Serving the Mid-County: A Q&A with Natalie Cantor, Part 2

Natalie Cantor has spent the past 26 years of her career working in the County's Services Centers and the past 16 as Director of the Mid-County Center. Cantor, a fixture at Wheaton events and committee meetings, is retiring at the end of the month, amid major organizational changes at the Services Center. 

Wheaton Patch sat down with Cantor to ask about living and working in Wheaton, and how her job and the area has changed. Read part one of the Q&A here. 

Wheaton Patch: How has it been working so close to home?

Natalie Cantor: There’s good things and bad things there, the good thing is that this has been a labor of love, this has been my community for 41 years. If I didn’t love this place I would have been out of here. The funny flip side of that is when I want to have my sweats and no makeup on a Sunday at the store, I can never find anonymity, because someone is always there that I know who has an issue.

I ran over to the mall the other day - and a women who somehow recognized me as working for the county government came up to me. She was very upset as she was trying to find scholarship money for her son to go to Montgomery College and she was asking me how do I do it, where do I go? I took down her phone number and I emailed someone from Montgomery College who will get back to this woman. That’s one of the things that’s very gratifying, you didn’t think you were going to have an opportunity to help last Thursday. At the same time, I was on a really tight schedule, I had 20 minutes and here was someone in distress, I spent the whole time, I never did my errand. But that doesn’t amount for that much when you get the opportunity to do something for somebody. That for me has been a gift for the past 25 years, is to, at the end of the day know that I made a small difference.

WP: Are you staying here?

NC: Yes, absolutely. This is our home. I’m looking forward to seeing all of the changes I’m anticipating for downtown Wheaton coming to fruition. And it will be, even know I’m not working at it professionally, it will be an added gift to see what I helped to start get finished.

WP:What’s surprised you the most about the changes in Wheaton?

NC: I think that what most surprised and gratified me, that with every major demographic shift, there was an added vibrancy of the town. That every group that came in added to this, I don’t know, it got tastier every day. And that was a pleasure to watch.

WP:Did having the Metro station here made a big difference?

NC: It’s funny you bring that up, because I completely forget that. I guess when you have a fairly long and I would say hectic career, there’s always something different here every day. There are so many memories that it’s kind of like your hard drive has too much in it already and it’s not working quite as fast as it used to.

With the Metro, one of the big pleasures I had, truly a pleasure, was both in 1989 and 1990, here, in Wheaton and then a few years later up in Glenmont, was watching the physical construction of those tunnels.

One of the roles I played was to ensure that the construction didn’t interfere, or interfered as little as it possibly could in people’s lives and people’s businesses. I would meet with the engineers and the subcontractors on a weekly basis to deal with complaints and I forged a very good relationship with the head engineers.

They used to take me down once a week in this tiny, in this bucket literally, that would go nine stories down and we would walk the tunnels. I had to put on a hard hat and all the rest and I would watch on a weekly basis to see this amazing thing that people were capable of doing, tunneling out, it gave me a huge respect for what physical changes human beings are capable of making. At the same time, I had to be very concerned that the Metro wouldn’t overtake this area that wanted to be a small town. That it would become a convenience but it wouldn’t subsume what people here wanted, which was to feel that they’re in a small town.

When a Metro comes, you are threatened, that you won’t have a corner store atmosphere anymore. We put a lot of effort into trying to maintain this small town atmosphere in working with our businesses, like on Triangle Lane, and to try and create the promotional activities that would keep them vibrant.

On one hand we had the physical changes but on the other hand we had to do programmatic mitigations to be sure those physical changes didn’t over take this downtown. And now that I’ve said that, one thing that I would want to stress is that one of the challenges of this job, but also the enduring reward is that I’ve always viewed it as teamwork, as partnership, and there have been, not just here in Wheaton, but all through the very large service area, which you know goes all the way to the Howard County line. 

Part 3 of our Q&A with Cantor will run on Friday.