CAPTION: Paul Dougherty and Valerie Lohse are seen outside Dougherty’s condo that he was displaced from due to flooding.

One month after the Patriot-Bridge reported on damages that Essex Street residents sustained to their homes following the severe flooding of Aug. 10, they still have found little relief.
Paul Doherty was displaced from his basement condo after the incident and was eventually forced to relocate to the Marriott Tudor Wharf, where he stayed for 10 days at a cost of $1,300 and 167,000 hotel points. In early September, he was able to return to his building to rent another unit, which was being painted, for $200 a week.
Dougherty was referred to the Boston Water & Sewer Commission immediately following the incident but eventually contacted, RestorPro, a Danvers based emergency restoration company, when the city agency could offer no immediate remedy. The company recently completed work on Dougherty’s unit to the tune of $12,780, he said.
As a result of the flood, his home-based business, Boylston Capital Management, also suffered when he was forced to work from his car and a local Kinko’s.
“I’m still displaced,” Dougherty said. “My office is displaced, and my home is displaced. All my belongings are in storage. I’m bleeding money right now, and the clock is ticking”
Dougherty filed a claim with BWSC on Aug. 17, and while the agency sent an appraiser to his home the following week, he wasn’t optimistic he would see a settlement anytime soon. He sent a letter to his elected officials soon afterwards and has only received responses from Jack Kelly, Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s Charlestown liaison, and State Rep. Gene O’Flaherty’s office to date.
On Oct. 7, Dougherty received a letter from BWSC General Counsel James J. Steinkruass offering an $8,772 settlement — an amount that is equal to 13.8 percent of his initial claim. (Dougherty said he now estimates the flood has cost him $66,000 “and counting”).
“Obviously, I want to reimbursed, but the issue needs to be addressed, so it doesn’t happen again,” Dougherty said.
And Dougherty isn’t the only one to receive a settlement offer from BWSC. His neighbor on Essex Street, Valerie Lohse, received a letter from Steinkruass also dated Oct. 7 offering a $4,042 settlement, which she said is equivalent to 26 percent of her claim.
Both Doughherty and Lohse view the settlement offers as an admission of fault on the part of BWSC and are currently exploring legal action.
“Out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re going to send us a check,” Lohse said. “I don’t think so.”
BWSC spokesman Thomas Bagley said he couldn’t comment on Dougherty and Lohse’s cases because both have active claims.
Dougherty asks any neighbors impacted by the Aug. 10 flooding to contact him at 617-519-8156 or via e-mail at pauldbcm@msn.com.

CAPTION: Steve Tower and Bob Cutler of the Charlestown Sports Collaborative.

The Charlestown Sports Collaborative launched its hotline last week, providing access to up-to-date game and practice schedules and registration information for neighborhood youth leagues.
“It’s an easy way for organizations to effectively communicate with players, fans and interested participants,” said Steve Tower, Sports Collaborative coordinator and FItz urban youth sports director for the MGH Charlestown HealthCare Center. “Residents of Charlestown can call this number to learn how they can get their kids involved in sports and how they can get involved as volunteers.”
The hotline provides information for programs including Charlestown Lacrosse, Charlestown Youth Football & Cheerleading, Charlestown Little League, CYO Softball, Charlestown Youth Hockey Association, Charlestown Youth Soccer Association, Charlestown Gym Hockey and Charlestown Community Center programs, as well as for special events in the community. According to Sports Collaborative member and Charlestown Lacrosse Executive Director Bob Cutler, it will be updated daily for each sport on practice and game days and periodically during the programs’ off-seasons. City Councilor Sal LaMattina agreed to record the main message on the hotline.
Cutler hopes other communities will look to the example set by the Sports Collaborative and launch their own hotlines.
“It’s a model for neighborhoods and towns all over the country by which programs can coordinate playing times for their respective sports,” Cutler said.
Meanwhile, Tower believes that the hotline will lead to increased involvement for the participating programs and help every child in the neighborhood find an appropriate sport.
“We want every parent to know about what’s available for their child and to make it easy for them to access this information,” he said. “The simpler we can make it the more participation we’ll have.”
Tower added, “We want every kid in every area of Charlestown to know about it. The mission is ‘no child left behind.’”
To reach the Charlestown Sports Collaborative hotline, call 617-499-9551.

