 Welcome to another show of Celebrate Life. My name is Gary D. Carlos, and I'm your host. For new viewers, the inspiration for this show was a combination of having written my memoir over the past year for my daughters and being a advert reader of obituaries over the years, and always leaving them with a sense of, gosh, I wish I had a chance to meet this person while they were alive. So I thought, why don't we have a television show that actually allows you to meet people while they're very much vibrant and alive, and thus celebrate life was born. If you're interested in becoming a person that I interview, please let me know. You can write me at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com, or if you know someone that might be interested, you can also send me a note. Also, if you have a question for the people that I interview, send me an email at celebratelife0747 at gmail.com, and I'll get that question over to the person I'm interviewing and get a response back to you. Listen, bottom line on all this is that everyone has a story to tell. What I have found that people have very rich lives, and giving you an opportunity to hear from them, learn from them is an honor for me to do. So today I'd like to introduce you to someone that I know very well. He's actually a close friend, but also a tremendous professional in his work. He's a community development specialist. He's written about it. He's lectured about it. He's organized meetings about it, and in my mind, he's the Tom Brady of Community and Economic Development. He's a special guy. I'd like you to welcome Bruce Seifer. Hi, Bruce. Hi, Gary, great to see you. Great to see you too. Great to have an opportunity to talk with you today. So Bruce, you have had an amazing career, and we've had a chance to work together back in the 1980s, but through a number of administrations in the city of Burlington, Vermont, who have done absolutely amazing things of bringing the business community and government together and making magic and helping fund projects that have given jobs to people, good paying jobs to people, have revitalized neighborhoods that were not doing well, and it really helped make Burlington a very vibrant, active city. So tell me a little bit. How did you get into this work, and what drives you to be who you are in your work? Thank you, Gary. I started my career, well, I studied accounting in college because I was a relative and suggested to me that if I wanna be successful on my own company, I need to know finance and accounting, and that's how we got into the nursing home business. He started as an accountant, and then opened his own nursing homes, and so I studied accounting at Ohio State University, and when I finished college, my father, who was an altruist and an honorable man, urged me to do two years of community service before I started working and getting into the business world. So I, after a year of traveling and after college, I traveled all throughout North America, looking for a place to live that I wouldn't wanna settle for the rest of my life. I chose Burlington as did many other people that I met traveling on the road for that year. And I started looking for jobs and nonprofits, and instead of, I mean, I researched companies, all the businesses that were in Burlington, who the people who ran the company is what they did, and I created business cards for every company in the Jitney County area, and how much sales they had. I did a lot of digging to figure out who was there so I can get engaged in the community. And it's something called Thomas's Register that I looked through for extensive in the library. And then I got a job at Champlain Valley Work and Training Programs as a data analyst. And I stayed doing that for two years and they were an employment and training organization that grew from a small organization to having 17 offices throughout the state of Vermont and 7,000 people in our programs. It was when the unemployment rate was getting high and the cities were burning across the country and the country was figured they should put people to work. And so then I switched positions to be that an auditor, we were giving out hundreds of contracts to private sector and public sector. I had five people working for me and we audited, I audited to personally 70 towns throughout the state of Vermont. And I learned to love working in the nonprofit world. And I did, I used to research effective workforce training programs. I'd read all these monitors that came out from the Department of Labor and I was trying to figure out the best innovative programs in the country that we could replicate this. We had literally 150 staff, 7,000 people working throughout the state of Vermont. And I wanted to make sure that people had a good career opportunity. And then I went to become the fiscal director for the governance committee in the employment of the handicap in Waterbury. And it was a statewide organization and I continued working in the employment and training. I got laid off and spent two and a half years traveling and came back to Burlington and met the woman and I fell in love with Julie Davis and I figured I'd better get a job. And I started volunteering at City Hall in the treasurer's office because Bernie was mayor. And when I was at the employment and training organization I would see things that were not right and I thought things should be different. And I saw politicians who were not operating but from my perspective effectively and doing a good job. I saw Bernie as somebody who was taking on the system and trying to help the underdog. And I had been doing that in my career for six years before that. So I volunteered at the treasurer's office and the first job I was given was to evaluate a budget for a new organization I wanted to create which is the Community and Economic Development Office. And I saw that there was this job doing economic development that was gonna be created and I said, now that's a good place. That's something I'd like to do. I could work for Bernie and I can help the business community to be successful. And they were gonna, Bernie had set aside $200,000 of stimulus money at that time and set up a revolving loan fund to help small businesses. And they wanted somebody to create the program and provide technical assistance. During the two and a half years and it wasn't, I stopped working at the Governor's Committee on the appointment of a handicap. I had provided counseling to businesses on accounting because I studied accounting and I knew finance and so I was doing that as some work on the side. And then I got hired to set up this loan fund and that opened up an opportunity to provide support to the business community with the principles and values that I, that were kind of imbued within me. So it wasn't a