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Quiet Heroes of New Canaan: Izzy Kaufman

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James Marks didn’t hire New Canaan High School senior Izzy Kaufman at Greenology—she’d been working for a predecessor fresh foods provider in the shop, located at the corner of Main Street and East Avenue. But he says now, “I wish I could have more of her.”

One of the most impressive things the teen has done at the organic, plant-based and natural foods provider is establish a successful food scraps program. 

WIth support from Marks, Kaufman established a program where the local Oak Forest Farm picks up scraps every day from Greenology—and it’s already seen about 2,000 pounds collected. “We have quite a bit of food scraps making juice, all the pulp and rind that’s left over,” Marks told NewCanaanite.com. “We easily fill a garbage can of that stuff.”

Asked what Kaufman is like as a worker (Marks launched Greenology is November 2020), he said “fantastic.”

“If she wasn’t in school she’d be a manager right now,” he said. “I’d have her managing a shift.

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Quiet Heroes of New Canaan: Jenn Eielson and Steve Karl 

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Jenn Eielson, New Canaan’s health director, paid out-of-pocket for a balloon guy and treats for kids for a COVID-19 vaccination clinic for children 5-and-older, held Nov. 11 at New Canaan High School, officials say. In all, 927 kids received their first dose during the clinic, Eielson told members of the Health & Human Services Commission during their regular meeting, held Thursday morning via videoconference. “Steve Karl from Karl Chevrolet caught wind that I paid for the balloon guy and all the treats and everything out of my own pocket, so Steve Karl and Karl Chevrolet graciously are going to be absorbing all of that cost,” Eielson said. “So I thank them greatly for that.”

The comments came during a general update from Eielson.

Around Town

Quiet Heroes of New Canaan: ‘Man with an Orange Shirt’

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Yolanda Gjuraj said her son was the first to discover the full-size soccer goal left on a patch of grass out front of her family’s Cross Street home. It was the morning of Sept. 11, and he’d just come home from a walkthrough football practice. Several of the kids in the neighborhood play soccer on the residential street that runs between Cherry and Summer just off the eastern edge of downtown New Canaan, according to Gjuraj. “Someone must’ve noticed the boys playing soccer as they always do and was kind enough to bring this goal to our home for the neighborhood kids to play,” she told NewCanaanite.com in an email.

Around Town

Quiet Heroes of New Canaan: Kristen Pace (and Family)

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Peter Ogilvie first noticed the activity at Canoe Hill Cemetery in the months after the COVID-19 pandemic set in last year, in driving by it on Laurel Road each day. Perched on a hill off of the east side of Laurel not far from the intersection of Canoe Hill Road, the final resting place of 200-plus New Canaanites—including the town’s (and possibly Connecticut’s) last living slave, Onesimus Comstock—had fallen into disrepair. With little dedicated parking and difficult to access even by foot, given a steep hill and crumbling stone staircase, the .69-acre burial ground was largely covered in weeds and fallen branches, with broken and illegible gravestones scattered about. One day, Ogilvie pulled over to see what was happening in the cemetery, and there met Kristen Pace and her daughters, busy at work. “She took on this project all by herself and in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of quarantining, and with her daughters out there, did the physical work of cutting down weeds and cleaning up just unbelievable truckloads of crap,” Ogilvie said.

Around Town

Quiet Heroes of New Canaan: Lally Jurcik

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In walking her dog in the area of Frogtown Road and the Noroton River, Robin Bates-Mason has gotten a firsthand look at how quickly trash can build up along the roadside and in the waterway itself. People driving along Frogtown, a heavily used east-west connection between Ponus Ridge and Weed Street, often don’t realize how much garbage there is because they’re moving too fast. “And of course, when summer comes in and the vegetation comes in, you don’t see it as well, but when you’re a dog walker and you see it, Frogtown just awful, it’s really bad,” Bates-Mason said. “Unfortunately  it’s not the safest route to clean up.”

Even so, as she did a few years ago, Llewellyn Drive resident Lally Jurcik took the lead last week in organizing a neighborhood campaign to get families out and cleaning up, said Bates-Mason, one of several residents of the area who received an email with details. Armed with garbage bags and loaned “grabbers” supplied by New Canaan Inlands Wetlands Director Kathleen Holland—an advocate fo the town’s annual “Clean Your Mile” campaign, more below—Jurcik helped organize more than one dozen volunteers who picked up everything from coffee cups, plastic bottles and plastic bags to discarded dog poop bags and beer cans.