For Mary Gleason, Life Has Been a Labor of Love

Mary Gleason has short straight blond hair, greenish blue eyes and often the manner of someone who is waiting for the punch line. Laughing comes easily to her.
According to Scampi, a very perceptive toy poodle, this is an attribute which has been invaluable to Gleason’s four-decade career in the hospitality industry. Scampi, in his brief five years on the planet, has been privy to some insights the rest of us aren’t privy to. Though always involved with community affairs, Gleason tends to be a private person. Scampi won’t reveal much, however he does allow as how a positive attitude and a sense of humor have been invaluable assets to his chief cook and bottle washer.
Born in Chicago, Gleason graduated from the University of Chicago with a liberal arts degree.
"After graduating," Gleason says, "my father pointed out that I had no marketable skills, so he enrolled in a business school, just two blocks from the university."
After swallowing her pride on that score, Gleason found a job in the music publishing industry that took her to New York, where she rubbed elbows with some of the big names of the time, for instance, the Andrews sisters, LaVerne, Maxene and Patty.
"Oh, no one will know who you mean," Gleason demurred, after revealing an anecdote too good to overlook. Oh, really? Well, some of us do. How about "Rum and Coca Cola," or "Beat me Daddy Eight to the Bar?"
"One of my bosses was married to Maxene," Gleason says. "I’ll never forget – she came into the office one day in a pink rabbit fur coat. It was the most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen! I coveted it."
Though the memory lingers, Gleason allows that her clothing taste has evolved since that time.
"Little did I think when I got off that Caribair flight so many years ago that a day like this would happen," Gleason said last year, when she was honored with the V.I Hotel and Tourism Association Tommy Star Award of Excellence at a ceremony at Marriott’s Frenchman’s Reef Beach Resort.
"I thought I’d be here for a month or two," Gleason told her audience, "and suddenly it’s 40 years later." Gleason was the star of that evening at the hotel which was an integral part of her life for almost 30 years.
Recalling those early days, Gleason marvels at her good fortune.
"When I went back to New York after visiting here" she says, "I looked around and couldn’t figure out why I’d left St. Thomas. I packed up and moved."
It wasn’t really serendipity, but Gleason sort of fell into her hotel career, one with an auspicious beginning with one of the island’s premier hoteliers, Milan Glumidge of Bluebeard’s Castle Hotel.
"He was my mentor," Gleason says of her old friend who passed away this year.
Gleason left Bluebeard’s to take a job as food and beverage secretary at Frenchman’s Reef, leaving in 2002 as sales and marketing manger. When she walks through the hotel today, she is greeted by almost everyone, you’d think she was still there, which, in her heart, she is.
Gleason loves the hotel industry, plain and simple. At a recent chat, she talks about a friend who had switched careers.
"He couldn’t believe it; he said on Friday he was off until Monday. He didn’t know what to do."
"We work 12 to 14 hour days," she says. "If you love it, you love it. It consumes you. That’s just the way it is. Someone told me once if you have a job you love, you’ll never work again."
Gleason has been and still is an active voice in the community, volunteering on many boards, including the St. Thomas-St. John Chamber Commerce, the St. Thomas-St. John Tourism Association, the Humane Society, the Ad Club, United Way and the Family Resource Center.
An active Rotarian, Gleason was the first female president of the Rotary Club of St. Thomas, and of Skal International Association of Travel and Tourism.
Well, what is Gleason happiest about in her life? She consults Scampi.
"Tonight," Scampi says, "she is happiest about her dinner, from a neighbor who just came over with a plate of barbequed ribs."