Local heroes

The Phoenix salutes seven individuals whose efforts make Rhode Island a better place

They say there's no such thing as a hero anymore, that people are too self-absorbed and complacent to do something extraordinary for someone else. But believe it or not, heroes do still exist -- we just need to look harder to find them. Maybe they aren't throwing themselves in front of a speeding truck to protect us from the blow, or demonstrating for our civil rights. But they're there in smaller, more day-to-day ways. They're the cop who sees beyond the criminal to the mixed-up teenager within, the film director who never forgets where he came from. These heroes aren't necessarily American icons, just good people who remind us that life is larger than it often seems. In honor of our first-ever "The Best" issue, the Phoenix salutes seven local heroes who, in various ways, have made their corner of the world better. These days, that's really what it's about -- seeing the little picture and doing something big about it.

Tim Patterson

Tim Patterson

A woman once came into Providence Detective-Sergeant Tim Patterson's office to report her spirit stolen. Her ex-husband had taken her picture -- and had robbed her spirit in the process. Some cops might have laughed her out of their office. Patterson got her picture back.

"It took me 15 minutes to find him, get the picture, give it to the woman and let her rip it up. I do a lot of things that people think are stupid," says the detective.

A year ago, people were probably calling Patterson more than stupid. Some thought he was crazy when Patterson, founder of the Providence Police Gang Unit, started the Street Warriors' Organization of Peace (SWOOP), a football league in which warring gangs play each other and the police serve as refs. But a year later, with gang violence down and police-gang relations improving, Patterson has proved himself to be anything but crazy. Indeed, his program has been so successful, he is one of Rhode Island's most valued heroes.

SWOOP grew out of a five-month period of violence in 1997, during which there were 22 shootings between the Oriental Rascals and the Providence Street Boys (PSB). At first, Patterson, who spends most of his work days talking to street kids and advocating peace in schools,tried to sit both sides down and talk it out. But when that idea failed, a PSB member came to Patterson with an idea: let's settle it on the football field.

A few weeks later, the nation's first police-organized gang football league kicked off. The players wore no helmets or pads, as the only official uniform was gang colors, while some of the refs packed heat. That day, the PSB won the series 2-1, but the Rascals and the police also won -- shootings between these two gangs virtually ceased. As Patterson's coworker, State Police detective Michael Weinquist, says, "I'd rather come here on a Saturday afternoon and volunteer my time [than] deal with shootings at night."

That year's off-season was busy for Patterson as well. He raised $11,500 from private corporations, individuals and the Providence Boys & Girls Club to expand the league, which had mushroomed into six teams (one has since been sidelined), with the 37 members in each sporting jerseys embroidered with their gang name, by the time SWOOP's second season began this fall. On the first day of play, the reigning champions, the PSB, made a dramatic, late entrance wearing PSB red and holding their trophy high. "Do you know what it's like to see these kids proud of themselves?" asks Patterson.

But that pride couldn't happen without Patterson. During his 21 years on the force, he has spent a lot of time building personal connections and learning about Providence's immigrants from the local community. He's often invited to christenings, weddings, birthday parties, and he knows almost every kid who takes the field by name. "Sergeant Patterson does so many things with these guys. I think of him like a father figure," says Weinquist. "If he says, `Stop it,' they stop. I never pictured these kids responding to a cop like that." With a police force notorious for its violence, maybe the gang members never pictured a cop responding to them like Patterson does either. As Tom Dy, 22, a Providence Street Boy, says, "I hate cops. But I like cops who organize football."

The SWOOP results have been so positive that Patterson plans to continue with a basketball league, start a GED program, and get corporate sponsorship for the league. He sees proactive community policing as key to community development. "That kid on the corner is a somebody," he says. "Some think he's maybe half the problem. I think he's maybe half the answer."
-- Celeste Perri

Walter Miller

Walter Miller

Okay, here's the deal. If you have an appointment with Providence Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, Jr., you could wait anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours before Hizzoner is ready to see you. Yes, there's the Providence scrapbook, filled with glowing articles about Cianci and his renaissance city, to leaf through while you cool your heels at City Hall. But that gets old fast.