coincidence that you went to work for the city of Burlington during a progressive administration. It sounds like it fits your values, it fits your skills and talents. It just kind of was a marriage between both of those things. Yeah, what they were looking for was somebody who had experience working with the business community and also understood government programs. And my responsibilities before was tracking all government resources, knowing the laws inside and out and making sure that our programs, we're spending money effectively and met the law but also understood the business community and my family, everyone owned companies, my extended family, and I just assumed I would be understanding business. My father had a business at his house and my mother used to do bookkeeping for companies on the kitchen, on the dining room table and she'd had me help her so I got to learn that and I was good at math growing up. Yep. So it was a chance to use the skills. At that time I was 30, 31 years old and help out in the community and work for an organization that was trying to unlock the capacity within our community. And that engaged me as something that met the values that I had and I learned growing up from my parents from throwing a temple. Right. And my family. And here's this brand new wing of government called the Community and Economic Development Office. You were right at the ground floor of that. And then so early on, what was some of your successes in your work? Well, first off, I was hired to create this loan fund. So we hired this guy, Alan Abraham, who had just stopped working from a small business administration in Washington and he set up their two major programs called the 7A program, the 504 or 503 program. And he just had created these programs and we were one of his first consulting gigs and we wanted to make sure that our loan fund mirrored the SBA program so a business could come for us for an application for a loan and also get an SBA loan and a bank loan without filling out three sets of forms. We just filled one set of forms. Right. And so we created, spent several months working in the attorney's office and making sure we fit all the federal laws, which are extensive in order to do business lending because there wasn't that much of it using community development block grant funding at that time. So we had to make sure that we met all of the strict rules which there are a lot of. And so I ended up doing that. And one of the first projects at the director of the office, Peter Klobel, who hired me asked me to create a laundromat in the King Street neighborhood. So I worked, I turned my attention to the Pine Street area and worked with a fellow named Arnie Sherman who had gaslight laundromat on North Street. And we encouraged him, I encouraged him to locate in the King Street neighborhood and he found the old Vermont main legal sort of syrup building on Pine Street on the corner of Marble and Pine that was vacant. And it was derelict to say the least. And he, I worked, we went to him, we had a loan criteria of no more than $25,000. And we would provide basically 25% of the funding he'd provide at least 10% in the bank would come in for the rest. And I worked with Arnie and the building had, it was complicated in that the city sewer system, we have this combined system then they didn't want to have all this water flushing through the sewer system because it couldn't handle it. So there was these vats in the basement that Arnie hooked up the washing machines into these vats. And so when they need to trickle off the water in the evening, when the sewer system wasn't over capacity. And so at that point, we got around our criteria and lent them another 20,000 on top of 25,000 in order to deal with this building, which is taken. And that was the start of the revitalization of the Pine Street area, which I ended up spending 30 years of my career revitalizing, which was a industrial wasteland at that point, a lot of vacant buildings. The industry had moved out to the suburbs. And it was happy all across the country. Wow, that's amazing. So you moved from that to some quite large projects too. I know you did some work with Main Street Landing. Tell the story of Main Street Landing and your work with them. Sure, well the city of Burlington wanted to redevelop our waterfront. It had been an industrial wasteland, it was contaminated to oil tanks everywhere. And it was not a safe place. My father-in-law at the time, Tom Davis, went to college at the University of Vermont in 1951. And he said he would never go to the waterfront. It was too scary. And so it was, the industrial age, when in the 1800s, when the waterfront was very active it was the third largest lumber port in the world. And they used to be lumber stacked basically from the waterfront all the way down the Pine Street area. And there were processes in it. And then the industry, the railroad came and things changed. And so we worked, the office worked with Main Street Landing Company, Mwanda Malton and Lisa. And we spent a lot of time changing this community and economic development office. Their charter, part of their charter was to help manage government programs, write government grants, develop affordable housing programs, revitalize neighborhoods, build economic opportunity because the economy was in the tank at the time, and also create a vibrant waterfront, including taking the planning of the waterfront on. And so the office spent a lot of time interacting with the community, presenting ideas, passing resolutions, the city council bringing several initiatives to the residents to see if they wanted this type of waterfront. And Main Street Landing owned a lot of the waterfront property. So we had worked with them on several iterations. And there were a lot of failed starts, but there was a lot of public process. We had meetings with a thousand people out of 39,000 showing up at public meetings. So we got a lot of feedback and eventually we got this federal designation as a renewal community. And which gave the city the ability to stimulate revitalization of underutilized areas if and what the requirement that we were offered the opportunity to change was offer accelerated depreciation for building properties, revitalizing properties. So instead of writing off the property over 39 years, you can write it off over 10 years, which gave tax advantages to stimulate investment. So we can allocate up to $12 million a year and I called Melinda and I said, look, we got this federal designation which took a lot of work to get and we could allocate $10 million to your project. Why don't we handle these failed projects? Why don't you build it and apply for this incentive, which she did. And the problem was that she didn't have any tenants. She had, they were going