The business of do-good

VANDY MAJOR/FLORIDA WEEKLY Contractors installing bricks for the downtown Fort Myers streetscape. The idea and much of the work came from two local businessmen. Never mind the current stereotype of single-minded profiteering and greed in American business, with its crippling economic consequences.

The do-gooders remain strikingly in evidence, fortunately for the rest of us.

From Fort Myers to Naples, business owners led neither by the carrot nor the stick — or for that matter guided by any promise of their own profit — have given tens of thousands of dollars and years of unpaid effort to change the world here.

In the City of Palms, the definition of "hands on philanthropist" comes in the form of two downtown business owners — supported by a few friends — who almost single-handedly saved the bricks under the asphalt streets of the historic district.

Raimond Aulen, owner of the Indigo Room, and David Yates, president of Geeks- R-Us, which manages computer networks for business and government agencies, couldn't get city officials interested, so they did it themselves, over roughly a two-year period.

VANDY MAJOR/FLORIDA WEEKLY David Yates and Raimond Aulen were the force behind the brick streets that line downtown Fort Myers today. First, they located the buried bricks after officials told them not many remained; then they designed and built a system to clean and restore old bricks as the city peeled back the streets to replace the infrastructure underneath; then they personally hired laborers and cleaned thousands of bricks themselves, while recruiting friends to donate equipment; and finally, they convinced officials that several blocks of downtown should be repaved with those very heavy red bricks, upon which Thomas Edison and Henry Ford once trod.

And now they are.

Which suggests a motto, the motto of Outward Bound School where Neapolitan John Remington, owner of the high-end A. Vernon Allen Builders, is a member of the national board and an alumnus of the Hurricane Island survival and self-discovery course, in Maine: "Change your mind, change your world."

For about 22 years now, Remington and his wife, along with philanthropist Lavern Gaynor, have been sending "two or three boats of kids and a boat of teachers each spring break to a course in the Keys," as he describes it — that's one of the rugged, outin the elements Outward Bound courses of eight to 11 days that help people reconsider their lives and their values.

Students and teachers come from all of Collier county's high schools, as well as from home-schooled environments; the cost to send them is roughly $140 per day, per person.

All of their stories bespeak an activist philanthropy both energetic and peerless, and capable of affecting other lives for the good.

Here are some of their own observations and a few of the details.

Raimond Aulen, Indigo Room owner, and David Yates, president of Geeks-RUs computer network managers, Fort Myers:

Years ago, David Yates learned that if you want change, you learn how the system works, and then you go out and change it.

That was when Mr. Yates studied the environment with now retired FGCU Professor Bill Hammond, in a high-school course designed to create "activists."

It did. Mr. Yates is an activist ala Bill Hammond. And so is Rai Aulen — an activist of the self-made variety.

"Rai's a historic preservation expert, and he just decided this had to be done," Mr. Yates explains of their two-year effort, supported by friends and fellow contributors, to pave the streets of the historic downtown district with red bricks that once supported the likes of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, before disappearing for decades under the asphalt.

But city officials were decidedly uninterested in such a project, as they geared up to rip downtown to shreds and restore its aged infrastructure, beginning about three years ago.

"The first thing the city told us was that there weren't many bricks under there," Mr. Yates recalls.

"We knew that wasn't true," says Mr. Aulen.

"So," adds Mr. Yates, with a huge conspiratorial grin, "allegedly we went on stealth missions at 3 a.m. and drilled holes in the streets."

From Jackson Street to Broadway, along both First Street and Main street, they found brick dust. Countless thousands of bricks that had been laid into the streets between 1918 and the early 1920s were still there.

Not only that, but they were in great shape, many of them.

So as city workers peeled the streets, piled the bricks on pallets and left them sitting on street corners or out in an industrial yard off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Mr. Aulen and Mr. Yates designed and built a cleaning system.

"Rai built the huge tables topped with heavy metal grills, the diamond-shaped ones, and we finally had a system where the frontend loader could drive down the middle between the tables with pallets.

