Island profile: Mary-Faith Westervelt never gave up on career goals

Mary-Faith Westervelt is not one to put herself on cruise control and take her foot off the gas. Don’t let the easy-going demeanor and ready laugh fool you. She’s a hard driver.

No wonder she’s a racing fan and far more than just a spectator. The former registrar and time-trials chair of the Eastern Motor Racing Association, she’s also past treasurer of the BMW Car Club of New York State, for which she helped run driver training programs at the Bridgehampton racetrack.

This chipper 59-year-old juggles three demanding jobs, too. A busy lawyer with her own firm on the Island with partner Kimberlea Rey, she’s also executive operations manager and former head of procurement at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) — a big reason why she’s put more than 160,000 miles on her 2006 BMW 325, “the cheapest model they make,” she said.

She has a side gig as a procurement advisor for the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. And of course, she’s one of Shelter Island’s two Town Justices, now in the third year of her first four-year term.

Her approach to that difficult job — passing judgment over matters involving people she might run into at the post office or the IGA — probably says it all about her work ethic and approach to life.

“It’s hard but it’s something that I’m used to,” she said, because of her work at BNL, in charge for many years of all its procurement policies and procedures.

“Either the scientists are unhappy because you didn’t give them what they wanted or the Department of Energy is unhappy because they think you are too loose with the scientists. So you never do anything right and everybody’s always criticizing you.

“If you are worried about what people think about you, you’re not going to do your job well. Being a judge is about being a judge; it’s not a popularity contest and you have to accept that.”

There are benefits. Her boss at the lab, Deputy Operations Manager Mike Bebon, has a part-time home on Shelter Island. When he asked Mary Faith how the justice job was going, “I told him I really liked it. I get so much respect … I’m not used to everybody standing up and saying ‘Good morning, your honor.’ I’ve never been treated with so much respect in my whole career.”

She gives the same respect to all who come before her, she said, which is a “very important” part of the process of keeping emotion and personalities out of it.

It was a long road to a law career for the Bronx native whose family, named Hughes, moved to Stony Brook when she was six. Her mother was a secretary at the university and her father a disabled vet who died when she was 18. She attended parochial schools and majored in English and economics at the State University at Stony Brook, where she earned a B.A. degree in 1975.

She went right to work at Brookhaven Lab in the secretarial pool, thanks to recommendations from SUNY professors for whom she’d helped prepare engineering and physics dissertations as a work-study student.

But she wanted more.  “My father always told me I talked too much and I’d make a great lawyer,” she said. “And I like to write and I enjoy figuring out puzzles,” both of which she said are important skills in a law career.

She couldn’t afford law school so she took a 13-month paralegal program at night at Adelphi. The trouble was “nobody knew what a paralegal was in those days” and the only jobs offered her were secretarial. She was doing that kind of work anyway at Brookhaven, which promoted her to be a contract specialist — a job that used her legal training and required a lot of interaction with the procurement department.

At about that time, she married her first husband, a racing enthusiast. “He hated lawyers but he’d told me to go to law school. He was always involved in being in trouble. He’d die if he knew I were a judge.” What did he do for a living? “Nothing. That was his problem.” She stuck with him for 18 years “because that’s what you do. He finally left me because I wasn’t good enough for him,” she said with a grin.

Early on, she was offered a job by a lawyer and professor at Hofstra that included free tuition to law school. When she told her boss about it, he told her the university consortium that runs BNL also offered a tuition reimbursement program. So in 1988, she started a four-year night school program at Truro College in Huntington, working full time at the lab every weekday.

“It was very hard,” she said, “because as much was expected from you as the day students and they had to sign a paper they wouldn’t work for more than 20 hours a week and you’re taking just one less course than they are. I was deputy division manager of procurement when I started and midway through the program my boss left and I became manager,” a job that never fit into an easy 9-to-5 day and made her responsible for buying everything from “pens and pencils all way up to multi-million-dollar research and development construction.”

“I would get up on Saturday and spend my entire weekend studying. There was not a lot of time for fun.”
Trucker Brian Westervelt prompted her move to sell her Stony Brook house and build one here in Shorewood.

Another racer, and a regular at the Bridgehampton track, she started dating Brian after her divorce. They were married in 2000 at Our Lady of the Isle Church, where both are “extraordinary ministers” and active committee members. Brian, formerly an independent trucker who now drives for John Hallman’s gas service, recently was elected president of the Eastern Motor Racing Association.

Mary-Faith is a member of the Boards of Trustees at the Shelter Island Library and the Historical Society. She has long been a cycling fan and enjoyed a biking trip to Vermont last fall with Islander Cathy Driscoll. “I wasn’t in as good shape as I’d hoped but we had a lot of fun,” she said.

Her schedule is dizzying, she agreed. Every day, she has to set priorities. But she’s loving her busy life on the Island. “Somebody told me recently that the reason I like Shelter Island so much is because it reminds me of my childhood,” she said. Pelham Bay Park “was a small neighborhood where you knew everybody; you walked into a store and you knew people, you went to church and you knew people, relatives were everywhere.”

So it goes today. “I see people out there I didn’t know before” they came before her in court “but I have to say most of those folks have all been very nice. I’ve never had anybody get really upset with me. So far so good.”