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This charming home resembles an English Country Home. Unique design with architectural details and the use of antique materials from Long Island Homes. Wide plank floor boards, 3 fireplaces. Loft constructed from a barn Circa 1756. Subdivision possible.
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This past Monday we celebrated Presidents Day. We should remember it’s not merely a day off from work or an excuse for a long weekend getaway. It’s a time to reflect on the impact of historical figures and the importance of leadership, both nationally and within our community.
Originally established to honor George Washington’s birthday, Presidents Day has evolved into a day of recognition for all U.S. presidents. It’s a day to celebrate the individuals who have held our nation’s highest office and led us through triumphs and challenges, shaping the course of history with their decisions and actions.
One of the primary reasons that Presidents Day holds such significance is because it serves as a reminder of the democratic principles upon which our nation was founded. The peaceful transition of power from one president to the next is a hallmark of our democracy, underscoring the importance of leadership in ensuring the continuity and stability of our government.
While Presidents Day traditionally celebrates the contributions of past presidents to the nation as a whole, it also offers us an opportunity to reflect on the importance of local leadership and its direct influence on our daily lives.
In our community, local leaders play a vital role in shaping the policies, programs and initiatives that directly impact our neighborhoods, schools, businesses and quality of life. From town council members to school board trustees, mayors to county legislators, these individuals make decisions that affect everything from local taxes and infrastructure to education and public safety.
This federal holiday serves as a reminder of the significance of civic engagement and the power of community involvement. It’s a time to recognize the dedication and hard work of our local leaders who devote themselves to serving our community and addressing the needs of its residents.
Moreover, Presidents Day encourages us to reflect on the values and principles guiding our community and consider how we can contribute to its betterment. Whether it’s through volunteering, participating in local government or simply being a responsible and engaged citizen, each of us has a role to play in shaping the future of our community.
Presidents Day provides an opportunity to celebrate the diversity and inclusivity of our community. Just as our nation is comprised of individuals from various backgrounds and walks of life, so too is our local community. Presidents Day reminds us of the importance of unity and collaboration in overcoming challenges and achieving common goals.
Each year as we observe Presidents Day, we should take a moment to express gratitude for the local leaders who work to improve our community. Let us also reaffirm our commitment to active citizenship and civic engagement, recognizing that positive change begins at the grassroots level.
MEET ROSEMARY!
This week’s featured shelter pet is Rosemary, a two-year-old female brown tabby cat who arrived at the Smithtown Animal Shelter on Jan. 23.
Little Rosemary was found as a stray begging for food. She can be a little shy/hesitant at first, but loves to have her head and face petted. She chirps at you for food and is learning to trust more people. She would do best in a quiet home with a little patience. Rosemary will reward that patience with love.
If you are interested in meeting Rosemary, please call ahead to schedule an hour to properly interact with her in a domestic setting.
The Town of Smithtown Animal & Adoption Shelter is located at 410 Middle Country Road, Smithtown. Visitor hours are Monday to Saturday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. (Sundays and Wednesday evenings by appointment only). For more information, call 631-360-7575 or visit www.townofsmithtownanimalshelter.com.
Blair Charles Marelli, passed away Feb. 14, at 84. A native of East Setauket, Blair’s life was characterized by love, laughter and cherished moments with family and friends.
Blair is survived by his beloved spouse, Gladys, with whom he shared over 62 years of marriage. He leaves behind four sons: Kenneth, Jay, Blair and Dean, and grandchildren Patrick, Taylor, Samantha, Mya and Tye. Blair is also survived by his brother Gary Marelli and his wife Beatrice, nephews Grant and Marcus and his niece Julie.
Blair made a significant impact as a teacher and coach at Riverhead High School for 30 years, where he mentored countless students in football and baseball.
A longtime member of the Mount Sinai Yacht Club, Blair found solace and joy in boating. He passed this passion on to his sons.
Family and friends are invited to pay their respects at O.B. Davis Funeral Homes, 1001 Route 25A, Miller Place. Visitation hours are Feb. 22 from 2 to 4 p.m. and from 7 to 9 p.m.
An interment ceremony will take place Feb. 23, at Washington Memorial Park, 855 Canal Road, Mount Sinai at 11:30 a.m.
Blair will be remembered for his kind heart and unwavering love for his family, students, golf, football and baseball. He touched the lives of many and will be deeply missed.
Cari “Clair” Gould Hoffman passed away Feb. 10 at Oak Manor Nursing Home, Largo, Florida, while in the care of hospice after a long illness.
Born Oct. 11, 1942, in Stony Brook, she graduated with Regents honors from Earl L. Vandermeulen High School where she excelled in English, math and music. There, Cari also experienced success in athletics.
