certain locations.

Brookhaven Town recently restricted smoke shops and lounges and one village is looking to strengthen rules already in place for the establishments.

The action started in the fall, when the Port Jefferson Village Board of Trustees passed a law that effectively banned hookah shops, as well as tattoo parlors and adult entertainment. Residents and village officials had been vocal about what they perceived to be too many shops on Main Street selling hookahs — water pipes used for smoking flavored tobacco — and their related products. Many had complained that the businesses attract an undesirable type of person to the area and sell unhealthy items. Some also said they feared the shops would sell paraphernalia and dangerous substances to underage patrons.

The dissent propelled a law that now restricts future hookah shops, tattoo parlors and adult establishments like topless bars to the Light Industrial I-2 District zone. While the preexisting shops are not affected, the law effectively bans future shops because only two properties in the entire village are zoned light industrial — and both of those Columbia Street plots are already occupied.

Hookah City is located on Main Street in Port Jefferson. Photo by Elana Glowatz
Hookah City is located on Main Street in Port Jefferson. Photo by Elana Glowatz

Passing an outright ban would have been an illegal action.

Port Jefferson Village is now seeking to tighten its restrictions by folding into the law marijuana dispensaries and stores selling products linked to e-cigarettes and vaporizers. The village code proposal, which will come up for a public hearing on June 6, states that such establishments bring “well-documented negative secondary effects … such as increased crime, decreased property values and reduced shopping and commercial activities.” It also cites the health risks of e-cigarettes and the dangers of exposing children to the behavior.

“The expansion of the foregoing businesses has resulted in increased anti-social behavior involving minors,” it says.

Among the restrictions, the shops in the light industrial zone could not be within a certain distance of facilities such as community centers, churches or schools.

The Town of Brookhaven got on the same train recently when its town board passed a law on May 12 that restricts indoor smoking establishments — businesses in which tobacco in any form, including through e-cigarettes and vaporizers, or other substances are smoked indoors. New shops can now no longer open within certain distances of residential areas, schools, churches, parks or other family- or child-oriented places. They also cannot open within 1 mile of one another.

Councilwoman Jane Bonner (C-Rocky Point), who came up with the idea, touted it as a measure to prevent kids from using drugs.

“You cannot believe how creative addicts and users are when it comes to situations like this,” she said, “what they can do and how they can manipulate this apparatus.”

Some have used hookahs, vaporizers and other tobacco devices to smoke marijuana, among other substances.

“This legislation came to pass because of what we see, what’s happening in our communities all over the place,” Bonner said. “This is a very important first step and we may take further steps as we see how this works out.”

Both the town and village laws have had their critics. In Port Jefferson, Trustee Bruce D’Abramo and other residents did not want the village interfering with the free market, which would determine how many smoke shops one neighborhood could sustain, and did not want the village policing people’s heath. They compared the smoke shops to the numerous bars in downtown Port Jefferson.

And Alex Patel, who works at Rocky Point Smoke & Vape Shop, said the town law might have little payoff because parents buy devices for their kids or the kids shop online — those under 21 may still get what they are looking for.

“Online, I see people buying left and right,” Patel said about vaporizers and similar devices. “It’s much cheaper online because they’re buying in bulk.”

But the town law also had community support: “When I think of these [smoking] lounges I think of heroin dens, something I read about and saw movies about when I was a child and scared the heck out of me,” Jeff Kagan, of the Affiliated Brookhaven Civic Organization, said May 12. “I believe that we don’t really know what these dens are all about or what’s really going to go on in these facilities. We don’t know the long-term impact.”

Alex Petroski contributed reporting.

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Kayla Kosubinsky races to the ground ball. Photo by Desirée Keegan

The Smithtown West girls’ lacrosse team walked onto the Dowling Sports Complex field Tuesday donning shirts that said “one team, one fight.”

Although senior midfielder Natalia Lynch stole the show by scoring six goals, it’s what her team had been through all season that made the season special.

