Smith-Mooney, Marilyn

 

Marilyn Smith-Mooney (Sun Article)

 

Marilyn Smith-Mooney could not find a quiet place to talk.

She was at the Military Heritage Museum in Punta Gorda, an institution of which she is board president, a few days after helping to cut the ribbon on it. Everywhere she looked, the place was buzzing with activity.

She fled the P-51 Club off the busy lobby and tried settling on the museum’s outdoor patio, where a nearby worker was tossing old sheet rock into a Dumpster on the ground level.

“C’mon,” she called out, “give us a break.”

She wasn’t unhappy. She’s a New Yorker.

Truth be told, it could not have worked out any better.

Active is what she desired, noisy is what she wanted as she presided over the museum’s move from a tiny facility at the head of Fishermen’s Village to a 17,000-square-foot, multi-level facility in the IMPAC building down the street at 900 Marion Ave.

More important, the move marked the museum’s transition from a walk-in, look-around display area into an interactive facility complete with its own theater. This old museum was an attraction at a destination. The new museum is the destination. 

This was what she had had in mind all along.

At a reception following the new facility’s opening, she remembered becoming board president in 2007 after the late Rufus Lazzell had approached her. The museum started in 2001 in a little store at the far end of Fishermen’s Village, whose other occupants were restaurants and boutique shops. 

“I thought, ‘There is no way you can get people in a shopping center to come into a storefront with the sense of reverence and awe that I wanted,’” she said. “This has been my dream from that day on – to have its own building where you walk in and go, ‘Oh, my.’

“This county has not seen a museum like this.” 

It’s a good bet Charlotte County has not seen anything quite like Marilyn Smith-Mooney or will in the near future. Called the “First Lady of Punta Gorda,” Smith-Mooney was the first woman mayor of Punta Gorda during a tenure of City Council that stretched from 1996 to 2008.

During her 30-year corporate career, she worked for an architectural firm and later became the first woman in executive management for a major cosmetics packaging company. She had a secondary career as a commercial pilot and flight instructor. 

The Military Heritage Museum is just one of dozens of community efforts she has supported, including serving as volunteer executive director for the Tetrault Family Foundation from 2008 to 2016, when the Peace River Botanical & Sculpture Gardens was first conceived, helping ensure the people of Charlotte County became the recipients of one of the largest botanical gardens in Florida.

She has been married three times, has a son and a bunch of step-children and grandchildren. She is known to grant favors, and known to call them in. She is 76 years old and a walking, talking lesson in intelligence, diligence and resiliency.

Growing up in a small town on Long Island, she “wanted to be either a nurse or an attorney. So many of the gals were becoming nurses. I would really have preferred becoming an attorney. But back them, gals weren’t doing that.”

The family had put away money to pay for college. When the time came, it went to her brother.

“My last week in high school, I went to one of the biggest architectural firms around,” she recalled. “I thought, ‘Why start at the bottom? Let’s go right to the top.’ They didn’t have any openings. I asked if they would interview me anyway and call me when they had the appropriate opening.

“The woman said, ‘I like your spunk; I’ll interview you.’ That was June, right before graduation. On my birthday, July 5, I got a call from her offering me a job. I started immediately.

“I made my own opportunities.”

She said she was once told by a business maven that she had the ability to turn a gut feeling into an idea that offered a logical solution to any given business problem. She applied that to her career in local politics. 

Her City Council efforts included a variety of initiatives, from opening doors to downtown businesses expanding to the sidewalks, to neighborhood and economic development, infrastructure improvements, and hurricane recovery.

“I was just very determined person,” she said. “I’m really self-driven. I was not one to sit and read romantic novels.”

In an earlier interview, she had said: “I was never a women’s-libber. I just grew up in situations where, because of some skill or talent I had, I ended up more often than not in a man’s world. They were things I was pursuing anyway, or they were things I thought were a challenge that nobody else wanted to tackle.”

She has never wavered from that walk.