PEOPLE OF INTEREST
83
ELISABETH GERARD
Age: 49
Occupation: Artisan
Family: Husband, Morgan;
daughter, 1adia Àve sons, 'avid,
Shawn, Ezechiel, Jeremiah
People
and Joshua
Education: Associate degree in
political science from Indian
River State College
Hobbies: Working with wood
Who inspires me: “My daughter, Nadia, inspires me because
she always stays composed and has such self-control, despite
any adversity thrown at her.”
Something no one knows about me: “I am a very open
person and I can’t think of anything no one would not know
about me. Something people should know about me is that if
you ask me something, I will give you an honest answer.”
our children,” Gerard said, adding that raising productive
citizens was their goal.
Since her husband knew her passion for creating things
with wood, he would pick up scraps at his construction site
and bring them home to her.
“I could make things better than what you could buy,” she
said, with a laugh. “When our son David needed a high chair,
I took the wood scraps and created one. It was better than
the ones you could buy, more like an old-fashioned one. It
might not have looked as pretty, but it was sturdy and had a
large tray. If one of the kids needed a desk for school work, I
built one. I built bookcases, bed frames and many other items
around the house.”
She and Jeremiah, her 16-year-old son, laughed as they remembered
a wooden dollhouse she built for daughter, Nadia.
“I had rough and tumble boys, so I had to make it indestructible,”
she explained. Jeremiah chuckled as they recalled
the sledge hammers it took to break the dollhouse apart for
disposal.
A woman at her church kept urging her to get her GED, as
she hadn·t Ànished schooling in The 1etherlands. After a lot
of nudging, she headed to Indian River State College’s adult
education program at what is now the Pruitt Campus in St.
Lucie West.
It took her very little time to study for the test, and her
teachers took an interest in her, she said. They encouraged
her to apply for scholarships. She received an award and
went on, attending college part time along with her three
older children while continuing to teach the younger ones at
home. It was a busy life.
Earning an associate degree in political science in 2008, Gerard
was invited to join Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society and
started working toward a bachelor’s degree, but had to stop
to focus on her younger sons and their schooling.
“At the college, I learned to buy local and participate in
community-service projects,” she said. That said, she and her
family spent a lot of hours on the weekends with Jim Oppenborn,
a 6t. /ucie &ounty coastal ocial, bagging and deploying
oyster shells in an eͿort to help cleanse the water in the
Indian River Lagoon. She also began to frequent the farmer’s
market after the bagging eͿorts and spent some money buying
local products.
Her children told her she should open a booth to sell her
wooden items. She had been making large 3- by-7 wooden >>