through the process and they were going to have a pizza place located in there, which eventually ended up on City Hall Park, flat bread pizza, but they couldn't wait as long because the process was taking so long. And so she said to me, we don't have any tenants. And it was a $17 million project. I said, start construction, we'll get to the allocation, the tax allocation and I'll find your tenant. And so she said, okay. They borrowed $17 million with no tenants and tax incentives that we could offer them. And halfway through the process, Melinda called me up, freaked out saying, I don't need tenants. We're spending $17 million on this project. I said, keep going, I'll get your tenants. And so thankfully next week, Jeffrey Hollander, seven generation called me up and said, they're looking for new headquarters. And I hooked them up with Main Street Landing. They rented 25,000 square feet and the project cash flowed ever since. And so it took a public private partnership. We were the public partner. Main Street Landing was the private partner. And I asked Melinda about this just the other day. I had lunch at her house recently and I asked her, I said, how could you, in your right mind, start construction on this project without any tenants? She said, we trusted you, come through. And so that's what it was, it was trust on all the communication and working over time. And so part of that was getting to know people in the community, helping them out. You did that, they had a partner in the city and they grow their companies. So that was in essence, what kind of launched that. So she's right to say that she trusted you obviously but where did you get the confidence to say, go ahead and build that, I'll find you somebody to have a sense of self that at some level it was a little uncanny for people who were taking risks but you have been able to come through for them regularly. Where did you get that confidence? I think my parents, my parents were very smart people. I didn't figure that out till I was 25. I thought they were dumb as a child growing up. But my father was an average student in school, public school, he grew up in Toronto, Canada. We had American parents. And when World War II happened, he got drafted and was in the Signal Corps and he was gonna be a radio man. And he found out soon thereafter that the radio name of the first people targeted by the Nazis to kill, he didn't want to be killed. So he then realized, then he found out that the top two students in the Navy became teachers in the Navy. So an average student by working with his buddy, Shaw, Harry Shaw, and they studied hard and became the top two students in the Navy. Then he became a teacher at the Signal Corps in Monmouth, New Jersey. My mother was a student of his and she had first to graduate college from our family. And she was a mathematics major and a minor in psychology and she studied under Abraham Maslow. Oh my goodness. And so she was a protégé of his and she respected him. And recently my brother, my mother, my parents, my father died in 95, my mother died 2005, 2009, excuse me. And we divided out the stuff in the house. My brothers went down through stuff and found out that my mother got accepted to go to Brooklyn College, which she was 13 years old. And we looked at each other and said, that can't be. He had the, you know, the invitation. She didn't go until she was 16. So I found out that I had smart parents. Yeah. And, you know, she was a code breaker during the war and she was on a team of mathematicians that worked with a fellow event of the computer during World War II. And so they focused raising the family as in the most important thing that they saw themselves. I have an older brother and an older sister, Mark and Mary. And they focused their efforts to raising whole people. And, you know, they would, they were, my mother was very clever. You know, she would give a, give me choices, one A or B. So I had it, I had self-worth. Well, choice or A or B were either good choices, but she knew to give me those choices so I can make decisions on my own. Yes. And so I, you know, at the dinner table, we had breakfast and dinner every day as a family, my entire life growing up. And so there was intelligent conversation at the dinner table. She got psychology today magazine. My brother became a PhD in psychology, taught psychology, college forever. So dinner conversation a lot was very shy. The issue of psychology today. So I was mostly quiet and listen, but I had a good upbringing. Thankfully, I got good genes. I worked hard, you know, as a child, I was interested in sports and I played sports and I knew in Little League. And when I was five, how good I was and I saw, I improved by the time I got to a sophomore, I was on the varsity team. And I see that I improved and so I had a sense that if you worked hard and get ahead, our family were immigrants around the turn of the last century, that they all came with nothing, worked extremely hard, owned companies, started companies and they competed. So I had that, you know, the family lore was my mother's father had started as a clerk at a hardware wholesaler and worked hard and ended up owning buying the company on July, on Friday the 13th. So that day was considered a good day in our family. And he became very successful and ended up, you know, helping a couple hundred members of the family financially when they didn't have money for pots and pans or baseball gloves for their kids. Seven children were named after my grandpa, Harry. My father's father was a chief dress designer in Toronto for the largest department store and had a dress design school and became an inventor and invented things like the six pack and the case and cardboard boxes, women's boxes which sold a hundred million boxes. So I knew that I had people in the family who started with nothing, worked hard and succeeded and my parents nurtured that, never pushed us and let us do whatever we chose to do. It was just expected that we would go to college and that would be successful and my father and pushing me to do something good for society. Underpinnings kind of gave me the belief in myself that I tried hard. When I was in college, for example, I took 10 gym classes but I took more gym classes and I took classes in accounting, work classes in economics as I was a jock in high school and but I learned when I took a tennis class, for example, the teacher, it was eight o'clock in the morning, it was across campus at Ohio State University which was a long way away, a 20-minute bike ride, it was a long way. And an 8 a.m. class was not, I missed a lot of them and the teacher said that if you miss more than three classes, you fail. So at the last class, I missed many classes and I thought I was gonna fail, which traumatized me. And he said, we're