It Ain't Over (16 page)

And she logs in fewer hours than she once did. She’s earning only a fifth of her IBM salary, but she and Denny don’t miss the extra cash. “We both drive cars that are more than ten years old and live well within our means as far as our home and travel,” she says. “We find we don’t want or need much ‘stuff’ anymore.”

Instead, she considers herself rich with time to do things she enjoys. “I am volunteering, exercising, visiting friends and family, serving more
home-cooked meals. As they might say in that commercial, ‘Lower income in exchange for greater health and happiness . . . priceless!’ ”

Best of all, unlike her IBM clients, her current customers are always happy to see her. “I come walking in the door and they say, ‘Oh, Carol’s here! It’s massage day!’ It’s very rewarding.”

Sometimes when a customer first sits down in Carol’s chair, it’s like looking at her old self: cold hands, a sign of poor circulation, or fists clenched in anger or frustration. As soon as she places her hands on their shoulders, she can tell how bad their day has really been. “Sometimes their muscles are as hard as rocks.”

If they’re quiet, she stays quiet. If they start venting—“My husband really irked me today!” “I’m having a hard time with my mom.” “My boss is driving me crazy!”—she lends a sympathetic ear. “People open up quite a bit. Just by listening and saying ‘I had a similar experience and it worked out’ helps them.”

As Carol kneads their shoulders, their breathing slows and their muscles soften. “When they walk out of my massage, they know they can handle anything. And I love knowing that I am helping to relieve people’s pain, just as I did with my brother all those years ago.”

“I have never given up. You get knocked down, you get stepped on, you get up, you brush yourself off, and you keep going.”

Sue Rock, 51

Brooklyn, New York

W
hen Sue Rock opened the door to her apartment building that afternoon, she was stunned. Staring at her from a funeral notice posted on the glass was the face of Tyleasha, a woman she knew from the neighborhood.

She couldn’t believe it—she’d just seen Tyleasha a few weeks before. Shocked, she rushed over the next day to see Tyleasha’s mom to offer her condolences. The grieving mother hugged Sue and whispered in her ear, “Her husband did it. He took himself, too.”

“My blood turned to ice,” Sue recalls.

Then Sue began reading news accounts of the killing. The week before her murder, Tyleasha had applied for a protection-from-abuse order, telling the police that her husband had beaten her, choked her, and threatened her with a knife—all in front of her children. Eight hours after the judge granted the order, neighbors reported seeing a man dragging a woman into the house
during a violent argument. Tyleasha’s husband stabbed her more than a dozen times, then called her mother to say, “I just killed your daughter,” and, as security guards approached the house, shot himself in the head. Tyleasha’s nine-year-old daughter answered the door.

Tyleasha’s death haunted Sue for months, coming at a time when she was just recovering from her own family tragedy: Three years earlier, during his college spring break, her 18-year-old son had ended up in the hospital with end-stage liver failure. He died three days before his nineteenth birthday.

“It was horrifying,” Sue says. “I knew I could either grieve for my son and never come back, or try to find a way to live a life without him. It took me three years.”

Then Tyleasha’s death. “It gave me a sense of urgency. I, too, could be gone at any moment, so any good I could do with my life, I wanted to do it.”

Memories of Tyleasha came flooding back, only now Sue saw them in a new, grimmer light. “I began to remember pieces of the times I had seen Tyleasha. Late at night just arriving at her mom’s.
Was she running away from her home?
In sweats.
Was that all she was able to leave with?
And I hadn’t seen her in a while.
She must have gone back to him
.”

The shocking murder had awakened her to a somber reality: Women escaping domestic violence flee with only the clothes on their back.
How brave they are,
Sue thought.
But how do they even begin to start a new life?

An idea began to percolate.
The first thing they need is clothes,
Sue thought.
Maybe this is the good I can do in the world.

And Sue knew about clothes. She had grown up knitting and crocheting, and her husband, Jerome (“Rock”), was a trained tailor. For a year, they had been collecting fabric and other sewing treasures that were literally being given away.

“The garment industry in New York City was in sharp decline,” Sue
explains, “and free fabric began to flood the market.” And not just any fabric: Sue and Rock gathered cotton jersey, silk charmeuse, even leather, rescuing the precious materials before they went into the garbage.

They had been brainstorming about how to put the fabric to use. Jobs were hard to come by in the hospitality industry, where Rock had been working as a sous chef. So with a daughter and young son still at home, they got creative about how to use their talents to make money.

The couple came up with a plan: Sue would continue her nine-to-five job to make ends meet, while Rock would use the reclaimed fabrics to make easy-to-wear women’s clothes. They’d call their small clothing line Sue Rock Originals and try to sell them to boutiques and online.

But with Tyleasha’s murder, and their business plan in place, they decided that in addition to creating a contemporary eco-fashion line, they would also launch a clothing charity for women who were victims of domestic abuse.

“The idea was to find hundreds of regular folks like me—volunteers who knew how to sew, knit, weave, and crochet—and provide them the materials to make clothing for people in need.” The more she thought about the concept, the deeper the connection she felt to the women who would be wearing her clothing.

Sue researched her idea online and was shocked to discover how desperately her charity was needed. Crafters were already supplying preemies with caps, the homeless with scarves, and dogs and cats with fluffy beds. But nothing for women!

Sue and Rock decided that their charity would be funded in part by the clothing line. They would also change the name of the charitable arm to Sue Rock Originals Everyone Inc.—signifying that
everyone
in the community could participate, using their hands, not just their wallets, to make a difference.

