By JOSEPH KELLARD
The Butterfly Garden Ceremony was held for Peggy Radicone, a clerk typist at School 8's library and a long-time Oceanside resident, who passed away in March after battling cancer. Radicone was known for her love of butterflies, so the school planted three butterfly bushes just outside a window by the library's circulation desk, where her presence will continue to be felt by students and her coworkers.
Two of her closest associates, Heidi Burns, library media specialist, and Joann Hisky, an instructional assistant, spearheaded the making of the garden, conceiving it as a living tribute to "Peg," as Radicone was called, because "she believed in living life and living it today, and she thought that was important, perhaps because she had been suffering for several years," Hisky said.
With butterflies seemingly everywhere -- from the cut-out paper kind colored in crayon to their image on the shirts of students sitting in the grassy courtyard -- Burns first looked skyward and thanked Radicone for providing beautiful, warm weather, and proceeded to tell everyone the original of the garden.
A plaque placed alongside its bushes will bear words that Radicone lived by: "Cherish your yesterdays, dream your tomorrows, but live your todays."
Burns urged the students to look at the garden during their school days "and remember to live your todays to the fullest, just as Mrs. Radicone did."
Many of Radicone's yesterdays were spent with her husband, Mike, and their three sons, Michael, Greg and Chris, at a home they owned in Montauk, where she enjoyed nature. "She was always fascinated by butterflies and took photographs of them," Hisky said.
During the ceremony, students read poems about butterflies penned by themselves or children's authors, and sang songs about the morphed caterpillar and read facts about what it has symbolized in various cultures, from ancient Greece onward.
Following their performances, Mike Radicone was presented with a book on butterflies signed by students and staff. "There were two things that Peg loved most," he told the crowd. "Butterflies and, most of all, children."
In describing Radicone, Hisky said that you would have never known she was personally struggling "because she smiled all the time and loved working with the children. She was a very sunny person who really had an ability to bring out the best in people."
Radicone worked half-days performing such tasks as checking out books and guiding children toward resources where they could find needed information. Initially, she was active in the PTA while her sons attended School 3. In 1995, she began working at that school as a clerk secretary, and just last year she decided to work alongside Hisky at School 8.
"Peg was an absolute beloved parent, PTA member and employee," Jeff Schlissel, principal of School 3, told the Herald. "She was a person who cared about all children all of the time."
Schlissel's school will establish a graduation award in Radicone's honor, and will install a stained glass window featuring a butterfly in the office where she once worked.
As the butterfly ceremony neared its conclusion, students and Radicone's husband and her sons, Chris and Greg, took turns shovelling soil on the newly-planted bushes. Then the real butterflies, whose cocoons had been kept by the school's second graders, were released one by one.
As they flew throughout the courtyard, some of immediately mingled with the students. Something Radicone herself was so fond of doing.
