Julie San Martin

When her father joined a St. Croix law practice, Julie San Martin arrived with her family from Pennsylvania to live in a Caribbean that some say no longer exists. In the mid-1950s, she recalls, cattle was unloaded from -schooners onto the waterfront, banks stored cash in cigar boxes to -deter hungry bugs and Fort Christiansvaern served as the -island's jail.

She soon joined other children who were learning to sail small boats off the foot of Queen Cross Street in Christiansted harbor. "Friends you make through sailing are friends that you keep for life," San Martin says. Like many Virgin Islanders of that era, she left after eighth grade for boarding school and college. At Duke University, her natural aptitude for the new field of computer technology meant a host of job offers even before graduation.

San Martin put her skills to work in 1968 when she was hired by TRW to work on the Apollo moon mission at the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center. After living in Arizona with husband Joe San Martin and their son George, she returned to St. Croix in 1986 to take over her mother's real estate business, today a RE/MAX franchise.

For the past 25 years, she has sought ways to make her hometown a better place to live and visit. After much of Christiansted's foliage was destroyed by Hurricane Hugo in 1989, San Martin became the town's unofficial tree maven, spurring on planting and restoration through a tree council.

"There are many more trees now than there were 15 years ago," San Martin says. She focused on a gnarled baobab, the rare "dead rat" tree sacred to African and Caribbean culture, when she saw it dying from neglect and paved-over roots in an asphalt parking lot. "Our baobab has a brass plaque and is producing 'dead rats' now," she says.

She renewed her childhood love of sailing and served as fleet captain, commodore and regatta director for the St. Croix International Yacht Club for many years. In February 2010, she turned the regatta into a fundraiser for the local hospice that provides compassionate care for St. Croix's terminally ill patients.

These days, the former rocket scientist turned Realtor and community activist spends free time sailing with her husband and Tank, their Schipperke Belgian canal boat dog. She has an ongoing love for an island where many things have never changed — people still help one another and a newcomer can find a warm welcome.

"People remember the feeling of community with nostalgia," San Martin says. "On St. Croix, we still have it."