At 40, Sandel is in its prime

Lee Abbate, now 90, first became a member of the Sandel Senior Center in Rockville Centre 23 years ago, at age 67. Her husband had recently died, and she was looking for company. “I lost my husband, but I gained new friends,” she said as she played a game of dominos on a recent Monday. “And I meet new people every day.

“It’s my home away from home,” she added.

The center, which is a day program funded and run by the Village of Rockville Centre, recently turned 40. It provides social services and an array of recreational activities for adults ages 60 and up. The oldest member is 103-year-old Selma Stone.

The Sandel Senior Center is the core of the village’s Department of Senior Services. Most of its services are funded by village taxpayer money. It is also among the only Long Island senior centers accredited by the National Council on Aging, an advocacy group.

For members who need the service, the center provides weekly trips to the grocery store. There are also art, fitness and educational programs, as well as trips to museums, baseball games and shopping malls. On occasion, there are even overseas trips.

Sandel resembles a recreation center, which was its original purpose. The village purchased the former gas station – a casualty of OPEC’s 1973 oil embargo – in 1975, intending to turn it into a drop-in center where seniors could spend time outside their houses and apartments. It was built in response to an increasing number of seniors living nearby in the village, according to the center’s director, Chris O’Leary.

The structure was expanded three different times in 1982, 1988 and 2002.

In its early years, the facilitywas unstaffed and offered relatively few services and activities, but as it was consolidated under the Department of Senior Services in the 1980s, its role expanded. Its activities are organized by member-run committees, which work with the staff to bring projects to fruition.

“There are so many things to do,” said Lilly Carroll, 80, as she described some of the center’s programs and activities.

“What about the poker?” interrupted 84-year-old Sal Iannone.

“Yes, the men’s club plays poker,” Carroll said.

Additional funding for the center comes from the locally-based non-profit Friends of Senior Services. Most recently, the group paid for a new bathroom, flooring and motorized doors, with the money primarily coming from its annual fundraiser, Monte Carlo Night, at the center.

“The thing I would really like the community to understand is it’s not just the people who come here who benefit from the senior services,” O’Leary said. “It’s a service to the village as a whole.”

She said the center’s services provide peace of mind to family members of aging loved ones. “Even if your house doesn’t burn down, you’re still happy there’s a fire department nearby,” she said.

Center members have been celebrating Sandel’s 40th anniversary in a variety of ways. Members helped design anniversary T-shirts, and the street sign outside had one of its cards replaced with the name “40th Anniversary Avenue.” They also crafted a commemorative quilt and pieces of artwork, all of which are hung in the Rockville Centre Public Library.

Sitting across from Abbate during the dominos game, Cass Pena, 88, reminisced about his time at the center. “You know,” he said with a confident look on his face, “I didn’t know how to sing when I got here.” That apparently is no longer the case, because no one around him believed him when he said it.