On Feb. 26, 1993 the Twin Towers were rocked by an explosion deep in the underground levels. The blast, the work of terrorists who had driven a load of explosives into the underground parking areas, came at 12:18 p.m.

Kirkpatrick, an employee of the Port Authority, was at work in the towers when he was trapped in the explosion and collapse of tons of concrete.

Kirkpatrick’s death hasn’t been forgotten in Rockland, even after 87 individuals identified by The Journal News as having links to the county died in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

In fact, there are connections that forever link the two terror incidents.

The afternoon Kirkpatrick died, a New York City Fire Department unit headed by Lt. John Woods of Pearl River rescued 16 people trapped in a WTC stairwell. And later, they searched for victims and recovered the remains of Robert Kirkpatrick. Five others who perished, John DiGiovanni, Stephen Knapp, William Macko, Wilfredo Mercado, and Monica Rodriguez, who was pregnant, were also recovered.

Months later, when his unit was honored for their actions that day, Woods spoke about problems FDNY members had communicating over radios in the aftermath of the attack, a problem that persisted eight years later.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Woods, then retired, lost his son James, who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald at the WTC. Woods helped with the search at Ground Zero, where his son’s remains were eventually recovered and identified.

Shortly before his death, Kirkpatrick’s family moved from Lonergan Drive in Suffern, a street visited by sorrow again in 2001.

FDNY Lt. John Ginley had grown up on the street, where his parents still lived at the time he died in the terror attacks. Their neighbor, FDNY firefighter Charlie Anaya, also perished in the rescue attempts on Sept. 11.

Along with Anaya and Ginley, Kirkpatrick is remembered on the Rockland County Sept. 11 Memorial at Haverstraw Bay County Park along the Hudson River and on Suffern’s 9/11 memorials at Village Hall and at Donna Hallett Park on the street they all called home.

The issue was simple, yet very complex.

The center’s operators are Jews who observe the sabbath on Saturday, a day when the NAACP and others argued many Spring Valley residents of other faiths would like to access the center and its services without having to take time off from work during the week.

The standoff goes back several years and has resulted in an on-again, off-again discrimination complaint against the center by the civil rights group.

The parties came close to a resolution in 2007, but that fell apart when the state found no bias.

Mendel Hoffman, the head of Monsey-based Community Medical and Dental Care Inc., which operates the center along with a sister facility in Monsey, now says opening the clinic on Saturday is in the interests of its patients.

“I’m changing my policy,” Hoffman says, “because of my firm belief  in serving the public good and preserving the health of all above all else.”

The Saturday hours will begin soon, said Hoffman, who will also operate the center on Jewish holidays falling during the week.

Whatever motivation, the bottom line decision is the right one — making health care funded by federal dollars available to all, no matter of their faith, the color of their skin or their ethnicity.

The key, off course, will be having the right staff to make the Saturday hours a success.

But when Montebello Mayor Jeff Oppenheim spoke, he had a very practical concern.

He didn’t want the cost of road repairs in the village to trickle down to local taxpayers because Gov. David Paterson was cutting into assistance under the Comprehensive Highway Improvement Plan.

Now Paterson says money from the federal economic stimulus program will be used to restore much of the $112 million that was being cut.

If everything holds up, it means that communities other than New York City will get the same amount of CHIP assistance they got for the 2008-09 fiscal year which wraps up at the end of March.

If the usual assistance didn’t come from the state, Oppenheim told state Sen. Thomas Morahan and Assembly members Ken Zebrowski, Ellen Jaffee, Annie Rabbitt and Nancy Calhoun — all of whom represent either all or part of Rockland — that wasn’t going to magically mend the village roads. It was a concern voiced as well by a village mayor who had made the trip from Orange County. 

The roads would still need to be repaired and the only way the village would be able to do that would be to raise village property taxes to fund the work.

It’s true that whether the work is paid for with federal money, state assistance or village property tax receipts, it’s still our tax dollars at work.

But those state or federal funds are coming from deeper pockets than a village government.

If the dollars don’t come from one of those larger, deeper pools, they have to come from a relative puddle raised by a small village.

In this case, it looks like fixing local roads will be one area where what trickles down will be revenue, rather than another expense for local taxpayers.

And then, he says, he stops abruptly because he’s gotten a little older and a little wiser. And oh, by the way, he had a neck injury and it got him worried.

That’s Alex Rodriguez’s story and he’s sticking to it…at least for now.

