As we empathize with the grief of  Manhasset, Let us never forget that a 
Disproportionate share, 25%, of the Heroes, the Police and Firefighters, were 
Italian American, with a somewhat smaller proportion of the civilian victims.
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Column One, Front Page

A TOWN'S LONG ROAD TO RECOVERY

Just across from Manhattan, has become a dot on the map known for taking a 
disproportionate hit Sept. 11, losing nearly 50 residents in the towers.

By J.R. Moehringer
Staff Writer
Los Angeles Times
February 16 2002

MANHASSET, N.Y. -- 
...For generations, this small town 17 miles east of Manhattan has straddled 
two identities. Simple country village, enclave of vast wealth. A cross 
between "Our Town" and Fat City. Even before F. Scott Fitzgerald romanticized 
Manhasset and used it as the setting for much of "The Great Gatsby," the town 
had a reputation as one of those lovely places where the American dream rings 
true, and often comes true.

Now, Manhasset has a different reputation. Like nearby Garden City and Belle 
Harbor, Manhasset will always be known as one of those tiny dots on the map 
that took a disproportionate hit Sept. 11.

Elsewhere in the country, people may be moving forward, gingerly trying to 
get back to normal. Here, where the loss was so focused, the grief is fading 
more slowly. In this 350-year-old community,...residents find themselves, in 
Fitzgerald's words, "borne back ceaselessly into the past." "Everything feels 
different,"...

Optimists among Manhasset's 18,376 residents like to say the gloom is 
lifting. They talk with tight smiles about the resilience of residents, the 
indomitable human spirit, the fresh start that comes with a new year. But 
each day brings new evidence that things are not normal.

The sadness ebbs for a time; then, like the tide in Manhasset Bay, it 
returns...

"There's a pall over Manhasset," says Lillian Orofino, owner of Olive Duntley 
Florist. "People are just going through the motions."

"People who were born here," says her husband, Ray, "who grew up here . . ."

He stops and wipes his eyes with a rough, stained hand.". . . don't live here 
no more."

The Orofinos' son worked in the World Trade Center. He should have been at 
his desk the morning of the attacks. But after keeping his staff of 28 
computer technicians working late into the night Sept. 10, he gave 
everyone--himself included--the next morning off.

When the Orofinos first heard that the World Trade Center was in flames, they 
didn't know their son was safe, sleeping late. They locked up their shop and 
dashed to his house.

Later, after their relief wore off, dread set in. They began to hear names, 
an endless roll call of names. People who weren't so lucky. People who hadn't 
yet stepped safely off one of the trains pulling into Manhasset's station 
like troop trains limping back from battle...

Among the dead were men the Orofinos knew as boys and watched grow. Their big 
round faces were as welcome in the shop as new daisies. They may have come to 
the Orofinos to buy orchids for their mothers, corsages for their prom dates, 
roses for their wives. Now, the Orofinos were making floral arrangements for 
their funerals.

In those warm days of late September, there was a sickening false spring in 
Manhasset as the town bloomed overnight with condolence bouquets.

Along with every other business in town, the Orofinos' flower shop sits on 
Plandome Road, the only commercial strip. Like a cardboard set for a play 
about small-town America, Plandome Road is the backdrop and foreground of 
life in Manhasset.

Beginning at St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church, the road runs down a gentle 
hill, past the bars where the men hang out, past the hair salons where the 
women hang out, past the soda fountains where the teens hang out, all the way 
to the yacht clubs, where the rich float out on Long Island Sound.

You can always read the mood of the town on Plandome Road, residents say. 
Especially now, with the stores empty, the bars and churches packed...

Plandome Road is where residents come for an egg sandwich at Manhasset Deli, 
a scotch and soda at Dunhill's, a slice of pizza at Gino's, a fishing license 
at Town Hall. Plandome Road is the site of the old-fashioned bandstand, where 
summer concerts are performed and where the town gathered in September for a 
wrenching candlelight vigil...

Louie's is where residents stop before boarding their morning trains to 
Manhattan. Newspapers, cup of coffee, see you tomorrow, Louie. Just after 
Sept. 11, Lillian Orofino went there to search for faces.

There can't be a perfect list of the dead in Manhasset, because the town 
claims many who grew up here, or had roots here, but didn't live here at the 
time of the attacks. So Louie's, Orofino knew, would be the best place to 
gauge the town's loss: If someone stopped appearing at Louie's, the reasons 
were likely to be ominous.

After a few weeks, she spotted a man she hadn't seen since the attacks and 
nearly hugged him. She didn't know the man, but she was overcome with joy, 
and relief, because she'd presumed he was dead.

"That's what happens in a small town," she says. "You don't know everybody. 
But you know everybody's face."

Today, the cooks at Louie's still watch the faces, still listen for those 
special orders no longer ordered. The man who came in every morning--short 
stack of flapjacks, regular coffee, two sugars--will never come again. On 
weekends, he would bring his wife and children. Now, when the wife and 
children stop in without him, it breaks everyone's hearts.

There is a rumor in town that the wife and children of another vanished 
customer are selling their house, moving away. Hard times, say the people 
sitting at Louie's counter...

A few steps up Plandome Road, at Phil's Manhasset Sports Shop, Little League 
players still bound through the door after school, as they have since the 
store opened in 1947.

Some days, the boys actually spend money on a new mitt or a pair of tube 
socks. Most days, though, they just spill soda, knock things over, 
roughhouse, until one of the clerks chases them off.

Same as always. And yet, not the same, because some of the boys have lost 
coaches, uncles, fathers. So the clerks go easier on them these days...

Phil Ruggiero, the 90-year-old owner of the shop, remembers when Plandome 
Road was a dirt path. He's seen an endless procession up and down Plandome 
Road--sons and daughters of Manhasset marching past his window, followed by 
their sons and daughters, and nothing has ever really changed. Until now.

"This is the worst thing to ever happen to this town," he says.

On Memorial Day, Ruggiero notes, the parade starts at the bottom of Plandome 
Road and ends at the top. The whole town turns out, there are flags 
everywhere, and the local newspaper publishes the names of every resident who 
died in war.

Same thing every year.

But this year, the newspaper also will publish the names of those who died in 
the World Trade Center--a number that exceeds the town's total dead in the 
Civil War, World War I, Korea and Vietnam.