Chamber honors Man and Woman of the Year

The Merrick Chamber of Commerce recently named Merokeans Adrienne Garfinkel and Randy Shotland its 2013 Woman of the Year and Man of the Year in recognition of their lifetimes of community service and activism. The organization will honor both at its annual installation dinner on Jan. 23 at Chateau Briand in Carle Place.

Also to be honored at the dinner are siblings Linda Toscano and Paul Laursen, former publisher and editor of the Merrick Life. Richner Communications, Inc., the parent company of the Merrick Herald Life, acquired L&M Publications, the parent company of the Merrick Life, last summer. The Laursen family published Merrick Life from 1958 to 2013.

Garfinkel, a retired elementary school teacher, is at the center of many of Merrick’s longstanding traditions. She and her husband, Larry Garfinkel, helped to found the Historical Society of the Merricks in 1975, which they still lead today. She has personally seen to it that Merrick’s history does not disappear — in the 1970s, she participated in an oral history project, recording interviews with fellow Merokeans that became part of the Merrick Library’s historical collection, and decades later she arranged to have that collection moved from the library’s annex at Merrick and Kirkwood avenues to the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s offices at the Brookside School, just weeks before, as it turned out, a fire tore through the annex’s interior.

The Garfinkels are there every year for the historical society’s celebratory public reading of the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July at the gazebo in downtown Merrick. She is a lifetime PTA member, and she received a Founder’s Day Award from Birch School for her role in bringing cultural and arts groups to the school. And every year she and her husband help organize the Merrick Brotherhood Council’s “Thanksgiving Festival of Music,” which features musical performances by Merrick children, teenagers and ensembles from local houses of worship.