Firefighter Was Down, but Not Ready to Give Up

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 16, 2007

NORTH HAVEN, Conn.

The first fall should have been the catastrophe.

Dino Ferraro was at a fire in a largely abandoned clock factory in 1989 when he fell from a fully extended aerial ladder 25 feet to the concrete below, landing on his left shoulder. A different angle, he could have been paralyzed or killed. As it was, small miracle, he hit the ground and bounced up like a rubber ball. He separated the shoulder and was out for two and a half months, but lived to fight fires another day.

But you get to dodge only so many bullets. He didn’t dodge any on Sept. 23, 2000, when he came to work a little early and took a call he would have missed had he showed up five minutes later. This time he was on a ladder breaking open second-floor windows at a bedroom fire in a housing project.

The firefighters inside, not seeing him through the smoke, blasted him with a hose shooting out water at 150 pounds per square inch of pressure. He fell only 12 feet, but when a firefighter at the bottom of the ladder tried to break the fall, Mr. Ferraro landed squarely on the heel of his right foot. “When they pulled off the boot, it looked like scrambled eggs,” Mr. Ferraro said. He suffered what is called a pilon fracture. It is also known as a hammer fracture, which tells you all you need to know.

“They looked at the ankle and told me it was all over,” Mr. Ferraro, 48, recalled. “They told me before the surgery, they told me after the surgery, they probably told me during the surgery, that I was all done with fighting fires. They said there was just no way.”

There were operations, a steel plate and 13 screws in his leg, casts, boots and therapy sessions, all intended to allow him to walk normally, without pain. None were very successful. And when the ankle joint ended up 20 degrees out of alignment, the right leg an inch shorter than the left, that looked like the best that could be done.

But Mr. Ferraro, who at first wanted to become a state trooper but then caught the firehouse bug, wasn’t content with limping around, and, stubbornly, he wasn’t resigned to being a former firefighter, living on disability payments at the impeccably neat split raised ranch he shares with his wife, Annette. He wanted to walk normally. And he wanted to climb ladders, walk on roofs, smash gashes in burning buildings, fight fires.

So through his wife’s contacts as a radiology technician, he began looking for more options. In October 2002 that took him to the Hospital for Special Surgery in Manhattan and Dr. S. Robert Rozbruch, an orthopedic surgeon and director of the hospital’s limb lengthening and deformity service, who decided that Mr. Ferraro’s case might not be so hopeless, after all. He could see that in 95 percent of cases it would be a career-ending injury. But between the advances in orthopedics and Mr. Ferraro’s dogged insistence on going back to work, he figured it was worth a shot.

So, using an Ilizarov frame, a scaffold around the leg that looks a bit like a medieval torture device, his treatment consisted of two main elements — returning the ankle joint to something near its normal alignment and using the body’s ability to grow new bone to lengthen the leg to where it had been before the accident. The frame was put on in February 2003. It was removed that July.

After almost a year of therapy, Mr. Ferraro thought it was time to see how close he was to where he wanted to be. He took out his ladder and climbed to the top of his house with its steep-pitched roof. Then several times a week he clambered over its eaves and ridges, first without his gear, then in his heavy firefighter’s outfit.

On June 8, 2005, he was allowed to return to work as a firefighter, and he has been there ever since, back at the New Haven Fire Department’s East Battalion, Truck 3 at the Lombard Street station, where he began work 21 years ago.

This past week all the terrible images came flooding back, of the firefighters rushing into the burning towers, the almost unfathomable dedication, the miracles of bravery, medicine, heart and soul that got people through that week six years ago. Mr. Ferraro marvels and shudders like everyone else about what people did on 9/11. But, though he wouldn’t make any comparisons, he is a reminder of how, in far, far smaller ways, those miracles play out in daily life, too.

“It’s just something in my blood,” he said. “I climb ladders. I walk on roofs. I fight fires. I wasn’t really out to prove anything. I just figured I was 41 years old, and that was too young to quit.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Woodstock’s Values, and Abraham’s, Too

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 13, 2007

WOODSTOCK, N.Y.

In his Rosh Hashana sermon today, Rabbi Jonathan Kligler, like many rabbis, will try to put the eternal struggle to square human fallibility with human aspiration in a context particularly germane to his own congregation.

So in the prepared text of his sermon he begins by meditating on “messianic visions of modernity,” particularly the idealism and passions of the ’60s that brought so many of his peers to this Catskill town still defined by the concert that wasn’t held here. Along with mulling over the “yetzer hara,” the capacity for evil, and the “yetzer hatov,” the capacity for good and the ancient wisdom of Rabbi Huna of Tzipori, he’ll tell his congregation to keep hope alive.

“I never want to abandon my idealism,” he says, near the beginning of the sermon. “I’m the rabbi of Woodstock, for God’s sake!”

Yes, Mr. Kligler is the rebbe of a distinctive congregation, where the High Holy Days ceremonies are always held outdoors in their beloved tent, and the first Rosh Hashana service begins with the singing of the ’60s anthem “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with the rabbi playing guitar, where there’s always plenty of singing, dancing and hugging along with the davening.

But still, two decades on, there’s a tale of modern Jewish life in the success of the Woodstock Jewish Congregation — Kehillat Lev Shalem (which means “the congregation of the full heart”). Like its members, like many Jews, it has tried to balance tradition and modernity, staying true to its core values and adapting to change, and has managed mostly to do it, even though no one began with a vision of a place that has an annual golf outing at the Rip Van Winkle Country Club.

“Our goal has always been to be truly welcoming, truly tolerant, true to the Woodstock ethos,” said Rabbi Kligler, who came to the congregation in 1988 as a student rabbi and never left. “At the beginning, no one wanted to have memberships, there was no accounting system. Our challenge was to grow without losing our vision and spirit.”

There were plenty of Jews in Woodstock, but no synagogue closer than Kingston until late 1986, when two refugees from Brooklyn, Laurie Schwartz and Nathan Brenowitz, decided to start one. First, they wanted to have a place where their son could learn to be Jewish — and they could learn along with him. Second, as Mr. Brenowitz noted, most of the Jews in town seemed to be Hindus or Buddhists, and they wanted a place with a Jewish identity that evoked the spirituality all their friends were seeking.

