Spice of life

Variety is the hallmark of Barbra Rubin-Perry’s resume

BY ELLEN GILLETTE

There are no medals for rescuing neglected animals or for buying the deadest-looking plants in order to nurture them back to health. And there are no medals for having the most interesting resume, though if there were, Port St. Lucie’s Barbra Rubin-Perry might give Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps a run for his money.

Someone once asked Rubin-Perry why she’d had so many different jobs, including many in radio. “I asked her how many movies Lauren Bacall was in,” Rubin-Perry said. “Each movie was a separate job. You don’t think of it that way, but when you’re a broadcaster, you go from a small station to a bigger station, then to a bigger station.”

Rubin-Perry is still part-owner of Comp-U-Sultants, Inc., a New York-based company that she and her husband had hoped to continue here. “People don’t use computers anymore,” she explained. “They use laptops, tablets, phones. If it’s a desktop, I can take it apart and put it back together again, but…”

Geographically separated from her husband as he cares for his elderly mother up north, Rubin-Perry wonders what the future holds. Having survived Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Milton’s recent visit to the Treasure Coast reminded her of how life can take surprising — even tragic — turns.

Rubin-Perry’s paternal grandparents emigrated from Europe, establishing a successful business in New York. “They brought over all their relatives and gave them jobs,” Rubin-Perry said.

Her parents grew up in the same building in the Bronx — her mother, on the second floor; her father, on the fifth. “My mother wasn’t quite five feet tall,” Rubin-Perry said. “She hung from chinning bars to stretch herself until she was tall enough to get into the Marines.”

Meanwhile, the soldier who would become Rubin-Perry’s father was stationed in the Philippines. An uncle was in the Navy; petite Rubin-Perry later dreamed of joining the Air Force. Despite efforts with her mother’s method, she missed the mark — literally. “But I tried.”

ON THE RADIO

While Rubin-Perry was growing up in Queens, and later on Long Island, school didn’t hold the same appeal as Greenwich Village. “My friends and I would take the train and just hang out. The future famous rock stars were just people then. I met [Bob] Dylan, Mick Jagger. I’d sit and listen to Allen Ginsburg.”

The beatnik era was giving way to hippies, but performers still frequented coffeehouses. One night Rubin-Perry saw Gene Krupa playing the drums on a platform next to a bar. “I just stood there and watched.”

Rubin-Perry worked at a wallpaper store [“My uncle was dating the owner”] and a retail store. In college, she worked in the cafeteria. “Every day or so, I took one of the plates. I have a whole set. Pyrex, solid as a rock.”

A self-described science geek, Rubin-Perry entered Rochester Institute of Technology as a biochemistry major but, “The math killed me,” she said. She transferred schools, eventually earning a bachelor’s in speech with a minor in education. Later, she got her master’s in journalism — a career she never foresaw.

“I hated writing,” she said. “I fell into journalism accidentally.”

Rubin-Perry broke into radio through a boyfriend, when she was at the college radio station with him one night. When the news person didn’t show, she was handed the script and a microphone. “I became the news person, then got a Friday night show.”

ENTER COMPUTERS

Sharing an interest in electronics, Rubin-Perry and her then-boyfriend built their own computer in 1972: a workstation with no screen. “We had one of the modems you put the phone receiver into, but we could hack into three computers: at the University of Rochester, at Xerox — my summer job — and the Navy. There was a Star Trek game on that one; we played all the time. There was somebody in my apartment 24/7.”

Rubin-Perry landed a job at WNYR/WEZO in Rochester, changing tapes from midnight to six. “I was in show business! From there, I went to Channel 8 as the audio person for the news in master control.” She also spliced commercials into movies and literally cut-and-pasted news from wire stories onto paper for the anchors to read.

Working as news and public affairs director in Kingston, she met Robert, a disc jockey. Later, the two worked together in Connecticut. But when Rubin-Perry visited her ailing parents back home, she felt she needed to be closer. There, she found work as a commodities broker.

Robert followed. The couple was one of 14 tying the knot on Valentine’s Day, 1989, at Chase Manhattan Bank on 14th Street and 5th Avenue. When the 14th Street-Union Square Business Improvement District put out the call for prospective couples in the Village Voice, even the Wall Street Journal caught wedding fever and reported it. “We were on every news channel, CNN, even in Japan.”

Computers were again a common interest. “I knew wiring and soldering,” Rubin-Perry said. “He knew programming. We started our own business.”

Comp-U-Sultants built computers from scratch. “We had great clients. We even built computers for reading books for the blind, shipping them all over the world.” Little by little, though, manufacturing plants for larger companies made them obsolete. “Theirs were cheaper and not as good as ours, but we became more of a consulting and repair business.”

The couple also moonlighted as film and TV extras. Rubin-Perry’s credits include The Bourne Ultimatum and Law and Order SVU. On Long Island, she was involved with community theater.

OT and the STORMY WEATHER

Rubin-Perry was going door-to-door with the U.S. Census when a man offered her a turtle, rather than give it to a nearby restaurant for soup. “That was OT, for Original Turtle, in 2010. I don’t know how old he is, but they can live 50 years, so [he’ll] outlive me. That was the first one.”

Over the years, the number increased. When Hurricane Sandy blew through, Rubin-Perry’s turtle rescues survived; her house barely did. Chamber of Commerce president for 11 years in one of the hardest hit areas, she returned to journalism as editor of the Oceanside Island Park Herald. “We wrote a lot about the recovery from Sandy. FEMA. The damage.”

“We had 12 feet of water in our house,” she said. “No electricity. We called it the Year of Living Amish. We stayed with radio friends until we got the house fixed.”

Visiting friends who had moved to Port St. Lucie, Rubin-Perry experienced culture shock. After existing for years among zombie houses and businesses, in the midst of the maddening noise of jackhammers, “It was paradise.” They moved here in 2021.

There are limits to what any profile can include. Rubin-Perry’s participation in the March on Washington didn’t make it to this one. Her trip to China following Chairman Mao’s death. Last year’s visit to Abu Dhabi to help a friend after surgery. And there are almost always events that, for one reason or another, are best left private. But after a rough year and unsure about the immediate future, Rubin-Perry looks for ways to connect with others — even if it’s just making sure the yard crew outside her condo has cold water on a hot day.

“I want to do a 5K,” she said. “I found out they give you medals when you do 5Ks. I want a medal.”

Lauren Bacall would be proud.

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BARBRA RUBIN-PERRY

Age: 75

Lives in: The Lakes in Tradition

Occupation: owner, Comp-U-Sultants sales and computing firm in New York

Family: husband, Robert

Education: bachelor’s degree in speech communication from State University of New York at New Paltz; master’s degree in journalism from New York University

Hobbies: rescuing animals and plants; exercise; community theater

Who inspires me: “I’ve developed an interest, in my old age, in following astrophysicists like Neil deGrasse Tyson and I’m a Star Trek geek. I met Duke University’s Mohamed Noor, one of the show’s advisors, on a Star Trek cruise. When I talk about or think about or listen to conversations about space travel, or I’m trying to figure something out, I’ll shoot him a message and say, ‘What about this?’ I research, which goes back to my journalism days.”

Something most people don’t know about me: “When the Beatles came to the States in 1964, I cut school and was there at Kennedy Airport. If you look really carefully, photos show a shot of the people up on top of the building. In the corner, there’s little me standing there. And I was at three of the Woodstocks.”