CAPTION: The Bunker Hill Mall.

With the closing of Mattress Discounters at the beginning of the month, the Bunker Hill Mall now has another empty storefront.
According to Issie Shait, senior vice president of property management for New England Development, which owns the mall, the store closed after the Maryland-based mattress company filed for bankruptcy last month. Mattress Discounters, which reportedly is closing all 50 of its stores in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, was a tenant at the mall for the past three years.
In addition to the latest closing, the storefront occupied by Radio Shack since the mall opened in 1978 has sat vacant since March of 2006. Earlier this month, however, Plaster Fun Time, a Boston-based company that allows children to paint plaster pieces, opened its newest store at the mall in the space that Curves fitness center vacated in spring 2006.
Lynne Levesque, co-chair of the Charlestown Business Climate Committee commented, "The closing of the mattress store leave another hole at the mall.
Our hope is that New England Development will reevaluate their marketing and
leasing strategies and take last year's Community Survey into consideration
as they look for new tenants." (The Business Climate distributed its Community Survey to residents in November 2007 to gauge what types of businesses they wanted to see in the neighborhood).
CBCC co-chair Mark Rosenshein added, "Charlestown residents overwhelmingly indicated in the survey that they are would like more retail shopping and dining opportunities in our neighborhood and prefer to see unique and affordable retailers. We would hope New England Development will listen to those results."
Meanwhile, Shait said New England Developers is actively seeking new tenants to fill the vacancies despite the recent economic downturn.
“We’re showing the space…but the economic conditions today make it extremely difficult to consummate any leasing deals,” Shait said. “And with the credit crunch the way it is today, it’s very difficult [for prospective tenants] to build out space.”

