Have you ever watched Ahmad Sharbaan while he’s at CEC?

The man never stands still. He moves constantly, giving instructions, taking a call, making another call – cell phone a permanent accessory at his ear.  Even when driving from site-to-site, he works the phones, and he leans forward in the seat, as if working with the car to get him where he needs to go, as fast as it can.

“I like action,” he says. He also believes in communication. If you don’t reach out to him, be sure he will find and talk to you.

We are sitting on steps outdoors at the New York Hall of Science, during a break in CEC’s July staff meeting.  Despite the heat, Ahmad is talking intensely.

His life? He was born in the South Bronx, the youngest of seven children, and he grew up in both the Bronx and Mt. Holly, New Jersey. His mother, Ruth Belle, hailed from Petersburg, Virginia, and she was a school teacher. His father, Kaarhera Sharbaan, came from Barbados and he was a US Marine.

The father and the mother would have different but definite influences on their youngest son.

“My father was overseas quite a bit,” says Ahmad. “He was a Marine Gunnery Sergeant. A career Marine. He was in Vietnam, he had been in Korea. When I was 12, he was stationed in Germany, and I went to visit him there. I never felt cold like that in my life. I remember asking my Mom, ‘Mom, why would Daddy ask me to come over here?’ She said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘It’s freezing.’ And I was sick for the six months I was there, because of the weather. Every time I breathed, the mist would just freeze up my whole face.  I pretty much stayed in the barracks and had a tutor, because I refused to go outside.”

In addition to wanting time with his son, the Marine in Kaahera Sharbaan perhaps intended to inculcate discipline.  Certainly at home, growing up, Ahmad was always being told to present an orderly, neat appearance. Clothes had to be pressed. Nails had to be cut. Hair had to be cut. The same went for Kaahera Sharbaan’s house. Every Saturday, General Inspection. “I said, ‘Mom, what does that mean?’  General Inspection: everything had to be clean. Clean? The place is clean. Nope. You got to wash the windows, wash the walls.”

“But,” says Ahmad, “it made me a better person. So when somebody opens the door and sees you, they say, ‘This guy is about something.’”

Kaahera may have instilled self-respect in his son, but he could not lure him to the military. “Tried to get me to go into the Marines,” says Ahmad. “Not for me. My main thing is music.”

Ruth taught her son the piano. Indeed, practically all of Ahmad’s sisters and brothers played an instrument, including an older brother who died of kidney failure at 24.

“We used to stay in the house and play music,” says Ahmad. “Everything my mom provided for us – everything we did – was in the house. So we weren’t out running the streets. With me, it was music.”

Music has been Ahmad’s passion since he was at least 16. He is an audio engineer and has a production company – Strength Entertainment – and a studio at his house near Seaview, in Canarsie. “I hear seagulls first thing in the morning, last thing at night, which is very nice because it helps my creativity.”

“I do music for a lot of recording artists, a lot of music studios,” he says. “But I like to do it at my leisure. I don’t like to be pressured to do it, as a job. That’s why I created the studio in my house, so if I get up at one or two o’clock in the morning, I can go in my next room, put on my earphones and just create at my pace.”

What kinds of music? “I do R&B,” says Ahmad, “I do gospel. I do a little bit of jazz and a lot of rap. Rhythm tracks for rappers. Rap is easy to do; with jazz or gospel, there’s more structure. You have to know harmonic qualities, chords. You have to bridge it.”

His business method is straightforward: “If someone gives me a deadline, I give them my guidelines. Once I hear their lyrics and learn how they want the composition, we discuss and I give them a timeline. I say, ‘Give me a couple of weeks, let me put a rhythm track down.’ Then I produce and engineer and mix it.”

In addition to Strength Entertainment, Ahmad belongs to the Rock Stone Cultural Arts Center in Jamaica, Queens. “It’s a K through 4 program that one of my partners has,” says Ahmad. “We teach kids about music, MIDI production and how the instruments can interface with each other. Teach them how to understand tones and how to mix music.”

Even when he is on-the-go at CEC, on some level he is thinking music. “Everything feeds music,” Ahmad explains. “Every type of sound. You walk in there,” he says, gesturing toward the high-pitched sounds of youngsters milling around in the Hall of Science, “and you have children screaming, and that gives you an idea: ‘I could possibly use that somewhere, just that type of shrill.’ I used to record sounds and change their wave shapes. You have to learn sounds, wave shapes, patterns – every sound has a pattern that you can alter.”

After a job history that included the Association for Energy Affordability (AEA), construction and auditing for Bedford Stuyvesant Restoration, and a car dealership (“Giving my little automotive skills a test”), Ahmad reconnected with Leroy – they had known each other way back — and came to CEC as an auditor. Then Patrick needed an assistant, and now Ahmad is also a construction manager.

“I love the work itself,” he says, “but I like connectivity best. I like to be around a lot of people that I can talk to. Some places you work, like that dealership, people are cold, and you end up finding yourself in your own little box. I don’t like covered boxes, I don’t like closed doors. I interact with everybody.”

“Everybody” includes his children – 27-year-old Dominique, who is a paralegal, and her son, Tyce (“He’s a handful”), and 17-year-old Isaiah, who lives with his mom in North Carolina but this summer hung out with his father in Brooklyn.

“He’s a musician, too,” Ahmad says proudly. “He has a drum set, and he plays the French horn and the trombone in his school band.”

Speaking again of music – has anyone at CEC heard Ahmad play? He says no, because he prefers “putting stuff together on my own.”

“If you’re doing production yourself, I know how I want it to sound. I’ll put a base line to it, a melody to it, maybe some strings, some horns. I can’t argue with myself about the drum track. If you have solo creativity, it’s a beautiful thing.”

There in his studio, among his equipment, is perhaps where the Ahmad who’s always on-the-go finally relaxes into another rhythm. “I like to sit back. I don’t want to do what’s stressful. I do it at my own pace. That’s what I love,” he says.

–A. Greene

The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience.  The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him.  He goes “sight-seeing.”  ~Daniel J. Boorstin

Thelma Arceo has always been a traveler.

Her love of travel began, she recounts, when she was a youngster growing up in Manila, the capital of the Philippine islands. Her father, a man of many talents, including publishing a newspaper and producing popular entertainment, often took the whole family – Thelma, her two sisters, her brother and their mother – on trips each winter and summer.  Hong Kong, Japan, most of Southeast Asia, Egypt, and Europe – the Arceo family visited them all.

