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01/13/2016 07:30 AMBefore she committed herself to run for first selectman of Chester, Lauren Gister needed some vital approvals. Not from the town Democratic Committee—that came later. Not from outgoing first selectman Ed Meehan, who had already decided not to run. The very first approvals Lauren needed were from her two teenage daughters Sophie and Maya.
“The kids needed to sign on; I wouldn’t be as flexible as I had been, and I needed their buy in,” she says.
The girls agreed and the result is that Chester has a new first selectman.
Lauren has never held office before, not even in school, but she thought that her training as a lawyer had equipped her with the kinds of skills that would be important in the selectman’s office.
“I know that I am a problem solver; I deal in conflict resolution, in administrative matters,” she says.
Beyond that, Lauren had something in her background that indicated she could meet challenges: She was a United States Marine Corps officer. She served 10 years on active duty, 15 in the reserve, and retired as a major in 2002.
“The Marine Corps was the best thing I ever did. I learned a lot about myself and how not to be afraid of life,” she says, looking back on her military service. “I gained an ability to figure things out and how to accomplish them.”
She joined the Marines after a year of college. It was a challenging time for her family and she felt paying for her college tuition was only adding to the problems. First she signed up for the Air Force, but it canceled guarantees for the jobs she was interested in. She wanted to work in interrogation and translation. The Air Force recruiter, she recalls, told her, maybe instead she could work in the post office or the mess hall.
“If I wanted to work in the post office, I could get a job without joining the Air Force,” she says.
After obtaining assurances she’d be assigned to the kind of work she was interested in, she joined the Marines. Her training was at the most famous of Marine bases, Parris Island. She later completed officers’ training at Marine Corps Base Quantico. Afterward she herself became a trainer for officers there. She also served as an intelligence analyst in Japan.
While in the service, Lauren completed her associates degree, and after she retired from active duty, earned her bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington in l992. She had planned to get dual advanced degrees in both law and Latin American studies through a program at the University of New Mexico. After a year, she moved to Minneapolis “for the sake of a relationship” and, unable to find a similar joint degree program, continued with law at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.
“I did not start out to be a lawyer, but I knew a law degree could never hurt,” she says.
For the last l9 years Lauren has lived and practiced law in Chester. Her mother Natalie Lindstrom and her sister Meg Gister, the music teacher at Chester Elementary School, also live in town. Being first selectman has given Lauren both a new title and a new portable telephone. She now carries not only her personal cell phone, but an official town portable as well. So far, she hasn’t had the late calls that often characterize a town official’s evenings. There was just one call from the fire chief saying there had been a boat fire, but that the department was handling it.
Lauren enjoyed running for office.
“The campaign was fun. I wanted to hear what people were saying,” she says.
She would like the conversations she had during the campaign to continue, and, in fact, to include many more people in town. One of her primary goals is to communicate better with Chester residents.
“I want to make everybody feel invested and feel informed,” she says.
Lauren wants to keep people informed using a variety of tools, including email blasts with an expanded list of local residents; meetings with community groups like the Merchants Association; informal coffee chats in local restaurants; and get-togethers at places like the gazebo in front of the Chester Meeting House.
“I want to explore all the ways we have to get people to connect,” she says.
One of the challenges facing Chester at the moment is the construction from January to the end of May on the bridge underneath the roadway at the intersection of Main and Water streets. It will disrupt traffic and temporarily take away some parking spaces in the heart of downtown Chester. Lauren points out that there is expanded parking space further down Main Street at Laurel Hill Cemetery and there will also be parking made available by the Goodspeed at the Norma Terris Theatre on North Main Street. For pedestrians, the construction will leave a sidewalk passable on one side of the street or the other.
“Will it be convenient? Maybe not, but it will be passable,” she says.
So far Lauren’s biggest shock in her new office has come in a role many townspeople probably don’t realize she has: not only is Lauren first selectman, she is also the police chief. In that capacity, she was handed a folder with pistol permits to sign.
“Now that really surprised me,” she says. “I thought, ‘Wow, do I really do this?’”