Tag: oral history

Adam Moore is the CEO and co-founder of WHEELHOUSE Center for Health and Wellbeing along with his wife Dr. Tegan Moore, Executive Medical Director. Originally hailing from Brooklyn Heights, Adam’s father’s family is Caribbean and his mother’s is from the South. His mother, Madeliene Moore Burrell is a groundbreaking industrial designer, marketing executive and cultural leader, who was among the first Black women in her field while his father is the former head of psychiatry for Harlem Hospital. The Moores moved to Westport in 2017 with their children Addison, a rising sophomore at Staples High School and Mia who is a rising 7^th grader at Bedford Middle School.

“We lived on the Upper East Side in Manhattan for over a decade where I owned and operated Moore Creative Living, a multi-disciplinary personal development company while my wife was the head of the Center of Excellence–a clinic run jointly by Bridgeport University Medical school and Dr. Peter D’Adamo who is best known for creating the blood type diet.

We founded WHEELHOUSE together in 2018. WHEELHOUSE is an integrative health center that focuses on multiple aspects of a patient’s health by employing a spectrum of unique professional perspectives. My wife’s focus is precision medicine based on genetic assessments. We also work with a nutritionist, another physician and an acupuncturist as well. My focus is in cognitive health and wellness based on a combination of different training and disciplines ranging from lifestyle management to neurolinguistics and hypnosis. As an ordained minister, I also help patients reflect upon their challenges from a larger perspective, asking them to examine themselves in relation to their health problem. We think about how these different health approaches fit together and create a treatment plan with respect to them. So, say you come to us with digestive issues, we think about disease tendencies, anxiety level, and your nutrition to create a multi-pronged treatment plan.

My role in the organization is split between helping our patients enhance their cognitive health and wellness and being the CEO — running the ship and developing a relationship with our community. I think of WHEELHOUSE as not just a business but as a movement.  We are thought leaders and change agents in area of medicine actively driving how we evolve individually and as a community.

Our role is to get people excited about having a positive relationship with their health. The way I describe it to our staff is that I want people to be as excited about their health as they are about their new iPhone. We want them to be excited for their next upgrade.

We were situated in a unique place when COVID hit because our approach is highly evidence-based. Everything we do is grounded by a scientific and clinical foundation but we also have access to a lot of traditional medicine because our Executive Medical Director is a naturopath.  We were already talking to health professionals from different areas of medical research which meant we were able to hit the ground running by providing patients access to different emerging technologies. We saw the COVID curve before it was coming and decided to situate ourselves first to create strategies for treating symptoms ranging along the physical to psychological continuum.  We have a genetic map for most of our patients, so we know their respiratory and gut weaknesses. We can say to some degree ‘If you get COVID here’s your unique primary risk factors and here’s how we’re going to keep that risk low.’ We’re trying to create strategies to mitigate the unknown: What would happen if you had to get to a hospital? How would symptoms play out if you became ill?

We also examine the impact of lifestyle and emotional factors in dealing with COVID: My role is in part to ask ‘What does this pandemic mean for you and how is that affecting your health?’ How is your anxiety about getting or spreading COVID impacting your sense of well-being?

The other side of that equation has been actively treating the patients in our practice who have been infected. We have patients all over the globe, but a lot in the Northeast corridor. New York started to get it first and we were able to give our patients strategies to treat physical symptoms as well as manage their mental health needs, and address their nutritional demands: How to calm down, how to get better sleep, how to maintain healthy eating habits, etc.

Of course, the unspoken conversation that is developing in all of this is about how COVID has hit African-American and Latino communities harder and I’ve gotten into some intriguing conversations with people in this community about that. Through this experience—and now the experience of the renewed civil rights movement –I’ve learned that a lot of the assumptions I came to Westport with were misplaced.

I believed that because the town is so geographically close to NY that there was spillover of a certain cultural openness and I didn’t expect quite the level of racism that we have encountered here. I remember trying to check out diversity organizations before we arrived here. I did find TEAM Westport but I also found articles about people repeatedly vandalizing the Black Lives Matter banner at the Unitarian church. Still, I told myself that being from New York and being a world traveler, I could handle what little racism Westport had to offer.