Forget that it’s unbelievable on it’s face.

Forget that he admits he likely wouldn’t have come forward were it not for the recent report in Sports Illustrated and a later interview with ESPN.

Rodriguez made it clear he wants to get on with baseball, to be surrounded by his teammates, embraced by the Yankees management. All forgive and praise the next home run champion of baseball, the man who would snatch the tainted title from Barry Bonds.

But wait. There were no follow up questions today in Tampa, in a press conference orchestrated by the Yankees. Rodriguez sidestepped many of the questions and just didn’t reply to others.

The episode, he said early on, was “a stupid mistake and a lesson learned.”

But reporters, true baseball fans and maybe even some Yankee apologists will  have many more questions  throughout Spring Training, into the season and probably into A-Rod’s retirement years, when he hopes everyone will look the other way and enshrine him in the Hall of Fame.

Who is you cousin? What’s his name? He’s not saying.

If it wasn’t helping, why keep doing it for three years? He was young and curious, he says.

Do you consider what you did cheating. “That’s not for me to determine.”

How could you not know what you were doing? It was over the counter stuff, he says.

Should you statistics from those years be wiped away? There will be a lot of debate over that, he says.

If you didn’t think what you were doing was wrong, why did you hide it from everyone? “I knew we weren’t taking Tic Tacs.”

When Mark McGwire was before Congress, his mantra was, “I’m not here to talk about the past.”

Today, A-Rod’s  became “I was young and curious.”

But there were hints of McGwire, too.

“Spring Training represents a new start for me,” he says.

And, later, “I hope, after my career is over, the evidence falls in my favor.”

His last words the the day: “Judge me from this day forward.”

If only life worked that way.

It’s more likely, after today’s press conference and his half approach to the truth, that another of his observations is more likely to come to pass.

Asked about the questions that follow from his truth by the dose approach with Katie Couric, Sports Illustrated and others, he said, “I may have to answer for the rest of my life.”

The village has always been a draw, no matter the era and no matter the attraction.

Over the decades, there has always been one more parking problem than there are solutions.

There have been different approaches, different rates and different studies of the problem.

As contentious as parking has been, the village has now found a new way to kick the tension up a notch  — bumping the fee to 75 cents per hour to try to cut into Nyack’s budget deficit.

So far, it’s not a very popular idea. Shoppers were mixed when reporter Ben Rubin  told them about the plan,  which would go into effect in June if enacted by the Village Board.  Merchants and workers in the village  were a little more concerned, fearing that  shoppers will  eventually rebel at paying more.

Bumping up the fines for overtime, overnight and handicapped parking violations sounds like a better idea, even to me.

Shortly after the new system went into operation, I spent 20 or 30 minutes pulling into and then out  of spaces that looked good at first, only to turn out inappropriate.

How I didn’t get a ticket still eludes me.

That aside, raising money by raising parking rates — while posing some threat to the free flow of customers downtown — sound like a better Idea than slashing away at beneficial programs atr the Nyack Center and elsewhere.

The center is an anchor downtown and programs there are valuable to residents of all ages.

At the very least, bumping the parking rate by 25 cents can give Nyack a start on plugging its cash gap.

Even if it isn’t enough to mend a broken budget, maybe it can keep the village on its feet to find other solutions.

Class membership is competitive, based on an application including an essay, three references and interviews by Leadership Rockland alumni. Since the first class in 1990, nearly 500 individuals from business, non-profits, education, government and other aspects of life have graduated  from the program. A $1,000 tuition fee, usually paid by the individual’s employer or organization, covers ten day-long classes — typically one each month — and includes meals, materials.

Areas of study include leadership skills; Rockland history and diversity; environment and transportation; economic development and tourism; education and developing human capital; politics and public policy; and arts, culture and the media, among others. Classes are facilitated by local expert coordinators, often at locations appropriate to that class topic.

The organization is dedicated to nurturing a visionary leadership base that is prepared to address the county’s challenges and their solutions.

The deadline for applications, which can be downloaded here, is April 24, 2009.

I had driven to Newburgh, to the new home of the Hudson Valley Council of Boy Scouts of America, at mid-morning for a noon presentation there on plans for the Boy Scout centennial celebration beginning this month and extending through the February 2010 anniversary until the end of next year.

We then boarded a bus in Newburgh, amid snow flurries, to ride to Hyde Park, for a similar but modified presentation in Dutchess County, one of five counties served by the Hudson Valley Council.

