Setauket firefighters battle a 2010 Old Field barn fire. Photo by Dennis Whittam
Residents of Old Field Village will see a new line on their Brookhaven tax bill for 2018.
At a July 20 Brookhaven Town public hearing, the town council unanimously approved a motion to extend the boundaries of the Setauket Fire District to include Old Field. The change means that instead of paying for contractual services through the village budget, residents will pay taxes for fire, rescue and emergency services to the town when the new tax billing period begins Dec. 1.
Towards the end of last year, Old Field Mayor Michael Levine and the village board of trustees requested the expansion after the village received fire and emergency protection services from the district on a contractual basis for decades. The village includes approximately 400 homes and no commercial properties, and while residents received the same services from Setauket fire departments as residents in the district, they were unable to vote in district elections or run for a position on the board.
Marie Michel, assistant town attorney, said the hearing was required by the state.
“While a fire district is its own municipal entity, New York State town law requires that the town in which the fire district is situated conduct a public hearing to consider the proposed fire district extension,” Michel said.
According to the plan prepared by Hauppauge-based law firm Farrell Fritz, P.C. and posted on the Brookhaven Town website, the cost of the one-year contract for Old Field in 2017 was $515,000 with the right to renew in 2018 at the same rate. From 2012 to 2016, the village paid a contractual rate, which increased slightly each year. The cost of the contract ranged from $340,000 in 2012 to $382,673 in 2016.
The increase in the cost of the contract was attributed to the fire district’s plans to expand and refurbish the existing Main Street Fire Station at a cost of approximately $14 million dollars.
Both Stephen Shybunko, Old Field deputy mayor, and Jay Gardiner, vice chairman of fire commissioners, were in attendance at the July 20 public hearing.
Shybunko said the village’s reasons to be included in the fire district were monetary.
“The amount of payment proposed in the most recent contract would be equal to what the tax rate was so in fairness and equity we have been going through the steps to be included in the fire district as we will be paying a rate equal to all other members of the fire district,” Shybunko said.
Gardiner said the board of fire commissioners was in favor of the resolution.
“We have been providing fire and emergency services to Old Field for over 50 years, and we intend to continue to provide excellent fire, rescue and emergency services,” the commissioner said.
Brookhaven Councilwoman Valerie Cartright (D-Port Jefferson Station) said residents who spoke at a previous town board meeting asked if taxes would increase for residents within the fire district’s current boundaries.
“Their taxes will not be raised as a matter of this extension,” Michel said.
New York State Senator Ken LaValle does not approve of the decision
John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson. File photo from Mather Hospital
A Port Jefferson institution established in 1929 is set to undergo an unprecedented change, the likes of which has never occurred during its near-90-year history. John T. Mather Memorial Hospital leadership has signed a letter of intent to join Northwell Health, New York’s largest health care provider, which has 22 hospitals under its umbrella. Prior to the agreement, Mather was one of just two Long Island hospitals unaffiliated with a larger health system. Mather’s board considered affiliation with Stony Brook University Hospital, though ultimately decided on Northwell.
Mather Hospital is set to join Northwell Health. Photo from Huntington Hospital.
“I don’t think it’s a good decision,” State Sen. Ken LaValle (R-Port Jefferson) said in a phone interview. LaValle is a fervent supporter of the university, often publicly spotted wearing a red SBU baseball cap. “For 50 years-plus there’s been a culture in place if people needed tertiary care they would go from Mather to Stony Brook. Stony Brook will still be in place, will still offer services and people still if they choose can go to Stony Brook.”
LaValle said he didn’t know why Mather decided to go with Northwell, and members of Mather’s board declined to discuss specifics of the agreement with Northwell because discussions are ongoing. The changeover could take place as soon as prior to the end of the year.
“I would have wished that the Mather board would have been considerate of the people in their area rather than for whatever other reasons they made this decision,” LaValle said. “I don’t know whether Northwell came in with a bag of cash and that’s why they made the decision; but if they were making the decision based on the people they serve in their catchment area they would have gone with Stony Brook.”
Mather Hospital Vice President of Public Affairs Nancy Uzo, said Stony Brook was considered an option for affiliation and offered an explanation by email as to why it was ultimately spurned.
“I don’t think it’s a good decision.”
— Ken LaValle
“Our goal through this process is to ensure that our communities continue to have access to advanced, high quality care and superior satisfaction close to home and to serve the best interests of our medical staff and employees,” she said.
Mather Board of Directors Chairman Ken Jacoppi and President Ken Roberts declined to comment further through Uzo.
“Our community, employees and medical staff have a deep commitment to Mather Hospital,” Roberts said in a press release. “We chose a partner that would support our culture of caring as well as our future growth.”
