Getting crazy with the Crazies

Go ahead, call Tom Gerdy and his freewheeling band of Habitat for Humanity freelancers “crazy.” They won’t mind.

In fact, that’s what they call themselves — the Habitat Roadtrip Crazies. But this is the kind of crazy that threatens to give that word a good name.

If you know anything about Habitat “blitz builds,” you know how much time, energy, money and connections are needed to pull one off. Generally, for most Habitat chapters, it’s a year-long focus. Roadtrip Crazy leaders Gerdy, Larry Owen and Chuck Doremus have two scheduled in the next two months.

For that, you can blame a 12-year-old Farmville boy named Jacob.

“When we saw him,” recalled Gerdy, “we couldn’t say no.”

Jacob can’t walk, can barely use his hands, and can only be understood by those very close to him. What he can do, however, is smile.

“He’s got a great smile,” said Jayne Johnson, director of Farmville’s Habitat

chapter.

It gets better. Jacob’s mother, Diane, is a long-time waitress at one of Farmville’s busiest restaurants. Almost everybody in town knows Dianne, and that means many of them also know about Jacob’s challenges, and the fact that their current house is so small that Jacob has to keep his wheelchair outside and crawl around on the floor, and that one of her two daughters died in an automobile accident a couple of years ago.

This sounds like a story line for “Extreme Makeover, Home Edition,” minus the cameras and the bus. Instead of being sent away on vacation, Diane and her other daughter will be working alongside the Habitat volunteers on April 4 and 5, creating a new house from Ground Zero. That’s the Habitat way.

“We received some money from the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services to create a house that would be accessible for Jacob,” Johnson said, “but the catch was, the work had to be completed by May 1. We’re a small chapter, and as the time got closer, I started wondering what we were going to do.”

She did remember meeting Tom Gerdy, who once stopped by her office on his way through Farmville, and she remembered the term “Habitat Crazies.” What she couldn’t remember was his last name, or any contact

information.

“Then, I happened to be on the national Habitat site and saw that they (Gerdy and his group) were looking for small chapter to help with a blitz build,” Johnson said.

The problem was, the Crazies had already found a partner, an affiliate in Monroe, N.C.

“Still, we decided to drive over to Farmville and meet the family,” Gerdy said. “When we did, we were hooked.”

I asked Larry, and he said: ‘Of course, we can do it.’ I asked Chuck, and he said, ‘Of course we can do it.’ I had no choice.”

Gerdy runs a construction company in Lynchburg that pays his bills. Building Habitat houses feeds his soul. The Roadtrip group is hard to explain, being made up not only of Lynchburg Habitat volunteers but people who have been collected in previous blitz builds in places like Hagerstown, M.D., Brewton, Ala. and even Los Angeles (where actor/comedian Robin Williams swung a hammer).

“We’ll take anyone who wants to help,” Gerdy said.

Building houses is one of the goals for a Roadtrip Crazies blitz build. Another, and perhaps equally important, purpose is to energize the chapter it visits. In Farmville’s case, that’s already working.

“They’re pumped,” Gerdy said. “They can’t wait.”

If you want to participate, you can contact Tom Gerdy in Lynchburg or Jayne Johnson at (434) 392-6627 in Farmville.

That is, if you don’t mind getting a little crazy.