She was preceded in death by her parents, Evelyn and Eddy Gould, her daughter Cynthia Lynn and her younger sister Linda Dwyer. She is survived by her son James, a Navy vet of New Jersey and her daughter Beth Eads of California, several grandchildren and her nephew Thomas Dwyer of Nesconset and her sister Joanne Talarico of Florida.
She moved to Pinellas County, Florida in 2003. She spent much of her time there assisting other retirees by driving them to appointments. She was faith driven.
Services at Bryant Funeral Home are limited to close family.
Thank you to LMC and Oak Manor for the loving care she received.
By Daniel Dunaief
Yes, I borrowed the headline from the movie “Groundhog Day,” as Bill Murray’s Phil Connors, discusses the weather with Angela Paton’s Mrs. Lancaster in his hotel in the morning.
Weather has always been a potential safe and easy topic when bumping into a neighbor we don’t know well, meeting the parents of a boyfriend or girlfriend, or breaking uncomfortable silences in, say, the office of the school principal or the boss.
These days, however, weather discussions seem to have changed.
Some of that, whether you believe in or are concerned about global warming or not, reflects the reality of several consecutive mild winters.
We have become so accustomed to milder conditions that a sudden drop in temperature or the forecast for a few inches of snow becomes conspicuous, causing us to reach for our heaviest coats, gloves and hats, and to urge others to “stay warm,” even as newscasts often lead their programs with predictions of “as much as four inches of snow.” Heaven forbid!
Back in the day — okay, I wrote it and those words are like nails on a chalkboard (teenagers may need to look up what a chalkboard is) to the younger version of myself — we had long stretches of time when the temperature fell below freezing, or even below 20. We also had real snow days and not these virtual classes amid storms. Not a fan! Let the kids make snowmen and sled down the hills.
Sure, we get periodic bouts of colder weather, but they don’t seem to last as long.
This has lowered the bar and our tolerance for temperatures that threaten to dry out our skin, make our hands numb and freeze our exposed earlobes.
Even, however, when the weather remains mild for long periods of time and we don’t need to talk about something to fill awkward silences, weather has remained a topic of conversation. Why, for example, does a place like San Diego, which has relatively stable weather day after day, need a weather report? They could just run the same graphic each day, with an occasional break to signal a change.
Weather, however, reminds us that we’re alive and we get to experience some of the conditions of today. Each day’s weather brings a unique backdrop against which we face possibilities, opportunities, and challenges. Two straight days of weather with the same temperature, dew point, humidity and barometric pressure challenge us to find unique parts of the day, as the changing cloud cover or a slight wind acts like unique whirls in the fingerprints of a day. We might be walking down the street when a subtle shift in the weather helps our brain consider a problem from a new perspective. And, even when the weather doesn’t lend a hand, it helps define the moment.
The way the soft early morning light casts a glow on the bare branches at the top of a tree, while the bottom of the tree awaits in flatter light, allows us to celebrate the gift of our senses.
Movie directors use weather not only to create a backdrop or to establish a man-versus-nature themed challenge, but also to reflect the mood of the moment.
As a main character grapples with the worst of his shortcomings, he may trudge through a rainstorm. When the clouds slowly part, he can reach an epiphany that helps him become a better version of himself.
The weather, with its unpredictable elements and the effect they have on everything in their path, helps us experience the same trees, the same grass, the same car across the street in a different way. A column of light beaming through clouds can offer ephemeral inspiration.
The weather can be an antagonist or a companion, an enabler or a disruptor, and a headwind or a tailwind in our lives.
Then again, it’s also a safe topic when our potential future father-in-law asks us one of many possible questions we’d rather not answer truthfully, if at all.
At that point, weather becomes a safe topic for chitchat.
By Leah S. Dunaief
Women’s History Month is almost upon us. What is it all about? Named in 1978 by the schools of Sonoma County, California, “as a way of examining women’s history, issues and contributions,” according to the Encyclopedia Britannica on the internet, the celebration is throughout the month of March. Originally championed by the National Women’s History Alliance, “a variety of agencies, schools and organizations observe the month by focusing on the ‘consistently overlooked and undervalued’ role of American women in history.”
So do we.
On our podcast this week, we will have as special guest, Nancy Burner, who is a longtime local Elder Law attorney and who just expanded her practice by partnering with former judge, Gail Prudenti. We hope you will tune in, as we summarize the local news every week, to “the Pressroom Afterhour” and listen to what Ms Burner has to say about women in the law.
Hers will be the first of local female success stories that we plan to bring you throughout the month.