When Thelma, in her twenties, received a scholarship from the Philippine government to go to the Netherlands and get a Masters degree in bio-fuels research, it did not seem at all inappropriate to visit her sisters in New York City along the way.

“So I did,” Thelma laughingly recalls during lunch at a Filipino restaurant in Long Island City. “And my sisters said, ‘Why do you want to go there? Stay here.’ And I didn’t know, but my older sister, Ramona, had already gotten a lot of school applications. So I applied and got accepted in Syracuse University, NYU and NYIT (New York Institute of Technology). Syracuse is very cold, and my sister said, ‘Oh, the suicide rate there is high. You should not go there.’ NYU was quite expensive. So we chose NYIT. And that’s how I stayed in the United States.”

But traveling, as most of us know, can involve more than visiting foreign countries. Traveling can involve journeys through careers, voyages into new workplaces and realms of learning. And in those respects, also, Thelma is one of Daniel J. Boorstin’s active seekers of adventure.

In Manila she had worked at the Philippine National Oil Company.

Manila, which Thelma still visits on occasion.

In the U.S., on some mornings she went to NYIT and other mornings she taught science to gifted youngsters in grades 1 through 6 at the Manhattan East School. “That’s why I have a loud voice,” she jokes. “Because of the kids. In class, I needed a loud voice.” Her mother was a teacher, and, says Thelma, “I’m more like my mother than my father, although the writing all came from him.” (Her father died last year.)

Studying and teaching rambunctious children might have been a full day for many people, but not for Thelma. At night she participated in an HPD (Housing Preservation and Development) training program, a connection that led to a job with the New York Urban Coalition, to which HPD subcontracted work on its buildings. At the Coalition in 1992 she came face-to-face for the first time with Richard Cherry, when the Coalition’s board asked to meet with her, so they could give her a department. (She later learned it was Mr. Cherry’s decision.)

“The role of my department was to be a consultant to everybody,” says Thelma. “I was doing all of the technical services for different departments.”

There was one interesting catch, she recalls. There was no budget for her department: Mr. Cherry told her she would have to fund projects herself (she did). “In hindsight,” says Thelma, “I think he knew the Coalition would be closing.”

Indeed, two years later, in 1994, the Coalition dissolved, and CEC was born. The Coalition’s technical services department moved to CEC mostly intact, Thelma with it, making her one of the first CEC employees.

CEC was, she remembers, a very different kind of place from what it is now. There was a smaller staff (she recalls about 20 people.) Mr. Cherry came to work early and left late. And weatherization was sole focus.  Then as now, weatherization funding had its ups and downs, and so, to find other ways to support the agency, Mr. Cherry initiated “fee-for-service” operations.

As CEC has grown, so has Thelma’s department. Sixteen years later, by her count, she oversees 24 people – more than CEC’s original group of employees. CEC’s family now includes BIG!NYC and Solar One, and fee-for-service work encompasses retrofits, solar thermal installations, damp-spray cellulose insulation, LEED, retro-commissioning, and other services.

“We have done quite a bit to change the world,” she says. “At least from my end, 16 years, I’ve seen buildings on the brink of being sold out, tenants being pushed out of their homes, and we basically saved the building for the owner by giving him all the improvements. Buildings that were really in distress, with the boiler broken and the roof leaking. We gave additional years for those tenants who lived there.”

At the same time that CEC was maturing, Thelma’s yen for world travel took her to countries few of us get to see: Mongolia, Peru, Africa, India, and Bhutan – among many other places.

She particularly loved Bhutan, a small kingdom that nestles in the Eastern Himalayas. But India? Not so much.

Thelma in Bhutan

“The people of Bhutan are wonderful,” says Thelma. “It’s the only country where they don’t calculate the GNP – they calculate the Gross National Happiness of the people. It’s a Shangri-la.”

“But the only way I was able to go to Bhutan,” she explains, “was through India, because Bhutan is protected. The army of Bhutan is actually provided by India, which thinks that, when China tries to invade, it will be through Bhutan.

“I was so depressed after leaving India. The poverty. The dirt. You see people sleeping on the sidewalks. It’s just overwhelming. There’s much to see architecture-wise – the temples – but for me, the impact of travel is about the culture and the people. I found India really depressing.”

Of course, as numerous people have observed over the years, one of the pleasantest aspects of travel is to come home.

For Thelma, that home is in Forest Hills, Queens, where during the week she lives with her younger sister, Theresa, who works in Manhattan and commutes back to her own house in Pennsylvania on weekends.

But clearly the center of Thelma’s home life is a beloved 13-year-old dachshund named Hund. “I call her my baby,” she says affectionately.  “But she’s old – very old – 91 in human years.  Her expected life is 15 years, so I’m getting ready. But I’m too close with her, and I think I will be devastated.”

Hund in her native habitat, with Thelma at home

Assuming all goes well at CEC and at home, Thelma, not surprisingly, is planning a fall excursion. She has booked a trip to Morocco in November, but because of the trouble next door in Libya, she feels that she might go the Amazon River instead.

Always traveling.

A.Greene

Richard Cherry, President of CEC

Usually at around this time I write a profile of a CEC employee.

But last February 25 Richard Cherry spoke at Princeton about what it means to be “engaged at every age,” and he talked about employees who had come to CEC after pursuing other careers for many years.

So that sounded like a good chance to write a little about a number of people at CEC—including Richard Cherry – and also to write about why and how one starts a new career at a certain age.

As Rick Cherry told the group assembled at Princeton, “I trained as a lawyer and, after clerking at the U.S. Court of Appeals, I went to work for a major Wall Street firm. Then came my first career change. When I realized I just didn’t get any kick out of working on that lease or contract for that big real estate deal, I left, for what I thought would be a few years, to do housing development at a not-for-profit, the New York Urban Coalition.

“I stayed with the Urban Coalition for over 20 years, and in my early fifties took a deep breath and founded the Community Environmental Center to focus on environmental issues in the urban environment. I had some lucky breaks and was able to pull it together.”

Indeed, the folks at Princeton apparently wanted to hear about how, at age 50 and beyond, one can start a company. This was, after all, Princeton, and perhaps the organizers of the conference thought the audience would all be Type A entrepreneurs.

But as Rick Cherry pointed out during his talk, “not everyone can or should try to start an organization,”  and he went on to talk about many of the people working for CEC who are on their 2^nd and sometimes their 3^rd careers — using their own words.

