Bikers bring gifts to children's psychiatric center

Santa Claus rode a Harley Sunday.

He gunned it hard around the turn and up the drive of the Sagamore Children's Psychiatric Center in Dix Hills. Eighty members of the Lighthouse Chapter of the Harley Owners Group followed on their own motorcycles, presents in their saddlebags and handlebars adorned with antlers that may or may not be street-legal.

This was the Lighthouse Chapter's ninth year delivering gifts to the center and the bikers knew where to go once they'd parked their bikes: through a series of doors that locked behind them and into the gym. The children waited there.

"It hurts me that they're in here," said Joe Cambareri of Huntington, 56, a school bus driver back on his bike after a January collision that broke a leg and seven ribs and blew a lung out. "They need to be with their families," he said, recalling his own father and "the way he would take my hand and pull it, just a little tug - that's what I mean."

From 250 to 275 severely emotionally disturbed youngsters from Long Island pass through the center every year, staying four months on average, officials said. Some go back to their families and some on to long-term care in other facilities. About 25 will spend their holidays at the center, and that's where the bikers' gifts come in.

In the gym, bikers and children mingled gingerly, the children unsure of what to make of these men in black leather and handlebar mustaches and the bikers not sure how to break the ice.

One boy broke it himself, asking Charlie Danca, 53, a carpenter, what kind of bike he rode. Danca said he rode a 2005 Harley Super Glide, and have you ever sat on one? Because that could be arranged. "You get yourself a jacket and just look for me, Charlie," the biker said.

Later, in his office, Dennis Dubey, 59, the center's director, sat at his desk. He has worked at the center, a state facility, since 1975. He is proud of this place, which has a school, a staff of psychiatrists and therapists, bright yellow walls with pictures of summer cookouts, all of which only go so far.

"These kids have witnessed domestic violence," he said. "They've experienced abandonment, a lot of moving around, medical problems. Any one of those would be difficult to overcome; some of these kids face two or three of them."

State finances being what they are, he said, he has funds to cover the essentials but precious little left for things like presents. So he is grateful to the bikers. Because of them, every child who wakes up in the center Christmas Day will have something small wrapped up to open and keep: a puzzle, a doll, a pair of slippers or maybe a hair dryer, which is what some of the older girls asked for this year.

"We will give them as many presents as we can give them," Dubey said.