(Selected by the Long Island Advance, our own Laurie Fosmire!)
The text of the LI Advance article from 3/21/13 appears below:
BY LINDA LEUZZI
Laurie Fosmire was in Norwell, Mass. on Sunday when we caught up with her about our selection as the Advance 2012 Woman of the Year. She was tending her kid sister, Helene Quinn, who had fallen and fractured her pelvis after a skiing accident.
“She’s been home a week and is mending,” Fosmire said. “I thought I’d help out her husband a bit.”
Coming to her sister’s aid is right in line with Fosmire’s volunteer efforts. For one thing, Fosmire has been manning the front desk at Brookhaven Memorial Medical Center a day or so a week for 42 years with a smile and a compassionate word or two. She’s also served as a past president of the Bellport Garden Club, and assisted with the Street Garden Program. Beautification is in her blood; her slender figure can be seen picking up litter along South Country Road near her East Patchogue home, where she’s lived since 1969.
Need a little something to enhance your home? Fosmire is one of the volunteers at the Bellport-Brookhaven Exchange Shop, too. Step right in; she can help.
“The kids were all in school except the youngest one. She was in kindergarten,” she said of the start of her volunteering efforts. She and her husband Fran have five children and three grandchildren.
“Fran has worked in hospitals even when he was in the service and my background was X-ray technologist (she’s a registered radiological technician in New York State), so my natural inclination was to be working in a hospital with people. I had finished my studies back in 1967 before we got married and then didn’t work again at it until the late 1960s when I had to study again for an exam as a registered technologist. I did mammographies at Brookhaven and when we lived in New Jersey, for a number of months. It was part-time and then I volunteered as well.”
The first face that greets a concerned loved one or visitor in a hospital is important and Fosmire knows that. “When you’ve been at it as long as I have, you can
tell from their face how to speak to them,” she said. “You can joke or let them know you care. That’s what’s so wonderful about it. I do two days a week there; one day as ambassador in the surgery area. With that, you’re a go-between and can help the nurses a little and go to the waiting room to speak to the families, get answers for them, sit and chat and help pass the time.”
“She is an outstanding citizen and role model,” wrote Kathleen Dallin. “She is always friendly and kind to everyone she meets.”
Oh, she was also the first female firefighter in the Hagerman Fire Department; the first of two, with Jay Backes, in 1981. She was named a Fire Person of the Year there. And before that was an EMT with the Bellport Ambulance Company from 1975- 81, racking up 10 merit awards, including the Chief’s Award for Outstanding Service. Did we mention Playcrafters? She served on its board. “Two other friends and myself produced ‘Leader of the Pack,’ ” she said. “The more important thing was working on the scenes and then working with two of my friends.”
If Fosmire has a motto, it’s this: You want to learn and do. A past president of the South Bay Art Association, Fosmire even exhibited her photographs last month with her friend Michele DePalo in the Patchogue-Medford Library.
DePalo is a next-door neighbor who cites Fosmire as her best bud. “Laurie has had a tremendous influence on me as far as giving my time to community organizations,” she said of their over-40- year friendship. “She’s gotten me involved with Playcrafters, the Bellport Garden Club and even volunteering at Brookhaven Hospital Medical Center years ago.”
Back from her sister’s this week, Fosmire can’t wait until the weather gets nicer so she can cultivate her garden.
“Even pulling the weeds is therapeutic,” she said.
Her advice for a good life? “It’s in volunteering and doing for people that you feel most rewarded,” she said. ■