Natalia Lynch grabs possession off the draw. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Natalia Lynch grabs possession off the draw. Photo by Desirée Keegan

The Bulls never made it to the Suffolk County finals, and although they were the No. 1 seed with a near perfect record, they were overlooked. Smithtown West battled a tough No. 3-seed West Islip team — the only opponent the Bulls lost to in the regular season — and remained neck-and-neck to the end, when the more experienced team battled back to come out on top, 9-8.

“It was amazing — they played phenomenal all season,” Smithtown West head coach Carie Bodo said of the run her girls had. “We played them much better than we did the first time we beat them. We knew, as much as we were the No. 1 seed, that we were the underdogs because they’ve already been here four years in a row. They know how to play this game.”

Lynch tallied a hat trick in the first half with her second goal off an assist from her best friend and longtime teammate Mackenzie Heldberg.

Jessica English defends against a West Islip attack. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Jessica English defends against a West Islip attack. Photo by Desirée Keegan

“It’s been unreal since first grade, playing with someone as amazing as she is — it definitely made the game easier,” Heldberg said of Lynch. “We just had a special connection on the field that not everyone else has and she’s made me so successful and brings out the best lacrosse player in me.”

Also scoring for the Bulls in the first half were junior midfielder Kayla Kosubinsky and junior attack Chelsea Witteck. Senior converted-goalkeeper Marissa D’Amico made big stops between the pipes to keep the score 5-5 at the end of the first half.

“We did what we thought we needed to do,” Bodo said. “We covered certain people. We knew that if we played them tight, they’d be forced to make tough shots and miss the cage because we swarm them so good, so the defense did an amazing job. We had opportunities at the end to come up with the goal, but we just didn’t come up with it.”

Lynch gained possession off the draw, like she had done all night, to open the second half, and after passing it to Heldberg, received a feed from her friend in front of the cage and dumped in her fourth goal of the game.

Chelsea Witteck leads the team in celebration of her goal. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Chelsea Witteck leads the team in celebration of her goal. Photo by Desirée Keegan

D’Amico made back-to-back saves after a West Islip goal to maintain the stalemate, and on a diving play, Lynch fired her fifth goal of the game. She won possession off the next draw, but wouldn’t impact the play again after being sidelined for two minutes, with 2:21 left to play.

“She played an amazing game,” Bodo said of Lynch. “It was a killer, she got that penalty at the end. She played a great game.”

Witteck netted her second goal of the game off an assist from Heldberg, for the only other score of the second half, to put the team up 8-6 with 7:03 left in the game, but West Islip rallied back with three unanswered goals for the 9-8 lead with 1:24 left to play. The Lions raced up and down the field until time expired to seal the victory.

“I’m super proud of them,” Bodo said of her team. “For us it was a win. We were ranked No. 3 in the preseason and Newsday didn’t even rank us, MSG Varsity doesn’t ever give us anything, so no one thought we would do anything. For us, we did it for ourselves. We didn’t do it for Newsday’s publicity or MSG Varsity’s publicity; we worked hard all season to prove it to ourselves.”

The players said they were proud of how far they’ve come.

Mackenzie Heldberg charges toward the cage. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Mackenzie Heldberg charges toward the cage. Photo by Desirée Keegan

“The loss hurt a lot, but for a team who never got much credit for anything we did — just making it to counties and playing a hell of a game against a team as talented as West Islip, there is nothing to hold our heads down for,” Heldberg said. “Coming here and experiencing this for the first time in Smithtown West girls lacrosse history was truly something amazing and something to be proud of.”

Although she, Lynch and D’Amico, along with three other senior nonstarters will be leaving the team, Bodo is excited for the future now that the Bulls are starting to move in the right direction and continues to make playoff strides each season. Kosubinsky said that after all of the doubt, Smithtown West lacrosse showed what it’s really made of.