Evi Blaikie: “I emigrated to the United States and made a successful career in the garment industry. But when I was around 60, I decided that I wanted to devote my energies to a place where my work would be meaningful. So I came to Rick and CEC, where I’ve done everything from redesigning the interior of our offices to being in charge of Human Resources.”

Sal Iacono: “I worked in my father’s construction business, then became a CPA and worked for Revlon until I founded my own middle-management search business, which I ran for 20 years. When you’ve done something for 20 years, you sometimes find yourself in a rut. To do something new is invigorating. Being at CEC is similar to when I started my business: it’s exciting. You’re full of ideas. Also, I love the mission of CEC. After a long career, you start to think about how many people’s lives you’ve touched. I know I touched a lot of lives running my search firm, and I feel I also do that at CEC by improving people’s living conditions. I’m giving back.”

Claudia Edwards: “I was an executive at a Fortune 500 company, heading the company’s foundation. But when corporations moved from philanthropy as corporate citizenship to philanthropy as a marketing tool, I realized that I needed to decide what to do with the rest of my life and I realized that helping families in urban communities was a passion I wanted to fulfill. So I returned to school and got a Ph.D. in philosophy. And I worked with communities in urban school districts, building public support for public schools.  At CEC I consult on green job training for at-risk youth and other green educational initiatives, and I empower young people for careers in the emerging green economy.”

Demetrios “Jimmy” Hatzis: I started as a sales rep for an oil corporation, and then I set up my own business – a florist shop. That didn’t work out, so I worked for a construction firm, weatherizing buildings. Now I do that for CEC, and it’s good – it makes me feel good to do something that really helps people.”

Alexis Greene: “I had been writing and teaching about theater for practically all of my working life. But much as I loved theater, I had to admit that theater just wasn’t doing a lot for the world at large. I wanted to work in a field that truly, directly, benefited society, and at CEC I feel truly purposeful and that my work counts.”

Chris Collins: “After a successful legal and then corporate career, I took a year off at age 50 to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I decided that there were one or two social issues that really moved me, and the environment was one of them. When the opportunity came to work at CEC, I grabbed it, and boy am I happy I did.”

People are living longer and working longer.  Indeed most health professionals agree: work that one enjoys, work that has a purpose, is as important for continued wellness as exercise and a smart diet.  Maybe even more important.

Or as Richard Cherry said at Princeton, “CEC is a stronger organization because of these skilled people. And we all get a kick out of working with these young 30-year-olds who think they have it all figured out.”

–A. Greene

After all, where would CEC’s WAP or fee-for-service work be if crews did not have the cellulose for insulation or caulk guns–or trucks?

Many is the time that Patrick or Ahmad has to drive from a work site to the nearest Home Depot to buy an item. Christina Procolam is at the other end of the cell-phone call, giving them an okay and a P.O. number.

“I actually want to go out with one of the crews,” Christina recently told me over lunch at the Indian restaurant attached to Five Star Banquet. “I want to see what they do and the kind of materials they use. Because when the guys come to me and tell me, ‘I want this,’ I often say, ‘Can you show me what it looks like? If not, let’s Google it, so I can know what you’re talking about.’ I want to be more comfortable buying the products they need.”

She was born on the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean. Her father was born and raised there; her mother is from Guyana.

When she was about three, however, Christina’s parents separated, and she came to New York City with her mother and with her brother, who is eight years older than she, and together they all learned about Brooklyn: Midwood first, and then, when her mother married an American of Italian descent, Gravesend.

“This is where the plot thickens,” says Christina with a smile. “I had a little of everything: Italian life, American life, West Indian life.” Her father in the meantime had moved to North Carolina, which Christina describes as “another country.”

For a woman who is only 28 years old (she just celebrated her birthday), she has already had a taste of several professions. At Brooklyn College, for instance, she majored in Radio and Television Technology—got behind a camera (“I loved working a camera”), wrote scripts, sat in the booth where they run the graphics and the audio.

But ultimately she felt that TV and radio were not her calling and that she was more interested in the world of business. So, after a few obligatory receptionist stints, she landed a job at a company called National Data Conversion, which collected information for corporations and transferred it to electronic formats.

“I did that for four years,” says Christina, “but unfortunately in 2009 the company went belly-up. They made a couple of bad decisions, and the week before Thanksgiving, they came in and said ‘we can’t keep the doors open anymore.’ We were all told to stop what we were doing and go home.”

She describes herself as being “heartbroken,” largely because she felt close to her co-workers—“it was a family environment”—and she promised herself that her next job would provide the same feeling of collegiality.

She was out of work for seven months. When not looking for a job, she cooked, a skill learned from both her mother and stepfather. “That’s the one thing that makes me really calm,” she says. “Going into the kitchen and creating something.” (See her recipe for a delicious, creamy Chipotle Sweet Potato Soup with Bell Pepper-Bacon Salsa, following this profile). At one point she even contemplated going to culinary school.

“But as much as I love to cook,” says Christina, “I love to work out even more. Because all that good food has to go somewhere, and when I was laid off, in addition to job-hunting, I worked out.” She lives in Far Rockaway, and in the spring she likes to jog on the board walk. She hopes to do the two-day, 39-mile Avon Walk for Breast Cancer next October, although she will need a corporate sponsor. [Editor’s note: Hint to CEC.]

In May 2010, Christina’s out-of-work interlude ended when Sal Iacono called her to interview for a position in CEC’s purchasing department, and last fall she became Manager of Procurement.

“Whatever Sal and Meir did to sell me on CEC, I fell in love with it, because there’s nothing better than a job that’s rewarding. That’s the only thing that was missing from the job at National Data Conversion. Here, even if I get frustrated during the day, I know that everything has a purpose.”

She admits to having felt a little rocky when she first stepped into the position. “I was freaked out that I was going to mess something up. This is federal money.”

But now that she’s been handling procurement for a few months, says Christina, “I’m able to make decisions on my own. And I don’t mind people coming and asking me questions. My parents say I should have been a teacher, because I really don’t care how many questions someone asks me.”

And needless to say, everybody at CEC feels comfortable bringing Christina their questions and requests.  “It feels like a family here,” she says. “I like that CEC is not a rigid environment. I like that Mr. Cherry and Ken and Meir took a chance on me, and I hope I can make the purchasing process better and easier for everybody.”