They placed an ad in The Woodstock Times announcing their intentions to start a synagogue that attracted 70 responses. First they planned a High Holy Days ceremony in a single room at the Woodstock Children’s Center. Then as word spread, they thought they could do it in two rooms with the prayer leader straddling the doorway between them. In the end, they rented a tent and more than 250 people attended the first service.

They operated for many years out of an abandoned flea market in nearby Saugerties. They contemplated a new building but worried that a traditional capital campaign might not be their thing. “The capital campaign consultants talked about a giving pyramid, with the big donors at the top,” Rabbi Kligler said. “That wasn’t going to work. We’re more like a giving mesa.”

But they pulled it off. This is their second year in the new $3 million, 12,500-square-foot building (which actually is in Woodstock) with the 150 purple chairs in the sanctuary donated by the Catskill Mountain Christian Center in Margaretville. There will be about 1,500 people attending the High Holy Days ceremonies, the membership is now 375 families, and the new building means the rabbi no longer has to operate out of a trailer behind the old flea market.

There have been at least two times of crisis. The first came when the congregation split over the rabbi’s suggestion that it affiliate with the Reconstructionist Movement, where he was trained (they decided to remain unaffiliated), the second the result of bitter political schisms after 9/11 and the second intifada over whether the synagogue was supporting Israel enough or supporting it too much (a few members quit, but life went on).

THE congregation is still distinctive, proud to have sponsored the bat mitzvah of a transsexual member who had her bar mitzvah decades ago. But Rabbi Kligler figures that with Judaism facing a growing chasm between the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox on one side and those more comfortable with modernity on the other, its experience isn’t just its own.

And though anyone can attend the High Holy Days services, those who’ve paid their membership dues get to park at the temple, a perk that might have been blasphemous in the old days, but no more.

“We finally have a privilege for members,” the rabbi said. “It makes a big difference. People have joined, so they can park on site.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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New Chapters in Summer’s Tales, From Paris to New Jersey

A Purple Heart design that Roger Baker mowed
in Orange County last month is being kept up.
Photo: Chris Ramirez for The New York Times

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: September 9, 2007

As summer fades to black, three updates — plus a late-breaking sports report — to summer tales from this space.

Leroy Varga, alas, didn’t make it.

The 80-year-old marathon man from Dover, N.J. (Our Towns, July 12), failed in his attempt to become the oldest person to complete the grueling Paris-Brest-Paris Randonneur, in which contestants have to bicycle 750 miles through the French countryside in 90 hours.

He had figured he needed almost everything to go right to finish the trip. Instead, he ran into the Randonneur’s worst weather in memory, which inspired a newspaper headline reading: “Never as Cold Since 1970, Never as Wet Since 1950.” Cycling through 35-mile-an-hour winds, in a relentless downpour and temperatures around 50 degrees, shivering uncontrollably and weathering a bout of heart arrhythmia, he packed it in after going about 200 miles in 18 hours. As a reward, he got to pedal the 200 miles back to Paris.

It turned out he had plenty of company. About 28 percent of the cyclists who entered failed to finish, the highest rate in memory and about double that of most years. Back in New Jersey, he’s now on a much more leisurely cycling regimen, 50- or 60-mile trips instead of the 130-mile-a-day trips he made while training for the Randonneur.

Before he left for Paris, he figured this was his last shot at the Randonneur, held every four years. He says his responsibilities at home make it very hard to consider trying again. Still, sounding like a potential presidential candidate, he said he can’t imagine doing it. But if he were able to find the time to train, and if he felt as good as or better than he does now, well, who knows? “I’m not saying it couldn’t happen, but it’s not likely,” he said.

With the stakes much, much higher, Richard Lapointe didn’t make it either. Mr. Lapointe (Our Towns, July 15) is the mentally impaired man in Connecticut serving a life term for the 1987 rape and murder of his former wife’s grandmother. Over the years, a loyal core of supporters, saying he could not have committed the crime, have championed his innocence. Mr. Lapointe is now represented by Centurion Ministries, which has had enormous success in freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners.

Despite new testimony backing up his alibi from his ex-wife, who did not testify at his trial, a long-awaited hearing in July came to an abrupt end when Judge Stanley T. Fuger Jr. agreed to consider a prosecution motion to dismiss efforts for a new trial.

He rejected the request for a new trial in a stinging decision on Aug. 2 that said Mr. Lapointe’s petition was an abuse of the legal system that failed to document claims of constitutional errors. His supporters plan to appeal and continue the fight. But they face the hurdle common to similar cases: Absent slam-dunk DNA evidence, an argument for innocence, no matter how compelling, is not necessarily the same thing as a compelling case for constitutional errors that would merit a new trial.

Things went much better for Roger Baker, the Leonardo da Vinci of the lawn mower, whose 850,000-square-foot Purple Heart medal mowed into a field in Orange County, N.Y. (Our Towns, Aug. 5), ended up having an extended run. Usually he does his creations (Elvis, Albert Einstein, Jimi Hendrix) and they are soon given over to the ravages of bugs, wind and growing grass. But this piece of field art was done on county land, and county crews are keeping it mowed according to his directions. They plan to keep the image well into the fall.

Meanwhile, Mr. Baker is already thinking ahead. A huge fan of Luciano Pavarotti, whose music is often playing in his studio, Mr. Baker is already poring over photos and trying out sketches in hopes of cutting a giant Pavarotti next September on the first anniversary of the tenor’s death. His ideal canvas would be Central Park. But he’s open to whatever options present themselves. “It would really be a challenge to get it right, because of who he is and what it is , but I don’t know. Hudson Valley? Modena, Italy? Anywhere it’s supposed to be, that’s where I’ll do it. I just mow the lawn. It’s what I do.”

