Still: Best/Worst of Times

By Viki Volk

Publisher

By many reckonings 2012 was a very good year for the Lexington Park business community. But it was also the year it lost three pillars.

Former state senator J. Frank Raley and Robert Gabrelcik lived long lives, much of those lives dedicated to the development and investment that created a vibrant business economy out of a depressed peninsula of marsh, farm fields and forest: Lexington Park.

Walter Sawyer was not granted as long a stay but from the moment he arrived in Lexington Park he was the personification and the champion of the people who both prospered and suffered as a result of that cultural collision.

The older men’s obituaries list public accomplishments and deeds that will  benefit generations to come. They were contemporaries, friends and partners representing two very different aspects of the Lexington Park of the 1940s and 50s. Mr. Raley was native born; Mr. Gabrelcik one of the first flyboys to invest.

Mr. Raley energetically embraced change through his long life. He sought incorporation of the new with the historic traditions and natural landscapes of his home. He was, it must be said, a liberal without so much a social agenda as an economic agenda. He was of the rising-tide-lifts-all-ships philosophy and a successful Lexington Park businessman and investor. His ability to embrace  attributes and attitudes outside the traditions of his community were his key to personal success and his successes on behalf of his community.

Mr. Gabrelcik flew in with the U.S. Navy and after helping win World War II opened a car dealership in Lexington Park. Couple years later he joined a few friends and started the Maryland Bank and Trust Company. This was a key to Lexington Park’s success.

Banking and other land interests were largely controlled within the boundaries of Leonardtown. Without Maryland Bank and Trust, goes local economic theory, there would be a lot less commerce in Lexington Park and it wouldn’t be owned by newcomers.

If not antagonistic, the divide between locals and newcomers was pronounced those earliest decades of Mr. Raley’s and Mr. Gabrelcik’s investment in Lexington Park. Two decades hence, when Mr. Sawyer arrived, the divide hadn’t much changed. But a lot else had.

By the 1960s Lexington Park’s infrastructure was inadequate for its growth. Community leaders including Mr. Raley and Mr. Gabrelcik did much to staunch the decline and negotiate improvements using public-private funding partnerships.

The population was growing and becoming more diverse in wealth and education. The economy continued to shift from rural to suburban.  It was mostly military personnel rotating through, civilian workers on base were from local families. There weren’t defense contractors. The war was Vietnam.  St. Mary’s County hadn’t yet gotten its first traffic light.

Enter Walt Sawyer, a teenage boy dropped into an uncle’s home, an officer on the Pax River base. He befriended the teenaged children of the WWII entrepreneurs who built the town around it. He may even have looked like a James Dean character, incapable of taking orders and unable to leave be that which is unjust. Memorials testified that he never outgrew either trait. He was the champion you wanted by your side.

“Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story,” reads the Desiderata by Max Ehrmann, the prose poem reprinted on Mr. Sawyer memorial program.

Quiet help and good advice given without fanfare was the cadence of Mr. Sawyer’s life and also his memorial. He was an unshakeable ally of what was right and made himself wholly available to all who sought his help.

Mr. Sawyer’s accomplishments are more likely told friend to friend, family to family than listed in public annals. His integrity made him the easy selection when the courts needed to appoint a trustee, mourned a judge at Mr. Sawyer’s memorial. He stood up, always, for the underdog. Perhaps less heralded, but as important to a community as its libraries, schools and police stations. Maybe more so.

All three men made their careers in Lexington Park. They are missed. Lexington Park isn’t quite as colorful in their absence. They lived full, generous lives and thus their memory seems ill-served by lamentation. Rather, in appreciation of what they have left us, here is the conclusion of the Desiderata:

“With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”