Antone “Tony” Volinski was one of the thousands of first responders who hurried to the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
As a member of the Greenport Fire Department, he and a half-dozen other members drove one of the trucks to Lower Manhattan on Sept. 12, stayed for 24 hours helping with recovery efforts and returned Sept. 16 to continue the work.
Mr. Volinski, 62, has lived in Greenport since age 5 and is now a 44-year GFD veteran. And he’d mostly put the dark days of 2001 behind him until May, when he began to complain of throat pain. He visited a local doctor, who was alarmed by what he saw in the back of Mr. Volinski’s throat and sent him to Stony Brook University Hospital.
There, after many tests, a cancerous tumor was confirmed.