Stony Brook University Senior Vice President for the Health Sciences and Dean of the School of Medicine Ken Kaushansky declined to comment on Mather’s decision via email. President Samuel L. Stanley Jr. did not respond to a direct request for comment nor through a university spokeswoman.
In 2016 the American Hospital Association released research suggesting hospital mergers like the one Mather is set to undertake result in cost savings and quality improvements. According to the research, mergers decrease costs due to economies of scale, reduced costs of capital and clinical standardization among other efficiencies. An analysis showed a 2.5 percent reduction in annual operating expenses at acquired hospitals. Other benefits include the potential to drive quality improvements through standardization of clinical protocols and investments to upgrade facilities and services at acquired hospitals, an expansion of the scope of services available to patients and improvements to existing institutional strengths to provide more comprehensive and efficient care.
New York State Sen. Ken Lavalle did not agree with Mather’s decision to join Northwell Health over Stony Brook University Medicine. File photo
Huntington Hospital joined North Shore-LIJ in 1994, which became known as Northwell Health in February 2016. After the merger is official, Mather and Huntington hospitals will be the only Northwell hospitals on the North Shore in Suffolk County.
“Mather Hospital is known for patient-centric care both in the community and throughout the industry,” Michael Dowling, Northwell’s president and CEO said in a statement. “That deeply embedded sense of purpose is the type of quality we want to represent Northwell Health, along with an excellent staff of medical professionals and physicians. Together, Mather and Northwell will play a crucial partnership role expanding world class care and innovative patient services to Suffolk County residents.”
In what some view as a related move, Stony Brook announced in a press release Aug. 1 that Southampton Hospital would become a member of the Stony Brook Medicine health system.
“Today we celebrate a unique opportunity in which academic medicine and community medicine can come together to benefit our entire region,” Stanley said. “We will continue to build on successful collaborations achieved over the past ten years, which have already brought many new programs to the East End, including a robust number of internship and residency programs at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, and where students enrolled in graduate programs in the health sciences on the Stony Brook Southampton campus can put their training to good use as the next generation of allied health professionals to help address the shortage of providers on the east end and beyond.”
The acquisition will result in new offerings at Stony Brook including a provisional Level 3 Trauma Center, with 24-hour coverage by emergency medicine doctors and a trauma surgeon available within 30 minutes, a Hybrid Operating Room with sophisticated imaging capabilities and a new cardiology practice in Southampton with Stony Brook cardiologists, among other benefits.
LaValle declined to classify Mather’s decision as a “loss” for Stony Brook and added he expects Mather and the university to continue to enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship going forward.
“Stony Brook is close by and they will reach out and still try to encourage both local physicians and people to come to Stony Brook,” he said.
This version was edited Aug. 7 to include comments from Michael Dowling.
Suffolk County Legislator Sarah Anker speaks during a press conference in 2017 about the creation of a permanent panel to address the ever-growing opioid crisis. File photo by Kyle Barr
By Kyle Barr
Following another year of rising opioid use and overdoses, Suffolk County officials announced legislation that would create a new permanent advisory panel to try to address the issue.
“We have lost people from this [problem],” Suffolk County Legislator Sarah Anker (D-Mount Sinai) said during a July 25 press conference. “Children have died, adults have died and we’re here to do more.”
The panel would have 24 members, including representatives from health and science groups, members of law enforcement, hospital employees and individuals from the Legislature’s Committees on Health, Education and Human Services and would focus on prevention, education, law enforcement and drug rehabilitation across the county, Anker said. The panel is planned to be broken up into sub-committees, which would tackle a specific area.
“This is an issue that needs all hands on deck,” Suffolk County Police Commissioner Tim Sini said. “We are not going to arrest ourselves out of this — this is a public health issue [of historic proportion], but law enforcement plays a critical role.”
Over 300 people from Suffolk County died from opioid-related overdosess in 2016, according to county medical examiner records. Sini said that in 2016, the police administered Narcan, a nasal spray used as emergency treatment to reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, in Suffolk County over 700 times.
A 2010 bill saw the creation of a similar advisory panel with 13 members, many of whom are members of the new proposed panel. The original, impermanent panel ended five years ago, but had made 48 recommendations to the legislature focused mainly on prevention education, treatment and recovery. Two recommendations from this committee that were put in effect were the Ugly Truth videos shown in public schools, and countywide public Narcan training.
Though proud of the work they did on that panel, members agreed the situation has worsened since it was disbanded.
“[Seven] years ago we stood here and announced the initial panel — I had the privilege of co-chairing that group — a lot of the things we recommended actually happened, some things didn’t,” said Dr. Jeffrey Reynolds, chief executive officer of the Family and Children’s Association. “Regardless, the problem hasn’t gotten any better, and in fact, it’s gotten progressively worse. Some of the gaps in prevention, access to treatment, recovery and law enforcement haven’t yet been filled. For us to have an ongoing opportunity to have a dialogue together — to brainstorm some new solution to disrupt the patterns here — is very, very valuable.”
