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Leaving a Legacy in NB; Gery Moves on to Darien

When Pamela Gery leaves this week after 15 years as both Parks & Recreation and Senior Center director, North Branford’s loss will be Darien’s gain—but North Branford certainly gained a lot during Pamela’s tenure.

From establishing the town’s annual Potato & Corn Festival (PoCo) to dreaming up revenue-generating ideas like the Fitness Center, to guiding the once-tiny department through two moves that eventually created today’s Stanley T. Williams (STW) Community Center, Pamela has been a driving force and has certainly left a legacy for the town.

Pamela arrived here with four years’ experience heading up Westbrook’s Parks & Recreation Department. She was only the second person to be hired for the North Branford role, following a director who retired after serving 35 years. At the time, North Branford Hall on Foxon Road was the one facility for senior and Parks & Recreation programming.

“The focus was more on seniors than it was on Parks & Rec, and I think the town was ready for some change and they focused on hiring someone to expand that,” says Pamela. “Right away, we made some changes to summer camps, making them accessible to working parents, which really expanded that whole program. It was a really visible, easy thing to change. But my job was about creating things for everybody. So we looked at what else we could do for seniors and how could we bring in active adults? We introduced numerous bus trips to get people traveling.”

What else did North Branford need? Public events, says Pamela.

“There were no public events, therefore here came Touch-a-Truck and here came the Potato & Corn Festival. So that was born right away, right after I walked into the door and said, ‘OK, what does this town need?’”

Luckily, North Branford is a roll-up-your-sleeves kind of town, and Pamela’s staff has always been willing to work hard to make things happen.

“My staff bought into having to work harder to have more,” she says.

Pamela got the town to buy into letting her department establish a revenue-generating arm. Her vision, which has now come to pass, is that the department would not only be able to one day fund $100,000 events like PoCo, but that it could also begin supporting expenses such as the majority cost of a $98,000 phased-in playscape and pavilion to be constructed outside STW Community Center this summer; the account did so just this year.

“When I started out, we had a very small staff and a small budget,” says Pamela. “Now, the things we do don’t come out of tax money; it comes out of our own self-supported funds. That’s why a big component of the new playground is coming out of self-supporting funds. We had built the money up, and the reason we were sitting on it was because we were filtering a $100,000 event through that, so God forbid, if we had a rainy day, we didn’t have to go back to the town and say, ‘We lost that $20,000.’ Now, [PoCo’s] completely self-supported on its own, and also recreation’s self-supporting.”

Pamela spent the first five years working to convince the Town Council that a self-supporting account for her department would allow for a continuum of growth and improvements. In 2002, Pamela achieved quite a milestone, when the Town Council voted to provide $75,000 to help get the department’s revenue-generating Fitness Center off the ground.

“We spent $55,000 on equipment, and a lot of the rest of the work was us painting and convincing people the project was good enough. That’s how we raised another $30,000—with ideas like selling naming rights to rooms. It was very heartwarming,” says Pamela.

The Fitness Center was established as part of the town’s first stand-alone recreation building in the former Town Hall at 1599 Foxon Road. The idea for the move had been proposed before she arrived here, but “it got kiboshed because of the money,” says Pamela. “So my thought was, ‘How do I change the thinking of those who are handling budgeting? I’ll put a fitness room in here, and we’ll make money to offset expenses.’ Some people couldn’t understand—why would we need a gym? But I knew, when it got that green light, that they were looking for change. I said, ‘I think people will join at this price,’ and I put in a best-guess estimate, and the prices have never changed. We still have the original prices proposed in 2002. I’m very grateful that Town Council at the time was looking for change.”

When the department was green-lighted to move into 1599 Foxon Road in 2003, Pamela and her staff spent weekends and other extra hours helping to remodel and redesign the building inside.

“Again, if you had a staff that said, ‘This isn’t in my job description,’ we wouldn’t have gotten very far,” Pamela says.

Pamela has been with many of the same staff members since she arrived and has encouraged them in many ways. Her interim replacement, Recreation Supervisor Lauren Munro, was a Senior Center employee in whom Pamela saw much potential.

“We’ve worked together since the beginning,” says Pamela. “She was a driver for the Senior Center and an exercise instructor for seniors when I came in. I really encouraged her when they were looking to hire a recreation supervisor.”

Pamela saw the same potential in another longtime staff member, Senior Center Program Coordinator Judy Barron.

“I hired Judy as an intern and encouraged her to apply [for coordinator] as we separated buildings” on Foxon Road, says Pamela.

Pamela was delighted to recently re-hire staffer Roseann Krajewski in a new role as PoCo festival coordinator. Krajewski had worked for the department in Pamela’s early years and came back to work here again.

“Roseann moved away, but she came back because her heart was back here,” says Pamela.

Other dedicated staff members who’ve worked with Pamela through the years include Martha Meizies and Dennis Pannone.

“Everyone I work with on the staff, they’re my friends. When you have a good working relationship with people, you all grow together,” says Pamela. “I’ve made a lot of friends—whatever they need from me, I’m here.”

Krajewski has already taken Pamela up on that offer. Even though Pamela will begin her new role as Parks & Recreation director with the Town of Darien on Wednesday, June 8, she will be back in North Branford in August to volunteer at PoCo.

“Without a doubt, I will be there,” says Pamela. “It will be different this year—I was always the last one standing every night at 2 a.m., doing the money drop, and waking up and getting here the next day, for four straight days. I want to make sure that it’s always successful, especially in this transition.”

Even Pamela’s two children, who were 3 months and 18 months old when she joined the town staff, will be helping out at PoCo.

“It’s been a part of their lives—they’ve grown up with it,” says Pamela of Gleeson, 16, and Chance, 15. “It’s funny, looking back on my arrival here...I got this job when I had just had my son, and I had to go to a Town Council meeting to be introduced, and my husband had to work. So I showed up with both babies. Looking back at the faces that were in front of me as I stood there with two babies, some of them must have been thinking, ‘This is our new Park & Rec director?’ My spin on life is, that was a positive—I’m standing here with two babies in my hands; I’m not calling and saying, ‘I can’t come in!’ And I did all of this with two kids—I managed it, and it’s special to me.”

In fact, when Pamela exits North Branford, she leaves behind 1,300 hours of accumulated sick days never used.

“To me, that just speaks to a hard-work ethic—you don’t call in sick,” says Pamela. “It’s about being a player. In this office, everybody has their niche, and I was part of everybody’s niche and I was doing my stuff. So it’s not only about being the director, it’s about been part worker-bee.”

In Darien, Pamela will be Parks & Recreation director for a town that’s looking for a producer and visionary. Among her first tasks will be helping to dream up the best use for a newly-purchased parcel of land next to a town beach. The career move opportunity is an upward step for Pamela, a Guilford resident.

“It has to do with career growth,” she says. “If it was a lateral move, I would never have taken it, because that would mean I wasn’t happy in North Branford. I’ve loved it here. I built my journey. It’s almost surreal when I look back and say, ‘Wow, we built this.’ We all laugh at the stories that we have and the things we’ve gone through over the years. It’s a circus here sometimes, so you have to be able to laugh. It’s all about the journey, and being happy and believing that you can.”