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On Island Profile: Erva Denham

Nov. 12, 2007 — A most telling way to learn about Erva Denham is to take a look at her grandmother’s cookbook, which isn’t really a cookbook at all — it’s a family history punctuated with recipes.
Like Denham herself — civic leader, environmental activist, musician, vocalist — its approach is kaleidoscopic, embracing many things at once, going off in tangents as the mood suits. And that is how Denham begins to unfurl her reminiscences over lunch at a seaside restaurant in Frenchtown.
Though not actually born in the Virgin Islands, Denham is as much a natural part of the islands as a sea grape or an ale wife. She presents an enigma of sorts: part strong-minded civic leader, and part free spirit, clad in jeans and a cotton blouse, her ponytail bouncing around as she makes a point.
The islands are her passion — politically, environmentally, personally. She is determined about trying to preserve the islands as pure as when she first met them in 1955 at age nine. Her grandmother moved from Puerto Rico to St. John permanently in 1945. About six years earlier, they had explored the island and built a ramshackle “great house” on Trunk Bay, which they purchased at that time.
Upon returning, according to the cookbook, grandmother Erva Boulon was startled by the deterioration, but not so much that she wasn’t inspired to start a guest house. Boulon’s stories are written with humor and compassion for the island they had taken to heart. Trips to St. Thomas’ Market Square for provisions took days. And all the experiences are squeezed between recipes for stewed mammee or fried turtle. (Remember, this was more than 50 years ago, before turtles were protected.)
Denham and her folks didn’t reach the island until the guest house had become known as an outpost with unlimited privacy, where it attracted noted psychologist Karen Horney.
“Granny became world famous as a cook and hostess,” Denham says.
Denham’s father, John Denham, worked in electronics for the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory under the Atomic Energy Commission.
“He was a genius,” Denham says. “I feel to an extent, some of it rubbed off on me. He played the trombone and the E-flat tuba.”
Denham inherited her father’s musical bent. She has played the guitar, worked at the Guitar Lady on St. Thomas and given guitar lessons, to say nothing of her choral career. She glances at her hands.
“I can’t play anymore with these arthritic fingers,” she says. But the arthritis doesn’t affect her voice, an alto. She is an active member of the University of the Virgin Islands Choir and Polymnia Choir, and past member of the Caribbean Chorale.
Her favorite part of being in a choir is not the performances.
“I love rehearsals,” she says. “It’s a total mind dump. You learn the music and just really are into it. It’s wonderful.” The performances, she adds, “are anticlimactic.”
But back to St. John. Denham laughs easily, frequently at herself. She was the first schoolchild commuter, taking ferry and taxi rides first to Sts. Peter and Paul School. Before that, it was Julius Sprauve.
She grew up with the family of famous physicist Robert Oppenheimer.
“We would share meals together and our houses were always filled with laughter,” she says. “Toni Oppenheimer and I did everything together. There’s probably not an inch of St. John we haven’t walked or ridden our donkeys or horses over. We were ‘yard’ children. We were products of the ‘yard’ culture. The only trouble we could get into was falling off a donkey or a mango tree.”
Denham says she learned the most important lessons in her life from her “yard” parents.
“In those days, after we got out of school in Cruz Bay, if our folks couldn’t pick us up Miss Medea Keating — and Myra, her sister, who was a nurse at the Morris deCastro clinic — took care of us,” she says. “They taught us it’s not what you look like, but what you do that counts.”
Other islanders also left their mark on a young Denham.
“Theobald Moorhead, whom we knew as “Mooie,’ was another hero, where I got my first taste of politics,” she says. “Clarice Thomas, principal of the Sprauve School, was my fifth-grade teacher. She taught me more about human relations than anyone else. It was because of her that I became a teacher.”
Denham graduated in 1966 from the College of the Virgin Islands (now UVI) with an associate of arts degree, and from New York University in 1968 with a bachelor of arts degree in English on a full scholarship. She attended a year at New York University in Manhattan.
“It was a joint program with NYU, and what an experience in the late ’60s in New York,” Denham says. “We stayed at the Grosvenor Hotel. It was an exciting time for me.”
She taught high school English for 10 years at Nazareth High School (now Ivanna Eudora Kean) and Charlotte Amalie High School.
“My only regret,” she says, “is that I didn’t teach longer. I quit for personal reasons, but I loved teaching because I thought I did a good job. I would have liked to be a super master teacher, and groomed people along the way. My success rate was very good.”
Though she says she is “retired,” now, that is hardly the case. She works largely from home, where she cares for her 90-year-old mother.
Denham is current president of Rotary Club of St. Thomas II, and outgoing president of the League of Women Voters, a post she has held more than once, along with a string of community affiliations long as your arm — or both arms. She is a member of the UVI alumni association, the Golden Key International Honor Society, the Northside Civic Association, Advocate for the Preservation of GERS, Red Hook Community Alliance, West End Alliance, Nature Conservancy and EAST.
“I didn’t realize the environmental issues in the territory until I got into the league,” she says. “It was like the scales fell off my eyes.”
Denham is well known in the community for her defiance of projects she feels are destructive to the environment. She and Helen Gjessing, a fellow league member and environmental activist, are frequent faces at Coastal Zone Management and Senate meetings.
Denham takes her presidential positions in stride.
“It’s being a traffic director,” she says. “You’re a spokesperson of necessity, but if you’re perfectly satisfied with your committees, it’s easy. At home, between the phone and the computer, I can do an awful lot.”
How would she like to come back, after departing this earth?
“I’m a basic Buddhist,” she says. “I’d like to come back as myself, only better.”
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