The Bobby Bones Show - On The Range, In Yonkers

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

Marcellie Bellinger cleaned up the streets of Yonkers, NY – literally. He takes his job as a Ranger seriously, and brings his infectiously optimistic work ethic everywhere he goes.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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From sunup to sundown, a leave's got your bag. Try a leave. Use as directed for minor aches and pains. Welcome to On the Job. This season, we're focusing on how people and businesses are getting back to work. Let's call it a great transformation, a change in the way workers are thinking. Employers need people to work more than ever, putting laborers in a sort of position of power. We'll be hearing from people navigating this new normal for themselves as they find their life's work. Today, we talk to someone who has never not been in a great transformation.

Marcelli Bellinger lives in Yonkers and is almost maniacally dedicated to improving himself, which eventually landed him in a job where he supervises people, all trying to do the exact same thing. Okay. All right. Thank you very much for talking today. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. For this episode, I had the pleasure of talking with Marcelli.

Marcelli Bellinger. He was 57 when I interviewed. interviewed him back in March. My birthday comes next month on April 23rd, which I would turn 58. He's a very spright 58, and he's a very busy guy. Are you talking to me in the middle of a workday right now? Yes, I am, as a matter of fact. Yes, I am.

Marcelli was born and raised in Yonkers, where he works now as a Grayston Ranger. And his job is to take out the trash. To make sure that Yonka stays as clean as we need to make it. No question about it. Okay, so the Graston Rangers is a really amazing Transitional Workforce Program designed to keep Yonkers clean. Grayston is actually a bakery founded in 1982 with the goal of hiring anyone who wanted to work. No background checks, no resumes.

And in the 2000s, they started programs like the Rangers to create more jobs and make Yonkers a better place to live. My official job title is Rangers Development Program Manager. I've been a manager right now for exactly four months. But prior to that, I was an actual worker for eight years. As a manager, Marcelli oversees the Rangers as they spread out through the city, drive routes, and clean up the streets. A lot of people sometimes see us, and the first thing that goes through their mind is, this is such an easy job. But I'm here to tell everyone, it is not an easy job.

I never assume trash collection was an easy job, but the way that Marcelli describes it, his job is a job. His job is like a big game of chess, with the street maps being his board. You need to be strategic about your routes. You need to have some serious hustle, and you're battling the elements all the time. You have to be a quick thinker. Every day is a different day. It's not the same routine. It may be the same route, but it's never the same routine.

A big part of this is that the Rangers in their fluorescent vests have become a huge part of the Yonkers landscape. They're constantly interacting with the community, getting people involved, talking with them, and spreading the ethos that Grayston and the Rangers are founded on. And believe it or not, they start to catch on to it as they see us working every day. And the Grayston Rangers, it's a truly immersive program that helps workers to get to a place of self-sufficiency in every part of their lives. So in addition to cleaning the streets, Marcelli is always helping his workers out with housing issues, putting together resumes, and finding other. work. So the Rangers is a place you go when you want to get on your feet, work, and you need a

hand to get that started. And whatever the situation is, we're going to assess that. And we're going to try our best to work a solution now for you. Marcelli is infectiously positive and exudes Grayston's mission of teaching self-improvement, upward mobility, and second chances. He's even got one of those inspirational office posters behind him in the interview. I'm going to read it to you. My story is continuing. No punctuation. After talking with Marcelli for a bit, it feels like he's always been an inspirational poster in human form.

Again, he grew up in yonkers. His parents were both really hard workers. Dad was a mechanic. So I was well on my way to be in that type of worker, you know, because I saw my father working hard every day. I saw him doing the things that he had to do to take care of his family. And I adopted that also. In high school, he was a very serious athlete, pushed himself hard.

In 1983, he ended up going into the Army after seeing their commercials about bettering yourself and thought boot camp might be challenging. I wanted to work out, be the best I could be. So it wasn't like a rah-rah patriotism, go America. Oh, nah. You wanted to do push-ups. You wanted to break records. That's all I wanted to do was make myself better.

That's true. That's the only thing it was about. He quickly moved up the ranks in the Army, then got out in 1987, worked to AT&T as an operator. Then he switched gears to do a more physical job with his uncle's business. And I started doing moving, being a relocation engineer, because that's what they call them now. They're just not a mover.