“I know I’ve never seen Smithtown West girls lacrosse play with so much heart, and even with a loss, I’ve never been so proud of my team,” Kosubinsky said. “We had an amazing season and every single person contributed to that. Tonight we walked off the field with our heads held high because we know we played our hearts out.”

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It has been more than a quarter of a century since I was married, but nonetheless I read, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” a front-page piece in the Sunday Review section of The New York Times this week, with great interest. Before my husband died, I had been married just shy of 25 years, so I figured I had a dual perspective on the issue.

I was not surprised to learn that the article had one of the highest “hits” in the entire Sunday paper, from those who read online. Marriage is a fascinating subject, both for those who are, those who never were — and those who are no longer. There is some magic in the whole process of falling in love and of deciding that this is the person one wants to spend the rest of one’s life with. By the same token, that was not always the primary criterion for marriage: financial security, international alliances, duty — these are but some of the other motivators. My grandfather, for example, was widowed at a young age when my grandmother died in a wagon accident at the turn of the last century, leaving him with three young children. The family expected him to marry his wife’s younger unmarried sister, which he obediently did, to keep the clan intact and provide loving care for the children, who were after all her nieces and nephew. There are countless instances of royals who were married off to other royals in order to cement strategic alliances — between countries, between tribes, between sects.

Marrying for love is a fairly recent and novel idea that is even today not always practiced around the globe. Marriages can be and still are “arranged.”

But this article last Sunday dealt only with a marriage that is made by mutual choice of the couple involved. So what are the problems the couple will face? Alain de Botton, the author, attempted to list them. “We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well,” is definitely one of his better lines. He continued, “In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: ‘And how are you crazy?’” He doesn’t say this, but when one buys a house or a car, one asks,”What are the problems here?” Certainly the choice of spouse is far more critical, and all liabilities and drawbacks should honorably be revealed.

Even in today’s lenient “shacking up openly” culture, something new by the way with only the past couple of generations, couples may not know all that they should about one another. “One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with,” the author said.

“Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating,” de Botton asserted. He certainly hit the nail on the head for at least my generation. We all became engaged as casually as picking a partner with whom to go to the prom. We dated for two months, two years, whatever the case, but always on our best behavior and in settings like concerts and parks that surrounded us with beauty. Perhaps today’s greater intimacy lessens the surprises.

The author makes a key point: That what we seek in marriage is supposedly happiness but in fact is familiarity. We seek to recreate relationships we experienced or yearned for that were out of reach in our childhoods. Those are not the relationships most conducive to happiness.

Also people who feel terribly lonely, who find the thought of being alone throughout their lives terrifying, “risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.”

And then there is custom. Everyone married when they finished their schooling, or shortly thereafter, it seemed to us of a certain age. Indeed, my mother told me on my wedding day that I had barely managed to avoid being “an old maid.” I had just turned 22.

All the world’s a stage.

I read those words long ago, but didn’t appreciate the stage itself until recently. As a child, I struggled to wade through school books rife with flowing descriptions. Who cares what kinds of trees are outside the house, if there is a swing set near someone’s first kiss or if a fog sits heavy on a town?

When I was my son’s age, I found those details as relevant as the cars that drove by me on my walk to junior high school. Action and dialogue meant so much more. I wanted to hear what people said or know what they were thinking.

I now appreciate the stage more than ever. In fact, I’d like to go back to Ward Melville High School and thank the stage crew for building sets that turned the stage into the Upper West Side in the 1950s or a yellow brick road.

My appreciation for a setting, however, extends beyond the actual stage. It’s in the seats of an auditorium, where a shared armrest becomes the location for the first tentative effort to hold hands.

The setting continues through the wooden doors that, like eyes focusing from a distance, have opened simultaneously, allowing an appreciative audience its first glimpse of the land that awaits. It’s a part of the marble hallway, where the chatter of birds on nearby trees supplants the chitchat of children, who seem to race out through a revolving glass door that allows the nearby rays of the sun to pour inside.