On the education side, Islip School District Superintendent of Schools Susan Schnebel said at the press conference that education has to begin at a very young age.
“It’s important that schools take hold of what happens in the beginning,” she said. “That includes educating students at a very early age, educating the parents to know what’s there, what are the repercussions, what is the law. That needs to happen with a 5 or 6-year-old.”
Executive director of the North Shore Youth Council Janene Gentile, and member of the proposed panel, feels that the advisory panel is an important step. She said she hopes that it will be able to do more in helping prevent people, especially young people, from using opioids in the first place, and hopefully help those exiting rehab.
“Implementing a family component when they are in rehab is really crucial, while they are in rehab and when get out,” Gentile said. “There are other agencies like mine — 28 in Suffolk County. If we can reach out to them they can help with re-entry [into society]. They go on the outside and the triggers that started them on opioids are still there, and they need to have places where there are no drugs. We’ve gone through a lot, but we’ve got to do more — and prevention works.”
One protestor comforts another during a protest in Smithtown July 27. Photo by Jill Webb.
By Jill Webb
In a show of unity, North Shore residents resoundingly condemned President Donald Trump’s (R) intentions to ban transgender people from the military this past week.
Individuals gathered in front of the U.S. Army Recruitment Center in Smithtown in disapproval of President Trump’s announced ban July 27.
The ban stemmed from a series of tweets President Trump put out July 26, citing his reasoning for the transgender ban being that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
Trump’s declaration of the ban on Twitter led the Long Island Transgender Advocacy Coalition to come out to Smithtown to oppose the ban in a peaceful demonstration. The group advertised the demonstration via Facebook as a way for the transgender community and their allies to speak up for transgender service members.
Juli Grey-Owens, executive director of LITAC led the demonstration with a loudspeaker in hand, chanting in solidarity with the transgender community.
The goal of the demonstration, according to Grey-Owens, was to put transgender soldiers in the spotlight.
“To make people aware of the fact that there are Americans that are supporting our transgender troops — that’s important,” she said. “Number two, it’s to make people aware of the fact that the transgender community is constantly under duress, constantly being discriminated against and this is just one more thing.”
The aim of LITAC is to advocate for the transgender community, often through forums, demonstrations, and putting on informational sessions that Grey-Owens refers to as transgender 101s.
The Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act, passed in 2003 makes it unlawful for anyone in New York State to be discriminated against in employment, housing, credit, education and public accommodations because of their actual or perceived sexual orientation.
A protestor shows support for transgender military members. Photo by Jill Webb.
But the law isn’t as clear for transgender individuals. SONDA does not explicitly prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and expression — but it does apply when a transgender person is discriminated against based upon his or her actual or perceived sexual orientation, according to the New York State Attorney General’s office.
Specific counties and areas, including Nassau and Suffolk County have taken matters into their own hands and passed more specific anti-discrimination legislation for sexual orientation.
Grey-Owens said that LITAC’s objective is to step in at any time the transgender community is being discriminated against.
The executive director, along with many of the other attendees of the demonstration, was aggravated with Trump’s accusations against the expenses of transgender health.
“One of things that they found is the number is so small in comparison to the defense budget, that it is a point zero something of the actual cost,” Grey-Owens said. “The army spends more on Viagra — ten times more on Viagra — then they will on transgender health costs.”
One of the best ways to help the transgender community, according to Grey-Owens, is to unite with them.
“If you take look at the crowd that’s here now, there are way more cisgender people [someone who’s gender identity matches the sex they were assigned to at birth] than transgender people here, and that’s made our voice louder,” she said. “People are adopting our cause as their cause. If they’re interested in helping out, this is how you help us: expand our voice.”
One participant, Edna White, said that she was in attendance in support of her transgender family and friends. She stressed the negative effects of the segregation.
“Taking a serious defense of our country — that shouldn’t be separated,” she said. “We’re already separated enough in war as it is, so to do that is really disheartening for me.”
Heather Sacc, another protestor said she found Trump’s sudden tweets against the transgender community very alarming.
“There’s 6,000 trans people in the military that have risked their lives,” she said. “The military didn’t ask for this. It’s just [Trump] woke up in the middle of the night and decided ‘oh that’s what I’m gonna do.”
A protestor shows support for transgender military members. Photo by Jill Webb.
Jay Gurecio attended the demonstration representing the LGBTQ+ visibility coalition, a group she is a co-founder of. Gurecio said she felt betrayed by Trump going back on his claims he would support the LGBTQ+ community during his campaign.