playing in doubles and I'm on the opposing team and I realized at that moment that I better play well or else I'd fail. And so I dug deep and I played like I'd never played before in my life before or since. And it came to match point and it was tied. Oh my God. And I can serve it like a rocket or hit it wherever I could, like a rocket, like I'd never done before. I was getting right into the back corner, the back baseline corner and I said to myself, if I get it in, we win and I'm gonna fail, I better miss. So I hit it and I just hit it just out and we lost but I did pass the class. Wow. I knew that I could succeed if I tried hard and that with Melinda, I knew that if we tried hard and worked with companies and I worked, I provided counseling to over 4,000 business people in my career for the city, 158 year. So I knew that companies were growing and needed space because they were looking for space. And I thought that that would be a wonderful space because they were building and building that was gonna be a green building, a LEED certified building and people would wanna be in there. Wow. So what a fantastic foundation for your life that your parents gave you. My goodness and extended family too, it sounds like. Where did you grow up? Where was that? I grew up in West Hempstead, which is Long Island. Okay. And it was about 20 miles east of Manhattan on the South Shore. We grew up in what you would think of as a Levittown type of house, but it wasn't built by Levitt, it was built by gold. But it was a former potato farm years and years before. It was track housing kind of like South Burlington. Yep, yep. On a hill, a small hill on Laurel Road and it was a new house that was put up 1948. All these houses were built. My father just got out of the war, moved into a new house with everybody else who bought new houses. So there were every new young families, all little kids running up and down the street. And so we got to plan. I got a chance to play with the kids on the block growing up. Walter Neufeld lived across the street. Gail Johnson lived next to us. Myridge and Janice Goldstein lived next door and other kids we played with on the street, on the sidewalk, in the backyards, in the wood behind the house. So I got a chance to grow up in a suburban neighborhood that was very safe. And the kids could run around, we were expected to be on the dinner. They didn't check in on us and we would run around the neighborhood. When I was a little kid, I stayed close to the street and then as I got older, I would explore the next block over and the next block over and the next block over. You know, Walter Neufeld was down the street, he was my agent around the corner, he was Russell Porter. So up the block and around the corner was Michael Byrd and we would play street football with each of the end zones, being the telephone poles and stick ball and street ball and yo-yo. When you were a little boy, what were your dreams of what you would be when you grew up? You know, I was, when I was the first dream I had when I was five, my parents set up a savings account at Meadowbrook Savings Bank. They wanted to show us to have to save money and put money away. So we would go, I would save my allowance and we would go to the bank and we would put in the bank and the teller was there and I said to myself, God, I want to get to be a banker. That's where the money is. I don't know other than the money went to this place. What do you know? You know, Irma Brombeck had this story. Her father would go into work, she didn't work, so she threw the doll under the bed because that was work to her, you know, she didn't know what that meant. So I thought the money was there and then probably I watched television as a kid and I read books about archeology. I was interested in archeologists that interested me and I saw dancers on TV and I saw myself as a dancer. Those were kind of the three things as a child but I really didn't have dreams other than the fact that I thought I would own a company because my extended family, my uncle had a factory and retail stores. My aunt and uncle had a travel agency in Manhattan. My father had a television repair and building business in the basement when I was young and then the extended family all had companies. So I just assumed that I would own a company and my parents, my mother's cousin, Ernie Dicker said to me, you know, study accounting so you can start a company. So my dream was to own a company and being at my self-employed and have employees like that was my dream. Yeah, any kind of company in particular? After I started working for the Champlain Valley working training program in the city, I started thinking about that when I was young. No, I didn't, no, I didn't and I would, I would explore, I worked for my uncle's company as an installation person for putting furniture in people's houses. I worked and I learned about interacting with customers. I worked for my aunt's travel agency. I take the train at the Lionel Railroad standing on the train as I do this again. And so I learned customer service. I learned, you know, accounts receivable, payable and I had a degree in accounting and between my junior and senior I worked for my mother's childhood friend, Ernie Evans. I had a company called Margo Lynn Wine and Evans in Long Island and I worked in an accounting firm where I had a job to digitize all their records. So I ended up reading all their files while I was digitizing it. And I saw what it was like to work for the accounting firm and at that time to be a CPA, you had to apprentice in a accounting firm and there was no way I wanted to work for accounting firm. Why I decided that I would probably just own my own company and by the time I got to working I started, I wrote a couple of business plans. One was for the nursing homes because that was in our family. And so, and the other was to start a business that would service the elderly, a conglomber. They would have from TV, radio stations that service the elderly to products and services. So I started dreaming up products and services that the elderly could have and so you would actually have this company that would service and support the elderly. So by the time we got to this age the demographics showed boom with all the services and places on multitude of companies that I was gonna create. But I realized at that moment that I liked what I was doing, helping businesses succeed and I got a chance to live vicariously through their successes. Yeah, and that's exactly right. In some ways you're a public entrepreneur, Bruce. And you have facilitated all these businesses amazingly, actually amazingly. So, you know, Mary and Wright Edelman talks about the lanterns in her life. The people that in her life helped mentor her to become the woman that she became. Who