Oh, and the lost boys of summer, the Can-Am Grays of the Can-Am League (Our Towns, July 26), finally got to go home. Despite playing a full season of just road games from late May to early September, they delighted spouses, moms and any other fans with an impressive 24-23 record for the second half of the season. But it wasn’t enough to join the North Shore Spirit, Atlantic City Surf, Nashua Pride and New Jersey Jackals in the Can-Am playoffs.

Best wishes for a few more weeks of summer to the game-but-tired Grays, and to us all.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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The Death of a Fisherman in a Place of Good Water

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 19, 2007

AMAGANSETT, N.Y.

The eulogies at Calvin Lester’s funeral were mostly about small acts, not big thoughts.

The time he and his friend, Billy Havens, ages 11 and 12, bought a 1954 Ford for $25, ripped the doors and fenders off and turned it into a dune buggy. His daughter Kelly’s remembrances of the bliss of being with her dad salvaging lobster gear after a storm off Gardiners Island.

“I just keep thinking he hated it when I cried,” his daughter’s eulogy read. “He doesn’t want us to cry over him. We have to pick up the pieces and carry on and keep fishing.”

But there were lots of tears this month when they parked Calvin Lester’s fishing dory outside the funeral home in East Hampton and buried him at the age of 54. There were tears because he died of cancer way too young, tears because he was so good at what he did — probably the best bayman of the past 30 years, someone, it was said, who could drag a scallop dredge down a driveway and have it come up full of scallops.

And there were tears because everyone knew that when they buried Calvin Lester, they buried the most powerful link to the Hamptons’ fishing past, the person most at home in the disappearing world of South Fork baymen that was recounted in “Men’s Lives,” Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 book.

Amagansett means “place of good water” in one American Indian tongue, and for generations of Lesters who have lived here, it’s been true in the most literal way.

The eulogies at Calvin Lester’s funeral were mostly about small acts, not big thoughts.

The time he and his friend, Billy Havens, ages 11 and 12, bought a 1954 Ford for $25, ripped the doors and fenders off and turned it into a dune buggy. His daughter Kelly’s remembrances of the bliss of being with her dad salvaging lobster gear after a storm off Gardiners Island.

“I just keep thinking he hated it when I cried,” his daughter’s eulogy read. “He doesn’t want us to cry over him. We have to pick up the pieces and carry on and keep fishing.”

But there were lots of tears this month when they parked Calvin Lester’s fishing dory outside the funeral home in East Hampton and buried him at the age of 54. There were tears because he died of cancer way too young, tears because he was so good at what he did — probably the best bayman of the past 30 years, someone, it was said, who could drag a scallop dredge down a driveway and have it come up full of scallops.

And there were tears because everyone knew that when they buried Calvin Lester, they buried the most powerful link to the Hamptons’ fishing past, the person most at home in the disappearing world of South Fork baymen that was recounted in “Men’s Lives,” Peter Matthiessen’s 1986 book.

Amagansett means “place of good water” in one American Indian tongue, and for generations of Lesters who have lived here, it’s been true in the most literal way.

Calvin Lester’s father, Captain Bill Lester, fished well into his 80s. When he said, “Just as long as I can crawl, I’m going down there,” he could have been reciting the family creed. The Matthiessen book told of another family patriarch, Ted Lester, Calvin’s uncle, who, even when he was near death, “still had to jump into the car every damn morning, run down and make sure that ocean was still there.”

Calvin Lester quit school at 16 to fish full time. He learned from his father and others about tides and wind, where to find weakfish, bluefish and striped bass, how to operate fyke traps, pound traps and drift gill nets, and most important, how to run a five-man crew that set the ocean haul seines that were most effective in netting striped bass, the baymen’s money fish.

This was about skill, strength, knowledge and cunning. But it was also very much about a way of life. So he became, in some ways, the last of the Bonackers, the East End natives, born of the sea. When the Lost Tribe of Accabonac was formed in 1984 to bring together natives of East Hampton, he became its president. When people looked for the consummate fisherman, someone who could catch any fish, find clams, oysters, scallops or lobsters when the season was right, that was Calvin Lester, too.

It was never an easy life, with mornings that began at 3 and seasons that bore no resemblance to the gentle rhythms of the tourist economy. And members of the tribe feel it’s a life that’s been under assault for decades with restrictions on netting, rising costs for everything from gas to land. To him and others the harshest blow came in 1990 when the state banned ocean seines to catch striped bass, which many saw as a death blow to small fishermen.

Twenty years ago there were about 150 people working as full-time baymen. Now there are perhaps 20. His older children, Danny, 34, and Kelly, 30, do it part time. His youngest son, Paul, 28, it is said, could end up the last full-time bayman standing.

“It made him a bitter person,” Kelly said. “But he didn’t sit and cry. He had bills to pay and a family to support and he did what he had to do to stay on the water. And he was very proud that he could make a living on the water no matter what.”

HE was, everyone said, a man of few words, who took care of others before he took care of himself — witness the cigarette invariably dangling from his mouth. But his work and the life he led spoke for him. So, like his father, he went to the sea to the end, bringing in fish from the pound traps the weekend before he died.

“Calvin had an extraordinary connection to nature, to the sea, to the creatures who lived in it,” said Arnold Leo, who worked with him in the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association. “He represented a strain of spiritual awareness and communal values, which we’re losing contact with every day.”

Calvin Lester, he said, was more than the embodiment of a quaint way of life that has to go because hedge fund managers need places to build houses on the beach. He was the embodiment of a set of skills, a turn of mind, a connection with nature that we lose at great cost.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Two Crimes So Dark, Blurring the Images of Two Towns So Different

A memorial to the three people killed at a Newark playground.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 9, 2007

NEWARK

Instead of a memorial of bouquets and flowers on a landscaped suburban lawn, there are a dozen candles and as many balloons on the aluminum bleachers by the chain-link fence on an elementary school playground.

Instead of the hand-painted yard signs for flowers and sweet corn, there are the billboards offering up to $500 in a program to buy back guns and $2,000 for Crimestoppers tips.

Instead of stunned friends and neighbors who peer at the seared and boarded-up colonial on Sorghum Mill Drive as if contemplating an unknown world, there’s a stream of weary neighborhood folks and friends who venture down the alley to the playground where three young people were killed and a fourth was shot and left for dead on Saturday night. Three of the victims, including the survivor, were college students; the fourth was to begin classes this fall.