Trump tweeted in June 2016, thanking the LGBT community.
“I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people that will threaten your freedoms and beliefs,” he said.
Guercio believes he has not kept to his promise.
“For him to go back on something that was implemented a year ago, that trans-people were allowed to serve and were allowed to get their surgery and their hormones covered, it’s just outright wrong,” Gurecio said.
Gurecio thinks the message Long Island should take from the demonstration is there is an LGBT community that will do everything in their power to stand in solidarity with each other.
“We’re peaceful, this isn’t angry, this isn’t something that’s even violent in any which manner,” Gurecio said. “I want people to understand that we just want to live our lives, and that we want the same rights as everyone else.”
The following day protestors continued to berate Trump during a visit he made in Brentwood to the Suffolk County Police Department.
Patricia Rios was holding a sign saying she voted for Trump and regretted her decision.
“Once he comes for the ‘T’ [talking about Transgendered] he’s going to come for the L, the G and the B,” she said. “So we’re here to protest that.”
Dr. David Kilmnick, CEO of LGBT Network, a Long Island LGBT advocacy group said more than just transgender military members rights were ignored this week.
“We found out… Trump was coming here, and timing would have it that he tweeted that he was going to ban transgender folks from serving our country and serving our military,” he said. “That wasn’t the only thing he did to the community this week — which was big enough. His attorney general filed a court brief saying that Title VII doesn’t protect LGBT people from discrimination from the federal government. Having Trump here on Long Island, having Trump as president is an embarrassment, a disgrace. He doesn’t represent the values of our country of equality and justice.”
A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released July 28 showed a large portion of the county disagrees with Trump on this position.
According to the poll, 58 percent of adults agreed transgender people should be allowed to serve while 27 percent said they should not.
Currently it’s unclear if Trump’s announcement will lead to real policy change, as the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford said last week the current military policy would not be changed until the White House issued further guidance.
Additional reporting contributed by Kyle Barr and Victoria Espinoza.
Volunteers at last year’s Three Village Kids Lemonade Stand event. Photo from Three Village Kids Lemonade Stand
The fifth annual Three Village Kids Lemonade Stand will take place Aug. 2 from 2 to 6 p.m. With permission from the Three Village Central School District, this will be the first year that co-founders, siblings Maddie and Joseph Mastriano, will have the lemonade stand on the grounds of R.C. Murphy Junior High School instead of in front of their home.
The organizers anticipate visits from celebrity Chef Barret Beyer from the television series Hell’s Kitchen, team members from the Stony Brook University men’s basketball and women’s soccer teams and the Long Island Rough Riders. There will also be a performance by the local student band Swim.
Sales from the lemonade stand benefitStony Brook Children’s Hospital. Last year 70 student volunteers from the school district were on hand to help out, and customers included members of the New York Islanders, the Long Island Ducks and local legislators.
In addition to lemonade being available, the day will include games and activities for all ages and raffles.
Rain date is August 3. R.C. Murphy Junior High School is located at 351 Oxhead Road, Stony Brook. For more information or to make an online donation, visit www.threevillagekidslemonadestand.com.
Jenn McNary and her children, above, are featured in the movie ‘To the Edge of the Sky.’ Photo from Brian Ariotti
By Jenna Lennon
Duchenne muscular dystrophy is the number one genetic killer of boys in the world.
In “To the Edge of the Sky,” Emmy and Oscar Award winning producers, and Old Field natives, Jedd and Todd Wider tell the story of four mothers in their fight against the U.S. Food & Drug Administration for the approval of a potentially life-saving drug for this fatal disease.
The world premiere of the 118-minute documentary at the 22nd annual Stony Brook Film Festival was met with a standing ovation July 23. Continued feedback from the audience, during and after the Q&A period, has been nothing but positive for the brothers and for raising awareness for treatment of this disease.
“As a documentarian, there’s no greater reward than hearing audience members come up afterwards and ask how we can help, what we can do, how can we bring further attention or shine further light on these issues and help the families that are suffering so deeply,” Jedd said.
‘To the Edge of the Sky’ is produced by Jedd and Todd Wider brothers who grew up in Old Field. Photo from Brian Ariotti
“We spoke to so many people after the film who wanted to get involved and that’s incredibly rewarding to us as filmmakers,” he continued. “We invest years of our lives into these topics to help bring attention to these issues to help these families and for us there’s just nothing greater than that, than hearing that response.”
With such a large audience, Todd couldn’t help but be emotional as he took the stage with his brother for the Q&A session.
“It was a weird thing — I’m not normally that emotional during a screening,” he said. “I got to say it …. was a little surreal. It’s not like I hadn’t seen it before. I’ve probably watched it about a thousand times now, but I found that screening was extremely, unbelievably, emotionally powerful.”