Relocation engineer. That's exactly who I am. You know, you want to big up that a little bit. So I became a relocation engineer, and I got good at it. I got very good at it. I got so good at it that I did it for 20 years. He got married, had two kids. In the early 2000s,

He got a job at the local power plant. He and his wife had just had their third child, and the night before Marcelli was going to start this new job, their baby passed away in his sleep. It was obviously an unspeakably horrible moment, and Marcelli remembers how his new boss at the power plant was human. He cried. I cried, and he said, Marcel, listen, go take care of your business. He said, do what you have to do.

Your job is still here. Do not worry about your job. Don't you even think about this job. They sent flowers to the funeral, gave him as much time as he needed. Before he even started, Marcelli was being treated as more than an employee. I caught a lesson from that. That you have to treat people in a certain way. When you show your kindness and you show your heartfelt loyalty to somebody,

you always get 100% back. And from that day, that's what I plan to do. I said, I'm going to treat every person with respect and dignity. He worked there for a while, then he was a concrete inspector, then back to relocation engineering. He liked moving around and doing new stuff. So in 2014, his friend told him about a program that Grayston put together for veterans. He was telling me about a Ranger program.

And I said, oh, you mean the bakery? They're like, yeah, I said, yeah, I used to work there. I used to do a little part-time over there. Of course he did. Marcelli went in to Grayston to hear about the job and found that it was a trash collection program. And in the interview, he was asked if he had any problems cleaning up the streets.

But he said, he wanted to work. He needed to feed his family. He wanted to be physical and outside. And he thought about this question with the mantra that his dad imparted to him early on. whatever job you do, be the best at what you do, because people are going to see you. He said, it may seem like the lowliest job in the world. He said, but I guarantee you, someone's going to see you.

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Go to Expresspros.com to find a location near you. Back to Marcelli's story. He went into interview at Grayston for the Rangers job, but the interviewer was late. Marcelli was patient, and after two hours the guy shows up, pretty surprised. that Marcelli was still there. When he brought me in the office, he asked me about myself, I told him a little bit about myself, and he stopped me in the middle of it and said, you really stayed for two hours? I said, yes, sir. When you want what you want, you have to stay and wait for it.

I said, you can't lose your discipline. I said, I'm a very disciplined person. And he said, you know what, you got the job. Just like that. Just like anything he'd done until then, he wanted to go above and beyond, move up in the ranks and be challenged. And he definitely found that challenge coming into this job. Yonkers Avenue at that time was drop off garbage city of the capital. Mattresses, old furniture, this, that garbage, this. It was a mess. It's why the Rangers was put together a few years earlier.

So he immediately went at it with his team and says the streets looked completely different in two weeks. cleaned everything pristine. Two weeks. Two weeks. In two weeks. Got it taken care of. To where now we can just do our usual cleaning and it's not a problem. The Yonkers landscape changed quickly.

And Marcelli was noticeably the guy out on the streets making that change. One day he was out on one of his routes and a car pulled up. Guess who's in the car? The mayor of Yonkers rolls down his window and he says, Listen, I just want to tell you you're doing a phenomenal job. What's your name? Marcelli Bellinger. He said, I'll be seeing you soon.

Roved up his window, went right on about his business. A week later, Marcelli gets invited to City Hall. The mayor shakes his hand in front of the assembly and gives him a letter of accommodation. And he tells me, because of you, I'm going to make this a job with the city because of you. The Grace and Rangers had been funded by grants to start out. Now, the mayor agreed to fund the program through the city. Marcelli picked up more rats on the other side of the city where he lived. So everybody's seeing me everywhere.

Somebody would see me. Aren't you the guy that clean? Yes, I am. That is me. You know? And he was like, wow, you do a damn good job, man. I see you. I see you.

Eventually, he became supervisor, the position he still holds today. And all I kept doing every day was, making our routes better. How can I do this to make this more effective? Have my community see that it's clean and how can I involve them in the cleanup? As he and his team go around, they talk to people. Say, if you can clean your storefront or in front of your apartment, we can spend more time cleaning the parks and the streets to the point where now it's part of the community routine that everyone does their part. So those are the things, like I said before, that when you, put 100% into it and you get involved with that community, those are the things that happen,

those are the results that happen, those are the things that happen because after you do a great cleaning for them, they want to see it clean all the time. Marcelli has simply helped make Yonkers a better place to live. The community has pride in the Rangers and what they do. And cleaner streets bring in more business, get people out and about more. We had little children that came up every day and said, listen, can I use your picker? Can I help you with the picker? Can I? Sure you can. The picker's fun. Yeah. So it wasn't a thing that we were like, hey, kid, get out of here.

