BY MICHELLE GENZ ASSOCIATE EDITOR
Take it from a woman who’s dealt with more than her share of construction workers: There is one big advantage working on Habitat for Humanity’s job sites. “They don’t whistle,” says Sue Croom. “That’s kind of refreshing.”
But fans of Sue Croom will be standing, cheering and maybe even whistling in January when the 61-year-old Orchid resident, who puts in 20 hours or more each week on construction sites, is honored in Atlanta as 2008 National Volunteer of the Year by Habitat for Humanity International.
Croom, whose association with construction was for many years through a now-ended marriage, is being recognized by the global organization for her own work with Habitat’s Women Build program. Her all-woman work force has built nine homes locally, with more on the drawing boards.
“She represents the true Habitat spirit,” says Carrie Rossman, assistant operations managers in charge of volunteers, who nominated Croom for the award. “Her energy and enthusiasm is almost contagious. She makes volunteers – especially women volunteers – feel really comfortable in stepping up to the plate and saying ‘Yes, I’ll volunteer.’ ”
While Croom was the first nominee from the local Habitat chapter, Rossman says she wasn’t surprised that Croom won — though Croom herself was. “She was shocked. She’s very humble about the work that she does. She should be proud.”
Standing at a job site near Olso Road, what Croom seems most proud of is her ability to gather good intentions around her to turn a vacant lot into somebody’s home. She’s also proud of having found a passion in her life.
“Framing is the thing I love most,” says Croom, who had no hands-on construction experience before she started with Habitat. She also loves roofing, can put up fascia and soffit, and can set windows, and operate a table saw and a circular saw.
While she still gets regular manicures and wears pale peach lipstick on the job, the Harley-riding Croom is entirely comfortable with terms like jacks, cripples and studs – and knows how to wield them in pun-strewn descriptions of the male crews.
“I can never figure out why men come out here and want to be bossy. But we’ve got them pretty well trained,” she says. “We don’t put men with our group unless they are of like mind and like heart. You don’t want to be treated poorly.”
“It used to be you drew the short straw if you had to supervise the Women Build,” she says. “But over the years, we’ve developed into a fairly skilled group of people. The Women Build gives a new person opportunities to come into a group and not feel intimidated by the men. It makes them comfortable about learning new skills.”
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Croom credits her community service with Habitat with restoring her sanity. Raised in Sarasota, Croom had married local builder David Croom at 21. Moving to Vero in 1976, she raised two children, and worked in the office of her husband’s construction firm. Thirty-one years later, her husband suddenly left her. He remarried the next year. They have not spoken since, she says.
Devastated, Sue Croom fell into a deep depression. “For five years, I didn’t know whether I was coming or going.”
It was a friendship with a neighbor in Orchid Island that eventually drew her out of her sense of worthlessness. That friend, Jo Tripp, was recently widowed, and had not known Croom’s ex. That gave Croom a sense of making a fresh start, having found a kindred spirit in figuring out how to have fun as a woman alone.
One day, Tripp invited her to the groundbreaking of Grace Pines, Habitat’s community of 26 homes in Gifford. Orchid Island was sponsoring one of the houses about to be built.
Through that first visit, Croom began her association with Habitat. “Through helping others, I finally got out of my box,” she says. “There’s a whole lot worse stuff out there than me and my problems.”
“A verse comes to mind when I think of Sue,” says Cyndy Hazelton, a Women Build crew leader who lost her husband to cancer a year ago. She has known Sue Croom since their children were small, and they both served on the parent association. After a few years without contact, they reconnected by chance at church the morning after Sue’s husband moved out.
“ ‘Man’s heart plans his way, but the Lord directs his step.’ I think that’s exactly what happens in Sue’s life,” Hazelton said. “The opportunities have come her way and she’s participated in them, and that’s how she got where she is today.”
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Croom’s first role at Habitat was as a family support partner for a prospective homeowner. Habitat’s homeownership process is rigorous, involving a dozen classes in budgeting, legal matters, and home maintenance. “It’s a huge amount of preparation. These are the working poor. To participate in this program is a lot of extra stress on them.”
Habitat tailors mortgage payments to a family’s income; a typical payment ends up at around $450 a month, which includes property taxes and insurance.
“It’s eye-opening when you look at the amount of money these people make,” Croom says. “It’s nothing, yet they manage to live off of it. It’s humbling to work with these people, after working with a firm that built multi-million dollar homes.”
Once Croom had moved her new homeowner into the Habitat-built home, Croom looked for another way to participate. Habitat had just started work on Grace Grove, another community in Gifford. Croom’s church was involved in what Habitat calls a “Circle of Faith build,” and one cool clear day in May 2004, Croom drove over to see how she could help.
Plenty of workers had already shown up there, so they directed her to another project down the road.
That house needed someone to work on the roof. Croom didn’t hesitate. She clambered up a ladder, where longtime volunteer Dave Dearing was working with a group of girls from the juvenile detention center who were performing community service. The girls were sheathing the roof with plywood.
“I had never hammered a nail in my life,” says Croom. “One of the girls showed me how to angle the nail to catch the truss and go through the plywood.”
The sight of tiny Sue Croom on the roof caught Habitat executive director Andy Bowler’s eye.
“He said, ‘Susan what are you doing up on there?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know but I’m having a blast.’ ”
By the end of the work session, she had blisters covering her hands. Exhilarated from the effort, she had forgotten to wear gloves.