Christina Procolam’s Chipotle Sweet Potato Soup with Bell Pepper-Bacon Salsa

Ingredients:

Salsa

4 slices bacon

1 small red onion, cut into ¼-inch dice

1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded, and cut into ¼-inch dice

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Juice of 1 lime

Soup Base

5 garlic cloves, smashed

½ teaspoon finely chopped fresh ginger

2 small white or yellow onions, roughly chopped

2 tablespoons dark brown sugar

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon pureed chipotles in adobo

¾ cup dry white wine

3 large sweet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch dice

6 cups chicken stock or low-sodium canned broth

6 tablespoons butter, chilled and roughly chopped

Juice of ½ lime

1 tsp olive oil

1.      To make the salsa: cook the bacon, crumble the bacon and set aside. Pour most of the bacon fat out of the pan, leaving only enough to coat the pan lightly.

2.      Add the onion and red pepper to the pan in which you have cooked the bacon and sauté over medium heat, stirring, until brown, about 6 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Add the reserved bacon and the lime juice and set aside.

3.      Heat the olive oil in a large pot. Add the garlic, ginger, onions, and brown sugar, season with the salt and pepper to taste and sauté, stirring, until the vegetables are brown, about 6 minutes. Stir in the chipotle puree and the wine, and cook over medium heat until the mixture is reduced by about three-fourths—about 6 minutes. Add the sweet potatoes and the stock and simmer until the potatoes are very soft, 20 to 25 minutes.

4.      Using a hand blender or food processor, puree the soup mixture. Add the butter one piece at a time, blending again after each addition, to thicken the soup slightly. Stir in the lime juice and correct the seasonings. Immediately ladle into bowls, spoon a portion of the salsa onto each and serve.

Anthony "Tony" Scariolo

The images of the Vietnam War exist uneasily in our memories. First come the grainy, black-and-white films of soldiers weighed down with backpacks and M14s. Then the still color photographs: HH-3 helicopters hovering over walls of orange flame, and a naked young girl, burned by napalm, running down a road.

Tony Scariolo was there.

Beginning in 1970, when he was 18, he spent 26 months in Southeast Asia, fighting with the U.S. Army. Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos–he saw it all. Only when he was seriously wounded did he finally begin the physical and psychological journey back.

“It’s taken me almost 38 years to come to grips with it,” Tony says.

He was born in Brooklyn, the youngest son of Gaetano and Louise Scariolo, who had come to the US from Syracuse, in Sicily, during the 1940s.

“Me and my brother, who is 3 years older than me, were the first American generation born here,” says Tony. “But my parents were very strict and old-fashioned; they had only one way of raising us. My dad, being Italian, was always hard on us, and me and my brother both really wanted out of the house.”

“Out of the house” for the two brothers meant the army. Three months after he graduated from Fort Hamilton High School, Tony was drafted and on his way to Fort Bragg in North Carolina for basic training. From there, the Army hustled him to Fort Sam Houston in Texas for Advanced Individual Training (AIT), and when that stint ended, Uncle Sam flew Tony’s company to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines and then to Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Southeast Asia.

There were 140 guys in his company; 105 never made it back.

“They told me when I got there that the war was over,” says Tony, a touch of sarcasm lurking in his unmistakable, throaty voice. “Unfortunately it really wasn’t.”

We are sitting in Aunt Rosie’s, eating lunch and talking about a war that shaped the country for decades. Listening to Tony, it is horrifyingly easy to understand why, even now, the US is haunted by this messed-up, misguided conflict. It is also clear why it took Tony, personally, more than 30 years even to be able to talk about it.

“I was with the 173^rd Airborne Division,” he says. “We would go out for 15 days at a time—live in the jungle—and we would ‘sneak and peak.’ Get ‘intel,’ as intelligence is called. Then crawl into a helicopter and go back.”

“I don’t know how to really put it into words,” he says. “I felt ready to do what the Army had taught me, but I wasn’t ready to adapt what they taught me to what I was there to do. That took time. But there were people trying to kill me, so I kind of returned the favor. I saw a lot of combat. Almost every day.”

He recalls going over with great enthusiasm for winning the war. But his enthusiasm gradually evaporated, and determination simply to survive took its place.

“There were points of time when it was totally nightmarish,” he recalls. “Like something out of a horror movie, where, if you could possibly take yourself and get closer to the ground, you’d continue to go. And when shells are coming, they are very indiscriminate.  But the natural high of adrenaline is what actually keeps you going. When the shooting

American forces destroying a Viet Cong base camp (1968). Courtesy National Archives & Records Administration

stops, you become depressed, because you’ve just been through something that focused you. All of a sudden it’s over, it’s done. And then it starts up again in two or three hours, and the adrenaline—you just learn how to use that to stay alive. I slept in the rain and mud, I lived with rats. It was appalling. But it made a better person out of me to live through something like that. I know there’s nothing out there now that’s going to stop me from doing what I have to do.”

Thirteen months into his second tour of duty, he was stationed at a place called Chuchow. The 25^th Infantry’s base camp was set up right above the Viet Cong’s miles of huge tunnels, where the North Vietnamese—the enemy–lived, kept supplies, set up hospitals, and fought.

Tony’s assignment, because he had a slight build, was to wriggle down narrow holes into the tunnels.

“The first time I did that,” he recalls with a wry smile, “they gave me a .45, a flashlight and a rope. So I knew what to do with the gun and the flashlight, but I said to my lieutenant, or LT, as they are called, ‘What do I do with the rope?’ He said, ‘You tie it around your waist, so we can pull your body out.’

“So I said, ‘Ohhh kayyy’ and down I went. Anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, depending on what you find. Pitch black. You can’t see nothin.’ If you don’t run into anybody—and you pray you don’t–you come back. Then you bring C-4 explosives down the hole, and as you’re coming back out the second time, you start pulling the charges and then you blow the hole up.”

One day in Chuchow, Tony saw a friend of his get out of a helicopter and get shot. “When I went to pull him off the dike,” says Tony, “I felt like somebody had hit me real hard in the back. I took a deep breath, and blood just started to come up. It was like you’re running, running, running and somebody’s knee hits you in the back and you lose your breath. I passed out and woke up the next day in a hospital.”

The bullet went through his left side, came out the front, and tore his kidney, his spleen and the lower parts of two ribs.  He spent the next six months recuperating in Osaka, Japan, and received The Purple Heart and the Bronze Star Medal.

Then came the challenge that demanded almost as much bravery as fighting the war: coming home.

