Meet Your Neighbor
Kevin Dugan
BY MARY LANCASTER INDEPENDENT WRITER
You read about islanders who are in the public eye all the time, but what do you know about your neighbors - those you see at the supermarket, the gas station, at school or just in passing on the street? Everybody has a story about how they came to be here, what they have done and how their experiences have shaped their lives and added to the fabric of Nantucket's unique character. This week The Nantucket Independent continues a new feature highlighting island residents. There is no better way to describe Kevin Dugan than as a people person. In the course of about a half hour last Friday it seemed as though every five minutes Dugan was waving and calling out to someone from a bench by the town's visitor's center, asking how they were doing personally, how their job was going and just letting them know that someone cared about their well being. Every job he has ever had, or organization he has been involved with, has offered him the opportunity to relate directly and meaningfully with others, which is what Dugan most enjoys.

ROB BENCHLEY/The Independent

"My wife says I should run for mayor," he joked as he greeted a passerby.

Dugan was born in Boston but raised in South Dartmouth, where he attended grade school. He went to high school at La Salle Military Academy in Long Island, N.Y., graduated from Stonehill College in 1968 with a degree in management and accounting, then ran his own General Motors dealership in the New Bedford area for 25 years. He sold the business in November 1992 and moved to Nantucket after visiting the island several times.

"I always fantasized about moving here - I fantasized because I had three kids I had to educate before I moved," he said.

Calling himself "a complete workaholic," Dugan said although he took a couple of months to decide what to do for a living on the island, he immediately became a volunteer with Nantucket's Emergency Food Pantry, an affiliation he continues to this day. Then he saw an ad announcing that Colgan Air was opening a station here, and with no airline experience he was hired as its manager.

"I got a fast indoctrination into the airline business," he recalled. "I loved Colgan. It was exciting because it was brand new to Nantucket. I went door to door to inns and hotels dropping off schedules. This was in the early 1990s when New York people began to be more interested in coming here on a regular basis. It was very busy but it was a lot of fun getting it going."

In 1999, Dugan accepted a position as assistant manager at the Steamship Authority terminal working under terminal manager Paul Harrington. He enjoyed that experience, too, but began laughing when he remembered what happened when Harrington retired and he took over.

"It's a good thing I had a lot of management and people skills because [Harrington's] last day was the day before the Flying Cloud went into service. On the second trip of the first day of service - this was Memorial Day weekend - when the boat docked here the captain called me up to the bridge to tell me the boat wasn't able to go back because there was a major problem with the starboard engine," he said. "That was my baptism by fire."

Eight years ago Dugan wed his second wife, Dawn, who is also the mother of two sisters he hired to work for a summer at Colgan. They met when she came to the island to visit her daughters and had a three-year commuting romance between here and her home in Syracuse, N.Y. until she moved to Nantucket. Dugan's father became seriously ill in Florida and the couple spent a year there to help out his mother. When they returned here about a year and a half ago, Dugan opened a car rental agency by the airport for his brother-in-law. As that business was getting established, he learned of an opening as assistant administrator at Nantucket Visitor Services.

"This was a natural fit if there is such a thing," he said of his role welcoming and informing tourists. "We deal with 600 or 700 people a day and everything you can imagine. Our job here is to make sure people have a positive experience. It's a very busy place. It hops all the time, but that's a good thing. We need to make sure the tourists are well taken care of because we want them to come back and their friends to come.

"I don't want to say, 'This is it,' because it will sound like I'm ready to croak, but I'm very happy here. It's a great job. There's a lot of stuff going on and I need that because that's my nature, and it's similar to the food pantry because you're helping people. You have to be a people person to do this stuff."

Dugan is a former member of the Alliance for Substance Abuse Prevention, but being the busy guy he is, he now only has enough spare time to devote to being a member of St. Mary's Church and walks whenever and wherever he can. But his dedication to the food pantry is deep, and no matter what, the last thing he does before bed and the first thing he does when he wakes is to check the pantry's phone messages in case someone has an emergency need.

"I take my jobs very seriously but I enjoy what I do," he said. "It's nice to give back. It's a gift to be happy with what you do. I'm very happy with my life. I have a very good life and I have

everything I need." I