Mark your calendar and get your sale items ready!

In the tradition of Garden City's founder, Alexander Turney Stewart, who was known for developing the department store concept, the Garden City Historical Society will revive the memory of his entrepreneurship by hosting A.T. Stewart's Flea Market, an old fashioned community garage sale. The Flea Market will be held Saturday, June 3, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., on the Historical Society Museum's property, 109 Eleventh Street. Enthusiastic sellers are welcome to reserve their spaces now.

The Society is offering three options for participants:

Reserve a space and sell your own goods. For information, call Kris Harder at 747-1774. Eight-foot-square spaces can be reserved for $75, on a first come/first serve basis.

For sale on consignment-the Society will sell your items at the price you designate. You receive two-thirds of the sale. For consignment information, please call Peggy Griffin at 873-9096, or Jill Mayer, 747-8759.

Donate items to the Historical Society for use in the museum or for sale at the Flea Market. Items are accepted at the Society's discretion, and the Society receives all the proceeds of the items sold at the Flea Market. For information on donating items, call Sally Schreier at 741-5167.

Apartment dwellers and homeowners are welcome to participate. Sellers are asked to bring their own tables and chairs. All participants are responsible for removing unsold items and cleaning their spaces at the end of the day.

We'll do the advertising; you bring the wares. See you at the Market!

"Ireland's WWI Soldiers"

Tom Phelan, a retired employee of the Garden City Public Schools, will present "Forgotten Heroes: Ireland's World War I Soldiers" on Thursday, May 4, at 12:30 p.m. at the East Meadow Public Library, 1886 Front Street, East Meadow. Phone: 516-794-2570

A quarter of a million Irish men joined the British army and fought in the trenches in the First World War, and nearly thirty-five thousand died. Tom Phelan's gripping new novel, The Canal Bridge, tells the story of two Irish stretcher-bearers (and the lovers and families they leave behind) as they struggle to survive the slaughterhouse that was Europe from 1914-1918.

Due to political divisiveness, Ireland has had no tradition of honoring the memory of its WWI soldiers. One of Phelan's aims in writing The Canal Bridge was to give these men, many of whom he knew as a child growing up in Ireland, their proper place in the pantheon of Irish heroes.

Tom Phelan is the author of the novels The Canal Bridge, In the Season of the Daisies, Iscariot, and Derrycloney. He has written for Newsday and for the journal of the American Irish Historical Society. Born and raised on a farm in County Laois in the Irish midlands, he now makes his home on Long Island.