Jenn McNary, one of the mothers in the film, brought her sons Max and Austin to the July 23 premiere.
“Jenn and her family have been incredibly supportive of the film from the very beginning, as has all of the other families as well,” Jedd said. “They’ve all been strongly behind the film and hoping that this film could bring more attention to these issues and bring more attention to the potential companies out there and the foundations that are working to help fund further research.”
Filming took place periodically over almost four years and “was a significant emotional investment,” Jedd said.
“At any given point, the story line would change on the drop of a dime,” he continued. “We became very attached to these boys and very attached to these families.”
Duchenne is the most common type of muscular dystrophy and occurs from a mutation in the gene for the protein dystrophin. Symptoms begin appearing around the age of three or four. At first, young boys start having trouble walking. By their early 20s, they’re essentially paralyzed from the neck down.
“To the Edge of the Sky” examines the fight for FDA approval of the drug eteplirsen, produced by Sarepta Therapeutics, that is meant to help produce the missing protein. In 2016, and at the end of the film, the FDA granted an accelerated approval for the drug, but Todd said the fight is far from over.
“We live in the United States of America where we’re in a functioning democracy, and we can move our political organizations and our political institutions with the power of our will if we choose to,” Todd said. “And in the case of this situation, it was really these four moms that really moved the needle, we feel, on how the FDA was sort of dealing with this … it was the power of their advocacy and the connection and their love for their kids that helped to sort of focus that attention on what was going on in terms of the drug approval process in this particular case.”
Numerous trucks arrive at a construction site, each doing their part to make a blueprint for a building into a reality. In a destructive way, molecules also come together in cancer to change cells that cause damage and can ultimately kill.
Researchers often know the participants in the cancer process, although the structure of each molecule can be a mystery. Determining how the parts of an enzyme work could allow scientists and, eventually, doctors to slow those cancer players down or inactivate them, stopping their cell-damaging or destroying processes.
Recently, Michael Airola, who started his own lab at Stony Brook University early this year and is an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology, published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which he showed the structure of an important enzyme that contributes to cell growth regulation in cancer and other diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease.
Called neutral sphingomyelinase, this enzyme produces ceramide, which allows cancer cells to become metastatic. Finding the structure of an enzyme can enable scientists to figure out the way it operates, which can point to pharmacological agents that can inhibit or deactivate the enzyme.
“We are trying to understand the link between structure and function to try to get the first sort of snapshots or pictures of what these enzymes look like” in the on and off states, said Airola. In his research, he showed what this enzyme looked like in its off or inactive state.
Airola joined Stony Brook Cancer Center Director Yusuf Hannun’s lab as a postdoctoral researcher in 2010, when Hannun was working in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Medical University of South Carolina. When Hannun moved to SBU in March of 2012, Airola joined him, continuing his postdoctoral research.
Michael Airola in April in New Orleans aboard the steamboat Natchez on the Mississippi River with his family, wife Krystal Airola, four-year-old Harper and two-year-old Grady. Photo from Michael Airola
Airola conducted his research at Stony Brook and Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he used a technique called X-ray crystallography, which shows the structure of crystallized molecules. Getting this enzyme to crystallize took considerable effort, especially because it has what Airola described as a floppy segment between two rigid structures.
Those floppy pieces, which Airola said aren’t the active sites of the enzyme, can interfere with the structural analysis. To see the important regions, Airola had to cut those flexible parts out, while fusing the rest of the enzyme into a single structure.
The crystallization took almost three years and was a “very difficult process,” Airola recounted. “To get proteins to crystallize, you need to get them to pack together in an ordered fashion.” He said he needed to develop some biochemical tricks to delete a large part in the middle of the protein. “Once we found the right trick and the right region to delete, we were able to crystallize the protein in about three months.”
Airola said he took considerable care to make sure removing the floppy or flexible region didn’t disrupt the function of the enzyme. Hannun and Airola are co-mentoring Prajna Shanbhogue, a graduate student who is in the process of discovering molecules that activate and inhibit the enzyme.
Hannun was pleased with the work Airola did in his lab, which he suggested was a “challenging type of research. Getting to a structure of a protein or enzyme (a specific type of protein) can take several years and is never guaranteed of success, but the rewards can be tremendous,” Hannun explained in an email, adding that Airola was a “critical contributor” and introduced structural biology to his group.
While Airola will continue to work on this enzyme, he is exploring another enzyme, in a collaboration with Hannun and John Haley at Stony Brook, that is involved in colon cancer.
Airola, two graduate students and three undergraduates in his lab are focusing considerable energy on an enzyme involved in the production of triglycerides.