are some of your lanterns? My Aunt Dora Maxwell, my mother's aunt. She was, she kept her maiden name at that time in the 30s. Yeah. She was a bird of and she was working in an industry that was all male. She was interested in the principles of cooperatives. Then the idea of credit unions was being formed in this country. So she worked with Mr. Bergeron and six other men and was funded by Edward Filene from Filene's basement. Wow. Yeah. And they established the credit union industry in this country. And so she spent her career 22 years crisscrossing the United States and first sending up hundreds of credit unions in several months. All right, good. And then helping to establish the Credit Union National Association, CUNA in Wisconsin. She commuted to Wisconsin from New York and she became head of education for the national organization. And she sat me down at a family dinner. Our family would get together as the holidays year after year as extended family. And I was graduating college, high school, going to college. And she was one of the people with a conscience. And in fact, they named an award after her. It's the Dora Maxwell Award for Social Responsibility. Wow. So she had friends that were activists in the Socialist Movement. Helena Scott Nearing, friend. No. And she knew I'm in Hennessy and the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. And so she was interested in the Nuclear Freeze Movement. And so she provided land and she would do voter registration to get people involved politically. And she provided land for these two high rise buildings in Brooklyn Heights that was land trust housing in around 1960. And all of her colleagues that they're interested in social causes moved into these 40 story towers. And she was very active in the social responsibility movement before there was one. When they would go out, when they were traveling these six other men and her they'd go out to eat. And she said, if you can afford to eat out and you can afford to donate the same amount of money to charity. And so she would push these people for years to do that. That's why they named the social responsibility award after her because she lived in values. So she's got me down at dinner for just a half hour conversation and said, you know, these are things that are important to her and I should, I was a jock in high school and she opened my eyes because the war in Vietnam was happening. And she basically explained her perspective on life. And she did that over time. So she was one person, my mother's aunt, my mother's sister's mother-in-law was one of the early day traders in the stock market. And she escaped Nazi Germany, smuggled another couple out and her family out that stuck in Costa Blanca, you know, and they're on this boat and they got put in prison. And she, you know, the family that she was with that she paid to passage was very sick. The man was very sick in a hospital. And she had all these gems that she hid that she took with her. And she brought the family, they bribed the people at the prison to let, not the prison, but at the hospital to let the family and her leave Costa Blanca after being waylaid there for several months and they came to this country. So she became a day trader in the stock market. So she was, you know, a strong woman that helped many people in our family and other family and other family live because of her dedication. So she was another, Mania Adler was her name. They had a company, they made pianos, they burned down by the Nazis. Wow. And so she was another lantern. My son, when I was working, I wanted to be a better person. When he came along in 1998, I was working for the city. And I want the city to be better. I wanted to have programs and policies that supported young people. And I wanted to be a better person. So he motivated me. I was working hard to do better and be a better person. My parents were lights in my way, to show that I think of them often as what would they do? My father was a good man. He was an altruist. He believed in this country. He was getting an international award in California for quality control. He started a school for quality engineering in Long Island, New York City and New Jersey. He went to professional society. He had 700 professional engineers in the school. My mother was the registrar of the school. Parktime, my father ran the school and taught a course in quality engineering. And he was going out to receive this award in California and I was gonna go and watch him. And turns out he got a heart attack and he had me get his speech in front of 1,000 people. It was all... How old were you? I was 1990, so 40. Yeah, okay. So I met all these people that my father enforced who came up after I gave his speech and the person who wrote the book for quality engineering that's used in colleges everywhere came up to me and said your father got me to do this work and made me stick with it and now this book's used all over the world and other people came up to me. Many people came up and said my father had helped them. And my father never, ever, ever talked about work during his... It was all about family. Wow, interesting. He thinks from other people's eyes down into me about my father, the influence that he had. And I mean, he had a... During the war, he was at the signal core and they sent him to Michigan to inspect factory with the N8 Jeeps. They were... The noise suppression system didn't work. And so he stopped the factory production line and the head of the factory was freaked out but my father didn't want American soldiers being killed by the Nazis because they could get the Jeeps coming. Yeah. And so he was not viewed favorably by the head of this company because he was stopped production. And he had been a teletype operator before the war and was in the secretary to the union of the teletype operators. So when he was in the signal core one of these guys there wanted a promotion and my father was getting promoted very quickly hiring his friends, getting... He was just... The organization was growing tremendously and he was very successful. Well, somebody wanted a promotion and made an assertion. My father was communist sympathizer. And all of a sudden his promotion stopped. He didn't know what was going on. And after the war he taught at a college communications which he had been teaching in the signal core and that came up in the home of McCarthy area happened and he lost his job. Wow. Some guy who wanted to get ahead calling my father communist sympathizer. Wow. And he had three young kids and no job. And he started a business in the basement making fixing televisions, building televisions. In fact, we had the first television on our street and he went door to door, not door to door but he would make service calls to people's homes and I was