Interesting people are hard to find. They’re rare and precious things, similar to the ghost orchid that Susan Orleon wrote about in “The Orchid Thief.” Ghost orchids are found in the swamps of southern Florida, but the search is worth it. And like ghost orchids you will have to enter strange and sweaty places to find interesting people.
And so this is how I met Tracy Scahill. I had been sweating my way to fitness and weight loss every morning for years in the gym rooms of Healthtrax in Garden City and then one day about two years ago I noticed this woman who looked a lot like a marathon runner. She was lean and lovely and not afraid to work up a sweat. Here was diligence, hard work and perseverance made manifest in a single person. How does she do it? What is the driving force behind her discipline? How in the world does she keep the weight off? And to find out I introduced myself.
I first asked about her dietary habits, but over the months our conversations focused more on books. I have been working my way through the top 100 literary masterpieces and here I finally met someone who also had a real interest in reading great literature. She told me to try Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” which I loved, and in turn I would tell her to read D.H. Lawrence’s “Sons and Lovers”.
Over time I learned why she had an affinity for British writers. One of her forbearers was Sir Francis Drake. In case you’re not into world history, Sir Francis Drake (1540-1596) was the legendary English hero who was a sea captain, naval officer and explorer during the Elizabethan era and the guy who put Great Britain on the map. He was the second man to circumnavigate the world. I had a feeling that Tracy still had Sir Francis Drake’s DNA coursing through her veins and his legacy was one of the things which gave her this obvious indomitable will and discipline. Last week I sat down and actually formerly interviewed her.
The first question I asked was about her iron will and work ethic. She told me that when she graduated from Villanova, she was the recipient of the Sister Mary Margaret Cribben Award given to the student who showed the most discipline and fortitude. So I was right all along.
Tracy’s mother was Marie Occhicone, an Italian American fashion model, and her dad was in publishing, which is why she has such a love of literature. She has one older sibling, William, who introduced her to sports and her passion for tennis led to varsity play both in high school and college. After college she landed a job at Merrill Lynch in Garden City, which is where she remains, functioning as a financial advisor.
She is married to Frank Scahill, a well-known trial lawyer, and when asked to describe her husband, she told me “he has enough charisma to be the president of the United States.”
She told me a story of how her family gathered together when she was younger to take the first bus over the new Verrazano Bridge and how exciting it was and then told me her husband likes to say that she now serves as his Verrazano Bridge, serving to support him in so many ways.
The way she functions is inspiring and is why I wanted to do a story about her. How is it possible for one little person who can’t weight more than 95 pounds to inspire a powerful husband, win a crucial Villanova award, be a successful financial adviser, raise a big family, work out in the gym five days a week and capture the interest of a journalist who has the choice to write about anyone I choose?
This is not meant to be a rhetorical question. I think her ability to inspire and lead can be traced back five centuries to her famous relative Sir Francis Drake. Drake is still considered a mythic figure for the British and his courage and know-how set the foundation of the British Empire. Tracy Brewer Scahill is the personification of Sir Francis Drake and carries his genes.
At the end of our interview Tracy remarked in an offhanded manner that she “takes self-reliance to the next level” and it reminded me of the two great transcendentalists of the 19th century who believed in self-reliance above all else. Thoreau was the guy who built the cabin on Walden Pond and lived there for two years communing with nature in solitude and said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” and that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Emerson was the one who said “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” These transcendentalists established the foundation of American values.
Although Tracy’s relatives were British, it seems to me she is more like an American transcendentalist, someone not afraid to cut her own pathway in life, listen to her own drum beat and not be afraid to sweat it out and be self-reliant. Like I said, this is one interesting person and interesting people are always always hard to find, are always inspiring and heroic and then tend to lead the rest of us along this path we call life. Who would have guessed I would meet a person like that in a gym?
