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Working from the Heartland |
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Peggy Langley
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"It's important to demonstrate that you love your work. If you're not having fun and enjoying your work, that's a sad part of life. You really have to love what you do in order to do it right and feel fulfilled." |
Right now Peggy Langley has a lot on her mind. The month of February is drawing to a close after two long years of intensive fundraising for a new pavilion at Waterfront Park, alongside the Pasquotank River. This isn't just an ordinary gathering place for the locals. Its centerpiece is the dome that was recently removed from the old Albemarle Hospital. A lot of people have been born under that dome. And many of their relatives have died there as well. When the hospital was converted to an apartment house, that dome had to be saved.
The solution: make the dome the centerpiece of a park that would provide all the residents of Elizabeth City access to the river's many pleasures. It was a project for the community and by the community. And Peggy's job was to figure out how to raise the necessary $60,000 to turn the dome into a pavilion. She raised $40,000 of that by hitting the bricks...and selling personalized bricks for $50 each. Markers go for $500 and $1,000 each. (One of those $1,000 jobs will serve as a couple's tombstone, with their ashes thrown into the river.) She had found a way to make it affordable for just about everyone in the community to belong to the pavilion. And in three months, the pavilion will be finished.
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"Once we lay down all these beautiful bricks, I just know those people who didn't buy one are going to wish they had been a part of it," she says. Peggy alone bought at least three bricks, one for herself and one for each of her children. That's extremely important to her, because she knows it will be permanent reminder to her children where they came from.
"I never had the opportunity to be born and raised in the same community," she says. "That is a good background for my kids to have. I know they'll probably want to both leave Elizabeth City when they grow up. It's so small and there aren't that many jobs available.
"But I also hope they'll want to come back. So it's important for me to have their names on those bricks. They can always come back, see their names, and say, 'this is where I'm from, this is where I grew up, this is my heritage.'"
Growing up in the Air Force, Peggy grew up seeing a lot of the country and parts of Europe. So that sense of belonging is perhaps more important to her than to most people who take it for granted. She found that belonging over the years
After graduating from high school, young love made her stay. She took a college course here and there, but spent her professional hours selling furniture for a downtown store and raising her children, now as a single mother. It was the retail experience that helped her learn selling skills. It was being downtown that introduced her to people she would know all her life. But it was the volunteer work that trained her for her future.
"I've always been very active in the Junior Women's Club until they aged me out at 40" she says ruefully. "I'm now a member of the Women's Club. The oldest is 92. The youngest is me."
But as an active member of the Junior Women's Club, year after year she developed her skills raising money and coordinating volunteers for various charitable events. And those were the skills that got her the job at the Chamber of Commerce, not that leaving the furniture store after 13 years was easy.
"It killed me to have to tell the Mann family that I was quitting," she recalls. "But they were so understanding. They knew I was moving on to better myself and provide for my children.In fact, the week after I went to the Chamber, it was my birthday. And they walked over to my office with a brand new sweater as a present."
As things happen, she did well for two years and caught the attention of the 25-member board of directors for Elizabeth City Downtown, Inc. They already knew her in so many different other volunteer organizations she was part of. And they knew she was the perfect choice to sell the downtown area as a desirable place to set up business. She sells the Big Picture, and people are buying it. Her job, she says, is to walk the streets.
"If I'm not in the office, I'm out in the streets talking with a merchant, sharing ideas with people I meet, or picking up trash," she says. "In the summertime I'm planting flowers. In the wintertime, I'm putting up Christmas decorations."
And in between time, she's still busy with her volunteer activities. Within the next month, this is on her schedule: coordinating concession sales at the Encore Theater (the little theater upstairs from Bracy Books); selling bricks at the Elizabeth City Business Expo; coordinating the Bartender's Ball, in which all proceeds go to Crimeline, for which she is treasurer; and planning the St. Patrick's Day Parade which will march down Main Street. At Mariner's Wharf, they will give out prizes for best adult, best child and best pet.
"The downtown is like your heart," she says. "It's got to be healthy and pumping in order for everything to function and work properly. My job is to keep things pumping."
Copyright 2005 by Martha Finney. All rights reserved.