We can shift our attention to blades of grass on the playground, where an undersized third-grade transfer student catches a fly ball for the first time and suddenly feels as if everything will be OK in his new town. That same blade of grass can provide cover for an earthworm as it looks to go back underground after a heavy rainstorm, lest the birds circling overhead stop to bring the worm back to a nest of hungry birds waiting at the top of an awning on a boarded-up house the children believe is haunted.

A setting can become altered the way a police siren appears to change from the Doppler effect. Even though the alarm wails at the same frequency, its pitch seems different as the sound approaches. The basketball net that appeared to be impossibly high when we were in first grade is remarkably close to our hands as we age, making us feel as if we’ve become Gulliver in our own lives.

Nostalgia can imbue a setting with emotion. I recently drove down my old block. I saw a version of me that was younger than my children are now. I could see myself staring out the side window of my room across a row of evergreens, letting my eyes become blurry to soften the colors of the red, green, purple, yellow and white Christmas lights down the block. If we were lucky some evenings, the snow would cause the lights to flicker.

Down below those tall evergreens and just outside my front window were several bushes. During the fall, with a full moon and a violent wind, the needles on those bushes transformed into a man with a mohawk hairstyle swaying back and forth.

One morning, those bushes disappeared. I tentatively pulled back the shade, where a dump truck of snow buried my menacing friend. The bushes bent over double, as if the man with the mohawk had taken a hard punch to the gut.

As I squinted at the scene, I knew that I had aged but the man with the mohawk hadn’t.

Yes, each setting is alive with possibilities.

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“We wanted to prove everyone wrong that doubted us, and we did.”

That’s what Mount Sinai junior goalkeeper Hannah Van Middelem had to say following her Mustangs’ 6-5 win over previously undefeated Bayport-Blue Point Tuesday, which earned the girls’ lacrosse team the Suffolk County Class C title.

Van Middelem came up with nine key saves to help her team to victory.

“I felt really confident because my defense was channeling outside shots, which helped me,” she said. “Our defense played great and the draw circle was amazing. We got almost every single ground ball.”

Van Middelem made her first save of the game just 30 seconds into the contest and senior attack Rebecca Lynch made the first goal off a free position shot. A Bayport-Blue Point yellow card left the team down a player, and sophomore attack Camryn Harloff took advantage of the penalty when she scored off an assist by junior attack and midfielder Leah Nonnenmann.

“We kept cool, calm and collected and took it like every other day,” Nonnenmann said. “We did our work, we adjusted to everything we needed to, we did it all. Communication was key and never letting our heads go down, no matter what.”

After Bayport-Blue Point’s Kerrigan Miller scored to cut the deficit, she forced a turnover, and a yellow card on a slash left Mount Sinai down one for two minutes.

Despite missing a player, Van Middelem wouldn’t let up the lead that easily, batting away a free position shot before Kelsi Lonigro evened it up for Bayport with 12:49 left in the half.

With 8:28 left, Bayport scored again, but a penalty prior to waved off the goal. Harloff attempted the next shot, but the ball bounced off the right post. Less than a minute later, senior midfielder Caroline Hoeg scored on a free position shot to give the Mustangs a 3-2 lead.

“It was all intensity,” she said. “We all knew what we had to do, we game-planned amazing, our coaches were on top of everything we had to do to beat them and we came out here and that’s exactly what we did.”

But Miller and Lonigro, two of the Phantoms’ strongest players, also weren’t going to go down without a fight. They scored back-to-back goals to give their team a 4-3 advantage heading into the halftime break.

“It’s a very intense rivalry, but it’s a good rivalry,” Mount Sinai head coach Al Bertolone said. “I’ve had great wins, and this is probably one of the best. We had a tough nonleague schedule, we lost to them straight-up the first time and we did some different things this time and the goalie played great. She’s an All-American type, which is what you need.”

Hoeg said despite the lead loss, her teammates knew to keep their heads in the game.