No, you're doing it. No. We turned right around, and I would bring extra pickers. Listen, here you go, right before you go to school. Come on. Do your thing. By bringing in the kids to what Grayston and the Rangers are doing with the foundation, they brought the parents in too. Families all got to know Marcelli by name, and he got to find out more about their lives, what they needed.

If their housing was okay, if they needed work, or help putting together resumes. I speak with everyone. I talk to them, ask them how they doing. Still working? Not working? What are you doing? Oh, I'm not doing anything. Listen, you need to come to 21 Park Avenue and come see me.

Listen, we got jobs, everything up there. Come see me. Since I've been the manager, we have created at least 30 jobs. We have 30 people working right now. How does it feel now that you have, have transformed the space that you grew up in. It feels great. It feels that I've accomplished what I needed to accomplish, but I know I still got more

road to go. Marcelli doesn't really have an off button for his self-improvement drive. And that's what he's passed on to the people he works with. Every day before work, he has meetings with his team and he asked them, what can he do for them? They're family. They're my family. And I want to make sure that when they go out, there's nothing on. on their minds to inhibit their work.

A happy worker is a great worker. A worker that has no problems is one of the best workers you're gonna ever see, because there's nothing on his mind but the work itself. And at the end of every day, he makes sure to tell everyone he's working with one thing. I say thank you. I'm so appreciative of their work because I've been there.

So many times, nobody told me thank you. So every day, I make it a point to tell Every one of my people, thank you so much for just doing what you do. You make me. I don't make you. You make me. Marcelli might seem like one of those cheesy inspirational posters in human form, but that's because he actually operates by the mantras that most people pretend to live by.

And it makes a difference when you come across someone who actually lives their lives their lives like that, or does their daily job with that ethos, no matter what it is they do. And if anyone thinks that sounds cheesy or unrealistic or questions that one person thinking like that can make a difference, just walk down Yonkers Avenue and take a look around. Ask the mayor. I think there's a stigma against people who've worked as many different jobs and careers as someone like Marcelli has, like they can't lock down one or stay the course, always in transition. But why stay a course? Marcelli has transitioned so many times

because he's never wanted to stop growing despite any hardships that you'd assume would stop him or anyone else right in their tracks and the workers he supervises at Grayston are people just like him, humans in transition, just trying to be better. And if that means that one of his workers

finds other opportunities and moves on from the Rangers, he's proud of them. Listen, don't think that because you went and got a better job that I'm feeling mad at you, that I'm some sort of hater. I don't drink hateration. I don't drink hater raid. I don't do any of that.

What I do is I'm proud of you. For taking another step toward your goal. There's no roof. Don't make a roof. There's no roof. Whenever you think that you hit the ceiling, guess what? It's so more and more rungs that you've got to go up. In this season, all about the great transformation we're going through,

that's what I took away from Marcelli. lean in and keep transforming. It's literally all we can do. Stick to the goal of just being better for ourselves and just keep going. Once you lay the blueprint, just follow the blueprint. And it all makes sense to you at the end of the day

because you'll receive the prize that you need to receive, you know? No punctuation. No punctuation. That's it. For on the job, I'm Otis Gray. To learn more about Gray and the Rangers program, go to graceton. Thank you for listening.

Make every day feel epic in the all-new Hyundai Palisade hybrid. The Palisade hybrid is packed full of features, cutting-edge tech, and up to an EPA estimated 619 miles of range on select trims and class-leading interior space. Seating configurations for 7-8 passengers, available H-track all-wheel drive, so you can be ready to go anywhere in style.

Learn more about the Hyundai Palisade at HyundaiUSA.com. Call 562-3-4-603 for complete details. The Disneyland Resort is everything. We came to play the Calliway. It felt like I was in the round-up game with Woody and Picks our pier. Have you been holding out on us? No, just showing you where the real Hollywood stars are. Like Tiana's Bayou Adventure.

Oh, there's jazz, right? And a drop. You'll see. Grab a Mickey Fretzel on the way. Girl, you're reading my mind. We're almost there. Disney California Adventure Park and Disneyland Park. We came to play.

Both park tickets and reservations require subject to restrictions change and cancellation without notice. Visit Disneyland.com. for details. Spring is in the air and a leaf's long lasting pain relief is here to keep you moving. The days are longer. The flowers are blooming. Whether it's gardening, yard work, or just spending more time outdoors, spring has a way of getting us moving despite any body pain. That's where a leave can keep you going. With just one dose, a leave gives you long lasting body pain relief for up 12 hours. From sunup to sundown, a leave's got your back. Try a leave. Use as directed for

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