Shelter Island Profile: Linda Zavatto, angel of the 5K

Linda Zavatto has written a letter every fall for the past 13 years and sent it to virtually everyone she knows.

At its heart, the letter is about her mother, Virginia Zavatto, who died of breast cancer 25 years ago when she was only 60.

Unafraid to ask tough questions, over the years Linda has become really good at asking this one: “Will you help me honor my mother and all the other brave women like her with your support?”

Organized, outgoing and resourceful, Linda raises funds for the Shelter Island 5K Run/Walk to benefit the Coalition for Women’s Cancers at Southampton Hospital, the North Fork Breast Health Coalition and Lucia’s Angels, three local organizations that provide services and support for families affected by breast cancer.

She has done this work for 13 years, and for 11 of those years she has been the biggest single 5K fundraiser. One year she was responsible for one-third of the total donations.

This Saturday, the 16th annual running of the race kicks off at 11 a.m. at Crescent Beach. Runners and walkers can register online at shelterislandrun.com/5K or in person on Saturday.

Linda has developed a considerable network for her fundraising efforts over the past two and a half decades on Shelter Island, among customers of her house cleaning and property management business as well as family and friends.

“I’m not afraid to solicit them,” she said. “At the event two years ago, a woman happened to see how much I had raised for the 5K and said, ‘You raised all this money yourself? How come you didn’t ask me?’”

When Linda requested a donation the following year, the woman actually thanked her for remembering to ask.

She was a high school student in Nassau County in 1970 when her father decided to move the family to the Island. He had built a summer home here in 1967 and decided it was a more wholesome place to raise his four daughters than East Rockaway, where she grew up.

Linda’s interests at the time included pizza and shopping; neither was available in their new home and she was not happy to leave her known world behind. “The marks of my fingernails are still embedded in Sunrise Highway,” she said.

Linda’s the oldest of her three sisters. Laura was 13 when they moved, followed by seven-year-old Janet, and the baby, Amy, who was three months old. Shortly after they arrived on the Island, Linda informed their father, “You moved us to where the national pastime is driving around drinking beer.”

Her description of the Island in 1970 is familiar to many who lived here then, a time when every high school student knew the house in Silver Beach where an opportunistic local guy sold beer out of his garage with no questions asked.

“He must have made a small fortune,” she said. “I think he sold cigarettes, too.”

After a few months, she started to settle in, but continued to be amazed by the quirky practices of the rural Island. The father of a friend owned a gas station, along with acres of land in back of the store, laced with trails where kids — licensed or not — could drive around in old cars. “Some of the cars didn’t go into reverse,” she said. “So if you ran into a tree, you couldn’t back up.”

Her father had built a new business on the Island, West Neck Market, and had developed a reputation for high-quality food made on the premises. But after her high school graduation, Linda didn’t want to stay on the Island for long, travelling to San Diego, Key Largo and a three-year stint in Santa Cruz, California, working a variety of waitress and clerical jobs, and occasionally taking college classes.

“I kept trying school,” she said. “I’d take a few classes and say, ‘OK, that was fine.’”
In 1984, she decided to move back East and found an apartment in East Rockaway, about a block from where she grew up. She began working for the Barbizon Agency on a Winston-Salem cigarette promotion that involved wearing a satin jacket, holding trays of cigarettes and giving away samples with a male partner, who was there not only to hand out coupons but also for protection on the mean city streets of the mid-1980s.

“That’s how I learned my way around Manhattan,” she said.

It was during this time that her mother, whose friends called her Ginny, found a lump in her breast just a few months after a normal mammogram. After a mastectomy and therapy, Linda says she and her sisters naively believed their mother would recover.

There was little discussion of her condition or prognosis even in the family, as if her mother’s illness was a shameful secret. It wasn’t until a few months before her mother died that Linda and her sisters realized the cancer had spread and her time was limited.

“I just wasn’t equipped, I was ignorant of what was going on,” she said. “The difficult part was when I realized my mother was going to die.”

Linda and her youngest sister, Amy, who took a leave of absence from New York University, took care of their mother during her final weeks — just 18 months after her initial diagnosis.

Linda went on to work at Kaprielian O’Leary Advertising in the city as an assistant to the media manager, but when the economy went south in the early 1990s, she was laid off and came back to Shelter Island for the summer to tend bar and consider her options.

“I did a total 360,” she remembered. “I thought in my wildest dreams I would never want to move back here, and neither did anyone in my family. My father said, ‘You hated it here. Why are you moving back?’”

Deciding she wanted to establish herself on the Island, Linda started a cleaning business in 1993 and in 2004 segued to a successful property management business.

Seven years ago she was able to build her own vacation place in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina and relaxes there several times a year.

“I’ve never been married,” Linda said “but I’ve been engaged a few times.”

In her late 40s, Linda decided to get a college degree. A part-time student while working full-time, it took her over five years to complete her A.A. degree at Suffolk County Community College. When she was asked what she planned to do once she got her degree, she said, “I’m going to say I did it. And I did it well.”

In 2002, Linda’s friend, Sue Ryan, raised money for the Shelter Island 5K with the help of matching funds from her employer. Sue persuaded Linda to raise money too, in her mother’s memory.

Knowing that the funds would be used to provide services to families dealing with breast cancer — the kind of services Linda knew all too well were not available to her own mother, “I went around asking people and the first year I raised the second-most money of anyone for the 5K.”

Since then, more than one friend has suggested she consider going into fundraising as a career. “I started doing more and more and reaching out to more and more people,” she said. “Timing is important. I used to send the letter out early. Now I send it the third week in the month.”

The first year Linda raised less than $500; last year it was over $5,600.

“It never hurts to ask,” she said.