It’s been a bumpy ride culturally for us so far as residents of Westport. My family and I have been faced with frequent harassment from a neighbor who has repeatedly called the police and the fire marshal to our home claiming that I am physically menacing, that my wife is stealing flowers out of her garden and that our citronella candle is too strong and is aggravating her asthma. Each time the police and fire department come they agree that I am being harassed, and that it is an abuse of the system but that legally there is nothing that we can do to protect ourselves from it happening again. It’s truly disheartening to have my kids witness the weaponization of public resources as an instrument of targeted racism.

Racism is a regular occurrence everywhere but it’s a little more in your face in Westport. Not long after moving here, I went to the Chase ATM on the Post Road where a woman I perceived to be Caucasian and her rather tall teenage son were also approaching the machine. As I opened the door to follow them in, she held out her hand and said “I’d feel more comfortable if you waited outside”. I was so stunned I couldn’t even process it – so I just stood outside dumbfounded and later angry with myself for not course correcting her behavior.

Black people have been making adjustments to how we move in the world for the comfort of others and our personal safety for generations – it is and always has been an unfortunate necessity. My kids enjoy the Westport school system but have had their share of negatively biased experiences in school and they have naturally gravitated to friends of color – most are Asian, Indian, and Middle Eastern (as there simply aren’t that many black students to be found). They have their little brown squad.  I don’t think in NYC they thought much about that, they just had a mixture of different friends.

My son and I routinely discuss his own personal experiences with racism at Staples including the letter by a classmate calling out bias at the school. We talk about the assertion that the African American students sit together at the same lunch table out of unity, that there will be metaphorical lunch tables throughout his life and he must learn to take his seat.  I remind him that ‘You have to feel comfortable with your people because when it comes down to it, that is who will have your back.’ With this in mind, our entire family has been more active in seeking out other people of color in this town.

Because I still have clients and patients in NYC, up until COVID hit I was continuing to see clients in the city a couple of days a week. As a city-kid at heart that gave me what I needed emotionally in terms of a ‘city-fix’. Not having that has been hard. On the flip side, I really love living in Westport more than I thought. I was really surprised to see how much I enjoy the ready access to nature and the beach, the rich historical foundation apparent in the colonial architecture, and its deep commitment to culture and the arts. It’s a beautiful town.

There is a pocket of transplants here who share a common experience and we’re enjoying getting to know each other including a family a few blocks away who share some very curious parallels. They are also from New York.  The father is a person of color and the mother is also white. We have daughters with the same name and in same class and sons the same age who look strikingly similar. Bizarrely, about a year after meeting them, we learned that the wife and I are both distant cousins related by John Wilkes Booth. She is a descendant of the Caucasian bloodline and I am a descendant of Booth’s enslaved women with whom he fathered many children.

It’s wonderful to witness the civil-rights awakening Westport is undergoing. We attended the downtown protest organized by TEAM Staples and after the protest happened, one of our friends who is Indian was adamant that the protest not stall at the stage of outcry and that it progresses into action. She has put together a group of parents and people via Zoom meetings interested in making change within the government and the school system. As we do this, I feel it’s important to remember something my mom always said: ‘Don’t get lost in the sweetness of your own honey pot’.  Meaning: don’t get so enamored by your own indignation that you lose sight of the goal. It’s important to initiate change, but let’s not reinvent the wheel. Westport lives in a bubble. If change is going to happen it will require stepping outside of that bubble to employ the resources, insights and leadership of communities and organizations that have been working on issues surrounding equality and social justice for decades. We must be willing to turn to neighboring communities like Bridgeport and Norwalk for guidance—or even turn inward to organizations like TEAM Westport – that are already confronting these issues with a running start.

