House Work

“I thought I’d seen the peak when the Red Sox won the World Series and the Patriots won the Super Bowl,” says Gabrielle Carruth, BA’85. “Then I went to the Democratic National Convention in Boston—it couldn’t get much better.”

At the convention, the proud Peabody, Massachusetts, native helped muster pols on the floor. It’s the kind of wrangling she knows well. Carruth works as the executive assistant to U.S. representative John Murtha, a sixteen-term Democrat from Pennsylvania and the chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee. A member of Murtha’s personal staff as well as the appropriations associate staff, Carruth also serves as Murtha’s policy director.

Post-convention, though, life got even sweeter.

“One of the highest points of my career was winning back the Democratic majority [in November],”Carruth says. “And [last May] Representative Murtha was honored with the Profile in Courage Award for his brave stance on the [Iraq] war.” The congressman, who spent thirty-seven years with the U.S. Marines, retiring in 1990 as a colonel from the Marine Corps Reserve, has been a vocal opponent of the Bush administration’s war efforts.

Carruth joined the congressman’s staff in December 2001, following a one-year U.S. Department of Defense fellowship from Georgetown University. Her credentials included a seventeen-year stint with the Navy, working in far-flung spots—Jacksonville, San Diego, Okinawa—as a special Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) agent, examining sexual assaults and white-collar crime.

In fact, Carruth met her husband, who is also an NCIS agent, at federal law-enforcement training in Glencoe, Georgia. He was her machine-gun instructor. Today, the couple has three children.

Daughter of former Northeastern psychology professor Charles Karis, Carruth developed an early affection for her future alma mater. She says her dad would take her with him to classes (“We’d go in the tunnels”) and quiz her in front of his students.

“Why do the rats press the bar?” Karis would ask his three-year-old.

“To get positive reinforcement,” the little girl would reply. “You see?” the professor would say to the class. “If she can learn this, so can you.”

“I was brought up at NU,” says Carruth, whose three siblings are also alumni. “It’s like home to me there.”

—Kathy Kramer, MA'00

Photo courtesy Norm Morris

The Times of His Life

Norm Morris, BA’61, tosses out Boston memories like they were big-league pitches: consistent, numerous, and fast. “I want to preserve the history of the kids of the Dorchester-Roxbury-Mattapan area,” says the Dorchester native, “because I want to give our children the opportunity to understand what we had growing up.”

Morris has captured the old days in two self-published books, Ghetto Memories and Ghetto Memories Revisited. When the first volume appeared in 1999, he says, “people from all over the country sent me pictures,” which made their way into the second volume. Both books, available at <www.ghettomemories.com>, are now on Snell Library shelves, and a companion video documentary is being planned.

This resident of West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, and Boynton Beach, Florida, remembers rites of passage at other beaches—Nantasket, Revere, and Wollaston. Cavorting at Talbot Bowladrome, where he met his wife, Sandy. Playing street ball while parents watched from triple-decker porches. Gathering at “the wall” along Franklin Field on the High Holy Days.

Morris’s own back story weaves in and out. He was a left-handed pitcher who missed his graduation from Roxbury Memorial High School to play pro ball in the Canadian-American League. Then came the U.S. Air Force and the Korean War. Morris pitched during his stint in the Tokyo military league and, in 1958, returned to the States with a letter from the Red Sox in his glove, ready to join the majors. But Herb Gallagher, Northeastern’s athletic director, talked him into attending the university, at least for a while. “I said I’d go to NU for three or four months, and then I’d get out and play ball,” Morris says. “But I fell in love with school.”

Next, Gallagher urged Morris to announce Husky football. He did—for thirty-eight years, from 1958 to 1996.

After graduating from Northeastern, Morris says, the whirl began in earnest: “It was grad school at Brown. Going with the Federal Reserve. Accepting a private banking executive position. Teaching bank internal-audit evaluation around the world. Opening a consulting corporation. Lecturing at colleges, including NU. Getting back into baseball [as a scout for the Milwaukee Brewers]. Opening one of the first sports-memorabilia stores in New England, on Cape Cod. And retiring early due to military injuries.”

