_________________ BALDWIN ________________
HERALD Baldwin marks Memorial Day
New intern joins the Herald
First ever alumni basketball game
Page 3
Page 6
Page 10
Vol. 30 No. 24
JUNE 8 - 14, 2023
$1.00
Two dangerous diseases, and five marathons By BEN FIEBERT bfiebert@liherald.com
Courtesy Richard Brodsky
RIcHaRD BRoDsky wITH his wife, Jodi, at a marathon they ran in Miami in 2016.
Within a span of five years, Richard Brodsky was diagnosed with two life-threatening illnesses, which inspired him to help others. Since 2014, he has been doing that with a 5K race for a special cause in Baldwin. In 1997, Brodsky, of Atlantic Beach, was told he had HIV, and began taking AIDS medication, which he takes to this day. Then, in 2002, he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, but after undergoing months of treatment, he felt well enough to run the 2003
New York City Marathon. Brodsky, a one-time architect who’s now 70, realized he was extremely fortunate for the medical care he received, and wanted to give back to those in poorer countries with weaker health care systems. In 2004, he organized the World AIDS Marathon in Mbita, Kenya. The proceeds went to an AIDS orphanage there for children who had lost one or both parents to HIV or AIDS. Brodsky said that he always wanted to host a marathon in Africa, because that’s where AIDS is most common, and he wanted to raise awareContinued on page 8
Coming together after some badly timed lousy weather Following months of planning and two rainouts, 1,500 gather at Grand Baldwin Festival By BEN FIEBERT bfiebert@liherald.com
The Community Coalition of Baldwin worked around the clock to bring Baldwin’s biggest festival back after it was postponed last October. Claudia Rotondo, the coalition’s founder and co-chair, shrugged off the ill-timed rainout in the fall — and another one last month — and made clear that the Grand Baldwin Festival still succeeded in bringing the community together on May 21. The idea for the festival
dates back to 2011. Rotondo, the director of the Baldwin Council Against Drug Abuse, a drugprevention and awareness agency focused on teaching students about substance abuse, wanted to join a communitywide group, but there was none like what she was looking for in Baldwin at the time. So she sent out invitations to churches, fraternal organizations, PTAs — even groups of medical professions — and invited them to help her create a coalition that would have greater impact in Baldwin, and strengthen residents’ pride in the hamlet.
“One of the purposes with the coalition is to bring people together, so that people have a sense of belonging,” Rotondo said, “and that’s how the coalition got born.” As the director of the Council Against Drug Abuse, she wanted the new organization to help prevent community members from turning to substance abuse. She hoped that people could turn to other people for comfort instead of drugs. “At a coalition meeting,” she recalled, co-chair “David Viana said, ‘Let’s highlight the community and let’s bring the com-
munity together. David and I had ideas that just meshed, and this was how the festival was born.” It was Viana’s idea, she emphasized. The festival made its debut in 2019, behind the Baldwin Public Library, in conjunction with the library’s 50th anniver-
sary celebration. “They had somebody at the door, clocking people in, and about 3,000 people were in the library,” Rotondo recounted. “And I’m assuming that more people showed up to the festival throughout the day.” Continued on page 14