three, four and five I'd be his assistant carrying all his tools and watched him interact with people and I'd charge him a nickel for each call and then I'd charge him a dime. The joke in the family was I raised my rates to a quarter when I was five I put him out of business. I had a job at that point as an engineer. And the only time he talked about his job at the dinner table was when he got top secret clearance because he worked for one of the defense companies. This whole stain of atheism was past him and he was a, he broke the president ideas and how to build the economy. And he was passionate about building America as being the best place in the world to be. And his training engineers had to improve systems. In fact, he created a curriculum on the healthcare industry on how to improve quality of hospitals. Oh my God. So he started certificate programs, college degree programs and eventually when he after he died, actually they named the school after my parents. Wow. Wow. So your father was able to, your father was able to pivot quite quickly when faced with a terrible situation during the McCarthy era. Oh, how have you done with that when you've reached the difficult moments in your life and gotten through those? How have you done that? In my family growing up, laughter was really important. My father was funny. My brother was funny and my uncle was funny. My great uncle was funny and my aunt was funny. I wouldn't be this just sitting there laughing at the dinner table. You know, the big family gatherings, they people cracking jokes left and right. And it was just, so I learned that laughter is good medicine. And it also physically, it actually helps you deal with stress. That's right. So I've used humor as a way to deal with stress, to laugh at myself, not take myself too seriously, work hard, but that's the way that I've been able to deal with it is use humor and know that trust in people around you and use the system, but also verify. Yeah. And, you know, use your own knowledge and your extended network to verify and make sure that with the direction you're heading, there's appropriate. And trust me, one of the things I did growing up was hitchhike a lot. And I hitchhiked across the country after college. I hitchhiked to Florida. I used to hitchhike to college from New York to Ohio. I would take trips just to have fun. And I learned when you stick your head in the window to say where you're going, how to size people up quickly. You know, occasionally I had a bad ride, but I learned how to communicate to people and how to quickly size them up, which became very handy when I was counting thousands, 4,000 people over my career. How to size people up, how to talk with them. I was shy as a kid growing up. But you had to learn how to put yourself out there. And the joke in the family was, we had a house, my great-aunt Dora who had, they had built a house in Pauling, New York over five years, a stone house and a cliff. It was a beautiful place. We used to go there on vacation and stuff. And I would hitchhike to there. And the joke in the family was, would Bruce be able to convince the guy or the girl to drive them down this very windy road in the middle of nowhere. And if, literally, I'd be able to get to know people and I'd always get a ride right to the house. You know, when I'd be hitchhiking places, I wouldn't, this would bring a map. I would just trust my sense that I would get there. I had a roommate in college who lived in Connecticut, Danbury, Connecticut, lived in a suburban neighbor like I did growing up. And I just figured I'd find it. Just trust my intuition and I found it. Just trust your gut. Trust your gut. Yep. Purify. Sometimes you're wrong. Learn from that. Yep. But it's mostly trust in myself. You treat people with respect and dignity. They usually treat you well. Yep. And it's done you well and I have witnessed to that many times in your life, Bruce. So, we've talked about work. We've talked about your family. What are some of the things you like to do for yourself, for fun? Besides laughs. Reality is, I do a lot of different things. But my career, I ended up, I worked 24-7. The last 20 years of my life, I was working day and night, seven days a week. So a lot of the things that I used to do, I just gave up because I poured myself into my career and my family. The things that I did do, what I still do is, I have a nice, beautiful garden. And that gives me joy to see people stop. Spring, I plant a lot of bulbs in the spring in the front. I live in the South End by Challahan Park and people stop, take pictures of the flowers. I like giving flowers to my garden and my friends. I've mountain biked a lot in the past. I've been stowed and I love doing that. I have a bike, I like getting on the bike path. I like going through the woods, walking through the woods, I find that to be healing. Yeah. In nature. I like visiting with my friends and I'm a dead end. So I like going to concerts. And I have a broad network of friends across the country that I stay in touch with and visit, who visit me. So I like socializing. I like our community, the city is vibrant. It really is. So I like going to some of the places that I help support from the waterfront and see that. Out to some of the restaurants and the people that I know I helped. Yep. I've been able to, I like writing. I've been, since I stopped working for the city in 2012, I've come off in three books. I have a book coming out next week actually on community owned enterprises around the world. Wow. So I like helping people. So I've been continued to do that in my, privately helping some of the local business people still follow on me. I enjoy that. And I'm enjoying the writing process and following up with some of the businesses that I've helped and still many of the leaders. That gives me joy. So I like staying engaged with the business community that I've worked with over the years. And like, you know, some of the people that I got to know at work, I was too busy to become friendly with, but not more friendly with people like French Schmidt who ran the Center for Rural Studies at the University of Vermont. People like, Peter Clavelle was my boss. Will Ratt from Gardner Supply, Bill Mares who helped me start the South End Arts and Business Association who's our author, former journalist and teacher. So I spent time with friends like you and Mark Finari, go for walks and get an exercise. You know, I'm still a jock at heart. So I am, you know, as a natural athlete growing up. So I like, if I can continue to do sports, I try to do it as much as I can. That's great. So I look, looking behind you, I see a number of awards up on your wall there. So tell us about some of those. Where did you get them from? Well, one of them is two awards, actually. One is from, well, two