The idea of the bubble exemplifies something I think is problematic: Often when people say we need to have diversity and change, they are focusing on the goals and not the outcomes. We need to really ask and understand: What is the point of diversity? Do we want to have diversity just for the sake of saying we are diverse or is there a deeper goal? The town prides itself on its open-mindedness but if that doesn’t translate into meaningful outcomes then we’ve missed the mark. We need to better understand what racism is, and the multiple manners in which it shows up – not just in society but in our thinking, words and behaviors. Westport needs to invest in cultural competency so it can understand the benefits of having a more diverse cultural community instead of looking at it as an obstacle we have to get past.

It’s really important that parents take an active role in shifting this perspective to the benefit of diversity. For every Black person or person of color who has died at the hands of a white male cop—that white male cop had a mommy and daddy who failed to teach him to value all lives. It’s incumbent on anyone who has a child to teach them cultural competency and to set clear expectations in their behavior in a way that demonstrates respect for others—to make sure they understand who they are in context to the larger community. I believe a lot of Westport parents are open to this notion, not just for its inherent moral value but because they see that their children are better equipped to navigate the world in which they live when they are empowered by multicultural understandings.

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Darcy Hicks is a well-known figure throughout town—an activist and artist who moved here with her brother and mother, who is also an artist mom, in 1978. Darcy went to Hillspoint Elementary, Long Lots Junior High, and Staples High School. After leaving for college, grad school in Boston and a career in NYC, Darci moved back to Westport when she married her high school boyfriend, attorney Josh Koskoff. The couple have raised their three boys in town.  

“In my years in Westport, I have known so many good people who truly care about those less fortunate. But the bubble is real, and so is the desire, however subconscious, to stay inside of it. So, the words haven’t always turned to action. Humility is not America’s thing, and yet without humility we can’t change how we see things. However, lately I’m seeing the bubble in Westport get thinner, and people are listening better. This gives me hope. 

I want to be careful about belittling the effects of COVID in Westport because I know many people have been suffering the effects – physically, psychologically, and financially. But we are all so lucky. Just a few miles south and north of us, our neighbors are unable to socially distance because of congested living situations, because they cannot afford to stay home from work, and because they are often the essential workers we need to help us function. And many of them have lost their jobs as their struggling workplaces have shut down – so the students I work with in Bridgeport, for example, are simply hungry all the time. That’s the reality of COVID for so many. 

With respect to COVID, I’ve caught myself being less careful in the last week or so, especially as I feel the urgency of speaking out and participating in protests for Black Lives Matter. Also, we are social beings, and for many this has been either a lonely stretch of time or a claustrophobic family time. As the weather gets nice, of course, we all want to get out and see our friends or go to the beach and be among other people. But I am very worried that we have been impatient and in denial. The thing that really drives me crazy is the people who say they aren’t worried about getting it so they are willing to “take a risk.” They are ignoring the very real fact that many of us are asymptomatic carriers, which is like being armed with a weapon that has its own mind. We can be giving it to those who are susceptible to dying from it. It’s so important to try to think about other people right now. 

Westport has two mouths. Out of one, we preach tolerance and inclusiveness – and that is not nothing. And, we have walked the walk, a bit. For example, unlike so many other wealthy suburbs, we provide housing and services for the homeless, for lower-income families, and for people with disabilities. However, the other mouth is simply that: a mouth. Being mostly white and wealthy, we have this remarkable ability to rest on our laurels. We post the right sayings, go to the right protests, and then close the blinds on the rest of the world. It’s not enough. You don’t have to be a confederate flag-waving white nationalist to be part of the problem. In fact, resting on your words or your beliefs – without actually fighting for change – is the systemic racism which allows for what we see on our screens. I can sum it up with this anecdote: shortly after Hurricane Sandy devastated our shorelines, people in Westport were incredibly responsive. It was beautiful to see throngs of people at the beach, raking people’s houses and yards free of sand. A week later, I put the word out that there was a project community in Norwalk that had literally been underwater, and again, the response was so generous. I collected gift cards, furniture, and at Thanksgiving many people cooked extra turkeys and sides since the residents of the project lost their kitchens in the flood. But: I could not get a single person to come with me to deliver the items! I made eight trips because people were so generous – but they were also generous with excuses as to why they couldn’t join me to meet the people who lived there. Until the people who live in the comfort of towns like Westport meet people from towns like Bridgeport, they will not understand how similar we are, and how different our circumstances are. What they would have discovered is that many of these people who were so destitute were sharing the food we donated with the homeless that lived on the streets outside their project. They were as giving and as compassionate as we are, and I was sad this beauty was not seen by Westport residents. 

