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HERALD Also serving Point Lookout & East Atlantic Beach
Firefighter joins husband on force
Kids learn ball from the pros
National Night out draws crowd
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Vol. 33 No. 32
AUGUST 4 - 10, 2022
$1.00
Art gets serious at Arts in Plaza Janelle DeSouza is among full-time artists on display By lIllY MUllANEY Intern
M
Bob Arkow/Herald
JANEllE DESoUzA, 26, was among about 15 artists who displayed their work at Arts in the Plaza last Saturday morning. DeSouza is a self-described expressionist.
any artists come to Arts in the Plaza, in Kennedy Plaza outside City Hall, on weekends during the summer. Some are there to enjoy a nice day outdoors and to display their work. Janelle DeSouza, of Uniondale, is different. DeSouza, 26, is serious about her art. It’s what she wants to do. “When I create, I create from the heart, so I would describe my style as expressionist,” she said with a smile as she sat at a booth on a busy Saturday morning last week. She paints and sketches, and she was selling some of her work, which stood out, with bright imaginative colors painted on journals and jars. There were landscapes, clouds and moons, and abstract, marbled patterns. Continued on page 5
New work of fiction imagines firefighters’ 9/11 sacrifices By JAMES BERNSTEIN jbernstein@liherald.com
It took 10 years and 20 rejections, but Joe Calderone never gave up. And how fortunate, because he’s now celebrating his first book, “Don’t Look Back.” It’s a work of historical fiction about one of the worst days in American history, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. “It took many rewrites,” Calderone said. “I had to buy a whole new cabinet to hold the rejections.” Calderone spent years as a reporter for Newsday, but the Floral Park resident can now be
found in the public relations office at Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital in Oceanside. Two decades ago, however, Calderone was at the Daily News, covering the New York City Fire Department, routinely reporting on what would generally be stories about fighting fires or responding to accidents. On Sept. 11, he found himself writing something much different. Before that Tuesday ended, an unimaginable 343 firefighters would be lost as two hijacked commercial airliners slammed into the World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, eventually toppling them in
clouds of dust and debris. In all, 2,977 people were killed there, along with 184 at the Pentagon in Washington, and 40 on a hijacked commercial jetliner that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. “I covered the family organizations that were for med,” Calderone said. “I spent time with them.” “Don’t Look Back” focuses on the firefighters who rushed into the burning towers, their lives, and their sacrifices. Calderone didn’t make it to what would eventually be called ground zero until the day after, since that part of Manhattan was locked down in the attacks’
aftermath. In the years since, he had developed many sources among firefighters, getting to know their families as well. “I felt what had happened to the firefighters and their families has never fully been told,” said Calderone, who is now slightly graying at 56, but still filled with the thrill of writing. “Congress’s 9/11 Commission
did a good job looking at the situation nationally and internationally.” But he pointed out that the commission also discussed in detail New York City’s oft-failed emergency response due to poor radio transmissions. “I took that chapter to bring that part of the Continued on page 14