Today she knows better: she always wears gloves, and they are pink suede. She bought them for all her crew, as well as pink tool belts: they fully embrace their feminine side. On the open tailgate of a grey pickup truck, there is a welcoming display of goodie baskets filled with hand lotion, peppermints, bottled water, sunscreen, nail files, and this week, a bottle of Tabu cologne.
It also includes toilet paper and seat covers; the Portolet is not the favorite room on the site.
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The team is gathered on a chilly Saturday morning – they start at 7:30 am. Sally Slate-Hyatt is on the roof in a brightwhite sweatshirt, with “Las Vegas” written in rhinestones on the back. She is nailing shingles on plywood.
Sue Croom, whose nametag reads “Queen of Women Build,” has vaulted over the side of a dumpster to retrieve pieces of cardboard big enough to wrap around window screens, a trick they developed to keep the screens from getting damaged until the new owners set up housekeeping. Inside the house, concrete floors are swept of debris; exposed block is spray painted with one-word instructions.
It was Andy Bowler who convinced Sue Croom to start a Women Build group; they exist all over the country. In ten years, 1,400 homes have been built by all women crews.
It was not without its challenges. Soon after the rooftop rendezvous with Bowler, Croom started putting together to-do lists and working on publicity to recruit volunteers, looking forward to a January start date for her Women Build group’s first house.
But in August 2004, Croom discovered a tumor in her kidney the size of a tennis ball. Two weeks later, she underwent surgery to have the entire kidney removed. The tumor was benign, and the recovery period was relatively brief, a matter of weeks.
Croom is convinced that the tumor was her body’s reaction to the years of stress due to the divorce. “Habitat saved my life,” she says, by giving her a new focus and an optimistic outlook.
But another calamity was happening at the same time – the double hurricanes that struck Vero Beach in 2004 — and that recovery took much longer.
Croom hesitated, but in the end persevered amidst the chaos. She credits two grant writers at Habitat for showing her the bigger picture: the future. “Carrie Rossman and Kelly Brown became my best friends,” she says. “They opened up doors for me and encouraged me to go on.”
On this chilly Saturday, two women are driving screws into a window frame, inserting a black plastic shim under a twoby- four to block the screw from going too far into the frame. Janet and Kristy Zabrosky are mother and daughter, from Pointe West. They showed up after reading an article on Women Build and thinking it sounded like fun.
They smirk after explaining what they’re doing to a newcomer: it’s their first day. “We had no idea how to do this until about an hour ago.”
Youth is not a requisite to be part of Women Build: Croom has a 76-year-old working on a Fellsmere project. Another woman, Barbara Mandell, is 84; she sorts nails by the paint-bucketful, part of Habitat’s Green team that recycles materials thus saving dump fees and generating revenues.
The Green team was born of a thrifty homemaker’s ‘Ah-Ha!’ moment when Marcia Zimmer of the Moorings, working on a Women Build crew, asked, “Do we recycle these nails?”
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One nail will not go into any bucket. Croom, who is deeply religious, believes it was bent into a “J” as a sign from God. Fired from a nail gun, it ricocheted off something on the worksite and up into the eye of a crew supervisor the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. “It was a cold day, and you’re supposed to wear safety glasses, but his were steaming up. So he slid them up on his head.”
That’s when the errant nail struck him. As the eye began to bleed and swell, the Habitat crew surrounded him and prayed, though he himself was not “a believer,” says Croom. He was rushed to the emergency room where he was told he would lose his eye.
“An ambulance took him to Leesburg to a specialist. The doctor took the patch off and said, ‘You’re going to be fine. Your sight’s going to come back.’ We feel that that was a miracle. The fact that they had prayed with him and anointed him brought his sight back.”
One of Croom’s crew put the bent nail into a frame with the inscription: “I was blind and now I see.”
“We waiting for the second part of the miracle,” says Croom, who hopes the incident will make a convert out of the man.
The Habitat crews pray before every workday; when the ribbon is cut on the new house, the group gives a Bible to the new homeowner, along with a hammer with a cross on one side, though the group helps people of all religions, and invites all to participate in its work.
Habitat was founded in 1976 by a millionaire couple, Linda and Millar Fuller, who divested of their fortune to begin a life of what they regarded as Christian service. In 1984, former president Jimmy Carter and his wife Rosalynn joined the effort, greatly increasing public awareness of the organization.
The Carters’ efforts took Habitat international; homes have been built in more than a hundred countries.
Indian River County’s chapter is paired with Romania. In 2006, Sue Croom and Carrie Rossman were part of a team of 10 who traveled abroad and stayed with a local family while building a house in a small village.
“It was June but it was cold, and the host would come into our rooms to build us a fire since there was no heat in the house. It was quite an experience,” says Rossman.
It was on the job site when someone was painting a soffit red that Croom’s passion for Dracula came to the fore. She and Rossman conspired to make the most of a Romanian moment. “We turned the scene into a Dracula impalement.”
Another beloved hard-working and enthusiastic friend, Madeleine Kerns, is now the Saturday crew leader on Women Build. But she is working more and more at the Home Center, helping redesign the aisles for better merchandising, and enjoying the spectacular success of sales there – it is Habitat’s second highest grossing center in the country.
Sue Croom laments that the retail store may eventually steal Kerns from her crew, but some things are beyond her control.
“The word is, Madeleine is growing very attached to the flush toilets there,” says Croom, frowning. “We can’t compete with indoor plumbing.”