I think we are moving in the right direction. Every debate and every argument pushes us forward. Sometimes the smaller arguments online – the shaming, especially – can set us back. But we are a lively town, willing to share our thoughts. I’ve always loved that about Westport. This engagement is what moves the dial and allows for creative thinking. 

I think that most women, actually, have had to learn to be patient, hopeful, and hardworking in order to get through life’s challenges. So as a woman who has, like all women, dealt with sexism in school, in the workplace, and in social circles, I feel equipped for obstacles. On a personal level, I’ve experienced family tragedies and trauma. These times seemed insurmountable, yet here I am.  

My fear stems from the scapegoating and vilifying of particular groups, whether it’s by race or by uniform or by income. It is distracting us from finding solutions to gun violence, systemic racism, climate change, and the pandemic. Because one thing we must do now is VOTE. We MUST get Trump out of office or he will dismantle the few protections to our country and our planet we have left, which are fewer every day. Most urgently I think climate change needs to be addressed so we can all live long enough to fight the rest of the world’s ills. My hope is that we get every soul in this nation to vote in November so we can avoid the iceberg and focus on repair. 

I love this town. When you are a parent, you don’t see your child as someone that should be doing things for you. You see that child as someone you should be nurturing and helping to become a good, compassionate person. When they disappoint, you don’t abandon them. You correct them and admit that maybe you also need to correct yourself. I hope that people can see Westport – or anywhere they live – in this way. It’s not here for us… it is here BECAUSE of us. 

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Catherine—Cat—Graham joined Westport Museum as an associate, after graduating from Staples High School in 2019. In addition to greeting visitors, she is learning the ropes of the museum field, and also uses her skills and talent as an artist to help exhibit installation and more.  

“My sense of the current-ness of history especially in more recent years has consumed many of my thoughts. But this current-ness isn’t new. Systematic oppression advances as fast as technology. A telephone is a telephone if it’s a rotary phone or a smartphone. But with my new exposure to local history and my town’s place in that history, historical events don’t feel so distant both geographically and chronologically. 

I have learned that the interpretation of historical events has almost always been done by the victors. Rarely are the stories of everyone ever told, giving people in the present an incomplete picture of the truth. This is especially important in this moment because one day we’ll look back on this moment from a historical perspective and I hope that people in the future will interpret the immense documentation of our current climate in a holistic way, and they may learn from the choices we are making right now.  

I want other people to know that while it feels very much like nothing has changed, in a lot of ways that’s true, progress has been made. In our exhibit Taking the Cure I realized how the narrative around mental illness has changed. While we still have a long way to go in our treatment and discussion around mental illness, there has been immense strides in the right directions. I joke rather morbidly sometimes that if I were alive a few decades ago a doctor may diagnose me with being a black girl and I’d never see the light of day again. But I find that before mental illness was a taboo topic, buried away instead of treated. Now, my friends and loved ones openly discuss therapy and medication and feel safe to do so. While it’s taken a long time to get where we are now, and there is still a long way to go, change can be made. Being surrounded by our past every day at work has made me realize that there is hope for our future. 

I’m a biracial girl so my experiences in life will always be safer and easier than that of a fully black person. I also am very light, my skin is more olive than brown. Because of this I am not “enough” to many people. To white people I’m not white enough to be white but I do not fit the picture of blackness they have painted in their minds. To black people I am not enough because I haven’t been hurt enough and to an extent that is true, my light skin is a shield in many ways.  I have never in my life had a black person teach me black history in school. Neither have many of my peers, so I can’t really blame them for what they think I should be.  