Airola recently received a three-year, $231,000 grant from the American Heart Association to study lipins, a class of enzyme that plays a role both in heart disease and in diabetes. As he did with the enzyme that makes ceramide, Airola is developing a way to understand the structure and function of the triglyceride enzyme. He’d like to find out how this enzyme is regulated. “We’re trying to see if we can inhibit that enzyme, too,” he said.
Airola has “some creative ideas about using information from lipin proteins in plants and fungi, which have a less complex protein structure than mammalian lipins but catalyze the same biochemical reaction,” Karen Reue, a professor in the Department of Human Genetics, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a collaborator with Airola, explained in an email.
Reue’s lab will complement Airola’s work by conducting physiological analyses of the various “minimal” lipin proteins in processes that the mammalian proteins perform, including triglyceride biosynthesis.
While lipin proteins are necessary for metabolic homeostasis, Reue said a reasonable but still challenging goal might be to modulate the enzyme’s activity for partial inhibition in areas such as adipose tissue, while allowing the triglycerides to perform other important tasks.
Airola lives in East Setauket with his wife Krystal Airola, who is doing her residency in radiology at SBU, and their two children, four-year-old Harper and two-year-old Grady. The couple, who is expecting a third child next month, enjoy living in East Setauket, where they appreciate that they have a forest in their backyard and they can enjoy the water in Port Jefferson and West Meadow Beach.
When Airola’s postdoctoral position ended, he did a broad, national search for his next position and was delighted that he could remain at Stony Brook. “We love the area,” he said. “The research and science here are fantastic.” Airola’s collaborators are optimistic about the prospects for his research.
He is an “up and coming structural biologist that has already made important contributions to the field of lipid biology” Reue said and is a “creative and rigorous scientist with a bright future.”
From left, Laura Huang-Ernst, WMHO trustee; Gloria Rocchio, WMHO president; son Leif Halvorsen; Dr. Richard Rugen, WMHO chairman; daughter Lilli Halvorsen; Councilwoman Valerie Cartright; Emilia Retzlaff; wife Britt Halvorsen; and daughter Liv Halvorsen. Photo from WMHO
Family and friends of Erik Halvorsen, along with Town of Brookhaven Councilwoman Valerie Cartright (D-Port Jefferson Station) and Ward Melville Heritage Organization trustees, came together on the Stony Brook Village Green recently to celebrate his life. Erik was the former owner of Norse Tree and passed away tragically last November. Jeff Owen, of Owen Brothers Landscaping, donated a dogwood tree in his memory, and the Ward Melville Heritage Organization donated a boulder from the historic Mount House with an engraved bronze plaque.
The area selected for the placement of the tree and plaque (next to the Jennie Melville Gardens) was chosen not only for its beauty and peacefulness but because of Halvorsen’s help with revitalizing that area and the entire Village Green. Three Village residents made donations toward the project and their generosity exceeded the original cost. That balance was given to Erik’s widow, Britt Halvorsen. There are only three other plaques on the Village Green. One is dedicated to Jennie Melville and the other two to Ward and Dorothy Melville.
Watercolor study of “Steeds of Apollo” for the Apollo XIII insignia. Photo courtesy of Alex Katlan
New exhibit at The LIM showcases a modern-day Renaissance man
‘I always thought I was born under a certain star because I’ve been lucky my whole life.’
– Lumen Martin Winter
By Heidi Sutton
Lumen Martin Winter (1908 —1982) was an American public muralist, sculptor, painter and mosaic artist for more than 50 years. His most famous works are displayed at the U.S. Air Force Academy Chapels in Colorado Springs, at the AFL-CIO Headquarters and the National Bank in Washington, D.C., and at the Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Lincoln Center and the United Nations in New York City.
Through Sept. 17, The Long Island Museum in Stony Brook will present an exciting new exhibit titled Lumen Martin Winter: An Artist Rediscovered in the Art Museum on the hill. The exhibit, which includes 90 of Winter’s works of art along with photographs, letters and audio tapes, was made possible through a major donation by Alexander Katlan, a conservator for the museum, who began to collect artwork from the Winter family estate in 2015. Additional items are on loan from private collections and other museums.
“This is the first [solo] exhibition on this artist in a museum setting,” said Director of Collections and Chief Curator, Joshua Ruff. “Winter had been featured in other museums in small ways as parts of other projects; but this is the first time there has been a full-scale retrospective study of this artist in any museum anywhere.”
‘Mission’ by Lumen Martin Winter
Divided into several galleries, the diverse exhibit explores Winter’s art and career from his early works as a cartoonist at a newspaper and as a student in art school, his years spent in Europe, time spent out West in the 1960s and his final years in New Rochelle. Display cases further showcase Winter’s work as an illustrator of books and magazines, stamps and medallions, including one for the Apollo XIII lunar mission.
