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Meet Buster Toner

by: Kings Park Notebook – July 06, 2012

​Charles Toner, better known in these parts as “Buster,” has been named the Grand Marshal of the 2013 Kings Park St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Born in Kings Park in 1934, Buster was the youngest of three children.

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His mother, who emigrated from Ireland at age nineteen, came to the United States through Boston, where she worked as a governess for a year or two before hearing about a hospital in Kings Park hiring Irish immigrants. So she made the move, finding work as an aide at the Kings Park Psychiatric Center.

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Buster was in the first kindergarten class in Kings Park in 1939. His father died when he was five years old.