Looking at Tony today at Community Environmental Center, you can visualize him as a young man determined to get out of Southeast Asia alive. There’s a perceptible core of true grit beneath the laid-back manner and the jeans and denim jackets he likes to wear at work.

It’s harder to imagine that, long before he arrived at CEC, Tony was a corporate type of fellow. Armed with a BA in accounting, courtesy of the government that had sent him overseas to kill or be killed, he worked for 11 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He describes it as “A very straight, uppity-up firm. Strictly suit-and-tie on a daily basis. White shirts.” Then he worked for Jewish Home and Hospital, a private nursing home in Manhattan and another fairly staid organization.

Tony Scariolo in a suit, a white shirt with a button-down collar, and a tie? No way.

But there’s that vein of grit again. Consider that the young man who returned stateside was, in his own words, “having a very, very hard time with stress. I’d be walking in the street—all of a sudden, boom, I’m back there. Or I’d smell diesel fuel from a truck or boat–and boom I’m back there. My wife tells my kids the story of how one day I was in the house, and I grabbed her and jumped on top of her and was trying to protect her from a bombing, from mortar rounds that were coming in. It was in the middle of my living room, but my wife looked into my face and she said, ‘Sweetheart, you are not there.’ ”

The discipline of working in an exacting corporate environment was one way to climb out of the emotional hellhole of the war. “I don’t suffer from those flashbacks anymore,” he says, “but it took me a long time not to put myself in situations where that’s going to happen.”

A second marriage and kids also helped. “I’ve been married 24 years,” Tony reports, “and we have two great boys. Justin is in college now, trying to get out, and Jordan is in 10^th grade. He wants to be a designer of video games.”

Tony's younger son, Jordan, with Diamond

In his spare time Tony raises pit bulls, which are loving dogs in his experience. “The bad things you hear about them are because of how they’re raised,” he says. “But they’re loyal, devoted dogs. All they want to do is sit on your lap like a poodle. A dog like that, a good 65 pounds, solid muscle, she’ll kiss you to death.”

Another spare-time activity is rebuilding a 1969 Harley-Davidson Sportster. (Tony Scariolo on a motorcycle: now that we can imagine.) He bought an old bike and a how-to book, and now he’s halfway done. “I rode for a while after the military,” he says. “My boys tell me I’m gonna have long gray hair and a beard by the time I start riding again, and I said, ‘Sure I will. Why not?’

“Right now it’s in my garage in Sunset Park. Black and chrome. Front suspension. No springs, just shocks in back. It’s a heavy ride. I don’t know if Lillian, my wife, is going to ride with me. She’s kind of the opposite of me. I think that’s what made us last so long. I was kind of crazy when I came back from the military, and with her I kind of got what I needed. I owe her a lot.”

Until the long gray hair actually comes to pass, he is content to be at CEC. “Right now the finance department is very strong,” he reports. “Ken is a good boss to work for, and I like the way Mr. Cherry handles the company. We don’t have that Wall Street mentality. It’s like a breath of fresh air.”

Like thousands of other Vietnam Vets, he still wrestles with the physical after-effects of the war. “I went to a doctor, and he asked me if I had worked for an exterminator, because I had so much dioxin in my blood. I should have said, ‘Yeah, I worked for Dow Chemical.’ ”

But he has, finally, made some peace with the war he cannot forget. “One Christmas,” Tony says, “Lillian decided to make a plaque for me and get all my patches and my discharge and give them to me. And it was emotional for me. ‘Cause I hadn’t seen them for 25 years. Trying to bury them in the deepest part of the basement. Now it’s hanging on the wall.”

“War is war,” he concludes. “Finally I just said to myself, ‘You know what? I did what I had to do. Nobody should judge me for what I did.’ I tried a long time ago not to rationalize too much. Because you can’t. You put it in a suitcase, and you put it away.”

–Alexis Greene

December 26, 1964, Guyana – September 22, 2010, New York City

Very sadly, we lost Aubrey Edwards last week.

Aubrey first came to CEC on February 9, 2004. He had written on his job application, “I like to take a lot of new challenges.”

From the beginning he was a quiet, friendly and dedicated worker. He quickly became one of our best and most trusted workers.

Everyone liked Aubrey. We will miss his commitment and his friendship and his smile.

Rick Cherry, President, Community Environmental Center

“It sounds like a cliché,” says Jay Ackley during lunch at the LIC restaurant La Vuelta one torrid August day, “but I do love New York. However, sometimes we Minneapple folks get homesick for family and friends, and things like the stupendous Minnesota State Fair.”

He was born in South Minneapolis 23 years ago, to two dyed-in-the-wool Minnesotans. His mother, who works for the brokerage firm Piper Jaffray, hails from near Duluth, where the winter temperatures regularly drop well below the minus-zero range. His father, a musician and guitar teacher (Jay’s mom was one of his students in college), is from Brainerd, celebrated for its hundreds of nearby lakes. Minnesota, after all, is known as “The Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

From his father Jay developed a love for music. First there were piano lessons, until Jay was about 12, and then his dad bought him an electric guitar. When that happened, says Jay, “I gave up piano and started playing songs with friends in our basement.” Eventually he organized “a garage band” for guitar, saxophone, bass, and a drum set donated by a friend of his father’s.

Then in 2004, when Jay was 17, his parents moved to London—his mother’s firm was setting up a U.K. outpost—and Jay went with them to take his senior year of high school across the pond. He would end up staying four years.

Minneapolis has a population of 400,000; add the “Twin City” of St. Paul and you get maybe 700,000. Still, the town supports a Major League baseball team. It has the third largest theater market after New York and Chicago, and its Walker Art Center is a world-class hub for contemporary art and performance.

But then there’s London. The city’s famous underground and double-decker bus systems carry nearly 14 million people–an extraordinarily diverse populace–to hundreds of museums, theaters, sports events, and schools, not to mention pubs and restaurants that probably number in the thousands.

Moving from Minneapolis to London was like—like what?  Stepping from comparative calm into a maelstrom? Going from a still photograph to a kaleidoscope of rushing images and sensory impressions?

It was “a crazy experience,” says Jay, “because I’d spent my whole life in the same house, and then at 17 I was in a whole new country. But it was a good bonding experience for my parents and me, with the three of us not really knowing what was going to happen. It was exciting.”

Exciting and stirring and stimulating. There he was, living in the East End of London, in a Turkish neighborhood; completing senior year at an international school and meeting the love of his life; taking a dual degree in economics and political philosophy at Queen Mary, University of London (“It was pretty left-wing”); playing gigs at local pubs several times each month. Not bad for a kid from Minneapolis. Not bad at all.

