Team Leader Profile – Gordon Meuse
Builder of Skyscrapers now Rebuilds Homes
Few people have helped shape the Washington, D.C.-area’s built environment as much as Gordon Meuse. From 1979 to 2015, Gordon served as construction manager, field engineer, project manager and other roles for the Charles E. Smith Cos. and affiliated contractors.
Among the many projects he helped build are CityCenterDC, the Secret Service headquarters and FBI field office in downtown D.C.; the Georgia Ave.-Petworth Metro Station; Worldgate Centre in Herndon, Va.; University Center in Ashburn, Va.; and a dozen buildings in Crystal City, in Arlington, Va.
Now as a Rebuilding Together-AFF team leader, Gordon assesses needed repairs at clients’ homes, assembles needed supplies and tools, and supervises volunteer teams’ work.
From military bases to Michigan Tech
A winding path led Gordon to Washington and his impressive construction career. He was born in Meridian, Miss., where his dad was a senior master sergeant in the U.S. Air Force. When his father was stationed in El Salvador, he began elementary school there and learned to read, write and speak Spanish. After three years, the family moved to an Air Force base in Florida, but Gordon’s father died when he was 10.
When his mother remarried another Air force sergeant, later assignments took them to Oklahoma, Panama and finally Michigan.
Gordon became a civil engineer almost by chance. As the oldest of five siblings who always worked part-time to help the family make ends meet, he did not expect to go to college. Then, just a month before high school graduation, a letter from the Veterans Administration informed them that a review of his late father’s service entitled the family to full VA benefits, including college tuition. His high school counselor told him, “At this late date, the only place I think you can possibly get into is Michigan Technological University. And we decided on civil engineering.”
During college, Gordon joined the Peace Corps and, after graduating, he and his first wife were sent to Venezuela, where he served for two years doing land surveys, building two housing subdivisions, and teaching in high school.
Gordon worked six more years in Venezuela for the large engineering and construction firm Guinand & Brillembourg, building grain silos, industrial plants and other large projects. “The day I walked onto that [first] job site was my first day on a construction site with probably 500 workers,” he recalls. “And it was just neat. I just fell right into it.”
“We had no subcontractors. We did our own plumbing, electrical work, made and poured concrete. I learned how to do everything there.”
In 1978, Gordon, his wife and two sons returned to the U.S. and he began working as a surveyor for Greenhorne & O’Mara until joining Charles E. Smith the next year.
Cycling through volunteerism
In his spare time, Gordon is an avid long-distance cyclist, often riding 60 miles. In the 1990s, he cycled 750-mile round trips between Boston and Montreal and Paris and Brest. His wife Kay was a competitive cyclist. In her first USA Cycling national tournament in 2006, she won all three of her races (time trial, criterium and road race) in the 55-to-59 age group. She won at least one race annually for the next decade and is an 11-time national champion.
The couple also volunteers at Arlington’s Virginia Hospital Center, where Gordon is a wheelchair escort and Kay, a former nurse, works in the emergency department.
Gordon also used his skills to upgrade a community gardening plot run by Allen Chapel AME Church in Southeast D.C. With the Howard University chapter of Engineers Without Borders and other community groups, Gordon helped design and build raised garden beds, accessible paths and an irrigation system. He returns each fall to drain the irrigation pipes and each spring to restart them. For his efforts, Gordon earned the 2022 Community Service Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers National Capital Section.
A few years ago, Gordon discovered RT-AFF on the Volunteer Arlington website. RT “sounded custom made for things I like to do. There are a lot of new activities that you have to look into and figure out, so I feel like it keeps me mentally sharper.”
His most memorable projects include building wheelchair ramps and replacing sinking sub-floors in mobile homes.
Despite his extensive construction background, Gordon tells potential RT volunteers that “experience is not needed at all. Just get out there and start doing what they have you do and ask any questions you need to ask. You’ll learn how to do it.”
11th Street Bridge Park community garden
https://www.ewb-dc.org/projects/washington-dc/
2022 ASCE Community Service Award (p.5)
https://www.asce-ncs.org/images/newsletters/2022/ncs-nl-202205.pdf
