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Vol. 89 No. 9
FEBRUARY 22 - 28, 2024
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Rotary donates to L.I. Care’s Freeport pantry By MoHAMMAD RAFIQ mrafiq@liherald.com
Courtesy Dave Denenberg
Members of the rotary went on a $3000 shopping spree for items with which to buy items for the Nassau Center for Collaborative Assistance.
In the spirit of service and compassion, the FreeportMerrick Rotary Club recently orchestrated efforts to alleviate food insecurity on Long Island by helping to fill empty food pantries across Nassau County. This philanthropic jour ney was made possible through strategic collaboration and a grant from the district Rotary. The charitable undertaking falls within the Rotary club’s philosophy of providing service to others. Rotary International is one of the largest service organizations in the world, with the goal to infuse all of the various arms of the organization with that same service-oriented drive. Club secretary DeRosette Harrison spearheaded the mission by reaching out to the Long Island District Rotary for a $1,500 grant to buy food and other necessities, which were then donated to the Long Island Cares food CoNtiNued oN pAge 9
Village archivist on why it is that she loves Freeport By MoHAMMAD RAFIQ mrafiq@liherald.com
Regina Feeney loves Freeport — so much so that she’s dedicated a substantial part of her career to archiving and digitizing the village’s history, and assembling virtually an entire encyclopedia of her hometown. State law requires every municipality to have a historian on staff, and Feeney, a librarian and archivist at the Freeport Memorial Library, has also served as village historian since the death of her predecessor, Cynthia Krieg. She grew up in Freeport, and has worked at the library for over 20 years,
but it’s not as if the village is all she’s ever known. Quite the contrary. “I’m not like George Bailey in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’” Feeney said. “I got to leave Freeport … I went to college, I lived in Europe, I lived and worked in New York City.” And yet Feeney decided to focus a large part of her career on meticulously documenting the history of one of the largest villages in New York. Asked what drew her to such an extensive project, Feeney said, “All my life as a Freeporter, when I would tell people I was from this town, I would get these weird looks, like, ‘You’re
from there?’ “And people would say these really horrible things about this town,” she added. “And I was like, this is odd, because it’s not the Freeport I know. And I realized that we, as Freeporters, we allow people from other places to define us; we allow other communities to tell us who we are. We need to define ourselves. We need to set the tone and message. “My superpower is history,” Feeney said. “And I love talking about history, because the more I dig deep into Freeport history, (the more I realize) how amazing this town is. It has got such cool and interesting people, and
such interesting things happened here.” Feeney, 54, has been working at the library since she was 16. Even when she left town to work as a corporate librarian, or “information specialist,” in New York City, she still often worked part-time as a reference librarian in Freeport, staying with her parents.
After the downsizing of the business and economic think tank she worked for after the Sept. 11 attacks, Feeney moved back to Freeport. She bought a co-op in town and has lived here ever since. She has done groundbreaking work in archiving village history, specifically digitizing CoNtiNued oN pAge 5