Nov. 10, 2006 — Sylvia Weaver's middle name could be "Feisty." The longtime St. John resident has firm opinions on lots of matters, including the recent election.
"If you don't vote, you can't complain," she said on election day.
A couple of days later, she kept talking about the election in a far-reaching conversation that covered the victory by the Democrats in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate; getting older; building an off-the-grid house on St. John; and growing up as a member of the Doubleday publishing family in New York and Oyster Bay, Long Island.
A skilled raconteur, Weaver had tales to tell about her childhood. In one story, she says that when she was 16, her mother pushed her to get a job at a hospital.
"She was thinking I'd be a candy striper, but I got a job as an assistant in post-mortem," she says, laughing. She kept that summer job at St. Luke's Hospital in New York until she graduated from Vassar College with a degree in zoology.
Weaver stayed at St. Luke's working as a research assistant until she married for the first time and her three children started coming along. After that marriage ended, she married again, this time to a man with three children, which made her a mother to six children under age 11. The two divorced, but she stayed in their town, Stamford, Conn. After 10 years as a single mother, she met her third husband, Ken Damon, at a Unitarian Universalist Association meeting in Stamford.
The two decided to move to the Virgin Islands in 1976, first setting up housekeeping from their base at Cowpet Bay condos on St. Thomas. Weaver almost immediately got involved in the community. She served on the St. Thomas Coastal Zone Management Committee, a trying time for her.
A vote was due on the CZM permit for the Nadir racetrack. Although she wasn't opposed and saw the need to move the racetrack out of Sugar Estate, Weaver says, word somehow got out that she planned a no vote. In an apparent attempt to convince her otherwise, people called her house every 15 minutes for 24 hours straight.
"I was afraid not to answer the phone because my oldest daughter was due to have a baby any day," she recalls.
Every day she and Damon trekked out from St. Thomas to the Coral Bay area to build their house, a period Weaver calls a wonderful time. She served as the architect and Damon the engineer, creating a house that depends on alternative-energy sources for electricity.
The house remains off the grid. But Weaver, about to turn 81, admits that without her husband around to fix things that go wrong with the complicated system, it's become a bit harder to live this way. Damon died nearly two years ago.
Her off-the-grid existence results from Weaver's philosophy of living lightly on the earth. Still an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Association, she's working on the church's green sanctuary program, which deals with environmental and societal concerns.
When she and her husband finished building their house in 1981, Weaver gave up her CZM post. She did, however, continue with the League of Women Voters as its legislative observer. Going to St. Thomas for the Legislature's often lengthy sessions finally got to be too much, so she gave that up.
The long trip to St. Thomas also put the kibosh in her Interfaith Coalition involvement, where she served as secretary. She spent a year as a volunteer tutor at Guy Benjamin School, working with a handful of boys.
"They were dear boys, even if they didn't like school," she says.
Today Weaver keeps busy by going to the gym three times a week, attending the Unitarian Sunday services, reading, reading and more reading. She also enjoys the view from her house out over Coral Bay and surrounding hillsides.
"I love St. John. I get up in the morning and I look at that view and think how lucky I am to live in such a wonderful place," Weaver says.
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