CAPTION: Rev. Sue Fisher Seeger, the deacon at St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Unlike most who enter the clergy, Rev. Sue Fisher Seeger didn’t discover her calling until shortly after her 60th birthday when she said she had an experience that “knocked [her] socks off” and opened her to a new way of being in the world.
On Maundy (Holy) Thursday in 2000, Fisher Seeger, who now serves as deacon at St. John’s Episcopal Church, was resting at her home in Cambridge when a sense of “knowing” washed over her. She was immediately struck that she was being called to something new. In particular, the call focused on the diaconate, the Holy Order of Deacons, similar to but still distinct from the priesthood.. Since the order had been reinstated in the Episcopal diocese of Massachusetts only a few years before, she knew virtually nothing about it. For her it seemed an impossible goal, given her age and a physical disability.
“What do I do with this powerful sense that I can barely contain?” she asked. After some hesitation, Fisher Seeger shared the experience with the associate rector of Christ Church Cambridge, her parish at the time, who helped her sort out her feelings and make the process seem feasible.
After a long process of applications, discernment and interviews, Fisher Seeger, entered the diaconal training program conducted at St. Ann’s Episcopal Convent in Arlington. Here, the postulants and candidates are trained for ordination on weekends for three years; the program replicates seminary study in many regards. Two internships, one in a parish and one in the community, were also required. She now admits this was a path she never imagined her life would take. ”But I had to attempt it if I wanted to breathe fully again,” she added.
A native of Natick, Fisher Seeger earned a bachelor’s degree in American Literature from Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. She then worked in retail management in Hartford, Conn., for several years before moving back to her native Massachusetts. She moved into a new field when she took a job with the Boston-based educational publishing house Ginn and Co. More interested in being a professional editor than climbing the corporate ladder, she spent many years with the company and rose the ranks from assistant editor to program manager in the area of English/Language Arts.
In the first five or six years after she started at Ginn, the company was taken over by Xerox Corporation. Many years later, it merged into another big corporation. By the mid-‘80s, Fisher Seeger had worked for Ginn and Co. for more than 20 years and had enjoyed a great variety of assignments. But she knew it was no longer a good fit for her, leading her to ponder a career change.
“I had a sense of what I wanted to do…which was to work with people not products,” she recalled. “I was also interested in women’s issues, particularly in the workplace.”
At a time when downsizing was commonplace because of mergers and acquisitions, Fisher Seeger wanted to help displaced employees, not just to find work but also to find themselves apart from the work culture. She went on to earn a master’s degree in counseling and consulting psychology from Harvard in 1987.
About this time she began volunteering for Operation ABLE (Ability Based on Long-term Experience), a Boston non-profit that serves employees ages 45 and older who have lost their jobs. She also volunteered for such agencies as Educators for Social Responsibility and the United Way. Having worked 9-to-5 jobs her entire adult life, she enjoyed the rewards of volunteerism, something that she had limited time to do before then.
Around the same time, Fisher Seeger, began volunteering for the Episcopal Diocese at Massachusetts, which was preparing for the consecration of the first female bishop in the Anglican Communion, the Rev. Barbara C. Harris.
“It was the perfect thing for me to get involved with,” she said. “It was an historic time, and it meshed with my emerging interest in the church.”
Although she had been raised an Episcopalian, she had been away from the church for many years. On the First Sunday in Advent in 1988, Fisher Seeger started attending services at Christ Church in Cambridge. “I very much needed a faith community, and I felt very welcomed there. I knew I was being opened up to and called back to the church,” she recalled.
In June of 1989, Fisher Seeger became violently ill. Doctors, who were initially unable to make a diagnosis, likened her symptoms to those of a stroke. Her condition in fact was a severe inner-ear balance disorder that left her permanently deaf on one side and chronically vertiginous.
Fisher Seeger began a grueling regimen of physical therapy that initially included learning to stand and walk again.
“I’ve had it for 19 and a half years and continue to work on my balance,” she said. “I’m not allowed to drive because of permanent vertigo.”
Since the condition meant that she could not handle a full workweek again, Fisher Seeger began answering the phones in the church office and got involved with other volunteer work at Christ Church.
“Having had parents who were active in the church made this newfound work come naturally to me,” Fisher Seeger said. “It just seemed like coming home.”
Her various assignments included working with others on discernment, or helping them to explore a possible call to ordination. Fisher Seeger described it as “listening for the voice of God regarding vocation, lay or ordained.” She continued her discernment work with others throughout the ‘90s but never thought of being ordained herself – until that fateful Maundy Thursday in 2000.
In May of 2005, while in the ordination process, Fisher Seeger joined the Pastoral Care office at Spaulding Rehabilitation Center in Boston; she continues to serve there two days a week. She immediately found it easy to identify with the patients since she had suffered from a debilitating physical condition herself.
“Because I’ve been through it, I know the process of having to grieve what you’ve lost,” Fisher Seeger said. “But there’s so much that can open up for you once you accept being a new way in the world. Look how my life changed.”
After Fisher Seeger was ordained in June of 2006, she joined the clergy of the Christ Church as deacon.
As a deacon, Fisher Seeger assumes the role of “servant” to God and the church and thus is not paid for her work.
‘I couldn’t take money for my ministry,” she said. “I do it out of profound love and gratitude for everything I’ve been given in my life.”
Fisher Seeger finished her term as deacon with Christ Church in the summer of 2007 and began her search for a new parish. Her options were somewhat limited by the fact that she was reliant on the T for transportation. After visiting 11 parishes in the Greater Boston area, she visited St. John’s and felt immediately at home, especially with its rector, Rev. Gareth Evans. As the deacon, she said she has a distinct role in the liturgy, in particular proclaiming the Gospel and dismissing the congregation to go out into the world to love and serve the Lord.
Fisher Seeger now wants to help St. John’s to continue to be the warm and hospitable place it’s been for generations in the Charlestown community.
“I hope that we can make the parish a welcoming place for people looking for a faith community, whatever their past affiliations may be,” she said. “Especially now that the world is even more uncertain and disjointed, we’re there as a haven for people who are lonely or perhaps need someplace safe. We welcome people as they are, wherever they are on their faith journeys.”