You can hear us on our website, tbrnewsmedia.com and click on “Listen Now” at the top of the home page. Or you can catch up with the Times Beacon Record podcast on Spotify. There is a fresh one every Friday afternoon, and we archive the past ones for your listening pleasure.
There are some different stories on how the Women’s History Month came to be. One dates to a rally in New York City on March 8, 1857, of female garment workers demanding better working conditions and more pay. Although the police were said to break up the demonstration, several years later the women formed their own union.
Whether true or not, in 1908 a branch of the New York City Social Democratic Women’s Society declared the last Sunday in February to be National Women’s Day. The first was held on February 23, 1909.
In 1911, International Women Day was observed on March 19, a creation of the International Socialist Women’s Conference, “to focus on the struggles of working women,” as opposed to a similar movement by the feminist “bourgeoisie.”
But the March 8 day from the mid-19th century, became the official date in 1921. Then in 1978, the Sonoma schools took it from there, naming it March Women’s History Week. The idea went to the United States Congress in 1981, where it eventually became Women’s History Month to be observed since 1987, snd further caught on in other countries.
Nancy Burner graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts from Stony Brook University and in the top 2 percent of her class with distinction from Hofstra University School of Law with her Juris Doctor in 1988. She created Hofstra”s first law school course in Elder Law in 2011 as an Adjunct Professor there. She has won numerous awards and distinctions over the years, including selection by her peers in Best Lawyers in America for Elder Law. She has also served as President of the Suffolk County Women’s Bar Association and was inducted into the Hofstra University Law Inaugural Hall of Fame, one of only 50 such inductees.
We invite you to join us for the next Pressroom Afterhour podcast for a summary of some of this past week’s local news and the kick off to Women’s History Month. If, after listening, you have questions or comments, we want to hear them Email us at [email protected] or call at 631-751-7744.
We encourage feedback and thoughts about local issues.
By Daniel Dunaief
It wasn’t easy, back in the late 1960’s for astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, to discover pulsars, which are rapidly rotating neutron stars that emit detectable radio waves. So it only seems fitting that the famous and award-winning scientist, who is now a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford, might run into obstacles when she came to Stony Brook University’s Simons Center for Geometry and Physics to deliver a Della Pietra Lecture to the public.
The recent snowstorm, which canceled classes and events at the university for a day, also pushed back her talk by 24 hours. When the delayed talk began, Bell Burnell contended with a microphone that cut in and out. “It might be designed for a male voice,” Bell Burnell joked. Combining humor, accessible scientific detail, and a first-hand narrative, she delighted and inspired a crowd ranging from local high school students to Stony Brook professors.
“Her talk was refreshing and different,” said Marivi Fernández-Serra, Professor in the Physics and Astronomy Department and at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at SBU. “I loved that it was both a personal story and a physics talk.”
Luis Álvarez-Gaumé, Director for the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics, recruited Bell Burnell for a three-part lecture series that included a talk for high school students and one for faculty and advanced graduate students.
Her talks were “very inspiring,” said Álvarez-Gaumé. Bell Burnell is “very sharp, extremely intelligent and easy to talk to.”
Humble beginnings
Born in Northern Ireland, where, Bell Burnell said, “Catholics and Protestants fight each other,” she earned her bachelor’s degree in Glasgow, Scotland.
Bell Burnell endured a tradition where the men whistled, stamped and made cat calls when a woman entered the room, which, in lecture halls with wooden floors, meant she heard considerable noise. She learned to control her blushing because “if you blushed, they’d only make more noise.”
Bell Burnell had one female lecturer, who survived one class and then quit. When she got to Cambridge to do her PhD, she had the wrong accent, came from the wrong part of the country and was “clearly heathen-educated,” she said. “It was quite daunting.”
Surrounded by young men full of confidence, she thought the university made a mistake in recruiting her and that she would probably get thrown out. Until that day arrived, she decided to work her hardest so when they did, she won’t have a guilty conscience. Her strategy, she said, was to “do your best until they throw you out.”
Hard work
Working with five other people for two years, Bell Burnell helped build a radio telescope at Cambridge to search for quasars, which are enormous black holes that release energy and light. When quasar jets interact with gas around the galaxy, they emit radio waves. The data in the search for quasars came out on long rows of red ink paper charts that she had to go through by hand.
By the end of her survey, Bell Burnell had gone through about 5 kilometers (or over 3 miles) of paper. She discovered an odd signal she couldn’t explain, which could have been radio interference. Recalling she had seen something like it before, she checked and found that it was in the same place in the sky.
When she conferred with her thesis advisor Anthony Hewish, he told her she needed to enlarge the signal by increasing the speed of the data collection.