“Once they got the lead, we were a little down, but we knew we had to pick it right back up and come out here hard and do what we do,” she said.

Harloff had a shot saved to open the second half and Van Middelem made two straight saves, her second of which led to a Mustangs goal. After she passed the ball to Harloff, the ball was carried up to the front of the cage, where it was passed to junior midfielder and attack Rayna Sabella, who scored the tying goal.

Nonnenmann, trying to get a goal all afternoon, finally hit her mark when she swiveled around defenders in front of the cage and dumped in the go-ahead goal.

“I was a little off the first couple of tries and I was getting in my head, but I cleared everyone out, played my game and I finally pulled it out,” she said. “We’ve been working so hard and the hours and hours of practice we put into it was all for this.”

With 4:53 left to play, sophomore attack Meaghan Tyrrell passed the ball to Hoeg from 15 yards out, and a good goal gave the team a 6-4 advantage, despite Bayport’s defense being tough to penetrate.

“Once we got the lead, we knew it was ours,” Hoeg said. “From the huddles to the girls on the sideline, everyone cheering, we knew it was ours and we weren’t going to let it slip away.”

Bayport then wound up with the ball. The first of several free position shots was high and Van Middelem tipped the second away and made a save on the third to keep the game in the Mustangs’ favor.

Mount Sinai mostly maintained possession thereafter, but the stifling Phantoms defense forced a turnover that led to a breakaway goal with 41.6 seconds left to play.

Another Bayport yellow card left the Mustangs in control, and Tyrrell held onto the ball until the clock expired.

“This one is special,” Bertolone said. “We battled adversity, we did everything right. We’re young in some spots, but a lot of those kids were on the field last year. Hoeg played very well, she was tough all day, [senior midfielder Erica] Shea has been excellent all year. The kids really stepped up and came through for us.”

After losing to Bayport 10-2 in the regular season, and after a goal with one second left in the game gave the Mustangs a 10-9 win over Shoreham-Wading River in the semifinals, the girls now know anything is possible. Mount Sinai, at 15-3, has won eight straight games and looks to take the streak all the way back to the state finals, which the team won last season.

Mount Sinai faces Cold Spring Harbor in the Long Island championship on June 5 at 2:30 p.m. at a location still yet to be decided.

“This game helps us going forward,” Van Middelem said. “We felt really confident — we just believed in ourselves. We still feel confident. We can take it all the way.”

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An image from the Biomass Burn Observation Project. Photo from Arthur Sedlacek

The search for small particles has taken Arthur Sedlacek to places like thick plumes of smoke above wildfires raging in the western United States to picturesque vistas on Ascension Island, a staging area for the Allies for antisubmarine activities during World War II.

A chemist in the Environmental and Climate Sciences Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Sedlacek is studying aerosols, which are tiny particles suspended in the atmosphere. These particles can form the nuclei of clouds. Depending on their color, they can also either heat or cool the atmosphere.

“White” aerosols, as Sedlacek put it, such as sulfate- or nitrate-based particles, reflect solar radiation, while “black” aerosols, such as soot, absorb the sun’s light and help trap that energy in the atmosphere. By absorbing heat, darker aerosols increase the temperature, while lighter particles reflect some of that heat back into space.

“When you talk about climate change, you identify greenhouse gases, most notably carbon dioxide, which is responsible for warming,” Sedlacek said. “When you run through the model calculations, the models overpredict what we should see. Either something is wrong with the models or something else is counterbalancing the warming effect.”

Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek
Arthur Sedlacek photo from Sedlacek

Indeed, aerosols represent part of that something else. “We need to incorporate them into our models to better understand what we actually observe in the field,” Sedlacek said. He studies the types of particles, how they age, their color, changes in their color and whether they can act as cloud condensation nuclei.

“We want to understand what’s being produced and how it changes as the plume dilutes and gets older,” Sedlacek said. “How this aging alters the microphysical and optical [properties are] very important to quantifying the contribution of aerosol to climate change.”