of them from the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. I helped Blair Hamilton and Beth Sacks. They came to the office, Bernie was mayor. They had this idea for an organization and I said to myself, now here's some smart people. I'm gonna work with them. So every Tuesday afternoon is to go to the house and I'll write a business plan for Vermont Energy Investment Corporation. I had an idea and had to raise the money to create the organization and became president of the board. I was on the board for 12 years. So I got an award. Let me get it, actually. I'll come right back. Yep. I got an award from VEC. Shredded money in a light bulb. Oh my goodness. So that's an award. Thanks from the bottom of your heart award to help them. And they grew to over 200 people. So that was great. Another award that I got is an old light bulb from, yeah, it's made out of cement. And it is South End Arts and Business Association Innovation Award 2010. So I helped create the South End Arts and Business Association. I have an award from the Vermont Employer Ownership Center. Don Jamison came to the city and my idea to create an organization and we have been promoting employee ownership. So I spent seven years on their board to help conceive of that organization. I got proclamations from the city and government. One was for a Small Business Administration Award for Small Business Advocate in Financial Services, which Governor Howard Dean gave me. And so one is a proclamation from the city recognizing the achievements that I have. I have a recognition from Senator Jeffords, Bernie Sanders and Pat Leahy, Senator Leahy. Others, one is in a letter that went to the city council from Tom O'Brien who recently passed away, unfortunately. He was president of the South End Arts and Business Association, which basically says something had affected Bruce and so stoked the fires on Pine Street and the places, you know, boom, and we've just thought and let you know. Which was really nice because I put a lot of effort into revitalizing the Pine Street corridor and it's a national, international model. People all over the world to look at what we've accomplished in Burlington. I wrote a book called The Sustainable Communities Creating a Durable Local Economy. I've been interviewed on South Korean television, Slovakia, the BBC, innumerable national media about what we accomplished. And my co-author, Rhonda Phillips, has co-authored dozens of books and I recently spent a little time with her. She's the dean at Purdue University, the Honors College. And she was in Bennington and we went out to lunch and I don't really know that well. I've co-authored three books with her and just didn't work with her. And she said, when she went to graduate school in the 80s, she studied community economic development as a PhD and she learned what we were doing at my office and what I was doing. I said, you gotta be kidding. So what we've done is been replicated around the world. People showed up from Tasmania at City Hall from Australia. So they read this book, they wanna learn what we did and they came back the next year and spent a couple of weeks or two training them. So what we've done is it's not science, it's basically ask people what they want to help them get it. It's unlocked the capacity within the community and just be a facilitator and nurture that. That's fantastic. I think today, many people who benefit from the South End businesses and arts culture there don't appreciate what it was 30 years ago to where it's become today. Good for you, Bruce. Is there anything in your career or life that you still wanna do that you haven't done yet? Produce a movie, act in a, you know. I was asked to make a movie actually recently and I turned it down. About the work that I had done actually. Ah, it doesn't surprise me. Ah, you know, I set goals for myself. I set a 20 year plan when I was 30 and I met it in 10. My goals at this point are to enjoy myself, enjoy my life, enjoy my friends, enjoy the community, continue to be the active member of our community, stretch my mind, continue to learn and educate myself, challenge myself and become healthier as I age. I wanna continue to focus on my health and my wellbeing and learn about that and help my friends and family. I have extended family. I wanna continue to see them when very close with my brother, Mark and my sister, Mary. Great. I continue to spend time with them, which I did over the July 4th holidays for five days and just hung out together. That's when I spent time with my family. So career-wise, you know, I don't wanna start a company at this point, even though I have a business that I am finally operating, which is providing support to the business community at large and other communities across the country, I still do advising them. And I have a book coming out next week. So I'll be... So what's the title of your book? Well, the title is basically, this is not the exact title, but it's community-owned enterprises around the world. And that's basically what it's about. If I was to name it, that's what I would call it. Okay. But there's authors from all over the world talking about the pandemic and what does it mean to the community and the business community and what's being done contemporaneously right now, all over the world, to riddle society and communities and economies based on what's happening, which is businesses are being supported by their communities in a big way. Right. In a hard time, hundreds of thousands of companies that run out of business in this country. Right. And communities realize how important it is to have businesses there, to provide a services and products, but also a place for commerce and also culture and gathering. And a lot of people invest now in companies and they do. And so communities, not everybody succeeds in that. Like in Underhill, there was a corner store in a country store that went out of business. Community came together to try to make it resurrected, but it didn't work. So what learned from where it's wound? Yeah. All right. Well, in closing, Bruce, is there any words of wisdom you'd like to share with the audience about how to maneuver through their life? Sure. I guess I used to have a couple of signs on my wall at the office. One of them said one way to predict the future is to invent it. I like that. Figure out what you want to do and make it happen. Yep. The other one was absent health. Nothing else matters. So stay focused on a balanced life. Yep. Laugh a lot. Yeah. Medicine. Trust your gut. Listen to yourself. Sometimes you walk. Learn from it. Yes. Lighten up. Our country is divided. Family right now. And I think people, they should work hard, but have a good time. And there's usually solutions to problems. Collaborate. Collaborate with people that