“Lumen Winter was a name that I didn’t know a few years ago,” said Ruff during a recent guided tour. “This is a guy that made his bread and butter on public art commissions. These were projects that were done all around the United States — a lot of them were centrally located around the New York Metropolitan area.”
According to Ruff, “many of Winter’s biggest commissions and biggest projects were large-scale murals.” As a result, much of the artwork on view at the museum are preparatory works. For example, the large colorful mural that greets visitors at the entranceway to the exhibit is a preliminary corner panel for “The Fisherman,” a 14- by 28-foot mural on view at the HSBC bank in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, at the corner of Avenue U and 17th Street.
Winter’s favorite artist was Leonardo da Vinci and his mural replica of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” which is the same size as “The Fisherman,” still hangs in the South Dining Hall at the University of Notre Dame. In the exhibit, a recurring video plays next to a colored print of “The Last Supper” in which Lumen describes his process in re-creating the famous work.
Ruff spent many hours researching and planning the exhibit in chronological order, visiting many of Winter’s murals in areas in and around New York, Washington, D.C., and even interviewing members of Winter’s family. “Many of Winter’s works were untitled, often not dated, so there was a lot of detective work” that needed to be done, said the curator.
Lumen Martin Winter in front of ‘Venus of the Lakes’ at the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago, 1961. Photo courtesy of The LIM
According to Ruff, Winter started his academic career at the Cleveland Academy of Art and trained at the National Academy of Design and Grand Central Art Academy. He lived in New Rochelle from the late 1950s until his death in 1982 and had a studio in lower midtown Manhattan as well as out in Taos, New Mexico, for many years. “As a New York area artist, he was connected to the New York and Long Island artists that we have in our [museum] collection and knew them well.”
Winter did 13 different public commissions for public schools in New York City including “Voice of the Bell” a reference to the Verrazano Bridge, which was commissioned for a school on Staten Island. Some were marble sculptures but most of them were mosaic murals for the entranceway of the schools, said Ruff. Winter was also commissioned to do a lot of lobby work for the Sheraton Hotels across the country.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog that documents Winter’s works including what still exists and what is gone. Said Ruff, “We documented in the catalog all the projects that [the museum] had good details on. Unfortunately there are many that are gone or were moved elsewhere.”
For Ruff, creating an exhibit on an artist where most of his large significant commissions are gone or are in places that are hard to get to and see was a challenge. “What we have is the design work, the reference work, but then also what we really have is paintings that show his skill as a watercolorist and as an oil painter that he was doing for the love and joy of doing the art — without a profit motive.”
Winter once said that he had an intrinsic feeling that he could do anything. Scanning the exhibit, it is incredible how that statement rings true. It seems as if whatever medium Winter tried he mastered, including watercolor, red conte, gouache, graphite, oil, ink, charcoal, bronze and marble. There are incredible landscapes on one wall, abstract art on another and portraits on yet another.
Preparatory works for massive sculptures are also on view including sketches and designs for the Kansas State Historical Society’s “White Buffalo” marble sculpture, which depicts a Navajo Indian on horseback with a buffalo. This was Winter’s final commissioned piece and he passed away before finishing it. His son William, working from the designs of his father, saw the statue to its completion in 1983.
“I don’t think that people even realized in Winter’s lifetime how much he had really accomplished,” said Ruff, adding “Hopefully this exhibition and the catalog we’ve reproduced is a start and I’m hoping that continuously going forward this museum and other museums will be able to do more about him in the future, make more discoveries and that we’ll be able to connect him to other artists. It’s been a great journey so far …”
The Long Island Museum, 1200 Route 25A, Stony Brook will present Lumen Martin Winter: An Artist Rediscovered through Sept. 17. For more information, call 631-751-0066 or visit www.longislandmuseum.org.
As the nation sinks its teeth into another annual Shark Week on Discovery Channel, local fishermen from across the North Shore reflected on their experiences and close calls with the predators of the sea.
Capt. James Schneider, James Joseph Fishing in Huntington
Capt. James Schneider wrestles with a mako shark. Photo from James Schneider
I was giant bluefin tuna fishing on our smaller, 38-foot boat around 2004 and we were off Nantucket and we pulled up on a whale. Usually the tuna swim with the whales, they eat the same bait. And we saw what looked like giant tuna and we threw a bunch of bait into the water and put three lines in. All three rods went off at the same time and we hooked up what we thought were three tuna fish at the same time for a minute. Within 10 seconds of the hookup, the first fish jumped behind the boat … it was a 650-pound mako shark that got in between the other two lines. The other “tuna fish” were a 250-pound blue shark and another mako. We were using monofilament leaders for the tuna, and the mako came down on the line and snapped the leader (fishing line). Then the shark jumped above our eye level and cleared the water 12 to 15 feet, leaped completely out of the water trying to throw the hook out of its mouth. The other one we … caught it, after an hour and a half, it was a mako that was nearly 700 pounds, snagged in the dorsal, he’s swimming, felt a lot like a tuna fish. We put it in the boat and it was on the line for about an hour and half and then we gutted it and found about nine, full-sized bluefish intact in stomach, each weighing between 8 and 13 pounds.