During the summer and fall of 2013, Sedlacek was a part of a study called the Biomass Burn Observation Project, which included 14 scientists from seven institutions. Other BNL scientists included his co-principal investigator and chemist Larry Kleinman, atmospheric scientist Ernie Lewis, chemist Stephen Springston and tenured scientist Jian Wang.

Sedlacek spent several hours preparing the equipment that would gather data above these raging fires.

The planes flew into the smoke and then moved in the direction of the smoke, measuring the changes in these aerosols an hour, two hours and more away from the fire. These measurements showed how these aerosols changed over time.

While the study was conducted several years ago, Sedlacek and his colleagues are still working to put together the information.

They have learned that the particles in the air change dramatically in the first few hours. Biomass burning events produce aerosols that are considered “brown carbon” because they are not black, like soot, but they aren’t white like a sulfate- or nitrate-containing aerosol.

Brown carbon is known to evolve. They also observed a particle type referred to as “tar balls.” While others have seen these, Sedlacek and his colleagues are the first to show that they behave like secondary organic aerosols.

The description of these tar balls isn’t meant to suggest boulder-sized pieces of tar hiding somewhere in the clouds: They are about 250 nanometers in diameter, which makes them about 240 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair.

The group is trying to understand how these tar balls form. These tar balls may help clarify a sampling mystery. The top-down view, from satellites, suggests something different than the bottom-up view, from collecting data from particles. The satellite views indicate there should be more “stuff” in the air.

The bottom-up view may not take these tar balls into account. Not all wildfires produce tar balls, but the data Sedlacek and his collaborators collected suggest that they could represent 20 to 30 percent of the particulate mass in the plume.

In addition to flying above wildfires, Sedlacek also jets to places around the world including Brazil and Ascension Island.

He is also a mentor for two instruments, which means he is responsible for making sure they are functioning. He works with single-particle soot photometers, which measure the amount of black carbon in the air, and the aethalometer, which uses light transmission to determine the concentration of black carbon particles collected on a filter.

With the single-particle soot photometer, Sedlacek looked “at the data in a new way and from that gained insight into the morphology — the shape — of the individual particles, something that nobody had thought to do previously,” Lewis explained in an email. Lewis, who has known Sedlacek for over 10 years and has collaborated on numerous projects, said that Sedlacek is “wonderful to work with” and is a “very careful scientist with keen insight and great attention to detail.”

On Ascension Island, Sedlacek was a mentor in support of another scientist’s field campaign. That effort is exploring how biomass burning aerosols produced in Africa interact with marine clouds as the air mass moves from the west coast of Africa in the general direction of the island.

A photographer and bicyclist, Sedlacek takes numerous pictures of his work.

Sedlacek describes himself as an experimentalist and an observationist. He does not do any of the climate models. His data, however, informs those models and enables other scientists to include more details about the climate and atmosphere.

“Those of us who love to fly get to fly into these plumes,” where they are in an unpressurized cabin, so the outside air makes its way into the plane, he said. They experience considerable turbulence above these fires.

“When we see our instruments and our senses respond at the same time,” he said, “it makes for an unforgettable experience.”

North Shore resident Ivan Kalina is remembered by many as a man of adventure. Photo from Yvette Panno

By Yvette Panno

Ivan Kalina, 84, of Setauket died peacefully the morning of May 27 following a brief illness.

Originally born in Kosice, Czechoslovakia, in 1932 to beloved parents Geza and Ilonka, Kalina’s life was defined by courage, strength and resilience. First as a European Jewish Holocaust survivor, later as an escaped refugee from Communism to America, his story shaped not only his life, but also the history of a generation.

During World War II, Kalina was a young child who managed to survive the Nazis’ early invasion of Czechoslovakia and the deportation of the Jews to concentration camps through the help of Christian friends and false papers.

In the final years of the war, he separated from his mother and father and went to Budapest, Hungary, to hide in an apartment with relatives just blocks from Gestapo headquarters that was bombed day and night by American, Russian and British forces.