Jay's as-of-yet-unnamed band.

“One of the intriguing things at Queen Mary was how much we talked about Karl Marx in every class,” Jay observes. “Not in terms of whether Communism or Socialism is a good idea, but really respecting the influence of Marxist thought on political theory and economic theory, in a way that’s almost entirely ignored in North American universities.”

“More than anything,” says Jay, at Queen Mary “I developed an outlook on the relationship between economics and society. In Europe there’s a lot more emphasis on the ways in which our society makes us what we are and on how policy has to cope with the institutions that already exist.”  “There’s a lot of good work that can be spearheaded by governments, but it’s important not to think of intervention as a cure-all for market or social problems.”

Back in the States in 2008, Jay moved to New York to propose to Liz Dolfi, whom he married the next year. His plan: take graduate courses and pursue a music career. “I was going to take classes part-time while I tried to be a singer-songwriter,” he says, smiling at the naiveté of the ambition.

Money was an issue, and the New School offered a scholarship, but only if Jay attended full-time. So he enrolled in Milano, the New School for Urban Policy, and asked his professors if they could suggest part-time employment. An organization in Long Island City called Community Environmental Center was searching for an intern, he learned. He applied, and Rick Cherry gave him the spot.

His graduate education has been two-fold. CEC spurred his awareness of environmental issues, although, says Jay, “that’s a really strong theme in Minnesota politics.” Milano delivered urban policy courses and results-oriented projects. “I didn’t do as much as I could have in terms of strict policy,” he says. “I took statistics and data management classes, because I always like excuses to work with numbers. Milano is a place for students who want to do good things but are also looking for structure and skill sets.”

His thesis was about bi-level lighting, a topic for which he credits Thelma Arceo. One half of the paper was dedicated to the practical benefits; the other half to policy, in terms of programs that make installations easy and affordable for multifamily building owners.

The topic “got a little dry” toward the end, Jay admits. But he received an award for the best departmental thesis, and at the end of October 2010 he travels to Kuwait (that’s right, Kuwait), to deliver the paper to the 10th International Conference on Enhanced Building Operations.

CEC hired Jay full-time in June 2010, shortly after he graduated from Milano. Since the start of his internship he has written ten proposals, four of which have garnered contracts for CEC, and he was especially satisfied to help bring in the stimulus money for the multifamily weatherization contracts. “I love the diversity of the place,” he says. “And I think a lot of that is a testament to how really decent Rick is as a boss and manager. Getting to work directly with the CEO,” he adds, “is a really great way of learning the business.”

It is impertinent perhaps to ask someone who has recently married, recently settled in New York, and moved into a new job about long-range aims. Indeed, Jay avers that he really has none.

“I think part of moving to London, and knowing I wasn’t going to be there long-term—having no idea what’s going to happen—forced me to take things as they go. So I just try to make good and responsible decisions month by month and see how they play out. I feel if I had a job title or a specific goal in mind, then I would either be frustrated or I would accomplish it and not be satisfied (just based on a lot of novels I’ve read). People don’t necessarily want what they set out to accomplish.

“So when people ask me what I want to do, I flippantly respond, ‘Folk star.’ ”

Flippant, maybe. But Jay is serious, if modest, about his music. Now that school is finished, in fact, music is his primary pursuit outside of CEC. “I’m not an excellent guitarist by any stretch of the imagination,” he says, “but I like to write songs that have some substance to the lyrics.” His influences are the folk songs of the 1950s and ‘60s, Pete Seeger especially, mixed with punk groups from the ’80s and ’90s. “I write a three- or four-chord progression and write three or four verses over it,” he explains. “I invite people over to our apartment every week, and people write parts for their instruments. We jam and play a song for a few months, until it sounds like something a little more put-together. Just sitting around drinking a lot of wine and having fun with our instruments.”

Jay’s core band (as yet unnamed) includes his good Minneapolis pal David on bass, a young woman on violin named Jen, and Jay’s wife, Liz, singing. They have recorded a demo and are just starting to get the tracks back. Of course a recording studio does not come cheap, so Jay opened a “Kickstarter Account” on line, for pre-ordering CDs, and has raised enough money to cover the cost.

Rich though his life feels at this moment, he hankers periodically for Minneapolis. Not surprisingly, Minnesotan émigrés to New York City have found each other. Jay describes them as “a lot of friendly and displaced people who are not used to not being able to smile at everybody on the street.” Once a month they congregate for a Happy Hour, and they have set up a Web site called “Minneapple in the Big Apple,” for which Jay has just taken over the blogging duties. In honor of Minnesota State Fair Day, August 22, Jay participated in a food crawl to Manhattan eateries serving State Fair specialties such as cheese curds, fried Twinkies, and every true Minnesotan’s favorite—that unparalleled treat–the corn dog.

Taking time to celebrate a Minnesota event perhaps encapsulates Jay personally and professionally at this time in his life. “I’ve managed to get myself married to a terrific woman and set up a nice home. My résumé looks a lot better than it did a couple of years ago. So whatever happens,” he says, “I’m just trying to make sure that, on the way to what happens, I’m enjoying my friends and enjoying my family.”

A. Greene

Leroy is an original member of CEC, and has been working here since 1994.

“I think single houses are more challenging than multistory buildings,” says Leroy Anthony of CEC. “Because we go into closets, we go behind walls. We go into attics and crawl spaces. It’s more demanding all around.”

     Leroy should know. He manages the crews that roll out of CEC every morning, to bring energy efficiency to 1-to-4 family homes and multifamily apartment buildings. And he has been insulating attics and sliding along crawl spaces since before CEC was born — back at the New York Urban Coalition.

Leroy himself was born in Port-of-Spain, the capital of the Caribbean island of Trinidad.  He grew up not far away, in the oddly named town of Tunapuna (Leroy thinks it’s an Indian word), a place known, among other things, for its extraordinary produce, for being the birthplace of the Afro-Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James, and for figuring in a Petula Clark song.

“It was a nice place to grow up in,” says Leroy, talking one busy morning in his office, while the phone rang, and people darted in and out to ask about the day’s work. “Lots of streams.  Fishing, swimming.  Breezy and always hot.  It was good.”

But although he still has family in Trinidad, he does not return there often.  He came to the United States in 1989, when he was in his late twenties and “looking for work.” He has been working ever since.

