Island Profile: Ram Island Association leader glad to be giving back
Sue Siegelbaum is chairperson of the Ram Island Association and describes the job as “a big part of my life.” She will stay on in that office for at least another year, after a change in the bylaws was enacted to enable her to do so. She had been on the board for a year when asked to take over as chair in 2008.
“I was a little nervous. I’d never done anything like that. But I wanted to do something to be more a part of the Island, to give back.” The first month went well and then almost immediately the issue of the Ram’s Head Inn’s possible conversion to a drug treatment facility emerged.
“Up until then things had been fairly quiet, the only thing I was dealing with was the causeway repairs. I had always felt that there was less cohesiveness on Ram Island, but this issue sort of galvanized everybody.” People got more engaged, and “now we have a very full membership with most people actively involved.”
Sue’s commitment, however, is not only to Ram Island — she’s a full-blown Shelter Island supporter and marvels at the fact that this very important place in her life came to her family really by chance.
While living in New Jersey, she and her husband were at a dinner for the school her children attended, seated with another couple and in casual conversation about summer vacations, where their children went to camp and the like. The couple spoke of Shelter Island, a place Sue had never heard of and the more she heard, the more curious she became.
This led to an invitation to visit and “We fell in love with the place on the ferry. We couldn’t believe this little jewel just sitting there in the harbor and just so beautiful. We spent a couple of summers visiting, met other people and knew we just couldn’t pass this up, we wanted a place for ourselves.”
That was 1998, and they found a property that suited them on Ram Island overlooking Gardiner’s Bay. They moved into the house located on the property. But when the roof began to leak they undertook significant renovations, ending with their current residence. “I feel so lucky that we found it. Now I can’t imagine my life without it. This is the place we go to be together as a family, where we celebrate things.”
That family began when Sue got married 41 years ago. “I met my husband, Joe, in English class in high school and we started dating senior year, we really grew up together.” He’s a corporate attorney in the New York City office of a large Boston firm. “He’s my rock, my greatest supporter and my best friend.”
After high school in New Jersey, he went on to Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania and then to Rutgers Law School. She went to George Washington University and did graduate work for an MA in speech pathology, working in the New Jersey school system while he was attending law school.
Eventually she had her own private practice and later joined a medical group practice that included a psychologist and social worker, but as the children came along she gradually gave it up, turning to family life full time. Their children are now fully grown. Their son, Robert, his wife, Deena and their daughter, Amy, all live in New York City and gather frequently in the Ram Island house. Robert is a radiologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Deena, works in marketing, and Amy is at J. P. Morgan.
Robert had been an active sailor since he was a child but the rest of the family remained land-locked. Until recently. Sue says “I met Dona Bergin a few years ago and took her sailing class at Quinipet. It was one of the best things ever — the best way to be part of the Island is to be on a boat and see the land from the water.”
Now the family owns a small sailboat that they keep moored in Coecles Harbor, and they are enthusiastic members of the Shelter Island Yacht Club. In addition they’re both golfers, members at Gardiner’s Bay; and Joe is part of the Vote Shelter Island group.
During her “mid-weeks” in the city, Sue is very involved in a painstaking and labor-intensive hobby — the art of the decorative finish. She takes classes at the Isobel O’Neil Studio in such things as faux finishes, glazing, wood grains, gilding, malachite and lapis.
But nothing beats being here — “the place where we’re happiest.”