|
|
|
Citizen Of The Year - A Heart, a Brain, the Nerve
In spite of what he often says, lawyer/artist/community pillar Cheever Tyler turned out to be one guy with two last names New Haven could trust
|
Business New Haven
1/20/2003
By: Mitchell Young
|
Walking into one of the coldest nights in years, I turn a downtown corner straight into a face with handsome but beaten features, a man with a huge plastic garbage bag and what (in a moment's passing) appear to be filled with his life's possessions.
The bitter cold was a convenient excuse to move briskly by. As I sat warming in my car I was thankful - thankful he hadn't asked for anything, said anything, demanded anything, that he dutifully kept his distance and just let me be.
In any given year, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless, 3.5 million people across the U.S. will find themselves without a home. Mostly invisible, the homeless are far easier to endure as statistics rather than as a lurking neighborhood icon, displaced family or fallen friend.
Thankfully - for them and us - some of those neighbors and friends find caring comes a bit easier, and are eager to support the direst causes of the day. An even smaller group truly believes in the ability of this community to take direct action to aid the homeless, support the arts, provide a venue for "special" athletes and so much more. And a very, very select few see a need and say, simply, "I will do it."
We've seen these citizens confront the city's and region's problems as part of their everyday efforts. In these pages and with these Business & Civic Awards we've recognized a number of them: Fenmore and Phyllis Seton, Barbara Pearce, Larry DeNardis, Bill O'Brien, Matt Nemerson, Roger Joyce, Charlie Terrell, Ron Shaw - all justly (and often belatedly) cited for their efforts as outstanding citizens of the year.
This year, Business New Haven's choice for 2003 Citizen of the Year defines the award for New Haven. He is Cheever Tyler, the Elm City's indefatigable do-gooder, ringleader to good-deed-doers, cheerleader if ever there was one.
To be fair, there likely has not been a year in the past two decades that Tyler wouldn't have been as apt a choice for Citizen of the Year. And it's not as though no one else has noticed. Just last month the Arts Council of Greater New Haven bestowed its C. Newton Schenck III Lifetime Achievement Award on Tyler for his consistent support and activity in the arts.
Tyler is fond of saying, famously if facetiously, "Never trust anyone with two last names." But in dozens if not hundreds of examples, those were the last words potential donors heard before they wrote checks to the Shubert theater, United Way, Connecticut Public Television, Columbus House, the University of New Haven, the New Haven Public Education Fund, the Arts Council or any of the literally dozens of outfits he's raised money for or led over the years.
Columbus House has been serving the region's homeless population since 1982. To fulfill that mission it depends on the daily work of countless volunteers - to cook meals, host fundraising events, deliver sundry services.
But the effectiveness of those efforts were in jeopardy just as Columbus House neared completion of its second decade of service to the region's homeless. Facing the loss of its long-term lease, the homeless population's house of last resort was itself in danger of becoming homeless.
One individual to whom Alison Cunningham, Columbus House's executive director, turned was Cheever Tyler.
"We went to him as a friend of Columbus House," explains Cunningham. "We knew he would be a good resource. He saw the need and he offered his help, he cared about what we needed and made helping us his mission."
For the New Haven community it was time to make proverbial lemonade. Tyler supplied the sugar and the lemon squeezer, and Columbus House embarked on an effort to build a new, larger facility by means of a capital campaign aimed at raising $2.5 million, to add to $3.7 million in state bond funds.
Tyler stepped up as a volunteer to chair the capital drive that, according to Cunningham, is now halfway complete and well along its way to success.
With the help of the funds the campaign raised, Columbus House early last fall opened a 29,000-square-foot facility at 586 Ella Grasso Boulevard, capable of housing up to 101 single men and women. The facility includes an in-house laundry, TV rooms, baths, kitchen, dining rooms and lounges.
The design, by New Haven architect Paul Bailey, was recognized by the Connecticut chapter of the American Institute of Architects in its annual awards program.
Born in Los Angeles and raised in San Francisco, Cheever Tyler came to New Haven in 1955 as a Yale undergraduate, graduating with the Yale College class of '59. After a tour of duty in the Navy, he pondered his options.
"I was seriously considering divinity school," he recalls, "when I heard a loud, clear voice: 'I can do this without you.'"
Some might say he joined the opposing team when he enrolled in the University of Michigan law school. Following three years in Ann Arbor, Tyler and his wife Sally, a public school history teacher, turned down some big-city (and bigger money) offers to return to New Haven, where in 1964 he joined the law firm of Wiggin & Dana. Thirty-nine years and six children later, they're still here.
"I saw New Haven as a place where you could really raise a family," says Tyler. "New Haven is a city you can walk around and see people you know, on the street, stop and talk to them." Perhaps that explains why his footprints, literal and figurative, are so hard to miss throughout his adopted hometown.
