Our latest Shaker
Square Citizen is Carole Grady who has just
retired as the Assistant Director of SHAD, the
Shaker Square Area Development Corporation.
Carol Lowenthal, author of this
tribute, was founding
editor of The Connection and president of
Friends of Shaker Square, 1991-94. Her essay
first appeared in the Winter 2005 issue of The
Connection. |
For twenty-six years the most consistent
face at the
Shaker Square Area Development office has been
Carole Grady's. But Carole plans to retire in December
to move to southern California.
Starting when the
organization was in its early adolescence and still
called "Friends of Shaker Square, Inc.", Carole has
served as secretary, bookkeeper, security director,
office manager, and eventually as the Assistant
Director, all at various times during her career
depending on what was needed in the SHAD office.
The original organizer of the
neighborhood security patrol, Carole also
staffed the Very Square Affair annual events, for
holiday lighting ceremonies, and for band concerts on
the Square, and she was a founding board member of the
Uptown Cleveland Security Corporation.
I had the pleasure
of working closely with Carole when she helped me
start The Connection newspaper back in
1977. In those days before computers she typed each
article into columns and helped with the layout crunch
when those columns were pasted onto the printer's
sheets, fitted with headlines, and proofread again and
again. Then she helped stuff inserts and finally
delivered them to neighborhood households, businesses
and libraries.
When Friends of Shaker Square
needed a "temp" a couple of years later in
1979 as they searched for a new Executive Director,
Carole decided to apply. She's been here ever since,
even continuing past her retirement age. Carole has
worked with six very different Executive Directors,
Catherine Dickman Merritt, Jane
Campbell, Hanna Fink, Sarah Rasmussen, Joe Mazzola,
and for the past fourteen years Reid Robbins. It's a
stretch for anyone associated with SHAD to imagine the
office functioning without her.
In addition to her
full time commitment to SHAD, Carole has served as
a dedicated volunteer at St. Ann's Catholic Church as
the Director of the program for Religious Education
for Students with Special Needs from 1973 to 1980. She
also participated in PTA activities at her children's
schools, and delivered books for the Home Bound Book
program for the Shaker Heights Library from about 1995
until 2000.