The young man who was waiting for us in the mayor's office sported a neatly combed back, old-fashioned pompadour wave, a breezy open collar and a wide, welcoming smile. He had, he told us, made his first ever pilgrimage to Floral Park bearing good tidings about the skies above.

Pleasantly garrulous and brimming over with energy and intelligence Gerry Petrella, only 24 years old, is Senator Chuck Schumer's freshly appointed Long Island Regional representative. Facing the three of us, not a trace of nervousness disturbed a composure that belied his years as he effortlessly discoursed on various subjects affecting our community as if he had been manning his post for the last five years.

It all occurred at the end of a busy day on Friday, May 2, when our hard working Trustees Tomecki and Tweedy, along with myself, sat down with Mr. Petrella to discuss among other issues, the impact of low-flying helicopters over Floral Park. For years helicopters have used the LIRR's mainline as a guidepost to access the East End and Republic Airport, disrupting many a backyard summer barbecue and becoming, by most accounts, the most conspicuous pest in the Floral Park ecosystem.

In December 2007, however, Senator Schumer brokered a landmark agreement with the Eastern Regional Helicopter Council that sought to divert noisy choppers away from the airspace over residential communities to a newly established, over the water North Shore route. Senator Schumer's war cry from "Floral Park to Mattituck," to liberate us from air space tyranny may have lacked the dramatic flair of Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty or give me death" but it gets the point across very nicely.

To ensure compliance with the agreement, the senator has funded the creation of a 3-1-1 Call Center in the Town of North Hempstead, which will accept and monitor all complaints about low flying helicopters from residents throughout Nassau County. The Call Center will provide weekly, as well as monthly reports to both the Helicopter Council and Senator Schumer's office. The council has agreed to assess complaints individually, as well as collectively and will work with helicopter operators to adjust routes and altitudes to provide prompt relief to frequent complainant areas.

Helicopter flyers are living under the threat of being legislatively mandated to fly these routes, if they don't cooperate voluntarily. I am encouraging all residents to call 869-6311 (write down those numbers - it adds up to progress) the next time you are disturbed by a rogue, low flying helicopter. Call Center operators will be looking for as much information as possible such as the day, date, time and description of the aircraft. If visible, you will also be asked to provide the registration number of the helicopter. The center is open from 7 am to 7 pm on weekdays.

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rain comes it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

Those limpid, elegiac sentences about opening day were composed by A. Bartlett Giamatti, president of Yale University, and later Major League Baseball Commissioner and who along with writer Roger Angell, was as close to a poet laureate we've had in describing the glories of America's favorite pastime.

Baseball binds hearts and spirits into a weave of wistfulness and nostalgia that echoes back to simple annals of childhood. That sounds sentimental but I always believed it to be true and never more so as the American Legion Color Guard proudly led hundreds of Little Leaguers and their coaches and parents to the Floral Park Recreation Center where magnificently manicured fields awaited the sound of "play ball."

There in the wide, open yard, just before the curtain of dusk settled over the sunlit skies, laughter rocketed back and forth over the peaceful, green fields as bright-eyed children bedecked in their bright colored uniforms drank in the happiness of the day. Who can seriously say, here in America, that there is no intimacy between baseball and growing up.

Baseball will teach our youngsters about teamwork, the importance of practice, and the virtues of healthy competition, discipline, sportsmanship, how to win and how to lose and most importantly to never, ever give up. In the dancing eyes of children, dreams came alive as the entire scene was graced by a touching, sacred innocence; the grand game, as it was meant to be, untouched by greed and untainted by dishonor.

For along with the traditional lessons, our coaches and parents now shoulder the additional burden of teaching our youngsters about performance enhancing drugs that has reached epidemic proportions among young athletes and has, perhaps, irreparably damaged sports, especially baseball in recent years. The cultural bias toward progress and success with its rich monetary rewards has claimed, degenerately, a generation of stellar athletes.

Lance Williams, an investigative reporter and co-author of the exhaustively researched Game of Shadows, reports that as many as 80 percent of all baseball and track and field athletes have used performance enhancing drugs. Some have argued that performance drugs are so widespread in professional sports that the competitive balance remains unaltered. But this is besides the point; the tragedy is that the cultural bias toward success complete with its rewards of riches and fame has claimed, degenerately, a generation of stellar athletes seen as role models for maturing athletes.

This is not a moral indictment of the modern athlete who often sees doping not only as not cheating but necessary in order to be competitive. The temptations are frightfully seductive since these drugs are extremely effective, the payoffs staggeringly high and the prospect of getting caught, despite recent revelations, generally low. I have little doubt that if steroids had been around when Babe Ruth was playing, the Babe, phenomenal ballplayer though he was, would have been chugging the stuff down in his beer.

