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Today's Featured Biography
Rob DeRocker
You asked me to fill you in on the last 30 years. Hopefully, you won’t regret that request, but in any case, here goes:
· After a year at Oswego State – the college, not the penitentiary -- I finished my undergraduate schooling at NYU. Truth be told, NYU was simply the most legitimate excuse I could come up with for pursuing my real desire, which was to move to New York City. I had become a Gothamphile as far back as 10th grade, when social studies teachers Zane Petersen and later Tony Corsini would lead groups to the city for a Broadway show, museum visits, etc. Arguably ,the late 1970’s were the absolutely worst time to move to New York. The fiscal crisis, middle class flight, rampant crime and filthy streets had made New York a place that people were desperate to escape, not move to. But what does a 19 year old know? I just knew that it was the most captivating city on the planet, and more than anything else I wanted to be one of its captives. (I still feel that way, and now so does much of the rest of the world. When I was a student at NYU it was largely a commuter school, made up primarily of kids from the metropolitan area. Last year NYU became the most applied to school in the country. That’s all about the resurgence of New York City. It’s an incredibly different place from even 10 let alone 30 years ago).
· I finished NYU with a degree in political science. Typically, such a diploma serves as the precursor for one of two things: 1) Law school; 2) Sweeping streets. Having neither the interest nor the stomach for law school, I came closer to the latter, and actually drove a cab in the city before landing a job as a reporter for a community newspaper in Brooklyn. I did that for a couple of years before becoming the founding executive director of the New York City chapter of Habitat for Humanity. That was before Jimmy Carter had become involved. But in 1984 I had the opportunity to give him a tour of the abandoned building we were attempting to renovate on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. As he was leaving the neighborhood – much to the relief of the secret service – he told me to let Habitat’s executive director know if there was any way he could be of help. “Well, Mr. President, you might consider sending a group of volunteer carpenters from your church.” “We’ll think about it,” he said, and a day later he called to say that he would like to be among those volunteers. The Jimmy Carter work party several months later generated worldwide publicity for Habitat and put the program on the map. It was also the first and almost certainly the last time my picture would appear in People Magazine…
· The work with Habitat was quite a rush for a 25-year-old. In addition to the chance to get to know a former leader of the free world, it took me to developing countries that included Peru, Haiti and India. At the time I was living in pretty squalid conditions myself, in a bathtub-in-the-kitchen tenement in the East Village frequented by various and uninvited members of the animal kingdom. (One trip to Haiti, though, straightened out any leanings toward self pity). But as we finally completed our first project in New York, it became clear to our board that while I had decent skills as a communicator, I was less than a sterling administrator. In short, it was time for me to go.
· This led me to a new career in public relations, which is essentially the work I do now. In 1990, after a brief stint as a speechwriter in the administration of Mayor Ed Koch, I joined DCI, a marketing firm that specializes in helping communities market themselves for tourism and business investment. Our clients range from the Island of Puerto Rico to the country of New Zealand, and a lot of places in between. The firm’s website is www.aboutdci.com and if you’re really interested in learning more about it, you can Google DCI or, for that matter, yours truly. One of the blessings of the work is that it allows me to work in New York but also to frequently get out of it, often to some pretty neat places.
· You asked about children. We have none, but I do have a lovely wife. Her name is Melinda. She’s a singer and an actress from Mississippi who moved to New York in 1989 to pursue a career in musical theater. She ended up with a husband instead. We met at the West Side church I was attending at the time. I was quickly smitten, and we were married 10 months later. That very brief courtship made for an interesting first year to say the least. “Exorcism” might be a better term for it. By that time we were both in our 30’s and all too comfortable in our ways. But God got us through a tumultuous first year, and on Nov. 4 we will have been married for 18 years. No kids, but until last October we had a 10-year-old yellow Labrador named Lily. She died shortly after being diagnosed with a particularly vicious form of cancer. It may come as a surprise that we’re still grieving the loss.
· And speaking of exorcisms, getting me to move out of New York City felt like one, but we did exactly that in 2003. We sold the co-op apartment in Brooklyn we had bought in 1994 and began looking for a house, by then a fervent desire of Melinda’s. Grinding my teeth, I told her she could look outside of New York City, as long as it was within easy commuting distance (by train) of Manhattan. Over the course of six months she looked at some 80 houses, mostly in Westchester County. She never found one she either wanted or we could afford, so we ended up renting one in Tarrytown, a 35-minute train ride from Grand Central Terminal.
· And then with some of the windfall from the sale of the apartment in Brooklyn, we did the next logical thing: We bought my grandfather’s condo in St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Well, it was logical for me, anyway, having visited him there over many years since I was 18. Melinda had quite a different perspective. At first it was ludicrous, even infuriating to her that our fruitless search for a primary home in New York would be followed by the purchase of a secondary one in the Caribbean. Domestic relations got even worse when she saw the awful condition of the place; in the last 10 years my grandfather had really allowed it to deteriorate. For an island where the temperature never goes below 70 degrees, there was suddenly a lot of frost in the air. But thanks to the intervention of a mutual friend named Dianna Huber, who visited us in St. Croix that first year and essentially served as marriage counselor, we got through the troubled times and Melinda eventually warmed to the task of renovating it. Everyone says she did a fabulous job. As you’ll see on the website linked below, we ended up naming the place after Dianna, who returned to New York to learn that the experimental chemotherapy she had been taking to combat her multiple sclerosis had given her leukemia. She nearly died but thankfully she got through the treatment and now, three years later, she’s cancer free.
· At most, we spend three weeks out of the year in St. Croix and rent it out, mostly to friends, as much as we can the rest of the year. Let me know if you’d ever be interested in going there, and meantime, feel free to pass along the website link to any friends and family you know who might be interested: www.saintcroixcondo.com. It has two bedrooms and can very comfortably accommodate 4-6 people.
· Meantime, two years ago we were blessed with the opportunity to buy the house Melinda wanted. It’s in Tarrytown, and sits next to a largely undeveloped plot of land with a good view of the Hudson (especially after a tornado last year ripped out several nearby trees). It’s also known as the “ice house” because the basement in the oldest part of the house, which was built in 1847, was used to store ice for nearby mansions, now long since torn down. I’ll spare you the story of how we ended up with the house, which had been on the market for the better part of a year. Suffice it to say that it was a “God thing” as some of our friends like to say.
· Which is a good place to end this little biography (assuming you’ve even gotten this far). In my position at DCI I interview a lot of prospective employees. I always ask them to tell me about a dream fulfilled and a dream deferred. A few of them have had the temerity to ask me to identify mine. The dream deferred: Olympic swimmer. (It’s not looking good). Dream fulfilled: The life God has given me, none of it deserved, rarely fully appreciated but all in all quite wonderful.
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