It snowed most of the time we were in Hyde Park, which made a late afternoon trip down the east side of the Hudson River to the Bear Mountain Bridge slow and arduous.

The bus, carrying press, scout officials and several scouts, just made it to Bear Mountain in time for the 4:30 press conference there. Because I would be heading back to Newburgh by bus, another reporter Jenna Carlesso was heading from our West Nyack office to cover the Bear Mountain event.

Problem was, she was stuck in traffic behind accidents on the Palisades Parkway and made it to Bear Mountain about 15 minutes before the bus was to depart, taking me and all the sources she needed off to Orange County. She made it to the Merry-Go-Round at Bear Mountain just in time to speak with everyone she needed. Her trip back to West Nyack to file her story was uneventful.

So was my trip back to Newburgh to retrieve my car, except that it took almost three hours.

We left Bear Mountain at about 5:35 p.m. and pulled into the Hudson Valley Council Service Center parking lot at 8:30, most of the time inching along Orange County roads.

Fortunately, we had bags of chips, chocolate and plenty of water. We joked about having to ration one scout volunteer’s box of powdered donuts and another volunteer’s red grapes.

The driver of our West Point Tours bus showed remarkable endurance as he tried at first to head north on Route 9W past Highland Falls. When it became clear that route was blocked by accidents and cars on ice, he headed for the front gate of the Military Academy.

Because of the security there, an armed soldier had to board the bus and check each passenger’s photo ID.

We then headed north through the post and onto Route 293. After a merge with Route 6 coming off the Palisades, we crawled all the way to where the road crosses the New York State Thruway, near Exit 16. We headed north on the Thruway to Exit 17. From there, it was a short hop to the council offices on Route 300.

For most of the folks on the bus, Newburgh was a final destination. Of course, I then had to make the drive back to Nanuet, arriving after 9:30 p.m.

All that time, we saw only one serious accident — near Cold Spring in Putnam — but knew there were many out there who had bigger problems than a three-hour bus trip.

We were tired, but lucky, and we all realized it.

But now we’re seeing the proof that doing so would only make matters worse, even if it gave us some measure of revenge for the impact on our investments.

According to state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, cash bonuses paid out to Wall Street employees dropped by 44 percent compared to those paid out in 2007.

That’s going to mean a dramatic drop in state income tax revenue, although Gov. David Paterson says that loss won’t add to the state’s deficit because the amounts had already been projected.

Following that logic, deeper cuts in bonuses would only have hurt the state more, with even less income tax revenue collected.

So, rather than collecting a total of $32.9 billion in bonuses as they did in 2007, Wall Street types took home a total of just $18.4 billion for 2008.

Poor babies.

The folks at the St. Petersburg Times and their TampaBay.com Web site are tracking promises made by Barack Obama — 509 to be exact — to see how he’s doing in making them reality. They’ve set up PolitiFact.com to showcase their findings.

OK. He’s only been president for a week, a day less if you’re one to worry about the oath of office do-over. But there’s already movement.

The tally so far: Promises kept, 5; Compromises, 1; promises broken, 0; stalled, 1; in the works, 14; No action, 488.

They also check out claims made in chain e-mails circulating on the Internet and in statements made by public officials, White House staff and others, testing their truth as best the St. Pete editors and reporters can determine it.

It’s interesting reading. Drop by here for a look.

It was in 2007, when he and two other Suffern High School alumni — Scott Wright and Kevin Clark — were visiting the Camp Venture Select Day Habilitation Program in Stony Point.

The trio, all of them professional wrestlers, were there to promote a benefit for Venture and for Suffern’s High School’s Touchdown Club, which supports the school football teams.

Fuchs, who went by the name Paul E. Normous, was just that. But he was clearly a gentle soul.

He told me how he was chasing a dream of making it to the big time with World Wrestling Entertainment, the successor to the old WWF. He had one shot, but didn’t get a contract.

Then there was a setback, one that makes you think twice about just how fake the wrestling action is.

An opponent had come off the ropes making a spin move, he told me. “I didn’t get out of the way. His knee landed on my face. If people think this is fake,” he said, “those must have been fake screws in my fake face.”

He was coming back from the injury, still on that quest, hoping the benefit show at his alma mater might attract enough attention to get another call from the WWE.

He was still chasing the dream when he got a bit part in “The Wrestler.”  They even mention him by name.

But the day it opened was the day the quest ended, where it began, back home in Sloatsburg.