“We didn’t know them, but we’re just here to show some love,” said Ken Harris, a 20-year-old college student from the area, who stopped by the playground behind the Mount Vernon School here on Tuesday with another student, John Cavness. “It’s crazy. Young people doing this kind of thing to each other. We’re just here to show respect.”

There aren’t many places more different than the quiet suburban street in Connecticut where three members of the Petit family were murdered last month in a brutal home invasion and the mean streets of New Jersey’s largest city where four young people were shot execution-style on Saturday night.

But in an awful convergence, you could blur the two images and see almost exactly the same thing — good people who didn’t deserve to die, violence hard to comprehend, crimes so dark they took your breath away.

All murder is awful, but, in truth, not all murders are created equal. So in a town where violent death, tragically, is part of the backdrop of civic life, 17 officials led by Mayor Cory A. Booker showed up for a midday news conference on Wednesday, to speak about yet another murder.

The cameras were not there for the stated reason for the gathering — the arrest of Christopher Alexander, 21, who the police say shot and killed Quintez Waller, 23, on Sunday morning in what they described as a drug-related killing.

It was the 60th murder in Newark this year.

What makes some crimes go from horrors to symbols too glaring to ignore is not a simple matter.

In part, without doubt, it has something to do with the victims, but that’s not entirely simple, either. The Petits, who stood out as a successful and beloved family in the comfortable, largely white town of Cheshire, seemed utterly removed from the standard trajectory of violent crime.

But then the four young people shot in Newark stood out, too — students from good families who had no record of involvement in crime but who still couldn’t escape the violence around them.

In part, it’s a reflection of the extraordinary brutality of the crimes. Regardless of race or socioeconomics, there hasn’t been a crime in Connecticut in decades as brutal as the rape, kidnapping, murder and arson that played out on Sorghum Mill Drive. For all Newark’s history of crime, the execution-style shooting of four young people, in a largely middle-class enclave, left people reeling.

JOHN McCLAIN, whose grandniece, Iofemi Hightower, was one of the students killed, has been working as a Newark police chaplain for 40 years. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This is like back in the days of Al Capone. This is what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan, not in an American city.”

And both crimes resonated so much because they seemed to carry a message. And that’s where the comparison breaks down.

The extraordinary savagery of the attack on the Petits led to a run on locks and security gear, not just in Cheshire, but far beyond. It was, people said, the most chilling reminder that no place is entirely safe from violent crime. In fact, it’s a worthy reminder. Just check out how common home invasions are on Long Island.

But no one, no matter how comfortable, has ever been given a pass from random malice. Being safety-conscious is always a good thing, but it’s not as if Cheshire and places like it are beset by widespread violent crime. What happened there is more a reflection of sickening, random evil than of something people should reasonably fear.

In Newark, the lesson is far more immediate, which is why Mr. Booker, who has staked his career on curbing violent crime here, has the look of a stricken man. Unlike in Cheshire, violent crime really is a daily, inescapable fact of life in Newark and in many other cities as well. Newark can talk about a renaissance all it wants, but the sad truth is the violence that wiped out three promising young lives on Saturday night, if not contained, will kill the city, too.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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For Family of Migrant Farmworkers, a New Season Is Dawning

The house Jim Blaufuss built on his farm for the Hinojosa family.
Photo by Ángel Franco/The New York Times

By DAN BARRY

Published: August 5, 2007

BRECKENRIDGE, Minn.

Minerva Hinojosa and her family migrated north again last month, traveling from the Texas bottom of this nation to its Minnesota top to weed the sugar beet fields of a farmer named Blaufuss. Once here, they each claimed the hoe that felt truest in their hands by carving a telltale mark into the wooden handle.

For Ms. Hinojosa, 22, this is how it has always been: the Hinojosas working the Blaufuss fields, following the rows of beets deep into the green distance, then working back down new rows, their hoe blades getting duller with every hack at the black earth. All for about $22 an acre.

But she also knows how profoundly this migrant life is changing. It hit home a couple of weeks ago when her cellphone trilled while she was working in the fields, her long brown hair tucked under a Texas Longhorns cap.

Holding the hoe with one hand, she flipped the phone open with the other.

“Hello?”

Three decades ago, well before she was born, some of Ms. Hinojosa’s relatives began traveling 1,600 miles north, from Weslaco, Tex., to Breckenridge. Jim Blaufuss needed help with his sugar beets, and so a bond between two families was made.

Among those arriving from Texas every season was Eleuterio Hinojosa, a Mexican-born laborer accustomed to traveling far for work, whether to the fields or to the cotton gins that long ago changed the feel of his handshake by taking three finger tops. His wife, Rachel, and their ever-expanding family would join him on those long trips north, including his daughter Minerva, an American citizen who says she has been migrating “since I was born.”

The Blaufuss family eventually built a squat, one-story duplex with air-conditioning on their farm to accommodate the Hinojosas and their many relatives. The workers felt fortunate; not all growers provided housing, and those who did sometimes offered little more than shacks.

The hundreds of migrant families of Breckenridge became a tight but time-sensitive community, here for the sugar beet crop, then gone, some back to Texas, some to Michigan to pick apples. Not all local residents accepted them, that is for sure. But on summer Sunday afternoons, at least, they claimed a town park as their own, for music and barbecues.

“You’d see no white people,” Ms. Hinojosa recalls.

Back then, she was just one of many Texan children running about. Every morning she would take a bus to a supplemental education program for migrant children at the elementary school, overseen by a teacher named Bill Mimnaugh. She studied, played, got fed and stayed out of the fields — at least, that is, until she was about 11.

At 13, Ms. Hinojosa became pregnant. She named the boy David, took a hard look at what kind of woman his mother would be, and went back to school. This meant that every summer she would hoe her rows all day, then head off for night classes at Mr. Mimnaugh’s education program, determined.

Early last month the Hinojosas returned again to that squat duplex in Breckenridge, where they found a freezer full of meat, courtesy of Mr. Blaufuss. “They’re family,” he explains.