While I go home to a black mother who introduces me to black history, art, movies etc, my white peers don’t. Black issues and black history are almost a fiction. It’s too far back to be real and too far removed from them to be related to them. Oppression is part of the same world as poodle skirts and sock hops, because my white peers rarely interact with black people unless they are behind a checkout counter or cleaning their house. I was often the only black person in the room in my classrooms growing up. The students I sat beside only interacting with blackness when it’s convenient. They love rap music. They love full lips. They love a tan. They love thickness. They love the n word. They love black bodies and minds as long as they don’t have to live in them.  I can’t blame them for wanting me to be something else when they can wash blackness off in the shower and don’t have to risk being killed for it.  

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Chef Jes Bengston has worked in Westport for the last four years at Terrain’s popular Café and downtown-Westport sister restaurant Amis Trattoria.  She lives in West Haven with her wife who is a hair stylist. The restaurants opened today (June 12, 2020) after complete closure during the COVID-19 lockdown period. 

“We have never opened a restaurant like this before and may never again. When you open a restaurant you either take over an existing restaurant with its staff or start a new place and build it up. Yet, here we are starting over with an established restaurant as if it were brand new. For example, we started the week with an empty kitchen that had to be stocked from scratch yet we have the same staff doing the same dishes we were doing before. This morning we got some jitters out of the way and brushed up on some rusty skills, figured out where stuff was since things had been moved around. 

We have a smaller staff now because we did have a couple of people who have skipped coming back because they just don’t feel safe—and that’s ok. We only need a smaller staff now because we are doing very limited service—ten outdoor tables only this week and then will begin limited indoor/outdoor service next week. The folks who are back are really happy to be here—everyone is eager to get back to life even if it’s a completely different kind of life.  

There are things we’ve had to learn or relearn. For example, the mask makes it really difficult to work both in the kitchen and on the outside patio for the servers. Everyone’s struggling a bit. We already do handwashing constantly and keeping a safe distance is an old trick. The store is outfitted with new high-grade air filters, great signage explaining safety procedures and PPE. There is a full protocol about what to do if an employee—or guest—feels sick or comes down with COVID. When people make reservations, they are advised of safety procedures and again when they come in and again on their menu. So, we hope everyone feels prepared. So, it’s feels like business as usual but with a twist—kind of like the first day of school. 

Working in restaurants makes you feel prepared for everything. In many ways we are re-inventing the wheel everyday – managing problems is what we do. It’s not unusual to figure something out on the fly. We live in organized chaos all the time—what do you do if you don’t get a food delivery? Or a cook is out? Or the electricity goes off? 

In some ways, I feel like I’m working backwards. For example, we normally try to make our food in 12 minutes—fast. People want to get in and out, they want to get out and pick up their kids, get back to work, go on with their lives. Now I’m telling staff to take some time–we are trying to make good food, with masks and we don’t know yet where anything [ingredient-wise] is. It’s a work in progress.  So, now we have set the expectations is you get good food, but we hope that people realize there are things we can’t control – like the weather for outside seating. My hope is that, after being inside for so long, we take our time and enjoy being out, enjoy being healthy, and having the means to enjoy a nice restaurant meal. 

During lockdown, I did think about the fact that people were learning to produce food at home at a higher level so they wouldn’t have to depend on chefs and restaurants.  But I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. I myself have never been home so much as during the quarantine — my job has crazy hours. We all go to work to be paid to have a safe and great home to enjoy but we don’t seem to do it. But during quarantine, I saw a lot of people doing that. Maybe that’s why we are not yet seeing people are rushing around — because I think they learned it wasn’t that bad.  

Like a lot of places, I think Westport has a lot of work to do. My thought is that we all take charge in the areas we can to make a difference, permanently and with passion. It’s not enough to discuss for a moment or to chalk your driveway or donate money, we all have to do more. We need to be having open discussions and acceptance of our behavior in the past whether that behavior was intentional or not and just do better. I’m hoping to focus on people of color in the local farming community and bringing better jobs and wages and opportunity in the Restaurant business.  

We are now in a moment that is a great opportunity to start over—with respect to a lot of things: food service, race relations, the environment. I think food can be freedom, it can open doors. We all have a lot of work to do and it’s an exciting time to discuss all that has been previously swept under the rug.  

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