Now Morris has more time for archival work. What would his Northeastern English professors think about his writing career? “They’d never believe it,” he quips. —Katy Kramer, MA’00

—Katy Kramer, MA'00

Photo by Leroy Watkins

Easy Rider

Sometimes just spinning your wheels steers you in the right direction.

“I was stuck in my car on Route 93, heading north to Malden, going by the Big Dig,” says LeRoy Watkins, BA’04. “And this idea came to me out of thin air: It would be really, really cool if I could ride my bike in to work.”

Why not, Watkins thought next, create a whole fleet of bike riders? Sell inexpensive fifteen-speed mountain bicycles to commuters, and finance the operation by selling mini-billboard space attached to the bike frames?

“I had this feeling in my stomach,” says Watkins. “Nervous excitement, like you have before a big soccer game, and you know you’re going to do well.”

Thus the company called MyBike was born. But not everyone climbed on right away. “Some people thought I was crazy,” Watkins says. Undeterred, he amassed start-up money, found a supplier, hired staff to deliver and maintain bikes, and lived off his savings.

“We incorporated in August 2005,” he says. “By April 2006, we had forty bike orders, 80 percent coming through Craigslist.” A Boston Globe article that appeared shortly after the business’s launch helped build buzz. By the end of the company’s first season, three hundred MyBikes, which sell for $19.99, with optional extras, were cruising around Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and beyond, displaying the ads of several dozen companies.

Business is largely seasonal. When cold weather gums up the works, Watkins and business partner Cassie Farris, a student at Suffolk University, shift gears. “During the winter, we speak at universities, train people, revamp the website <mybikeonline.com>, and streamline for next year,” he says.

Propelled by what he learned from associate international-business professor Chris Robertson and balanced by his co-op experiences, Watkins sees only clear roads ahead. He’s hoping to expand the business into three more East Coast cities over the next couple of years. And last October, he cruised onto BusinessWeek.com’s annual list of best young U.S. entrepreneurs, “25 under 25,” where readers nominate promising candidates age twenty-five or younger.

It’s important to keep pedaling, the Montclair, New Jersey, native believes. “Giving up never really was an option,” he says. “It never crossed my mind.”

—Katy Kramer, MA'00

Profiles in Leadership

George Sakellaris, ME’75, MBA’82 Founder, president, and CEO Ameresco Framingham, Massachusetts

Company description: Delivers energy solutions through innovative systems, strategies, and technologies

Employees: Approximately 430 worldwide

For more than twenty-five years, George Sakellaris, the founder of three pioneering energy-services companies, has been at the forefront of solving tough energy-conservation issues. He credits his time at Northeastern with helping him achieve his successes. His personal motto plays a part, too: “Work harder than the other guy, be persistent, and focus.”

The motto proved its power in 1979, when Sakellaris founded NEES Energy, Inc., a subsidiary of NEES Energy. He was its president until 1994, when NEES Energy was converted into Noresco, an energy-conservation company serving municipalities, government agencies, school districts, and hospitals. Sakellaris acted as Noresco’s president and CEO until 1997. Then, in 2000, his vision for a company that went beyond energy conservation to address an organization’s entire energy stream was realized in the founding of Ameresco, where he currently serves as president and CEO.

Ameresco, which enjoyed a 400 percent growth rate last year, has been the recipient of several honors. In 2004, the company received the Frost & Sullivan Award for Entrepreneurial Company, given to a business that identifies emerging trends before they become the standard in the marketplace. In 2005, Ameresco ranked 99 on Inc. magazine’s Inc. 500 list, the annual ranking of the fastest-growing privately held U.S. companies.

Recently, Elmendorf Air Force Base, located near Anchorage, Alaska, awarded Ameresco the largest Energy Savings Performance Contract project in U.S. Air Force history.