Returning to Kosice, his was among the few Jewish families to survive.

Although his education was delayed for years by the war, as a testimony to his determination, in 1956 he graduated as the valedictorian of his medical school class from Charles University in Prague, as a pediatrician. That same year, he married his beautiful wife Vera Atlas, a histopathologist, in Kosice.

With the onslaught of Communist persecution of both Jews and democratic sympathizers, Ivan and Vera realized they could never be free in their oppressive homeland.

In 1965, they left their close families and planned a daring escape through the Yugoslavia border into Austria, until they could manage a flight to New York City with their two young children, Peter and Yvette. They came to this country with two suitcases and $200. With prison sentences awaiting them if they returned to Czechoslovakia, they dedicated themselves to making new lives. Ivan and Vera worked long hours at Bellevue Hospital and New York University while he took his medical board exams in English – his fifth fluent language.

Ivan’s favorite expression – said with characteristic humor and positive spirit – was “that’s why I came to America.”

To this country, Kalina brought with him the grit, charm and fun-loving outlook to be successful. His career spanned a private practice in pediatrics in Rocky Point as well as medical director of Little Flower Orphanage in Wading River, associate professor at Stony Brook University, and attending physician at both St. Charles Hospital and John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson.

Always athletic and tanned, he was a fiercely competitive, daily tennis player and longtime member of the Harbor Hills Country Club near his original home in Port Jefferson. A perfect day was sitting in the sun near the backyard pool reading a newspaper. A remarkable skier until the age of 70, he loved to travel and took multiple trips out to his condo in Vail, Colorado, and traveled several times a year around the world.

His love of children was no greater than that for his five grandchildren, who called him Papi and of whom he was most proud: Olivia, Mia, Sydney, Jake and Sam.

He is also survived by his children, Dr. Peter Kalina and Yvette Kalina Panno; daughter-in-law, Michelle Kalina; and long-loved partner, Carolyn Van Helden.

As he would say in Hungarian: Sok Szeretet, Servuse Tatulko.

North Shore ‘Makers’ to put creativity on display

A scene from last year’s Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. Photo from Maritime Explorium

By Alex Petroski

Creativity, innovation, exploration and a lot of fun are all on the docket for Port Jefferson’s Maritime Explorium this weekend. The Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire is slated to take place on June 4 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., rain or shine, at the Explorium, the neighboring Harborfront Park and all three floors of the Village Center.

Douglas Baldwin, fractal artist and experimental musician will be at this year’s event. Photo by thecoyote.org
Douglas Baldwin, fractal artist and experimental musician will be at this year’s event. Photo by thecoyote.org

Last year the Explorium hosted a Maker Festival that drew over 2,000 visitors after board members attended the New York City Maker Faire and gave it rave reviews. The Maker Movement has taken off worldwide, thanks to the efforts of Maker Media, the group behind the faires. This year the Maritime Explorium is being supported and sponsored as an official Maker Faire, albeit a miniaturized version of the ones typically found in big cities like Barcelona, Berlin and the Bay Area across the globe.

“[The Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire] totally fits in that [the Maritime Explorium has] a space there that encourages more participation from makers on Long Island, and it gives them somewhere to go; and then for people who are unfamiliar, it gives them a nice taste of it without having to go into the city,” said Stephanie Buffa, a volunteer board member at the Maritime Explorium in a phone interview this week.

Buffa said the spirit of the event is to remind attendees of all ages that they are capable of making incredible things with their hands. Makers bring their inventions, innovations, prototypes and experiments to not only show off to attendees but also to provide a hands-on experience to do it yourself and make your own.

“I think it’s imperative,” Buffa said about the importance of making. “Everything is at our fingertips. [These days] if you’re sitting at the dinner table and somebody asks a question you [just] Google it. It’s so easy to get answers that way and it’s also so easy when we buy our children something to buy that cool science kit. ‘Here it is, your seeds, your pot, your dirt, your shovel all in one. Let’s buy this and teach them how to garden.’ It’s so easy to get caught up in all of these pre-packaged things that we forget to sort of, do it yourself. You can be creative in so many ways. You don’t have to be a good artist and be able to draw beautiful pictures to be creative and to make things.”

