Phyllis Gates, elected to the Board of Trustees in 2008, grew up in Nebraska, came to New York in 1967 and, with her husband, writer Gary Paul Gates, moved to Shelter Island in 1998. “It felt,” she says, “like coming home,” although her hometown of Beatrice was actually “a ‘city’ of 12,000 in a sea of cornfield.
Her 30-year career in communications includes heading the Public Relations Departments of Esquire and GQ magazines, Corporate & Investor Relations at Esquire, Inc. and creating and heading the communications department of CBS Magazines [now Hachette], after which she joined Paramount [now Viacom] as a speech writer for the CEO and President and then freelanced as a speech writer for media and business executives until her recent retirement. She was a Director of the Advertising Club of New York, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Association of Visually Handicapped in New York City. In addition to the Library on Shelter Island, Phyllis is active in the community, including with the local chapter of the League of Women Voters of which she is an officer and Support our Shelter [SoS], a group of Shelter Islanders who support The Retreat, an agency providing shelter and services for victims of domestic violence in Long Island’s five east end towns.