Sue began advising her team of volunteers on what kinds of items women in shelters could use, like tank tops or hoodies.

“I felt inspired by how effortless it was,” Sue says. “Nobody said no. Fabric samples began pouring in from places like Liz Claiborne, Marc Jacobs, and Van Heusen. Everyone wanted to help. One day my husband even found a sewing machine by the door. And when we would hand out pieces to the women at the domestic violence residences, they were overwhelmed. It was a delicious, life-affirming sensation.”

Having started out with three local shelters, Sue’s outreach quickly grew to ten more shelters, along with another half-dozen national and international agencies that distributed the goods they made to women in need everywhere.

“Once we got started, we were on a roll,” Sue says. “We are get-to-work kinds of folks.”

Sue moved her headquarters from her cramped hallway to a 1,200-square-foot studio filled with 45 sewing machines. And she created a three-month program to train domestic violence victims, so they, too, could craft their own possessions. “When a new woman would come to the program,” says Sue, “I’d ask, ‘Do you want to make a leather coat to go with your wool slacks?’ And that would empower her. A woman who has done something as extraordinary and courageous as starting a new life deserves that kind of empowerment.”

Transforming the lives of others has transformed Sue, too. “I have created this new person in me who is vital and feels a sense of urgency toward what’s good in life. I’m making it up as I go along, but I’m doing it fearlessly.”

Laura Zander, 39

Reno, Nevada

C
all it pluck. Call it enterprise. Or call it desperation. But when Laura Zander was six years old and living with a single mom chronically strapped for money, she was determined to get an allowance any way she could. So she went door to door in their large apartment building in Raleigh, North Carolina, asking residents if there was a chore she might do in exchange for pay. For 25 cents, she would vacuum, do their dishes—or just keep them company while they watched TV.

So disarming was this small child’s request that people invariably took her up on her offer. To Laura’s young mind, she was raking it in. She hoarded her earnings, spending only a little, very occasionally, on candy.

Laura always knew how to take care of herself. When she attended North Carolina State, she paid her tuition by waiting tables and doing dorm security. After a year, she transferred to Sam Houston State in Huntsville, Texas, thanks to an academic scholarship and tuition help from her grandfather. She
earned her bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, then a master’s in political science from Washington State.

While working on a PhD in criminology at Penn State, Laura grew restless in grad school and curious about the riches she heard were being made in Silicon Valley, so in 1997 she moved west to join the Internet boom. Her first job was as a technical writer, but she gradually honed her programming skills until she became a software engineer.

It was in that first job that she met her husband, Doug, also a programmer. When they married in 2000, they were both working at midsized start-ups, Doug leading the entire software division of one, Laura progressing her way up the ladder of another. “We were working on some really exciting stuff, but the companies weren’t doing very well,” she says. “We worried every day that we were going to go out of business.” Then, in late 2000,
Pets.com
, one of the darlings of the dotcom era, went under. “When that happened, we thought,
This Internet stuff is never going to work,
” Laura says. “There were
Pets.com
ads and billboards all over the place, but even
that
wasn’t a sure thing.”

Laura and Doug reassessed their lives. Both still had jobs, but they decided to make a preemptive move to downscale their lives. As it happened, they had recently bought a house in Truckee, a small town just west of Lake Tahoe. “I thought,
Well, I guess we could move there,
” Laura says. And they did.

But how to earn a living in a town of 16,000? “You need to figure out what a small town needs,” Laura says. It was then that she regretted not having chosen medicine, law, dentistry, or another profession that lends daily infrastructure to a community.

Doug got a job in Sacramento as a software engineer, which meant a three-hour round-trip commute. Laura decided to make a go of it building high-end websites for local businesses. But she quickly discovered she had completely misjudged the market. “People move to Truckee to get
out
of the rat race,” she says. “They’re
not looking for someone to build them a $10,000 or $20,000 website.” Still, Laura tried everything. She even channeled her six-year-old self and started knocking on doors—with considerably less success. She signed up only two clients.

With time on her hands, Laura took up knitting. She knitted sweaters, then more sweaters, before switching to socks—dozens of pairs of socks. She’d have knitted still more but the closest yarn store was 40 miles away in Reno.

One of Laura’s two clients was Lorna Miser, who hand-dyed yarn. They became fast friends, and Lorna persuaded Laura to open her own yarn shop in Truckee. “Doug was keeping us afloat, but I was a little aimless. So I thought, ‘I might as well create a job that I’ll be happy to go to every day, and if I make $50,000 a year, that would be awesome.’ ”

Laura and Doug decided to sink their entire savings of $30,000 into opening a 500-square-foot yarn and gourmet coffee store on Truckee’s main drag. As it happened, Laura’s other client built espresso carts, and the two set up a barter arrangement: Website work in exchange for a deep discount on a cart. Laura and Doug installed the cart inside the little store and named the business Jimmy Beans Wool. (“Jimmy” is Doug’s nickname for Laura, after a character in one of their favorite Tom Snider songs; and beans and wool were the shop’s signature merchandise.) Two years later, they started a second shop in Reno.

“I didn’t have a board of advisers helping me build a brand. Not everyone is lucky enough to have millions in venture capital or a team of experts,” Laura says. “But even if you don’t have that, it doesn’t mean you won’t succeed.”

The business did well from the start, thanks to a few lucky breaks. First, Lorna, who was closing her own business, sold her inventory of yarn to Laura
at a rock-bottom price. Then fashion entered a scarf craze, and demand for yarn skyrocketed. “That was a real boon for us,” Laura says.