But this Texas contingent included only Ms. Hinojosa, her parents, her older brother Jay and her son, David — meaning that the many bunk beds in the house would remain empty.

People in Minnesota say that changes in sugar beet farming, including the use of improved herbicides, have reduced the need for migrants; that adequate housing remains a problem; that cuts in the migrant education program have caused child care and schooling problems for migrant families.

At the same time, the children of migrants are finding different paths, says Jay Hinojosa, 36, who has just changed out of jeans that are damp with sweat. “Some of them pursued education,” he says. “Some joined the Air Force, the Navy. Other family members decided it wasn’t worth it.”

Still, the Hinojosas see familiar Texan faces in Breckenridge, including that of Maribell Molina, 35, who migrates now to work for the Tri-Valley Opportunity Council as a family service liaison for the migrant education program. She says that older migrants return because they need the money, they feel loyal to employers, and they want to set an example.

“To show their kids the value of the dollar,” she says.

A couple of weeks ago the Hinojosas rose again before dawn. Rachel Hinojosa baked the tortillas and made the beans that would be breakfast and lunch. Eleuterio Hinojosa packed the coolers and sharpened the hoe blades with his metal file. Minerva roused David, now 7, and got him dressed. The family of five drove to the field and began hoeing at 5:30.

While David dozed in the pickup’s cab, the Hinojosas hacked at the weeds inhibiting the subterranean growth of the sugar beet, which is used to sweeten your soda, your cookies. After a while, Rachel Hinojosa drove David to the same migrant education program that his mother attended, run by the same Mr. Mimnaugh, who is sometimes called the “Dairy Queen guy” because on Fridays he rewards good students with cool treats.

“The same school!” Ms. Hinojosa exclaims. “I love it!”

The Hinojosas worked their rows, paused to eat, then reached again for their hoes. The sun arced high and hot over the Minnesota flatness. A cellphone rang, and Ms. Hinojosa answered.

“Finally!” she shouted, and the Hinojosas around her immediately knew:

Minerva Hinojosa, daughter of migrants, had graduated with a degree in English from the University of Texas-Pan American, and would be teaching this fall at her alma mater, Weslaco East High School. She is the family’s first college graduate.

Her mother said, “Thanks to God.” Her father said the family should celebrate by hoeing another row. And so they did.

Online: Audio and photos of migrant workers in Breckenridge, Minn., at www.nytimes.com/danbarry.

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‘In Cold Blood,’ Re-enacted in Our Time

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 2, 2007

CHESHIRE, Conn.

Shortly after noon yesterday, the Cheshire United Methodist Church was engulfed in what seemed like a disconcerting occurrence: normalcy.

Vacation Bible School was getting out. In the middle of an excited gaggle of children and moms — in tan shorts, a knit shirt and rainbow visor — was the church minister, the Rev. Stephen Volpe.

For the past week, Mr. Volpe has been at the center of a very different kind of scene, the extraordinary outpouring of grief and shock that followed the horrific break-in July 23 that left three of his parishioners dead.

So as he tried to balance the stirrings of new life with the horror of the past week, Mr. Volpe did his best to make sense of the way the crime had reverberated across Connecticut and far beyond, a reaction that lawyers say has probably exceeded any crime in the state in decades.

Part of it was the stunning brutality of the crimes, which left two career criminals facing capital murder, sexual assault, kidnapping, burglary, arson and other charges. The attack killed Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her daughters Haley, 17, and Michaela, 11, and left the family’s father, Dr. William Petit Jr., badly beaten. Much of the reaction reflected the degree to which the Petits were loved and admired.

But beyond that, Father Volpe said simply, “I guess a lot of it’s about the kind of place Cheshire is perceived as being.”

Which is to say a place where the local hardware store, R. W. Hines Ace Hardware, dates back to 1910 and every transaction seems more a colloquy than a mere sale. A place not in a city, not in a faceless hodgepodge of fancy new subdivisions and McMansions but in a sliver of New England with deep roots in old soil.

As the dismal refrain often goes, this is not the kind of place where this is supposed to happen. What place is? But what resonated with such force was the utterly random nature of crime and locale, as if it should have some logic, some lesson, something that makes it fit into some cautionary narrative, but instead is a blank slate of random, senseless malice.

So people run out to get gun permits at the police station (10 the other day, compared with an average of 2 a week). They hurry over to R. W. Hines in search of new locks and bolts. Jay Markella, a lieutenant with the Cheshire Police Department, said even he’s changed his behavior. He had bought a tent for his children to use in the backyard. Now, maybe not. He used to be casual about locking his doors. No more. “That’s the thing about this,” he said. “Usually, there’s something you can point to. Someone was having an affair. It had to do with drugs. It was in the inner city. You can look at it and say, that’s not me. This time you can’t.”

Lawmakers have gone into overdrive reviewing parole and sentencing procedures. No doubt there’s much to learn. One glaring problem, lawmakers say, is the routine failure to follow a law requiring that sentencing transcripts are available to parole officials.

But the state is already at the upper reaches of prison capacity, 19,000 in a system meant for 17,000, said State Representative Michael P. Lawlor. Finding the potential time bombs, he said, can be like finding a needle in a haystack.

SO the most compelling commentary on the case may be one that’s not about it at all. It’s Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” with its account of a nightmare from another time, the 1959 murders of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kan. In it, two parolees invaded the Clutter home while four people slept and then terrorized and killed them. That was about a prominent and beloved farming family in the heartland. This one, about a prominent and beloved doctor’s family in New England, is like a cautionary retelling of the same horrid meditation on evil, chance and fate.

To get to the Petits’ house on Sorghum Mill Drive from the main part of town, you turn onto Higgins Road, with its hand-painted signs reading “Flowers for Sale” and “Sweet Corn.” You drive through a neighborhood that’s neat, green and orderly until you come to the house that’s incongruously battered, smoke stained and boarded up. There are still welcome signs in the flower bed and on the garage. The mailbox, surrounded by black-eyed Susans, is decorated with pictures of bird feeders. There’s a white plastic chair in the shade, as if waiting for someone to take in the early evening air.