Shortly after he arrived in New York, in fact, an employment agency sent Leroy to interview at the Urban Coalition.  He knew carpentry (he’d done construction back in Trinidad) and possessed strong academic skills, and he was hired. Soon he was managing the whole weatherization operation there.

“We used to do the audit calculations by hand,” he recalls fondly.  “None of this automated stuff that we take for granted now.”  It was a job that he relished.  “I could use my hands and I could use my brains.  I don’t think anything is too hard once you have the experience.  You can’t be afraid to tackle new things and experiment, especially with this type of work.”

At the Urban Coalition Leroy met Richard Cherry, and when Cherry was starting Community Environmental Center in 1994, he asked Leroy to join as a manager.

Leroy shakes hands with a representitive of LIUNA

Much has altered within CEC’s weatherization division since those early years.  “Techniques have changed,” says Leroy, speaking quickly in his low voice, rich with the lyrical accents of Trinidad.  “Caulking.  That used to be the main sealant.  It would go along the walls, along the windows.  And we were still using fiberglass insulation back then.  But we started to use cellulose insulation more and more, and weed out the fiberglass.  Now we do much more cellulose insulation, in walls, in attics.”

“We used to be chasing the industry,” says Leroy. “Now we drive the industry to us.”

If there have been changes in the weatherization techniques CEC employs, there have also been radical shifts in the size of the crews and the kinds of work they handle.

“When I started,” Leroy remembers, “we had, oh, about four or five people.  And one truck.  Now we have 25 to 28 crew members, auditors, crew chiefs, construction managers, an operations manager.  And five trucks.”

“We used to bid out the insulation,” he adds.  “Then we found that the contractors weren’t putting in the amount of insulation they said they were putting into the walls.  So we started doing it ourselves.  We started doing cleans and tunes, because, again, we found the contractors weren’t doing them properly.  So now we ourselves scrape boilers down, get in there and vacuum and scrub.  We weren’t doing that before.”

Beginning in March 2009 CEC’s crews also started learning to install solar thermal systems, and they are in the middle of installing New York City’s largest solar thermal system right now, at Wadsworth Terrace, in the upper reaches of Manhattan.  

Leroy would like to add a roofing crew as well,  to lay shingles on a sloping roof or put down rubber, even, on a flat one.

CEC's weatherization crew poses with their first installation of solar thermal panels, in South East Brooklyn. Leroy is at the front, in the blue shirt.

“What we’re finding when we go and do the audits,” says Leroy, “is that a lot of the homes have roofing problems. But we can’t do the weatherization until the owner fixes the roof. So we go into a home where people really need help, and because the roof is leaking, we can’t begin to help them.  Lots of these people have had their homes for many years and don’t have the money to fix the roof.”

Ask what Leroy does in his “free” time, when he is at home in the Poconos with his wife, his son, Zafir, and his daughter, Raiysa, and he looks at you as though the concept of “free time” were non-existent.  It was taking him so long to commute to CEC in fact—sometimes as long as four hours one way—that he now rents an apartment in Brooklyn and remains in town four nights a week, in order to get to CEC early in the morning.

On the weekends, he says, “I do some work around the house, mow the lawn.”  And “mostly just rest.”

“This job here has taken a lot,” he admits.  “I’ve tried to go back to school, but this job is just too much.  What I really always wanted to do was civil engineering.  But I needed to work, needed the money.  So here I am.  One day I still want to fulfill that.”

Meanwhile, he is proud that his daughter, who wants to be a doctor, has won a full scholarship to Pennsylvania State University and its pre-med program.

And he still relishes the work, particularly stand-alone homes.  And, very importantly, “I like helping people,” he says.  “When we leave a home, people can feel the effects right away.  They don’t’ have to wait for a year or two. They get instant savings, instant benefits. And we are helping the environment.  I get a feeling of goodness from doing all that.”

Haiti would later estimate that more than 200,000 people died and 1.3 million were made homeless.

Roger Lamour, CEC’s assistant controller, was born and raised in Port-au-Prince. He learned about the earthquake when he reached his home in Pennsylvania that Tuesday evening and listened to a phone message from one of his brothers. “I said, ‘Oh, my lord. What are going to do?’” Roger recalls. He worried about an aunt, cousins, not to mention friends in Haiti. His wife, Carmel, was concerned about her brother, an engineer who works for the Haitian government.

“We were trying to call the first day—no answer,” says Roger. “We were trying to call all Wednesday. Finally my wife gets an answer: she lost her niece, and her niece has a son—the son died also. Both of them had come to the US last year and spent the whole summer with us. That was very, very sad.”

Carmel’s brother was luckier. Although both his legs were broken, he was transported to Santo Domingo for surgery and then to Florida for an additional operation. His wife and daughter also survived.

image from the website of chicagofree.info via Twitter

“I was crazy during those two days,” Roger remembers. “You are trying to find out about people, you don’t know where they are, if they died, and there is no way of communicating. I could not work.”

That is an extraordinary admission for Roger Lamour, who is usually observed working quietly and steadily in CEC’s fiscal office, often long after the business day has ended.

Steadiness and commitment have marked most of Roger’s career, beginning in 1982, when he moved from Haiti to the US.

Like so many Haitians, Roger’s family left the country during the reigns of the Duvalier dictators, father and son (“Papa Doc,” as he was called, died in 1971; “Baby Doc” was overthrown in 1986.) “Haiti with Duvalier was impossible,” says Roger. “If you had knowledge, you could not stay in Haiti. You had to leave.”

In the US he held a full-time job and also finished a B.B.A. degree at Baruch College. After that he worked in NYU Medical Center’s finance department and then for a photography agency. When the agency folded, Roger found a position at CEC.

It was April 1995, and CEC was in the early stages of its existence. “When I first started,” Roger recalls, “I did accounts, payroll—everything. Then the company grew, we hired more employees, and I began to do other things, too.

“I’ve seen so many changes at CEC. In terms of the fiscal department: more employees. And we need them, because we have so many programs. The WAP program, the ARRA program, and more fee-for-service jobs. We have an engineering department. When I started, we had no engineering division. We had 24 employees when I began. Now it’s like 80.”

His peak experience at CEC is an ongoing experience. “Being able to learn more of everything and learn from other people,” is how Roger describes it. “I love working for CEC. It’s my second home. Not everyone can say that about a company. I’m always happy. Anyone need something, I try to get it.”

When he is at his first home, in the Poconos, he relaxes and listens to music. He jogs and he loves to cook the vegetarian soups that are a particular favorite of his.