First-Person

David Hall

Photo courtesy of Craig Bailey

The process of writing my first book, The Spiritual Revitalization of the Legal Profession: A Search for Sacred Rivers (Mellen Press, 2005), was a long and circuitous journey. It began when I was a young boy in Savannah, Georgia, trying to balance two different dreams.

I was raised in a very religious Baptist family, who encouraged me to see God as the focal point of my existence. The church—along with my family and the schools—fundamentally shaped my values, insights, and beliefs. My father was a highly respected deacon in the church. Many people expected I would follow in his footsteps. He assumed I’d become a minister, he later revealed to me.

At the same time, the social ills of segregation and discrimination, and my desire to have a better life than my parents’, motivated me to consider another dream: becoming a lawyer.I didn’t know much about the practice of law, but I thought it might give me the power to improve my life and the conditions of my people.

I told my sixth-grade teacher I thought I might want to be a lawyer. “You will be a good one,” she said. For an African American boy growing up amid segregation, this simple affirmation was profound, and transformed a nascent wish into a compelling life’s purpose.

But when I told my mother what I hoped to do, her response was quite different. “Lawyers lie too much,” she blurted out. She associated lawyers with negative behaviors. She thought my becoming one might mean I’d have to abandon some of the values she had tried to instill in me. She wanted me to follow a nobler path.

Though I loved and respected my mother, I wasn’t deterred. I felt I could somehow reconcile her response with my teacher’s words. What I did not fully understand then was that the two reactions represented a deep schism within society’s perception of the legal profession, even within the legal profession itself. Eventually, I would stand in that breach, looking toward my mother’s spiritual values as a source of inspiration for revitalizing a profession gone astray.

When we pursue a dream, we seldom take the time to critique its shortcomings. We see only its attractive external contours. But after I became a lawyer—and certainly as I began to teach law—I realized there was an enormous conflict between some of my spiritual ideals and the legal profession’s culture. Even in law school, I was struck by the fact that no one ever described this profession as a “calling.” It was merely a job that could provide a nice salary, some power to change society, and varying levels of prestige.

My spiritual journey was undergoing its own ebbs and flows. Away from the shelter of family and church, I began to question some aspects of Christianity, especially those that appeared to support the existence of white supremacy. As I grew more distant from the church, I felt less conflict between my profession and my life’s journey. I still longed for law to make a profound difference in the world, but I focused on the political impact.

Yet as personal crises and challenges came, I was drawn back to the world of the church, and developed a longing to make what I practiced and taught more congruent with what I believed. I wanted to write a book that revealed to lawyers the underlying spiritual dimensions of practicing law. In 2002, when I stepped down as Northeastern’s provost, the time for writing such a book was right.

To allow my inner voice and the richness of my personal experiences to shape what I wrote, I went away from my family for a month, equipped with a computer, a couple of books, and copies of a few old speeches. I did some reflective writing, to produce a framework for the traditional scholarly research I would undertake later.

I spent part of that month by the ocean. One day, inspired by the movement of the water upon the rocks, I began to utter words out loud. They eventually grew into the last chapter of the book, entitled “Voices from the River.”When I do book signings or presentations, that’s the chapter I most often read from. For me, it gets right to the heart of how spirit and the practice of law are inextricably linked.

When do lawyers merge spirituality with the practice of law? They do so when, for instance, they try to address the “whole client,” not just the legal issues at hand. When they are as concerned with the lessons the client is teaching them as they are with what they are giving the client. I believe helping lawyers embrace the spiritual dimensions of their practice could remove much of the depression, personal dissatisfaction, and ethical violations that still stain this sacred profession.

An inner power can change how we see and approach our work. Likewise, as I discovered, our past powerfully informs our future. When I wrote my book, I drew on my mother’s admonition and my father’s hopes for me, to help create a new calling for lawyers.

David Hall is a professor in the School of Law. For more information on his book, go to http://www.sacredrivers.neu.edu.

 Photo courtesy Gabrielle Caruth