In the makeshift memorial of dozens of bouquets is a single red rose enclosed in plastic. Wrapped inside is a piece of paper. It reads, “May God watch over all of you and bless your beautiful souls.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Words May Have Power, but Gossip Is a Firing Offense

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At table from left, Sandra Piper, Michelle Bonsteel and Jon Meyer.

By DAN BARRY

Published: July 22, 2007

HOOKSETT, N.H.

Six somber members of the Hooksett Town Council, men with faces set as if in granite, trooped into the public library’s basement the other night to convene what was advertised as a special meeting. The agenda did not concern tax rates or zoning issues, but rather that most public of commodities: words.

Of particular concern: That among the deluge of words released daily in the Hooksett Municipal Building, words about everything from dog licenses to the lunch specials down at Robie’s Country Store, a lingering few uttered months ago concerned the relationship between the town administrator and a certain town employee. You might call it gossip.

The accused gossipmongers, two women whose expressions were also as inflexible as the state rock, sat across from the town elders in plastic chairs that constituted a makeshift dock. Fired from their town jobs for gossiping, they were appealing for reinstatement to the very body that had dismissed them without any semblance of due process.

Also in attendance were two dozen or so local residents, some of whom killed time until the call to order by discussing the persistent failure of an acquaintance to take care of himself. You might call it gossip.

The council chairman banged his gavel and led everyone in the Pledge of Allegiance. Then the lawyer for Hooksett explained that the dismissed employees had 90 minutes to offer their proof of innocence, but they could not call witnesses or ask questions of the council.

“Speak louder!” an audience member shouted.

Jon Meyer, the lanky lawyer representing the two fired employees, stood to begin his argument. But first he said that in his many years of representing public employees at termination hearings, he had never participated in or even heard of a proceeding such as this. “This is like jousting a ghost,” he said.

Then came another shout: “Can’t hear!”

When the spotlight comes to Hooksett, a town of 13,000 along the Merrimack River, it usually shines on historic Robie’s, where needy presidential candidates come to feign folksiness. But lately that light has been trained on the old, red-brick Municipal Building, where human nature, in the form of gossip, unfolded.

The town administrator and that employee often worked late together, it was said. Behind closed doors, it was said. Their cars the last two in the lot, it was said. Not kosher, it was said.

Word about those words and others reached the administrator, David Jodoin, who is said to be happily married, with children. Extremely upset about the untrue implication of those words, he complained to the Town Council, which dispatched a lawyer to begin a hurried investigation.

The lawyer, who works for the law firm that represents the town, conducted interviews and checked phone records to track the wispy trail of those words — past the “Watch Your Step” sign on the Municipal Building’s front door, down the hall and, finally, to the offices of the town assessor and the code enforcement officer.

She concluded that the conduct of the four employees warranted discipline, and the council agreed. Without publicly stating why, the council promptly fired the assessor, Sandra Piper, a town employee for 27 years; the code enforcement officer, Michelle Bonsteel; and two assistants, one of whom would later admit that she had once referred to Mr. Jodoin as a little you-know-what.

The four women became the Hooksett Four, their firings became national news, and cheap gossip regarding two private people in a small town was shared with an entire country. But Hooksett still had more to say.

After holding a special meeting to consider — and dismiss — the appeal of the two fired assistants, the Town Council issued a statement saying that the gossip reflected “a conscious and concerted effort to damage reputations, to spread untrue stories with the knowledge that they were not true and evidently to retaliate for some perceived preferential treatment.”

Although the statement clearly conveyed outrage and righteousness, it also reflected the council’s struggle with the concept of objectivity. After all, two of the Hooksett Four, the department heads, had yet to appeal their case at a special meeting. Until this night.

Ms. Piper, short and in blue, and Ms. Bonsteel, tall and in black, sat with mouths shut tight, though perhaps a little too late. They left the talking to Mr. Meyer and to Lauren Irwin, the lawyer who conducted the gossip-sleuthing.

Mr. Meyer said his clients never talked of a romantic relationship, but rather were speculating about the favoritism their supervisor was giving a subordinate. Ms. Irwin countered that the four women were clearly implying an affair was taking place; their knowledge that it was baseless only underscored the malice of their words.

Ms. Irwin said the town administrator was so distraught by the gossip that he was “having difficulty functioning,” and feared that his career and family life would suffer. Mr. Meyer countered that this was irrelevant to the proceeding, and that he could just as easily have laid out the profound ways in which the fired employees had also suffered.

And yes, in retrospect, he said his clients should have shared their concerns with Mr. Jodoin, but it was an awkward subject to broach. At the same time, he said, the administrator could have handled the matter internally, rather than complain to the council.

The council announced that it would consider the matter in a “nonpublic” meeting, which is a benign way of saying in private. Then a gavel banged to end this very special meeting, sending people into a thunderstorm-wet Hooksett to contemplate governance, gossip and the awesome power of the word.

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A Phillie (Briefly), and Now a Jackal, but at Age 37, Still a Boy of Summer

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 22, 2007
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LITTLE FALLS, N.J.

A lot has happened to Joel Bennett since he was chosen by the Boston Red Sox in the 21st round of the 1991 baseball draft.

There were the brief stops in the bigs in 1998 and 1999 with the Orioles and Phillies. Could they have been longer? Doesn’t matter now.

There was the Arizona Fall League in 1994, where he played on the same team as Michael Jordan (on Sundays, Mr. Jordan rented out a gym so they could all play basketball); the 221 Carolina League strikeouts in 1993, behind only Randy Johnson and José Rijo in all of organized baseball; his Kevin Costner moment in the New Jersey Jackals’ miracle championship in 2004.

At 37, Joel Bennett is not Roger Clemens. In the end, he’s just a phys ed teacher from outside Binghamton, N.Y., who pitched 19 innings in the majors, with a 2-1 record and an 8.53 earned run average.

Still, if (big if) this turns out to be his last season in baseball, how many players have had a nicer run than Mr. Bennett, a reminder that, at least in the minor leagues, there’s still some truth left in those dappled “Field of Dreams” images.