So thank God for Walter Miller, a bored reporter's best friend. "Pick a card, any card," the 63-year-old says, his soft, baked-apple face lighting up with mischief. He makes an elaborate show of shuffling the deck and then, somehow, your ace of spades or king of diamonds always lands on top. Cianci calls Miller, who lives with his cousin in East Providence, the "official greeter" at City Hall. Although he holds no paid position, Miller rides the bus there every day. According to the staff, he phones in the morning to see what's on the agenda -- and he always calls in sick if he won't be in.

In the office, Miller loves to play matchmaker, dance in quick little spins, and give out special gifts. In an obvious breach of journalistic integrity, this reporter, after a recent interview, went home loaded with goodies -- a pen with a guardian angel attached to the cap, a "Re-elect Our Mayor" pin autographed by Miller, a stick of wintergreen gum, and the Mayor's Own Marinara Sauce, which Miller says he drinks every day to stay young. (He also says that if you add a little pepper and salt, the sauce is great for colds, clearing out phlegm to make breathing easier.)

In another capacity, Miller is the mayor's secret weapon, the reason Cianci gets reelected every term. You see, Miller is a master of political jingles, recording tunes tinkling from the Crescent Park Carousel in Riverside and then singing over the music during impromptu performances. He also uses his tape recorder (Cianci usually buys him a new one for Christmas or Miller's birthday) to monitor conversations, being sure to report any Cianci-bashing back to the mayor.

Over the years, his fierce loyalty to Buddy has led to some impressive connections -- Miller has a file brimming with old news clippings about himself. There he is between Bob Dole and John Chafee; oh, and here's a letter from Bob Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots. Miller is also the subject of a film by a Rhode Island School of Design student, and many know him best as the guy who runs around at Providence College

basketball games with a magic shaker. "Whenever I point it at them [the PC team], they win," he says, although the folks in the office tease that Miller skips any match the Friars have a chance of losing.

By the way, did Miller ever tell you about the time a falcon fell off a building in downtown Providence and he grabbed the bird and kissed it? Needless to say, it's a long story, but next time you're at City Hall, you just might have the time to hear it.
-- Jody Ericson

Michael Corrente

Michael Corrente

When film director Michael Corrente was growing up in Pawtucket and Coventry, his dad was a big movie buff. "He'd drag us in in the middle of the day, off of the football field in the yard, to come in and watch it. To see Bicycle Thief, to come in and see these great classics," Corrente related on the Pawtucket set of his film, American Buffalo, a few years back. " `George, Michael, get in here. Sit down and watch this. This is a good picture. I seen it.' "

Thomas Wolfe once advised, "You can't go home again," but then he didn't have the opportunity to scout locations for movies. Corrente actually likes it here and his roots go deep. In fact, he still might be in the construction business, like his late father George, if Trinity Rep's Project Discovery hadn't latched onto him in high school -- and hooked him for life. Corrente ended up studying directing at the theater's conservatory and working there for a while as a stage carpenter. Soon he was in Manhattan, setting up a shoestring theater company and staging a play he wrote that would develop into the gritty Federal Hill, which was based on Corrente's experiences on the edges of the mob scene in that neighborhood during his late teens.

Corrente's latest directing effort is Outside Providence, which old Coventry pal Peter Farrelly wrote, based on his obligatory coming-of-age novel. (The last word from Miramax was for a 1999 release date.) While the Farrelly brothers managed to get shots of Providence in Dumb & Dumber as well as in their recent mega-hit, There's Something About Mary, Corrente, no doubt, will be the one doing the most to get high hair and the nasal Cranston whine into America's consciousness.

He plans to build a sound stage in Providence's decommissioned Cranston Street Armory, and last weekend, he was scheduled to meet with Steven Spielberg to discuss DreamWorks's coproducing Corrente's next movie, which is about boxing. In considering projects, Corrente looks primarily for screenplays that can be shot in Rhode Island. Among locally connected novels he is considering are Spartina, by John Casey, and Fence Jumpers, by local writer Bob Leuci.

