Joye Brown has been a columnist for Newsday since 2006. She joined the newspaper in 1983 and has worked as a reporter, an editor, newsroom administrator and editorial writer. Brown: On Long Island, it ...

I wasn’t supposed to be a newspaper reporter. Nope. Not me. Not with my microscope, telescope, chemistry set and especially my habit of taking things apart to see how they worked, before (some of the ...