you don't think you should. Talk to people and listen to them, especially if you don't agree with them. Hmm. You're friendly with them. Get to know them. Have them get to know you. Unlock capacity within yourself, within your community, within your family. That was one of the most rewarding parts of my job. Stick with your better angels. You know, listen to your inner self and you can't go wrong. One person that I turned to was Martin Luther King. He and I have a dream speech. And I used to have a file in my office. I still have that file. And when I would be questioning myself, I'd read that speech to inspire myself. Keep putting yourself out there. It's amazing what you can accomplish, especially when you say it can never happen. You know, Ben and Jerry's got this award for small business people a year from Vermont and then the whole country. You know, one thing that Ben Cohen said was, there's a rudder on an ocean liner. And there's a little teeny rudder. It feels like a trip wheel or something like that. Because they're like this little trip wheel that moves before the rudder moves. Actually the ocean liner moves. So don't think it'll ever happen. It might happen. You know, one thing I, Margaret Mead said I think that, you know, one person can change the world. The fact is probably the only thing it ever did. So trust in yourself that you can actually make a difference. And you probably will. And I think that finds joy and see where it leads you. Smile. You know, smiles can turn a bad situation into a good thing. To me it's, you know, be yourself. Don't try to be somebody you're not. And be true to yourself. Listen to yourself. And that's what I've tried to do. And also listen to other people. And, you know, one of the things I did was I helped create something called the Vermont Technology Alliance. And the Vermont Bioscience Alliance. And Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility as organizations. And they normally see themselves as competitors. But they, one of the things I try to get them to do is to see that they can work collaboratively together and find their common problems and work on that. And then they can work together to solve those. And by doing that, they can be successful themselves. And that seemed to resonate with those companies. And they saw the tech industry and the state has gone from tremendously because they collaborated. And they normally see themselves as competition. Right. And I learned that, you know, being a quarterback in high school when 10 eyes are looking at you, 10 sets of eyes are looking at you and they're all looking to be successful. And you want to be successful, so you want to be tackled. You know, but you also want to succeed. And you don't want to take them down. And so when under pressure and nobody's looking at you, you can succeed. You know, and trust within yourself. And, you know, our team wasn't that great. But what I learned that you can be successful. You know, I went to Ohio State. I didn't make their teams. I didn't try to be on their teams. But I ended up playing pickup games with the second and string football team. And when you play with people better than yourself, it helps you to excel. Yeah. I ended up playing. And I didn't remember this. I found all the letters that I wrote to my parents. And I read them recently. And one letter was, I wrote to my parents and I said, we played. I was playing a pickup game against the second string quarterback at Ohio State. And I hit through five touchdowns and he threw four. We won. I had no recollection of it. But I had this guy who was one of their ends on the football team and he was so fast. And I said, what's the place? Throw it as far as you can and I'll catch it. He did. I finished four yards and he was like a lightning ball. You know, you can play up if you play with people better than yourself. Yes, yes. You're from other people and trust yourself too well in the long run. Your community will do well if you do well, too well. So I think that, you know, I think my party knowledge is that trust in yourself, trust in others, put yourself out there, work hard, have a good time. You know, and have fun. And if you have fun, you relax. So when you relax, you seem to actually improve. The last thing I'll say, I played softball with a group of folks on Friday nights called the Smallheads. People like Michael Monney and Bard Hill and Tony Sine. You know, Libby Hardin and a whole group of local Berlin people. Mostly they were artists. They were art departments at UVM, Middlebury and St. Mike's. And we would play, it was a drinking league. You know, we barely kept score. And we had like 15 people out in the field. And if somebody couldn't hit, we pitched the ball so they could hit the ball. You know, they're like 20, 30 pitches. But after four or five years, you know, Aaron can hit the ball. You know, you always make the first face anyway. If someone, she would hit it. She would play until she hit it. And they've all hit it. You would try to catch it, but you would actually miss it on purpose, but you want to make it look like you're going to catch it. Right. They wouldn't feel good about themselves until they get on base and get it on. And what happened was, is that we ended up, everyone did that. They would let everybody else on base. At the end of the game, it was tie score and everybody won. We didn't, you know, that was how it ended. But what we learned was that if you relax, you enjoy yourself and you don't try, you make these incredible catches. You know, you're trying to try, you run out to the field. You know, you're going to miss it. All of a sudden you catch it. And you say, how the heck, you know? But we learned that if you, you know, you can keep score, but it really doesn't matter. Treat, relax and enjoy yourself. When you do that, you excel. And our team used to beat all the teams in town. We were not that great to begin with, but we just had fun, but also relaxed. When your muscles relaxed, it's like if you sink, when you swim, the best way to actually not sink is to relax and your muscles actually get off. Exactly. So float as much as you possibly. Go float. All right. Sage wisdom, Bruce. Thank you so much for the interview and the tying together. And on behalf of everyone who lives in Burlington, thank you for all you've given to the city. Thank you. We're better for it. It's been a pleasure to get to know you over time and respect everything you did as a city counselor in your career, what you've done for the city of Burlington, what you're doing now, what you've done for the Cemetery Association. Get it from us. But people know that the cemetery is important, right? I appreciate what you're doing. And thank you for the opportunity to talk with you as well. My pleasure. Absolutely. Thank you.