"I say that I live in New York, but I spent nine of the last 12 months in Rhode Island. You do the math," Corrente said recently. If he keeps that attitude, Providence may someday have kids hawking Map of the Stars' Homes up and down Blackstone Boulevard.
-- Bill Rodriguez

Shannah Kurland

Shannah Kurland

Little did she know when she signed on for a part-time work-study job at DARE (Direct Action for Rights and Equality) during her last summer at Brown in 1989 that her decision would result in a career and a lifetime commitment to fighting the good fight. Shannah Kurland, director of DARE for the last four years, remembers asking Mark Toney, the agency's first director and founding organizer, "How do you make people care?" His response was something she took to heart and has remembered each day since: "You talk to people who have to care because they're affected by an issue."

Addressing people's self-interest while broadening their definition of the term has been DARE's mandate since its formative days in 1986. It also has been Kurland's task, first as an intern, then as a community organizer and now as a director who trains interns and organizers.

Kurland came into DARE at a time when supermarket pricing and policies in South Providence were under scrutiny and members were pushing for new playgrounds, changes in school policies and voter registration. But when she became a full-time organizer in the fall of 1990, she took on a project that would have sweeping results -- fighting for better wages and benefits for the state's licensed child-care providers.

"We got a list of providers and held a meeting, and there was such amazing energy and anger that we saw the potential for developing new leadership and for winning an issue around this," Kurland recalls.

Indeed, after an "action" in 1992, during which day-care providers took over an employment agency within the state welfare office and demanded to speak to the director, payroll checks for providers, which had been running up to 12 months behind, began to arrive on time. And after another six years of meetings, hearings and protests by DARE members, Rhode Island, in 1997, became the first state in the country to offer health insurance (RIte Care) to child-care providers and their children.

The 31-year-old Kurland pictures herself as always doing something connected to "the movement" for economic, social and political justice and against racism and sexism. Marriage and a year-old son have mellowed her somewhat from her student days, but she can still tick off the qualities of a good organizer with a fervent jab at each finger: "love of a good fight; an almost irrational belief in what people are capable of, even when they can't see it themselves; an ability to see the work as its own reward; an openness to enjoy and get nourishment from different people's pictures of that work; a belief that you yourself can grow and develop; and an absolute determination to defeat oppression."
-- Johnette Rodriguez

Casby and Mary Sylvia Harrison

Casby and Mary Sylvia Harrison

On the surface, Casby and Mary Sylvia Harrison are a study in contrasts. Casby is the laid-back, easygoing one, while Mary is full of assertive, in-your-face energy. Casby grew up in a military family that moved around a lot, while Mary's large family has deep roots in Rhode Island. But don't let their different styles fool you -- both share a consuming passion for justice, family and community values and equal opportunity. Indeed, as Mary says, "Our values are completely aligned."

An attorney for Tillinghast Licht & Semonoff, Casby describes himself as "sort of a general practitioner." Although his primary work is in corporate and civil litigation, he also represents numerous nonprofit and community groups in areas such as fair housing and civil rights. On a volunteer basis, Casby, in his second year as board chairman for the Rhode Island chapter of the National Conference for Community and Justice (originally known as the National Conference for Christians and Jews), is at the forefront of an effort to foster brother- and sisterhood.

"It's an important organization, because it brings together corporate citizens who operate at high levels in their organizations to procure money, [and this] enables the organization to help the younger generation to bridge cultural gaps and break down racial barriers," he explains. "The focus is on eliminating prejudice."

Other civic duties of Casby's include serving on the boards of City Year and the Providence Black Repertory Theater, where Casby, also a major supporter, has been on the ground floor of a budding organization involved in bringing exciting new theatrical and musical productions to the area.

Mary, who met Casby while both attended law school at Antioch -- "the radical poverty law school," she notes with a laugh -- serves on the Rhode Island Board of Regents. More important, she is the heart, soul and brains behind the Children's Crusade, a visionary program working to level the playing field by "bridging the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children" in Rhode Island. In its eighth year, the early-intervention program works with kids from grades 3 through 12 and is involved in fund-raising, research, program development and providing grants.

It's obvious that Mary is the right person to undertake such an ambitious and vital organization. In addition to her energy and commitment, Mary Sylvia Harrison is clearly a woman who does not take "no" for an answer.

