Video cameramen record a news conference in East Moriches. (Newsday / Don Jacobsen)

Carol Saft slapped a newspaper on the counter Friday in Sherrie's Stationery Shop in East Moriches.

"It's pretty depressing, isn't it?" she said to Sherrie Chornoma, the deeply tanned, wise-cracking businesswoman whose cluttered variety store has become a local institution in her 21 years on Main Street.

"Yep. It's throw-up time," Chornoma told Saft, using a favorite of her earthy coversational phrases to describe the strange atmosphere that has enveloped this South Shore hamlet since Wednesday night's offshore crash of TWA Flight 800. "It's still horrible around here."

East Moriches is this year's Lockerbie, this year's Oklahoma City -- the rarely-in-the-news community suddenly thrust into the spotlight that attends such mega-events.

The crash's impact on East Moriches goes beyond the once unimaginable traffic jam at Main Street and Atlantic Avenue, brought about as official vehicles and media trucks make their way to the nearby U.S. Coast Guard station where the search and recovery operation is headquartered.

"Nobody can get anywhere around here," said Joan Kaime. "It took me two days to pick up my mail, because I was never able to get a parking spot on Main Street."

The accident's ripple effect also transcends the brisk business at the local delis, or at Sherrie's, where she cannot stock enough daily newspapers.

"Everyone is walking around in a state of shock," said Ralph Stears, who has owned a barber shop on Main Street for 33 years. "Who ever heard of us? But now, people may remember that East Moriches is where the big accident happened."

East Moriches is home to about 4,000 people and is situated along the Montauk Highway between bustling Center Moriches and Eastport, which people around here have noticed is beginning to bustle with weekenders' money. Chornoma says that makes quiet East Moriches "the little town that is lost out here somewhere."

But for now, East Moriches has been found. A dozen towering satellite trucks from New York, New Jersy and New England are parked at the waterside terminus of Atlantic Avenue, next to the Windswept Marina. More than 100 media cars and trucks are parked on a nearby baseball field, where a shuttle bus moves reporters back and forth to the Coast Guard command center.

It didn't take long for one resident along Atlantic Avenue to grow weary of the invasion. "PLEASE NO PARKING, NO INTERVIEWS, NO PHONE ACCESS," reads a 2-by-4-foot sign tacked to a tree on the property. "Thank you for respecting our privacy."

For many local people who attend St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, whose parish includes East Moriches, the tragedy has hit uncomfortably close to home. Virginia Holst, who died aboard the jetliner with her husband, Eric, attended St. John's, and the couple would have celebrated their sixth wedding aniversary Sunday.

Marie Frederick, a St. John's parish member and East Moriches resident who teaches physical education at Dayton Avenue School in Manorville, had Virginia Holst in her classes for six years. Frederick attended a packed memorial mass Thursday night for the Holsts at St. John's.

"This thing has been very big and bad here in East Moriches," Frederick said. "It really reminds me of the [Suffolk] fires last year. I can't concentrate on anything."

Like his wife, Jim Frederick expresses some uneasiness about the TWA tragedy pushing East Moriches into international headlines.

"The whole world is our backyard," he said. "I just hopes it's a good picture, because it's a good town."

Molly McCarthy contributed to this story.