__________________ Nassau _________________
RVC, MER, LYN, VAL
HERALD All the news of the Five Towns
Great Homes
5 2 ' % + # . % 1 / / ' / 1 4 #6
Local Home Showcase
/ /
Inside VoL. 99 No. 44
Family Business Awards
+8' 5'%6+10
7
Inside
,-
oCToBER 27 - NoVEMBER 2, 2022
Great Homes October 27, 2022
the Ultimate Local Home showcase
vecteezy.com/free-vector/black-green-background
RVC, MER, LYN, VAL
Joseph Santillo is remembered Page 12 $1.00
After surviving Ian, now what? Five Towns native is coming to terms with hurricane’s aftermath By HERNESTo GALDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Joe Abate/Herald
We’re with the band Hewlett High School’s Homecoming included a parade and a football win. More photos, Page 3.
Friends of Linda Doherty persuaded her to move to Fort Myers, Florida, after the children she raised in Hawley, Pennsylvania, were grown. In 2016, she moved to Florida and met a man who became her boyfriend, Todd Horman. But now she is back in Hawley with her kids, having returned with post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of Hurricane Ian. “I don’t ever want to live by the water again,” Doherty. A graduate of Hewlett High School, Doherty, 57, was a part of the Five Towns community for
40 years, growing up and attending school in Hewlett, and then moving to Woodmere after getting married. She and her husband had two children, a son and a daughter. Two years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the family moved to Hawley. “After 9/11, we just didn’t feel safe raising the kids there,” Doherty said of New York. In 2009, she got divorced, but she stayed with her children until they were “up and out on their own,” she said. Then she moved to Texas for two years before deciding to settle in Fort Myers. “Fort Myers, for the last six Continued on page 11
Community center aids ‘entrants’ from Central America By HERNESTo GALDAMEZ hgaldamez@liherald.com
Sasha Young, the director of Gammy’s Pantry at the Five Towns Community Center in Lawrence, has a new challenge on her hands these days, and it is testing her knowledge of Spanish. The community center’s services include an Aid to the Foreign Bor n prog ram, which focuses on new arrivals from other countries, many of whom need help with their English and their knowledge of American culture. The center has recently welcomed an unspecified number of migrants. “It’s
been kind of crazy,” Young said. Gammy’s Pantry provides not only food, but also clothing and other items to 200 people per day who are in need, which has been of great help to the newcomers, who aren’t familiar with changes of season. Most of them, Young explained, come from much warmer climates, such as the Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. “We are seeing many new entrants . . . coming in with shorts and T-shirts alone,” she said. Providing clothing for them
W
e’re here to help the people regardless of how they got here. SASHA YouNG director, Gammy’s Pantry
has, fortunately, not been an issue for the center. The services the migrants need vary, but a majority need help learning English — classes that the center recently started, Young said, adding that the center
serves 5,000 families who are registered for food aid through Long Island Cares and Gammy’s Pantry. T he f acility’s executive director, K. Brent Hill, has seen community members help the migrants in many ways, from donating clothing to canned foods to their time, to help them in other ways. “Sometimes peo-
ple just want to come and help in our citizenship class and our Spanish-to-English class,” Hill said. A good portion of the migrants are children. “Minors come through without their parents,” Hill said, “so that’s been kind of disturbing for us.” Asked whether the appearContinued on page 10