Jim Horner, 46, longtime Newsday staffer

Jim Horner, who died of a heart attack Feb. 6, was a Newsday lifer.

He delivered this newspaper when he was a kid, and helped to print it five nights a week for the past 25 years as a platemaker, coming in at 9 p.m. and clocking out at 3 in the morning.

Horner, who was 46, met his wife, Donna Horner, when she worked in the paper's makeup department, where advertisements are designed, and together they made friends who drove Newsday delivery trucks, sold classified ads and worked in production.

Horner persuaded his newspaper friends to take dozens of camping trips upstate, day trips on his little boat out on Great South Bay, and a vacation to the Outer Banks of North Carolina that coincided with the arrival of Hurricane Alex in 2004.

"The guys were out on deck wearing trash bags - they wanted to see what it was like to be in a hurricane," said Janine Kachadourian, a friend who worked at Newsday for 20 years before leaving in 1997. "They were getting pelted with sand and laughing."

Some of these friends had construction and electrical skills, which was lucky because Horner was a serial renovator. In recent years he added a sunroom and deck to the couple's Bayport home and renovated the garage, den and bathroom, generally paying his laborers in Heinekens and pizzas.

When his wife took a job teaching reading at Oquenock Elementary in West Islip in 1995 - she now divides her time between that school and Bayview Elementary - Horner started waking up early to make lunch for their daughter, Leah, who celebrates her 10th birthday Monday. "He'd go in for parent reading day, he'd do the carpools, and he loved it," Kachadourian said. "He would even shop, go to Target and pick out outfits for Leah."

It's a tradition in Leah's fourth-grade class at Academy Street Elementary that parents come in to read on their children's birthdays, and Horner was scheduled to go in Monday. Now Donna Horner will read in his place.

In addition to his wife and daughter, Horner is survived by brothers Hugh, Robert and Michael Horner; and sisters Patricia Von Preysing and Elizabeth Schindler.

Services were offered Thursday at Our Lady of the Snow Roman Catholic Church in Blue Point, and burial was at St. Charles Cemetery in Farmingdale.