PEOPLE OF INTEREST
ANTHONY INSWASTY
City Manager David Dyess and Jim Chrulski, community services director, consult on a video shoot showcasing culture in downtown Stuart.
BY DONNA CRARY
Sit down with Jim Chrulski and you quickly discover
that he enjoys putting his creative talents to work. As
director of community and legislative affairs for the
City of Stuart, he uses his artistic side to help make
the city an economically sound, vibrant and beautiful community.
His approach is a combination of a lifelong passion
for music and the arts mixed with practical, fiscal sense.
“It’s about creating a balance of left brain versus right
brain — being able to understand that if we want to enjoy the
beauty, aesthetics and cultural arts, there needs to be some
sort of financial plan,” he says. “There needs to be some logic
to this whole thing for it to actually manifest, or it’s just a
cool idea.”
Born in Lorain, Ohio, Chrulski developed a love for music
early on through the influence of his father and mother.
“When I was 6, my parents took me to a dinner and they
said, ‘Musical literacy is as important as anything else,’” he
recalls. “They told me, ‘You’re going to take up an instrument
and study it for 10 years and practice every day for at least a
half an hour — birthdays, Christmases included.”
Chrulski knew exactly what instrument he wanted to play.
“I told them that I wanted to be a drummer,” he says with
a laugh. “I’ll never forget the horror-stricken look on my
mom’s face. She had to suck it up when she realized that she
had to live with a drummer for 10 years. Although she was a
drummer herself — and a marimba player. She was fine with
it, in the end.”
For a decade, Chrulski was trained in multiple styles of
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