THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 19, 1996 TAG: 9601180126
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 03 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: THUMBS UP
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 129 lines
THERE ARE SOME OBVIOUS differences among the three city workers who were recently named to the Virginia Beach Employee Hall of Fame.
Master police officers Lou Thurston and Mike Carey are known to just about everyone in the Hampton Roads area who reads a newspaper, watches TV or listens to a radio.
They're the Police Department media relations officers, the guys who roll out of bed at 3 a.m. when there's a situation that calls for somebody knowledgable to keep the public informed. Citizens they've never met greet them by name in malls and restaurants.
On the other hand, Mary Ginger, an administrative secretary in the Virginia Beach Public Utilities Department's engineering division, goes through life pretty much unrecognized.
Nevertheless, the three longtime city employees have one very important thing in common: a reputation for going out of their way to serve citizens and co-workers alike.
For Ginger going the extra mile means taking special care of citizens experiencing problems with water or sewer service, contractors faced with mountains of specifications and change orders and staff engineers who need to keep the water flowing and the storm drains clear.
For Thurston and Carey, taking extra care means assuring that the public's need to know is met at the same time that the cops on the street are kept free to perform their primary duties of keeping citizens safe.
Since 1985, Hall of Famers have been selected by their peers from nominations submitted by co-workers. The name of each selectee appears on a plaque in the administration building at the Municipal Center.
Carey and Thurston were nominated by Pam Lingle and Diane Davis of the city's Public Information office. Ginger was nominated by Robert Clark, planning and analysis manager in the Public Utilities department.
Thurston, a Green Run resident with 23 years of service to the police department, and 14-year veteran Carey who lives in Kempsville, are best known as the city employees who arrive at the crime scene when the yellow tape goes up and continue to keep the lines of communications open until a suspect is identified and taken into custody.
When major cases break, the hours get long. One case that resulted in particularly long hours for the pair was the disappearance of a young pre-med student from Georgia, last summer.
``We had a bad feeling about that one almost from the start,'' Carey said of the day a group of college friends reported Jennifer Lea Evans missing.
The officers' fears, unfortunately, were founded. Nine days later Evans' body was found in Newport News. Two Navy men still await trial in her death.
It was a crime which hit Thurston, whose only child is a daughter close to Evans' age, and Carey, the father of 10- and 14-year-old daughters, hard.
So hard, in fact, that when the murder was solved and the suspects taken into custody, the two officers decided that they wanted to do something special to honor Evans' memory.
They had met the young victim's parents when the senior Evanses came to Virginia Beach during the investigation. The more Thurston and Carey learned about Jennifer, the deeper they felt the parents' loss.
``She wanted to go into rehabilitative medicine for children,'' Carey said. ``You try not to get personally involved in a case, but when something like this happens . . . ,'' he added, his voice trailing off.
``The Evanses were such nice people, we just felt we wanted to do something special for them,'' Thurston said.
That something special turned out to be the establishment of a scholarship at Oxford College, a two-year division of Emory University, in Jennifer Evans' name.
Their fund-raising on behalf of the project succeeded beyond anything the pair had expected. So far $15,000 has been raised for students at the small college where Evans had completed her first two years. More than $5,000 of that total was raised through a tournament at Honey Bee golf course in October.
Thurston and Carey's work in establishing the scholarship was only one of the reasons that Lingle and Davis nominated them for inclusion in the Employee Hall of Fame.
Among the others were their long hours, reputation for cooperation and teamwork, professionalism, integrity and especially the comfort they've given to grieving families.
Just about everybody who has ever worked with Thurston and Carey agreed with what Lingle and Davis had to say. The nomination had a thick stack of supporting documents attached, most from the people with whom they work most closely: members of the press and other city employees.
A lot of people supported Ginger's nomination as well, especially those in the Public Works department where she has earned the respect of staff and citizens over the past 18 years.
Respect from within the department comes in the form of the recognition that it's Ginger who keeps things moving and the engineers (whom she refers to as ``my kids'') in line.
It's she who uses her schoolteacher background to help them improve their letters, hone their writing skills and get their correspondence and reports out on time.
It's also she who helps contractors negotiate the paperwork maze that the complicated workings of major utility projects require. To help everyone involved in the process she developed something called the ``crazy'' sheet, a list that identifies and explains the when and how of every step that has to be taken in the process of installing, repairing or upgrading the city's hundreds of miles of pipes and thousands of valves.
Frequently Ginger volunteers to handle calls from upset citizens. ``I understand how they feel,'' she said of the times householders have called concerning blocked streets or interrupted service. ``A lot of times they're just too frustrated to push buttons or leave a voice mail message. They want someone to listen to them. Right now.''
She will, if the occasion warrants, walk down the hall and convince the person who can help that he or she should pick up the phone and listen to the citizen's problems.
A native of Kentucky, Ginger attended Berea College and Western Kentucky University where she met Walt, her husband of nearly 42 years. She followed him around the world until his retirement, at which time they settled in the Thalia section of Virginia Beach.
They are the parents of three children, now living in California, Kentucky and South Carolina.
When co-workers ask her why she and her husband stay in Virginia Beach, Ginger has one of her trademark answers. ``I love the work, my husband is retired, someone has to keep `these kids' straight and I have a lot of fun terrorizing them,'' she says. ILLUSTRATION: Photos by JO-ANN CLEGG
Mary Ginger, an administrative secretary in the Virginia Beach
Public Utilities Department's engineering division, deals with
citizens experiencing problems with water or sewer service.
Master police officers Mike Carey, left, and Lou Thurston are the
police department's media relations officers, the guys who - at all
hours of the night - keep the public informed.
by CNB