Those footprints have cut a swath through education and business as well as the arts. Tyler is past chairman of the University of New Haven, president of the Albert Schweitzer Foundation, founder and president of the New Haven Public Education Fund. He is or has been a member of the boards of directors of Connecticut Public Television, the Mark Twain House, chairman of the Greater New Haven Chamber of Commerce, and served stints as president of the New Haven County Bar Association and the United Way of Greater New Haven. The list of accolades that have attended those efforts would fill its own page in Business New Haven's Book of Lists.
"People often look for an external fix to problems [of the city]. Cheever would be looking for how to get people involved. He's one of the most visionary people I know," says Hart Caparulo executive director of the local United Way.
Caparulo and Tyler were founding partners of Nonprofit Strategies Inc. a for-profit company devoted to strengthening nonprofits. The pair started the firm after Tyler left Wiggin & Dana in 1994 after 30 years.
"I work with a lot people who do a lot of great things," Caparulo says. "Most people think of philanthropy as giving money. For Cheever, that's not what philanthropy is. It's involvement in the process. He isn't interested in sprinkling money down from the 15th floor. He wants to be on the ground - involved.
"What can I say about working with Cheever?" Caparulo adds. "A lot of laughter - and he's not afraid to ask for the money.
"In this business, not everyone leading a [fundraising] campaign can or will do that," she explains. "They'll make the introductions, pave the way. With Cheever, you get a level of commitment and personal involvement. It's not, 'Do as I say.'"
"As a lawyer you gain the ability to see what's really important, and that's a skill that's very valuable in the non-profit sector," Tyler says. While the law was and remains a passion of Tyler's, and although he maintains a limited practice, court briefs are not the writings you're most likely find this attorney spending his time on.
On December 7, 2002 the New Haven Register explained the Arts Council's Schenck award and characterization of Tyler as "New Haven's Renaissance man" by proclaiming, "The Arts Council of Greater New Haven bestowed its lifetime achievement award Friday on city attorney, playwright, poet, photographer, filmmaker and philanthropist."
Renaissance man, indeed. Today Tyler is president of the Elm Shakespeare Theater Co., and his own theatrical efforts include Tuesday, first penned as a play and later produced by Tyler as a short film that has been screened in competitive film festivals in New Haven, Rhode Island, New York and Los Angeles.
Tuesday follows on the heels of locally produced Tyler plays such as The Crystal Bell, Hooter and Rafting, the latter which was staged as part of New Haven's International Festival of Arts & Ideas in 1999. His plays, short stories and poetry have found ready audiences and brought Tyler critical recognition as well.
A production of Waiting For Justice: The Trials of the Amistad at the Long Wharf Theatre in July 2000 saw him take the stage as New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett (a role he prepared for some years earlier as publisher of the Yale Daily News while an undergraduate).
In a production that included other New Haven notables such as U.S. Court of Appeals Judge (and former Yale Law School dean) Guido Calabresi playing John Quincy Adams, Tyler also assumed the role of Theophilus Conneau, a 19th-century French slave trader who later wrote a book about the slave trade.
The real Amistad experience was a formative one for New Haven, according to Tyler. "It involved the entire community, there was an effort to do something to help the captives and it included recruiting a former President, John Quincy Adams, to handle the case."
Tyler was helping arts organizations survive and thrive long before he himself became a practicing artist. In 1984, then-New Haven Mayor Biagio DiLieto asked Tyler to take over as president of the Shubert Theater when the College Street icon ran into serious financial distress.
Illustrating that it takes a village to keep a theater open, Tyler was joined in the effort by DiLieto protégé (now New Haven mayor) John DeStefano Jr. The Shubert's finances were repaired and bolstered (for a time, at least). A more recent budget crisis didn't see a reunification of the old fixer squad, as now Mayor DeStefano brought in an outside arts organization, the Columbus (O.) Association for the Performing Arts (CAPA), to manage and program the Shubert.
That hardly troubles Tyler, who vigorously defends the current model. "The Shubert is a victory sign for New Haven," he says. "It is a very important part of the economic vitality of the downtown, for the shops, the restaurants. What matters is that there's activity there."
Cheever Tyler knows a thing or two about activity. "He has energized and re-energized so many arts groups - and he keeps going," says Elizabeth Monz, executive director of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. "With his own involvement as an artist, he speaks from the heart. His passion for the arts knows no boundaries."
Today Tyler is working to share that passion by way of an arts project designed to showcase the depth and breadth of New Haven's artistic legacy. The project, in its third year of research, will be published in book form and feature artists who have lived in New Haven over the past 50 years. With photographs of the artists, pictures of their work and personal comments from the artists, their friends and/or their works, the project illuminates an artistic depth that Tyler knows few communities the size of New Haven could equal.
Leafing through its pages, one notes that the volume is equal parts paean to art - and promotion of New Haven as Connecticut's Athens.
"I want you to meet them, as close as I can get you," explains Tyler of the project. "It's important for this community to know itself.
"It's not what we have - it's who we are."
|
Go FirstGo PreviousGo
NextGo LastGo
to Index
|
|