He has not tried to visit Haiti, which he last saw four years ago, when he went back for the funeral of an uncle. But he sends money on a monthly basis to people who are in desperate need.

“It’s quite a mess there,” he says. “People are sleeping outside, not in their houses.” Despite the funds that have poured in from all over the world, Roger reports, “nothing has been done,” largely because of an ineffective government. Charitable organizations that Roger trusts, such as the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, are now setting conditions for transmitting the monies they collect.

“Haiti is a very beautiful place,” says Roger. “But politically, it’s impossible.”

–A. Greene

If you are interested in sending a contribution to the victims of the Haiti earthquake, Roger recommends the following organizations.

Clinton Haiti Bush Fund

Yélehaiti – Rapper Wyclef Jean’s foundation

UNICEF

A poster about Sylvia Earle hangs on the bulletin board over Gwen McLaughlin’s desk at CEC. Earle, who was born in New Jersey in 1935, is one of the foremost oceanographers in the world. At the age of 75, she still descends to the bottom of the ocean, to study the flora and fauna that survive at the water’s darkest level. Fellow scientists call Earle “Her Deepness.”

“She’s an explorer,” says Gwen, with quiet admiration. “She goes down in submarines – sometimes in one-person submarines—to examine places most people would never dream of going. She’s led more than 50 expeditions worldwide and holds the record for the deepest untethered solo dive.”

Anyone would admire Earle. But that Gwen has particularly high regard for this scientist, whom she has met only once in passing, says as much about Gwen and her aspirations as it does about Earle’s achievements.

Born and raised in Middletown, New York, a city of malls about 80 miles west of Manhattan, Gwen says that “For as long as I can remember, environmental science and policy have been interests of mine.”

“My parents taught me that valuing the environment should be a way of life,” says Gwen. “You don’t throw anything on the ground; you take care of what’s around you. I was always taught to learn about animals and nature.”

Sylvia Earle

Despite its malls and a strip of fast-food eateries, Middletown is located amid natural beauty, near the Wallkill River and at the foothills of the Shawangunk Mountains. Gwen’s family lived across from a lake, and she and her sister and brother used to go out and feed the ducks, look at the trees and “slip around in the mud.”

Her interest in the environment became a focus. “My high-school Earth Science teacher, Mr. Allen, made me understand that earth science was something I could do,” Gwen recalls. “Before him, science was cells and atoms, and I was told that, if I learned enough about the small stuff, I could learn about plants eventually. But I was always interested in plants first and wanted to learn about cells later. My teacher made science accessible and fun, and I could apply it to every-day life.”

Indeed, at Fairfield University in Connecticut, she followed an independently designed major in environmental science and policy. But she traveled side roads through minors in English lit, studio art and marine science. “I was all over the place,” smiles Gwen.

That wide-ranging education appealed to her, and she recommends it. “Some people feel they just have to get through school and get out into the real world,” she says. “But the courses you take develop your interests. That’s really how I got into green building. I started out with an interest in water resources, which grew into an interest in understanding how we use natural resources and how we can use them in the best way.”

The Duke Marine Lab

After college Gwen pursued a Masters of Environmental Management at the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, an arm of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. Her concentration was Coastal Environmental Management, a specialization that led to her thesis – Sustainable Architecture on the North Carolina Coast – and to an idyllic summer internship with the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

Two days a week she would drive to a pier, take a small ferryboat to one of the islands of the Cape Lookout National Seashore and lead educational tours that explored the island’s rich flora and fauna. “I would take groups of people from the marsh side of the island – really a sandy tidal flat — through the island itself and then over to the beach. People would walk into the water with me, and I would pick up shells and talk about the animals that once lived in them.”

She would have been happy to stay in North Carolina. She calls Beaufort, on the southern Outer Banks, “my favorite place in the world,” what with its many varieties of animals and plants and “amazing people.”

But she missed friends and family, and when her older sister was having a baby in 2008, Gwen returned to the New York area.

She began at CEC that same year, attracted, she says,  “because CEC works with people who really need green building. They need lower utility bills and warmer housing. I really liked that about CEC.”

Initially Gwen’s work centered on creating green guides, specifically for UJA (United Jewish Appeal-Federation) and IAC (InterAgency Council of Mental Retardation & Developmental Disabilities Agencies, Inc.). “These are green measures that you can make part of your every-day practice,” says Gwen, “at an office, school or hospital. Saving resources that you’re using within the building, such as office supplies. Saving energy in any place you can, from turning off the lights to unplugging an empty fridge.” UJA posts the green guide on their Web site; IAC distributes theirs electronically.

Now Gwen has branched out. She manages at least 5 LEED projects, including BRG River House, a Parks Department site in the Bronx that has a green wall, among other features, and is aiming for LEED Platinum.

She works on projects that apply for Enterprise Green Communities certification. A less intensive rating system than LEED, Green Communities  is a national organization that provides developers of affordable housing with criteria for creating healthy and energy-efficient homes.

And she teaches low-income homeowners who receive weatherization services how to lower their energy use long after CEC’s crews have gone.

Still, her peak experience at CEC occurred shortly after she came on board, when she visited a group home on Staten Island, to prepare for writing IAC’s green guide.

“As I was going through the building looking for ideas for the guide” says Gwen, “people started to join me and ask questions. At the end, when we sat down to talk they all took out pens and paper and started asking questions ‘Okay, what kind of light bulbs do we need? Where should we move that printer?’ They didn’t want to wait for the guides to come out; they wanted to do what they could as soon as they could. It was so good to see that I was not just writing these guides and sending them forth. People were actually going to use and learn from them.”

Would she like to move back to the south? “I would love to, someday…”

Would she like to get a doctorate and teach? “I would, someday…”

For an explorer like Gwen, there are so many options.

In the meantime, she works at CEC and lives on Roosevelt Island – at the northern end, where there are fields and trees and even a community garden.

“I miss a lot of things about the south,” she says, “but one thing I really missed when I was living there was going to concerts.” Since moving back North, she has determinedly taken in a great deal of live music. “I’ve crossed a lot of concerts off my life list,” she says with pleasure. “I’ve seen Bruce Springsteen four times in the last two years. Twice at Giants Stadium.”

And whenever she “feels sluggish” or needs a jolt of energy, she looks at the poster of Sylvia Earle. “And I think about all the things that she’s done,” Gwen says quietly, “and all the things that I have yet to accomplish.”