As the pharmacological revolution grows ever more sophisticated and the prospect of genetic manipulation ever more real its allures will challenge our young people as never before. Already, more than a million teenagers have experimented, to a lesser and greater degree, with anabolic steroids and human growth hormone. Floral Park's youth is not exempt to its nefarious influences and it is well to remember that the long-term health impact of these chemical enhancers is still not fully understood.

Nor is it entirely understood how this will shape, if not transform, the way we understand sports and more importantly human achievement. A. Bartlett Giamatti, the humanist and Renaissance scholar who had the stones to ban from baseball the iconic Pete Rose for gambling on the ballgames, would have understood that something valuable has been lost in the steroid, record-breaking powered game we see today. His book, Take Time for Paradise, extolling the virtues of sports may have led, if he had lived, to a sequel entitled Paradise Lost after John Milton's 17th century epic poem a work he would, as a Professor of the Classics, been intimately familiar with.

As for myself, I haven't been to a major league game in years. Well before Mark McGuire hit his 70 home runs, I was something of a dismal seer divining something rotten about the game and said so, ad nauseum, to friends and relatives alike. I don't say this in any self-congratulatory way but with a profound sadness that could only be felt by one who truly revered something that was loved and lost.

I am, however, enthralled by the Floral Park Little League and the boys and girls who play with such enthusiasm as well as the wonderful adults who coach and manage with such devotion and commitment. It is pure, marvelous and fun. I hope when our Little Leaguers grow up things will change; and I hope they will help it, change it and, redeem the game I had once so deeply and passionately cared about.

Our library, I say this without any inkling of pretentiousness, is a priceless gift. Floral Park's Library opened its doors back in 1923 and behold, on its 25th anniversary, a group known as the "Friends of the Floral Park Library" was founded to dedicate themselves to safeguarding and polishing a jewel of the village. This year they are 60 years young and are helping to provide the funding to propel our library into the 21st century.

Across the years, the Friends have purchased computers, conducted annual book sales now held at Centennial Hall and furnished patrons with information about upcoming programs and events being sponsored at the library. Some of these programs include the adult computer classes and the children's and teen's summer reading programs. The Friends have provided funding for the audiovisual drop box, seed money for our video collection and recently purchased a video monitor that is positioned in the foyer of the library.

You've heard the old adage to have a friend you must be one. What more worthwhile institution can you be a benefactor to than our own library? Within the walls of its Mount Vernon architecture, knowledge of the great natural world, the long, infinitely varied arc of human history and the accumulated knowledge of the ages are all sitting at our fingertips. Libraries, more than anything else I can think of, are the great depositories of human civilization and as their heirs, our inheritance is both measureless and immeasurably rich.

Be assured that "The Friends" welcome your financial support as well as your talents. Share your commitment to the library and community by becoming a Friend today. Contact Jeanne Petta, president of the Friends, at 354-7137 for more information.

Exactly 100 years ago, our village was incorporated without nary a tremor to record the event for history. It all went down very businesslike; Oct. 15, the day of incorporation, was a day like any other day.

The men attired in their square-shouldered three-piece suits, wrapped with waistcoats and such tight, high stiffed collars that it is a wonder they were not asphyxiated, passed the day without any fanfare at all. The women, even more tortured in their ludicrously spine contorting corsets covered as many as eight layers of fabric with skirts that touched the floor, went nonchalantly about their daily routine. Outdoors, hats were virtually obligatory for both sexes and there are no accounts of anyone throwing them in the air in celebration upon hearing the news of incorporation.

Throughout the year the papers were full of stories of Robert Peary's race to the North Pole and, like today, the race for the presidency, which elected William Howard Taft the 27th president of the United States and who, at 356 pounds, was easily the heaviest of all our commanders in chief. Tensions with Japan in the Far East were mounting and Henry Ford's Model T revolutionized the automobile, the way Howard Levitt revolutionized suburban housing 40 years later in Levittown, by making it affordable through mass production. You could have your car in any color, said Ford, as long as it's black.

All these things were written and talked about, but little was said about the historic moment when our village was incorporated and we became, for the first time, a self-governing entity. Perhaps the mystery is not so very great. In 1908 Floral Park was still an experiment; today we are a stupendous success. Then we were untried; now we are tried and true.

This Saturday, May 10, however, we will launch the biggest event in the history of Floral Park. Our Centennial Parade will kick off at 11 a.m. at Lowell Avenue, replete with 11 fire departments, a host of marching bands, antique cars and, at last count, 73 dignitaries. After the parade, an Old Fashioned Centennial Fair will cap the day. What a difference a 100 years makes! Don't miss it.