“He said last year was the last one, and he said it the year before that, but he starts doing his version of spring training with the high school kids, and then here he is,” his wife, Jennifer, said as she watched the Jackals beat the Can-Am Grays, 12-5, on Thursday night. “It’s in his blood.”

It’s a long way from the majors to Yogi Berra Stadium at Montclair State University, where the Jackals play in the Can-Am League, which used to be the Northern League and the Northeast League. It’s an independent league, so the players tend to be former college athletes who didn’t get drafted or veterans hoping to get a second or third or fourth look in someone’s minor league system. Grabowsky Development advertises on the foul poles; Catholic Cemeteries, Archdiocese of Newark, on the outfield wall. A couple of thousand fans is a nice crowd. No one is getting rich.

But then Mr. Bennett’s sons, Jonah, 9, and Jesse, 7, come to all the home games as the Jackals’ ball boys. He gets to travel to Canada to play against the Quebec Capitales, where the fans spend the game singing in French. His family — the boys, his wife and their daughter, Jaylen, 6 — come along for the more desirable road trips, like the one this weekend against the Brockton Rox in Brockton, Mass., where they went whale watching last year. He’s lost a little on his fastball, which seldom got to 90 m.p.h. anyway, but he was always a curveball pitcher and can still strike people out. And in a league where players tend not to last more than a year or two, he’s a venerable star sought out for autographs.

He’s seen minor-league friends — Tim Wakefield, David Eckstein, Nomar Garciaparra — end up rich and famous. Like most of us in whatever we do, he shakes his head at some he saw in the minors who made it big but didn’t seem any better than he was. If he got to pitch more with the Phillies, where his appearances were few because Curt Schilling started every fifth day, who knows? But Mr. Bennett, who takes his Christianity seriously, just shrugs.

“Of course, it gets to you at the time,” he said. “You go from being in the big leagues to no one being interested in you. But I think it was a reward for work done well, and the Lord wanted me to have that pedestal to stand on for my life around kids now. You try to figure it out, but like my wife says, the one thing you know about baseball is that you never know.”

When he caught on with the Jackals in 2001, it must have seemed like a last shot, but six years later, an eternity in the minors, he’s still there. His greatest moment came in 2004, in the league championships against the North Shore Spirit of Lynn, Mass.

The Jackals lost the first two games of a five-game series. School, the real world, was starting back home. He had pitched Game 2. He figured the season and maybe his career was over, said his goodbyes.

But the Jackals won Games 3 and 4, and his manager begged him to come back to pitch Game 5. He said he couldn’t because it was the first day of classes, but he finally got permission from his principal.

He and his wife got up at dawn on a Monday and drove the six hours from Binghamton to Lynn, and he pitched seven innings on three days’ rest. The Jackals won 5-3.

“When you’re playing for the championship, it’s the best feeling in the world, no matter where you are,” he said back then.

“I don’t care if I’m in the major leagues, Triple A, Double A or Single A or independent ball. Every championship is a special feeling.”

Then they drove through the night, got home at 5:30 in the morning, and he left for school an hour later.

So some things don’t change. Box seat: $9.75. Hot dog: $2. Taking that championship from the North Shore Spirit: priceless.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Hardy Trail and Its Fans Age Together

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 19, 2007
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HARRIMAN STATE PARK, N.Y.

As a newlywed, married two weeks ago, Paul Dodson may have been skating on somewhat thin ice by leaving his bride behind so he could attend the conference of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the 80-year-old group that supports America’s most famous hiking trail.

But then, two months after he had his left knee replaced a few years back, he was out hiking mountains in New Zealand, which says something about Mr. Dodson, 70, and about the demographic that turned out over the past week at Ramapo College in Mahwah, N.J., for the 36th biennial conference of the conservancy (it used to be called the Appalachian Trail Conference).

Completed in 1937, maintained by hardy volunteers and rendered fleetingly trendy by Bill Bryson’s 1998 book, “A Walk in the Woods,” the A.T. is one of the true wonders of American life, even if no one really knows how long it is (the conservancy now puts it at 2,175 miles).

But if the image that comes up is of footloose granola-heads badly in need of a shower trekking from Georgia to Maine, the reality this week turned out to be another snapshot of the graying of America. The biggest age group at the conference was 60 to 69. The entertainment was the venerable folk-rock duo Aztec Two-Step and (yikes!) 1910 Fruitgum Company, and, in addition to the glories of the trail, the frailties of the flesh was a common theme.

“Old men, old boats and old cars are a pain,” muttered Glen Pyles, 74, after a mild tumble during a 5.5-mile hike Monday. He’s done 875 miles of the trail but figures doing the whole thing is probably out of reach.

Attendance was 855 people, down a bit from recent years, which organizers ruefully attributed to anti-New Jersey prejudice. Apparently many hikers think the A.T. in New Jersey wraps around the New Jersey Turnpike.

At the conference, held every two years, the faithful attended sessions on nature and history. But most sessions, held all day and into the evenings, had to do with the varieties of the trail experience (Hammock Hiking, What’s New in Tents, What to Do if Lost in the Woods, Beginning G.P.S. Usage) or staying healthy (Orthopedic Injuries on the Trail; Care of the Feet, Infections and Other Medical Problems on the Trail).

And mostly they hiked — a mile to 20 miles. The group that included Mr. Dodson and Mr. Pyles on Monday did Section 11 of the trail in New York, a lovely slice of Harriman State Park, about 15 miles from Mahwah, filled with abandoned iron mines, which date back to the 1730s.

They scaled Fingerboard Mountain, passed by the old Greenwood Mine, navigated the Lemon Squeezer — a narrow passage between mammoth chunks of rock — passed by Island Pond, reached the summit of Green Pond Mountain, turned onto Old Arden Road, which once connected the estate of the Harriman family to the town of Tuxedo, and ended at the Elk Pen parking area near the place where the Harrimans had unsuccessfully tried to establish an elk herd.