With their two children, Nina, 13, and Casby IV (known as "Max"), 11, the Harrisons live in a warm and roomy old Victorian house in the Elmwood section of Providence. Rather than making their home in the suburbs or the tonier East Side of Providence, the Harrison family has chosen to live in a transitional neighborhood, because, as Casby puts it, "If you're inclined to give, being here where folks still face a number of problems" is the answer. If Providence is indeed a "Renaissance City," it's because of passionate, involved people like Casby and Mary Sylvia Harrison.
-- Rudy Cheeks

Barnaby Evans

Barnaby Evans

On the midnight when Barnaby Evans first set the Providence River ablaze (and ushered in 1996 in the process), only 11 braziers were burning. Yet that was impressive enough to rate a first-prize award for creative programming from First Night International -- and to blossom into as many as 81 fires burning at once on close to 20 evenings this summer and fall as part of WaterFire Providence, a newly traditional event that has allowed the city to bask in the reflected glory of its national attention. All this from a sculptor and photographer who started out studying environmental biology at Brown University in 1972.

Evans's public involvement isn't all fiery spectacle, though. He was also at the forefront of the Banner Trail project, which allows visitors to get acquainted with Providence by looking for color-coded banners in front of arts and entertainment sites and museums. And Evans was the man behind the city's $1.4 million Regent Avenue School conversion into artists' studios, another helpful contribution in a city where an unusual number of artists stick around after graduation -- as Evans himself did instead of returning to his native Berkeley, California.

Such a civic-minded guy. Indeed, Evans was a natural for photographer Stephen Brigidi's book of accolades, Remarkable People. And how appropriate that his sculptural forté is site-specific art. Evans, after all, was the consultant hired to supervise the public art installations in the Rhode Island Convention Center two years ago.

Until recently, Mr. WaterFire was best known for his photography, having had sculpture and photography exhibitions around France, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as from Manhattan to Oregon. But WaterFire has proved to be his biggest claim to fame. From the New York Times to the Toronto Star, word is out about the sound and light installation that strikes people so dramatically as they stroll along the river.

The artist wants them to have a multi-sensory yet meditative community experience: soothing music, aroma of cedar and oak, heat on their faces, not to mention the transfixing fire in their eyes. "The human body is largely water, and what makes it alive is that it is combusting energy -- it is burning," Evans explains. "It is the same sort of chemical energy that is making those fires go. We just control it in a little more subtle way. So these are very emblematic of a human life." Especially a life as furiously creative as his.
-- Bill Rodriguez

Roberta Richman

Roberta Richman

In June 1999, Roberta Richman will celebrate her 20th year at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections and her 25th year as a member of Hera, the women's art gallery and collective in Wakefield. Although she has moved through the ranks at the ACI (Adult Correctional Institutions) in Cranston to become one of five wardens under the three directors, she has kept her art on a parallel track and was very pleased to have a show last May of her most recent work, landscape-inspired oil-stick pieces.

"As a working artist all those years before, I always had a need to give back," says Richman, the 57-year-old warden of the women's prison at the ACI. "I wanted to return some of the good fortune I felt I had had."

So in 1979, Richman administered a federally funded Arts in Corrections Program. And at the end of that one-year grant, she took over the physical-education program for the prison. From there, she moved on to administer educational services for 3500 inmates, then on to prison industries. In 1991, she was finally appointed warden.

When Richman started at the ACI, 18 women resided behind the prison's bars. They've now peaked at 260, and even though only 6.2 percent of the US prison population is female, there has been a 300 percent increase in the women's population, contrasted with a 200 percent growth among male prisoners.

In addition to the "core curriculum" at the women's prison -- daily groups on issues such as relapse prevention, healthy relationships, drug education, GED preparation and job exploration -- Richman has helped institute a 28-day voluntary holistic program called "Discovery," which includes health and fitness classes, daily aerobics, nutrition discussions, meditation exercises and a mural-painting project. She also has been adamant that other service programs be designed in collaboration with local agencies, in order to maintain a relationship with the inmate/client upon her release.

"If we, as a society, pay huge amounts of money to put and keep people in prison, we should at the very least provide them with opportunities to address their problems," says Richman. "Once they enter this system, we have a chance to pull them out of the invisible underworld they have been living in and, even if it's just six months, to get them into a safe, drug-free place with good medical care, a balanced diet, plenty of rest and to try to point them in the right direction.

"It's a very compelling world," she says. "It continuously gave me wonderful opportunities to learn something new. Now I'm in a role where I think I belong. Every day, I can help people rethink their lives."
-- Johnette Rodriguez