For the first 10 days, she didn’t find anything.
“The thing had gone way,” she recalled. “That’s the grad student’s [i.e., her] fault. If you’re thinking of being a grad student, go ahead and go for it. You will get the blame for things that aren’t really your fault. Your thesis advisor has to vent their fury somehow.”
She persisted with these high-speed recordings until she got one. After pondering the signal for months and speaking with other astronomers, she found another signal the day before Christmas.
Bell Burnell was planning to leave the next day with her boyfriend to visit her parents, where the couple prepared to announce their engagement.
“I kind of have to be there,” she laughed.
At 2 a.m., she heard the pulse at a slightly different repetition rate in a different part of the sky. During her absence, her thesis advisor kept the survey running. When she returned, she found a pile of charts on her desk.
Hewish told her to go back over the charts and found occurrences of these patterns. Bell Burnell and her advisor worked with another radio astronomer and student to see if other researchers could see the same signal.
When they didn’t, the two academics started walking away. The other student, however, stayed with the equipment and found the same signal. He had miscalculated when his telescope would be able to see the pulsar by 15 minutes.
“If he had miscalculated by an hour and 15 minutes, we would have all gone home,” Bell Burnell recalled.
What Bell Burnell had found — first with the unusual signal in the paper and then with a careful search for other signals — were rotating neutron stars that spin like a lighthouse and that emit pulses of radiation. Scientists have now catalogued over 3,000 of them.
The pulsars are “fantastically accurate time keepers,” she said, losing only about a second of time since the age of the dinosaurs.
You don’t want to visit
Pulsars have numerous compelling properties. The neutrons that make up a pulsar are so dense that a thimble full of them weighs as much as seven billion people. To climb a one centimeter mountain would require effort comparable to reaching the peak of Mount Everest.
“It’s not recommended to go to one of these,” Burnell said.
The force of gravity is so strong that an object falling from a few feet would hit the surface at half the speed of light.
Attendees react
Fernández-Serra, who, among others, described Bell Burnell as “a rock star,” appreciated how the guest speaker was an “extremely dedicated and hard worker and also a very sharp student. She went above and beyond what her advisor had asked her to do and was persistent in pushing for what she thought was something special. Thanks to that, pulsars were discovered.”
While science has made huge strides in its treatment of women since the 1960’s, Fernández-Serra still sees opportunities for improvement. “The science community values aspects that are more commonly found in men: loud voices, quick opinions, more presence in the room (height actually matters a lot!!!),” she said, and added that science would benefit from valuing the opinions and thoughts of people who are introverted, mild-mannered and cautious decision makers.
Rosalba Perna, Professor in Physics and Astronomy at SBU, believes “we still have a long way to go” in correcting various unconscious bias.
Perna, who conducts part of her research on pulsars in her work on neutron stars, suggested that Bell Burnell’s description of pulsar’s extreme gravity “still leaves me in awe any time I think about it!”
Neelima Sehgal, Associate Professor in Physics & Astronomy at SBU, said the technical talk was “of particular interest to our female graduate students who asked a number of thoughtful questions” while the high school students almost filled the big auditorium at the Simons Center.
“It was pretty great that we were able to bring her to Stony Brook,” said Sehgal.
Stony Brook women’s lacrosse scored 11 of the first 13 goals and got career offensive performances from Alex Finn and Ellie Masera to open the 2024 season with an 18-11 victory at LaValle Stadium on Feb 18.
Stony Brook (1-0) got a career-high eight goals and 10 points from Masera along with a career-high seven assists and nine points from Finn. Masera took 16 of Stony Brook’s 36 shots in the game. Kailyn Hart also added five goals on eight shots (.625), with Charlotte Verhulst getting in the scoring column twice and Morgan Mitchell once.
Defensively, the Seawolves had six caused turnovers and 10 ground balls as a team. Clare Levy and Emily Manning each caused two turnovers. Manning led the way with three ground balls and Finn, Levy and Masera each picked up two. In her first start as a Seawolf, Emily Manning made eight saves with a .421 save percentage.
In the possession game, Stony Brook got six draw controls each from Masera and Clare Levy, with Verhulst adding three.
For Dartmouth, Kate Elders scored four times, while Catherine Erb added three tallies and Lucy Murray scored twice. Goalkeeper Gisele Todd made nine saves in net on a .360 save percentage.
The team is back home on Feb. 20 to take on Bryant, with first draw scheduled for 3 p.m. The Bulldogs are 2-1 on the season with wins over Holy Cross and Sacred Heart. Stony Brook is 3-0 against Bryant all-time and this will be the two teams’ first meeting since 2019.
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