After 25 years of holding leadership positions in two New Hyde Park civic associations, Marianna Wohlgemuth and her sister, Marietta DiCamillo, have given up their presidencies in the organizations.
“It’s time to pack it in. It’s time for new leadership,” DiCamillo said in addressing a meeting of the civic associations on Wednesday, Jan. 21. “But we’re not moving away. We’ll still be up to the same mayhem,” the retiring president of the North Lakeville Civic Association added.
Wohlgemuth, 65, had sent an email to members of both civic groups earlier last week to inform them of the decision she had made to vacate her position as president of the Lakeville Estates Civic Association.
“Marietta and I made a joint decision that it was time to hand the leadership over to the next generation,” Wohlgemuth said in an interview prior to the Wednesday meeting. “I do a lot of work with the [military] veterans now. You have to make the transition as effectively as possible.”
Wohlgemuth and DiCamillo are both officers in the ladies’ auxiliary of Albertson VFW Post 5250, where their husbands—both veterans of the Vietnam War—are members.
Wohlgemuth said she will continue to serve on the board of directors of the Water Authority of Western Nassau.
DiCamillo, chief financial officer of the Major League Baseball Players Association, is currently serving her third and final year as president of the Great Neck Library Board of
Directors.
“We’ve always been a team, her and I,” DiCamillo said of her and her sister’s leadership roles in the civics. “It’s been a commitment of love and altruism. It’s time for new blood, for new people with new interests.”
After opening the civic association meeting, DiCamillo introduced longtime civic association activist Michael O’Donald as the new president of the North Lakeville Civic.
She told those present at the sparsely attended meeting in the Manhasset-Lakeville Fire Department headquarters they are proposing David Lau to become the new president of the Lakeville Estates Civic Association.
The Lakeville Estates group represents approximately 1,200 households, according to Wohlgemuth. DiCamillo said the North Lakeville Estates organization represents nearly 900 households.
The two women revived what had been dormant civic associations in 1991 as part of a campaign in response to exorbitant water rates being charged by the Jamaica Estates Water Company. They mounted an intensive countywide petition campaign to establish a new water authority, collecting more than 10,000 signatures, Wohlgemuth said, and enlisting the support of then-state Assemblyman Thomas Di Napoli and the deceased state Sen. Michael Tully in a fight that ultimately resulted in the creation of the Water Authority of Western
Nassau.
“That really was our pinnacle,” DiCamillo said.
As part of her work with the Foundation to Preserve Long Island’s International Heritage, DiCamillo initiated an effort to decontaminate and preserve the Sperry property in New Hyde Park that was the United Nations’ first home during which time the state of Israel was born. Wohlgemuth said she and her sister had earlier led a petition fight to prevent sale of the
Sperry property to a hotel.
Lockheed had acquired the property that Sperry had occupied in Great Neck with the idea of developing a 10-story hotel on the site.
They also formed a subgroup that pushed for an environmental inquiry into a plume of pollutants emanating from the Sperry property. When Sperry was producing gyroscopes for submarines during World War II, benzine was one of the by-products, which it was dumping in the area at the time resulting in an accumulation of underground toxic materials, according to Wohlgemuth.
One of Wohlgemuth’s current causes is an effort to restore the Schumacher House, a white clapboard house on New Hyde Park Road and Marcus Avenue. It was used as a school house for children of United Nations delegates who were meeting in the Sperry building in the U.N.’s nascent years.
The Town of North Hempstead received a state grant of $500,000 to start rehabilitating the structure, but more work remains to be done to preserve it. Wohlgemuth’s also not done with her effort to resolve the issue of an alleged shortfall in payments made by the Town of North Hempstead to the North New Hyde Park-Park Authority on a building leased.
Questions Wohlgemuth raised about those payments resulted in a controversial audit of the Clinton G. Martin Park finances, which ultimately revealed no irregularities.
Wohlgemuth has said her activist sensibilities were inspired by her mother, who led campaigns against a private bus company that had changed its route in their Queens neighborhood and against a school busing initiative to forcibly integrate two schools in Queens.
Asked about her own activist legacy, Wohlgemuth said, “I’m proud of the fact that I’ve been able to keep this community in the quality of life that we have always enjoyed, that people are proud of where they live.”