If you didn’t bring enough to eat, there were plenty of wild blueberries. There are many, many worse ways to spend a day. Many of the hikers are part of the 5,500 volunteers who essentially maintain the trail, which meanders through 14 states. Whether a generation raised on Xboxes and video games will do the same thing is a question that people are beginning to wonder about.

LEST it seem that only those with an AARP card hike, the highlight of the day was running into the through-hikers headed toward Maine, working on finishing all 2,175 miles.

First came Aaron Faust, a 25-year-old graduate student at Bard College, then Sharon Petersen, a quilter from Vermont, who is a 57-year-old grandmother of two. Then came a middle-aged couple barreling through as if they had a train to catch, and finally three hikers in their 20s: an Iraq war veteran, a guy lugging his guitar and a woman whose trail name was Singe.

These days, they do the trail with iPods and cellphones, so even the A.T. isn’t the ultimate wilderness experience. Still, only about a quarter of those who start finish. Mr. Faust said the hiking itself was the easy part. “You miss your friends, you miss your family, you overthink every aspect of everything,” he said. “I’ve been out here a quarter of a year, and it takes its toll.”

Mrs. Petersen said it’s still a cruel world on the trail. “We women don’t even lose weight out here,” she said. “You eat so much junk food; there are 240 calories in all those energy bars. You eat one and you’re hungry again in a half hour.”

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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Supporters See Innocent Man Serving Life

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: July 15, 2007
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WEST HARTFORD, Conn.

He is short, clumsy and mentally impaired, with thick glasses and hearing aids in both ears, given to telling the same stale jokes over and over. His nickname was Mr. Magoo. He once was a dishwasher. He’s now a convict serving a life term for rape and murder.

They are people who befriended him without knowing him: advocates for the disabled, lawyers, writers, a detective, nurses, business people, psychologists, teachers, perhaps 100 in all at different times, a core group of perhaps 25. For years, many of them met every other Wednesday at the Burger King in Wethersfield near here to plot strategy.

They have long since abandoned the Burger King. Some of them have died. But 15 years later, the Friends of Richard Lapointe have not abandoned Mr. Lapointe, who was convicted of crimes they say he could not have committed.

After years of legal setbacks, Mr. Lapointe has a hearing beginning Monday in Superior Court in the Tolland Judicial District seeking a new trial on grounds of ineffective counsel and suppressed evidence. Two remarkable stories will play out. The first is an uphill legal one that reflects the enormous hurdles facing any convict lacking the game-over DNA evidence that has freed more than 200 inmates in recent years. The second is a human one, how the Friends of Richard Lapointe have kept the faith all these years, sticking by a humble dishwasher like family when he was poised to disappear forever.

“These are people responding with absolutely pure hearts, who have put their money where their mouth is, their time where their mouth is, for someone they didn’t even know,” said Kate Germond, a lawyer with Centurion Ministries, which has had enormous success in freeing wrongfully convicted prisoners and is defending Mr. Lapointe. “They’re heroes. They really are.”

The case began on March 8, 1987, when Bernice Martin, 88, of Manchester, was raped, stabbed 11 times and strangled, and her apartment set on fire. She was the grandmother of Mr. Lapointe’s wife and someone with whom he regularly watched Red Sox and Celtics games.

For two years, the case went unsolved. On July 4, 1989, Mr. Lapointe, then 43, was preparing for a picnic with his wife and 9-year-old son. The police called and asked him to come down to talk about the case. He’d be back in time for the picnic, they said. When he arrived he was confronted with a bewildering display of exhibits and evidence, much of it bogus, purporting to prove he was the killer.

He was interrogated for nine hours, until 1:30 in the morning. No recording was made. During that time he signed three inconsistent confessions. He later said he signed them so he could go to the bathroom or leave. The first said he was responsible for the death but it was an accident, and his mind went blank. The second said if the evidence showed he did it, he did it, but “I don’t remember being there.” The third had details of the crime, some consistent with known facts, some not. At a 1992 trial, he was found guilty of capital felony murder and eight other charges. That should have been the end of it.

But one of those attending the trial was Robert Perske, a writer with a special interest in cases involving people with mental disabilities. He watched in horror, convinced that Mr. Lapointe was being railroaded on the basis of coerced confessions. He sent an alert to some friends, who attended the trial, too. When it ended, they raised money for appeals, visited Mr. Lapointe in prison, hired lawyers, generated publicity, organized a forum on wrongful convictions.

They say the case is preposterous, that Mr. Lapointe, a victim of numerous mental and physical infirmities, was not capable of such conduct. They say to commit a crime of astounding brutality, Mr. Lapointe, who had no history of violence of any kind, would have decided to sneak out in a 45-minute interval while his wife and son were upstairs. He would have taken a short walk to Mrs. Martin’s apartment, raped her, stabbed her, strangled her with a ligature that required far more dexterity than he had ever shown and set the place on fire.

And then, with no one seeing him come or go, he would have returned home, with no wounds, no blood, no smell of smoke, in time to calmly watch a National Geographic special with his family.

“He didn’t do it, he wouldn’t do it, he couldn’t do it,” said Irv Hargrave, a retired business executive who is one of the supporters.

Supporters of Richard Lapointe
at one of their frequent meetings.
***************

The jury disagreed. Michael O’Hare, the assistant state attorney supervising the case, said the confessions, a semen sample found at the crime scene consistent with Mr. Lapointe’s blood type and statements he made the night of the murder (which the state contends reflected knowledge of the crime not available at the time) provided ample evidence, and that Mr. Lapointe received excellent counsel. Because of the heat from the fire, no identifiable DNA was recovered.

“I’m sure they’re well-meaning,” he said of Mr. Lapointe’s supporters. “But I don’t believe their beliefs are supported by the evidence, which shows he is guilty and was properly convicted.”

The legal obstacles facing his primary lawyer, Paul Casteleiro, in seeking a new trial are daunting. His supporters could be excused if the whole thing is feeling Sisyphean or worse.

It’s been a long, long road without much to show for it, but some of them met this week to discuss the case and plan what they’ll do if he’s released. Mr. Lapointe still talks about the lobster dinner he ate once at Red Lobster. They’d like to get him a second one.

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