"Our laborers would offload bricks onto the tables from the inside, and then others lined up on the outside would clean the bricks and move them to other pallets, where they'd be restacked until they were ready for use."

But it's not that simple, and it shows how extraordinary an effect a few determined dogooders can have.

Mr. Aulen hired laborers from his own pocket. Mr. Yates finally convinced the city to donate a single employee, which then allowed him to get help from Sheriff Mike Scott, a fellow member of the downtown Rotary Club, who assigned prisoners to the job and even delivered them each weekend morning at 7 a.m. (generally the sheriff's department does not deliver its outside workers anywhere).

Meanwhile, "the good folks at Caloosa Tent and Rentals donated an entire 30-by- 30-foot tent, for almost two years, and they ended up losing that," Mr. Aulen says.

But workers and bricks alike had some protection.

And Rick Simpson at Construction Sales and Rental Equipment in downtown donated a big new front-end loader to move pallets of bricks.

"He had somebody bring it out Friday night and return it Monday morning, every weekend for months, and he paid for everything — gas, maintenance all of it," Mr. Aulen says. "I don't know how much that cost him."

The city offered no equipment, and seemed skeptical of the project, Mr. Yates says — until he and Mr. Aulen had cleaned about 80,000 bricks (they would clean and prepare at least that many more over time, and Mr. Yates now has a bad shoulder from the process of picking up broken bricks with his right hand and tossing them in a pile to be used for edges, and ends).

Then one afternoon, everything changed. The city brought in a crew that laid the first 25 feet of bricks as a test patch in front of the new Sidney and Berne Davis Art Center, and that's where Mr. Yates's girlfriend found him about 9 p.m. that night, staring in wonder.

"It was so much better than I ever thought it could be," he says. "And I have a wonderful girlfriend who put up with me being gone all day every weekend for eight months (she's Connie Martin, president of the POLO Club and the senior event coordinator for the Southern Region of the Make-A-Wish Foundation).

Ms. Martin and others even brought out pizza for the workers, who sometimes included high school students getting in on the project.

And now about half the bricks on those downtown streets are historic, and recycled.

In the minds of Mr. Yates and Mr. Aulen, that's better than streets paved with gold.

"It's not just a matter of having any bricks, although Rai located places where we could buy old matching bricks or have them made to those oversized scales. But it's having THESE bricks," Mr. Yates insists.

"It ties downtown together. It's our history, echoing under our feet."

John Remington, owner, A.Vernon Allen Builders Inc., Naples

Raised in New Hampshire, John Remington attended Outward Bound School on Hurricane Island, Maine, as a young man — a month-long course that helped him later decide to pick a major at the University of Florida that might benefit him in life, and allow him to help somebody else, too.

That's why he took a degree from the Department of Building and Construction in the university's School of Architecture.

And Outward Bound also helped give him the bold confidence to buy his company from its founder when he was just 24 years old (he's now 57), he says.

He's never forgotten. Mr. Remington has taken Outward Bound "refresher courses" in the wilderness throughout his adult life, and 22 years ago began sending young Neapolitans to Outward Bound courses, themselves.

Lavern Gaynor, a Naples philanthropist, helps.

"I built a house for her in 1978, and she let me talk her into sending her only granddaughter, at 16, to Outward Bound. She did a Colorado course and (Ms. Gaynor) said, 'John, you didn't tell me she'd have to stay in the woods by herself (referring to the threeday solo Outward Bound students do).'

"Our course each spring here is not a needbased fellowship. We send kids and teachers from everywhere and every background — some homeschoolers, and from all the high schools from Immokalee to Everglades City to Naples. This year, 24 went.

"One year, the Naples High School football coach took leaders of his team and did a sixday course."

Why?

"The reason we send kids and keep funding it is simple: We feel like we can touch some kids who are self motivated a little bit, and get a lot of bang for it.

"And some unmotivated kids recognize they can be in charge of their own motivation."