LI native now in Utah runs in critical House special election

Daily Point

From LI to Utah to … Washington, D.C.?

Given the Republicans’ narrow majority in the House of Representatives, every congressional contest attracts extra national attention. When Republican Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah announced in May that he was stepping down to help his ailing wife, a rivalry to succeed him suddenly commenced.

The special election to complete Stewart’s term is slated for Nov. 21 in the state’s 2nd Congressional District. And Kathleen Riebe, 54, the Democratic candidate, offers a bit of local interest 2,200 miles to the east.

Riebe is a native Long Islander, now serving in the Utah State Senate.

She grew up in Merrick and attended Bellmore-Merrick’s John F. Kennedy High School, followed by Hofstra University where she double-majored in elementary education and sociology. Skiing in Alta, Utah, and a subsequent love of the area, led Riebe to put down roots there.

By then she’d been visiting at every chance to the point where, she told The Point, her late mother told her, “You can’t keep going back and forth.” In Utah, she worked as a bartender, Alta police dispatcher and dump-truck driver, and has taught outdoor education.

Riebe’s driving goal doesn’t seem to be the power-and-money prize. A resident of Cottonwood Heights, 15 miles south of Salt Lake City, she taught for 21 years in the Granite School District and won a seat on the state’s elected Board of Education. Her own kids are 16 and 18 and her spouse, Steve Gilman, has long been employed with the Alta Ski Area. She won her state Senate seat in 2018.

But this scrap promises to be different — in a national spotlight that could prove either lasting or fleeting. Others from this region found political lives when they went west. Mia Love served in Congress from another Utah district from 2015 to 2019; she spent some of her early years in Brooklyn and Connecticut. The late Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan was born in Flushing and raised in New Rochelle.

Utah’s CD2 is a traditionally Republican bastion, but Riebe says she sees a unique chance. For one thing, she says special elections in those parts bring out more Democratic votes than most elections. For another, there is ferment among Republican contenders and a divisive GOP primary is scheduled for Sept. 5. Riebe goes unchallenged into the Democratic primary.

Riebe notes that it was with crossover appeal she managed to unseat GOP incumbents in her state Senate and school board races. The messaging has been plain and populistic — that she’s not sponsored by the lawyers or the construction industry, but rather speaks for teachers, cops, kids and working families.

And, of course, Riebe has heard of Long Island’s most notorious current congressman, Republican fabulist George Santos. She speaks of him, to put it gently, as someone who doesn’t have any of the civic involvement that she does.

— Dan Janison dan.janison@newsday.com

Pencil Point

A historic day

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Reference Point

A burning topic

The year 1968 was a violent one in America.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated; riots rocked Washington, Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City and Detroit; the Democratic National Convention in Chicago saw battles between protesters and police; and nearly 17,000 Americans died in Vietnam.

On July 6, Newsday’s editorial board wrote a piece that seemed to channel the tenor of those times. But the topic of “It Sounded Like a War” was not actual combat. It was fireworks.

Fourth of July festivities had just concluded and the board worried that “parts of Nassau and Suffolk sounded like a battleground” complete with “casualties” — including a Garden City teenager and his friend, one of whom was critically injured by a homemade firecracker.

The board blamed parents who buy fireworks for their children because they remember “the bad old days when everybody shot off fireworks.”

“The toll of those maimed or even killed was appalling,” the board wrote. “Of equal importance is the fact that fireworks are against the law. If children are to grow up with a respect for the law, parents must set an example.”

Fireworks have been a frequent target of Newsday’s editorial board. Two years earlier, in 1966, the board warned before July Fourth against “fireworks in private hands,” citing an “incalculable” national toll while advising that “the impulse to celebrate privately with noise that can kill and lights that can maim should be resisted.” After the holiday passed, the board congratulated law enforcement in both counties for their “watchfulness” and “visible and numerous” patrol cars in reducing fireworks-related injuries in Nassau from 71 in 1965 to 19 in 1966.

By 1973, the board was warning about the 31 Long Islanders — “most of them children” — seriously injured in fireworks accidents over the past two years. In 1975, it told the story of an auxiliary police officer who suffered second-degree burns when a 16-year-old threw a firecracker through his car window. The board demanded better police enforcement and a federal ban on fireworks, the lack of which the board said was “as inconceivable to us as the federal diffidence on handguns …”

The board really hammered the topic in the 1980s, beginning the decade with a plea to “Lower the Boom on Fireworks.” The explosives, it noted, were getting ever more powerful; it likened the popular M-80 device to a mini-bomb and argued that “nobody should be allowed to make a profit out of mutilation …”

In 1986, the board noted the nine people injured by M-80s thrown into a crowd at a Nassau Coliseum rock concert; in 1987, it cited a 20-year-old Plainview man killed while setting off a professional-type fireworks display, and a 15-year-old Queens boy whose hand had to be amputated after four fingers were ripped off by several M-80s set off in a pipe. And in 1989, it warned about the M-100, which “not only can cripple and blind and blow out eardrums; it can kill.”

One consistent theme through the years was that the plethora of safe public displays on Long Island should fill anyone’s desire for colorful spectacle and ear-shattering noise.

Suffice to say that decades later the board’s many warnings have borne little fruit. Many Long Island neighborhoods still sound like the war zones described in 1968. At least casualties, if any, were minimal this year, based on a lack of injury reports thus far. Certainly, the Island experienced nothing like the fireworks explosion on July Fourth in East Texas that killed one person and injured several others, or the Monday night explosion in Park Township, Michigan, where one woman died and nine others were wounded. Fireworks-related deaths also were reported in Kentucky and Missouri and serious injuries occurred in at least seven other states.

“That’s a lot of needless mayhem for the sake of booms, bangs and sparks,” Newsday’s board wrote in 1966.

An observation that, like the fireworks we crave, appears timeless.

— Michael Dobie michael.dobie@newsday.com, Amanda Fiscina-Wells amanda.fiscina-wells@newsday.com