Berkshire Profile: Lisa GordonBy Susan Bush
12:00AM / Sunday, May 14, 2006
 | | Lisa Gordon is a Williamstown Department of Inspection Services administrative assistant and an elected Stamford, Vt. school director. |
Welcome to Berkshire Profile, an iberkshires weekly feature appearing on Sunday. Each week, iberkshires will highlight a Berkshires resident or entity making a contribution to the Berkshires way of life.
Stamford, Vt. - May 14 is Mother's Day but during a May 10 interview, 27-year-old Lisa Gordon put the focus on her husband Robert Gordon.
The couple are parents to 15-month-old daughter, Madelyn, and Robert Gordon is a doting daddy, said Lisa Gordon.
Exceeding All Expectations
"He is the best father," Gordon said. "He has exceeded every expectation that I had. The cutest thing is when you see him with Maddy, in his work boots and uniform, pushing her down the road in her little pink cart. She loves him. She calls him 'Bob' and she runs over to the gate calling him:'Bob! Bob!'"
Gordon lives in Stamford and was elected to a term as an elementary school director earlier this year. She works as an administrative assistant for the Williamstown Department of Inspection Services. Gordon earned a bachelor degree in business at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in 2003. She is a 1997 graduate of Drury High School in North Adams.
Family is important to Gordon, she said.
Family Ties
She spent most of her childhood in Florida and attended the Gabriel Abbott elementary school. Her family was close and she spent time with paternal and maternal grandparents. The relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren can be wonderful, she said.
"I was especially close to my mom's mom. Those are days that you can't get back and you can't replace. You see my mom and my daughter out together and you see the unconditional love that she gives that baby. People think Maddy is hers. And my father, they have 'Grampa and Maddy' time. They watch T.V. or they go out on the lawn tractor."
She is hoping to provide Maddy with the same safe, comfortable childhood that she enjoyed, Gordon said.
"I loved growing up on Florida mountain," she said. "You just got to be kids.It's not that there weren't the little cliques, but all that went out the window when you were a bunch of kids in the woods playing 'Rambo.' You could be 11, 12 years old, boys and girls playing together and nobody thought anything about it. We want Maddy to have a childhood like that."
Something To Be Said For Smaller Schools
Interest in community and interest in her daughter's future were the catalysts for her decision to seek election as a school director.
"I think everybody should be involved in their community one way or another," she said. "And once I had Maddy, it was important to me to keep the [town] school known for what it is known for, being a very good school. There is something to be said for smaller schools. I believe that younger people should be getting involved in community and I wanted to be involved in the school. School is the children's future."
A Northern Berkshire "Homebody"
A brief family move to Tennessee that occurred when Gordon was 13 or 14 years old resulted in a resolute appreciation for the Northern Berkshire/Southern Vermont region, she said.
Gordon's father was employed at the Yankee nuclear power facility in Rowe and was anticipating the facility's close. He was hired for a similar job below the Mason-Dixon line and the family moved when Gordon was mid-way through the eighth grade.
"I hated it," she said. "I made friends and I had an active social life but it never felt like home. I am a Northern Berkshire homebody and I was very unhappy. I wanted to come home."
A combination of factors were considered by the family and less than two years after moving to Tennessee, they moved back to Florida, Gordon said.
Price of Gasoline:"Outrageous"
Maddy is cared for by a family child care provider during Gordon's work week, and Gordon said she is not upset by the cost of child care.
"My day care cost is about $25 a day, and for me, that's about $3 an hour," she said. "Would you work for $3 an hour? Maddy loves going there, and that's important to me, that she likes it."
Vehicle fuel costs are affecting the family budget, she said.
"The price of gas is outrageous," she said. "Between the two of us [she and her husband], we probably spend $110 a week in gasoline. If I'm not mistaken, when I first got my [driver's] license, it was about 99 cents a gallon. I don't think we'll see the price go back down to where it was and I hate paying this price for gas."
Her husband commutes to a job in Pittsfield. The region's bus service doesn't offer transportation to the outlying communities, and centrally-located shopping options are limited, she said. For example, people who want to shop at Wal-Mart and at Big Y supermarket are challenged if they want to use bus service, because the two entities are situated at opposite ends of North Adams, she said.
"You can't really take the bus to work, then take it to a central place after work where you'd get off a bus, do your errands, and then take a bus home," she said.
Family, friends, and community involvement all serve to strengthen Gordon's regional ties, she said. The family is unlikely to leave the area, she said.
"This is home and I don't have to think much more about it than that."
Susan Bush may be reached via e-mail at suebush@iberkshires.com or at 802-823-9367.
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