For Joe Samodulski, a job with rich rewards

Joe Samodulski was very much a part of corporate America, commuting from his Hicksville home to a job at CBS College Publishing in Manhattan, where he obtained copyrights. He later worked for another Manhattan-based publishing company before his job was outsourced in the late 1980s. But even then he stuck to his career, working freelance from home.

Then came 9/11, and Samodulski's life changed forever. He watched people hurl themselves off one of the Twin Towers that day. "I thought there must be more to life than just existence," he said earlier this week. He and his wife, Carla, went to church to pray.

Since then, Samodulski, 56, has left corporate life behind for a job he admits is "low-paying," as director of parish ministry at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in Hicksville, the same church where he was educated decades ago.

He was hired in 2003. Early on, when he had been volunteering at the church, he had gone on an interview at a trade magazine in Manhattan. He didn't get the job. One of the nuns, Sister Kathleen McCarthy, said she knew that would be the case. "I prayed you wouldn't," she told him.

According to Samodulski, "This is the field that is right for me." Each Monday, crates of food arrive from Fairway in Plainview and are shipped by National Grid truck and company volunteers to the church. Part of Samodulski's job is seeing to it that deliveries are distributed to a growing population of needy people. Samodulski has never looked back at his old life. "This is fulfilling in a way a corporate [life] could not be," he said. "You see tangible results for your efforts."