Another time, I was out 17 miles south of Montauk with my son when he was 8 years old. I wanted to catch my son his first shark. We went out, my son caught a mako shark pretty early in the trip. Within 20 minutes of him hanging the shark from the stern of the boat, I noticed a giant shape coming toward the boat and it was a great white shark, about 17-18 feet long, probably close to 3,000 pounds — about the width of a Volkswagen. It was cruising with such agility coming right to the boat and we had a little time so I asked my son, “Do you want your shark or do you want to watch the great white eat the shark?” My son quickly decided he wanted his shark to show his grandparents so we whipped the shark into the boat just in time as the great white came up to the stern.
Capt. Brett Clifford, Osprey Fishing Fleet in Port Jefferson
Take a bite out of Shark Week, Long Island edition. Photo from Brett Clifford
My 11-year-old son, Kieran, was excited to go shark fishing for the first time so he, myself and one of the first mates from the Osprey trailed my 25-foot Aquasport to Montauk last Wednesday, July 19. We launched there after catching some fluke, went out about 20 miles to the sharking grounds and we drifted for about five hours with very little action. My son got a chance to see a sea turtle, which was kind of cool. A mahi-mahi was on the lure for a couple minutes but we eventually lost him. All hope seemed lost and we brought in one line and then when Kieran was reeling in the last line, the float popped up and we weren’t sure if it was a wave or a shark. I picked up the line and felt little bumps, put the rod back in the holder as Kieran safely put his hand on the line so he could feel the bumps. He felt them and he looked up at me and then the shark took it and the line went off. He was able to feel the power of the shark and how fast it takes a line like that. We hooked the shark, put the rod in Kieran’s lap and had him start fighting it. It took him about 15 to 20 minutes to bring in about a 5-foot mako. Although it was a keeper, we clipped it and let it go. We put one more bait in the water and it was then immediately picked up by a blue shark, which we released. I’ve caught makos, blue sharks and thresher sharks before [but] nothing can compare to watching your own son’s excitement and feel the thrill of a big game fish like that for the first time, so that totally trumps any other shark experiences I’ve had.
Capt. Steve Witthuhn, Top Hook Fishing Charters in Montauk and frequenter of Cold Spring Harbor
A hammerhead shark swims right up to a boat. Photo from Steve Witthuhn
There’s a lot of bait and life out there in Montauk so it’s one of the more exceptional years for this. That’s the fishing capital of the world and you’re bound to catch something there. We had a trip Friday, July 21, where we took a father and his two boys out to an area 12 miles across Montauk Point and I saw signs of life viewing whales and dolphins in the area. There was also a sea turtle — it was like an aquarium over there. We decided to set up there and we got the baits ready, using circle hooks, and started chumming — what we call “drifting and dreaming.” You get things out there and you’re waiting for the bite and dreaming of when that shark comes into the slick and looks for the bait. Our first hit was a 150-pound blue shark and that got things rolling. The next was a 125-pound dusky.
As we’re getting another blue shark off the line, we see a big hammerhead shark swim by. Hammerheads are very finicky, sometimes they take a slab bait but normally I’ve found them to be aggressive, they want live bait. So as we hooked up a live bluefish, the bluefish got excited and started running for its life because the hammerhead was on its tail. He tore it apart. We started playing with him and put some more bluefish on the line when we saw another hammerhead come into the slick. Talk about shark-infested waters, we were in the right place at the right time. We hooked up one of the hammerheads, about a 6 or 7 footer, and we fought it for about a half hour. It ate the live bluefish and then another hammerhead appeared. Once the action starts, everybody wakes up. Once you hear that rod go “zzzzing” then everybody jumps up and wants to see what kind of shark it is. It was pretty wild.
All these sharks were caught and then released. For me as a captain, it’s more about the thrill of the catch rather than the kill of the catch. If we can respect nature then we can have a lot of fun and educate our customers. I told them, “I know Shark Week begins in a few days, but you’re experiencing something live and what it’s all about.” I’m all for respecting and preserving the resource.
Preparatory works for massive sculptures are also on view including sketches and designs for the Kansas State Historical Society’s “White Buffalo” marble sculpture, which depicts a Navajo Indian on horseback with a buffalo. This was Winter’s final commissioned piece and he passed away before finishing it. His son William, working from the designs of his father, saw the statue to its completion in 1983.
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