The event will feature dozens of makers, performers, artists and exhibitors as well as a Future Makers Expo and Robotics Showcase presented by students.

A scene from last year’s Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. Photo from Maritime Explorium
A scene from last year’s Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. Photo from Maritime Explorium

Some of the makers attendees should expect to see include Charles Rufino of The Long Island Violin Shop who will be demonstrating how to make a violin while finished ones are put to use and representatives from Stony Brook University’s College of Engineering and Applied Sciences who will be demonstrating build-your-own catapults. “Yarn bombers” who crochet colorful covers for trees and columns of buildings like the Maritime Explorium will be present to teach the art of crocheting as well as interactive sculptures, a Technology Showcase, a guided Marine Biology Exploration and Meet-a-Scientist.

Other organizations involved with the day’s presentation include SBU’s College of Arts & Sciences, Stony Brook School of Medicine, InnovateLI, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Touro College School of Health Sciences,  RINX Roller Skating on the Harbor and the Greater Port Jefferson-Northern Brookhaven Arts Council.

“It’s a little bit different from a high school or junior high school science fair because there’s more hands-on opportunities for people to actually participate and see how they can be a maker in whatever way themselves,” Buffa added. “It’s about participating and learning for all of the faire attendees, and getting a hands-on experience while they’re there.”

The Maritime Explorium is located at 101 E. Broadway in Port Jefferson. Tickets to attend the event are $17.50, though there are reduced family rates. For more information or to buy tickets visit www.easternlongislandmakerfaire.com.

A scene from last year’s Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. Photo from Maritime Explorium
A scene from last year’s Eastern Long Island Mini Maker Faire. Photo from Maritime Explorium

Rachel Masullo reaches for the loose ball. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Rachel Masullo reaches for the loose ball. Photo by Desirée Keegan
Middle Country’s Rachel Masullo reaches for the loose ball in a previous game against Sachem. Photo by Desirée Keegan

By Desirée Keegan

The Middle Country girls’ lacrosse team still can’t get through West Islip.

In the Division I Class A semifinals last Wednesday, the Mad Dogs fell to their rival, 11-7, to mark the third season in a row that that West Islip eliminated them.

In 2014, Middle Country felt lost in the last second of the Class A semifinal game, 12-11. In 2015, the two teams paired up in the Class A finals, where the Lions edged the Mad Dogs 11-10 in double overtime.

No. 2 Middle Country was hoping that this would be its year to make it past No. 3 West Islip. Although both teams continued to lose star athletes over the last two seasons, each still had powerhouse potential with returning players.

For Middle Country, it was junior Jamie Ortega. She and her older sister Nikki helped the team to two of its most successful seasons in 2014 and 2015.

In the semifinal game, Jamie Ortega tallied a hat trick and two assists. Junior Amanda Masullo notched two goals, sophomore Emily Diaz added two assists and juniors Ava Barry and Rachel Masullo, Amanda’s twin sister, rounded out the scoring with one goal each.

But Emily Beier and Samantha Blair each scored three goals to lead West Islip.

Beier actually assisted on the final play in double overtime last year for the goal that eliminated Middle Country.

West Islip moved on to take on No. 1-seeded Smithtown West in the Class A finals at Dowling Sports Complex in Shirley, where the team came from behind to outscore the Bulls 9-8.

Looking ahead, the Mad Dogs graduate just four seniors. Although losing some impactful players in Jordynn Aiello, Shannon Doherty, Nicole Lattimore and Brianna Reyes, the team will return some strength on the defensive end in junior goalkeeper Emily Walsh, sophomore Emily Diaz on the draw and scoring leaders Ortega and Barry on offense.