The Authors
Joyce Bernhardt Siegel and Paul Boardway Tukey.
Joyce Bernhardt Siegel
A Life of Persistence, Purpose and the Power to Noodge
There are people who see a problem and complain about it. There are people who see a problem and volunteer to help. And then there are people like Joyce Bernhardt Siegel, who see a problem and refuse to stop until something changes.
For more than six decades, Siegel has been one of Montgomery County, Maryland’s most persistent advocates for equal opportunity, affordable housing, education, and community preservation. Her remarkable life of service began with a chance encounter that would change not only her life, but the future of one of Montgomery County’s historic Black communities.
That story will soon be revealed when her memoir, aptly titled The Noodge, is released on Nov. 7. Written in partnership with author Paul Tukey, the book will be published by Green Mountain Design of Maryland.
Born June 28, 1933, Joyce Bernhardt grew up in a Brooklyn family that valued public service. After attending Smith College and Towson State, she eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in American Studies from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Southern California.
She moved to Montgomery County in the early 1960s and soon founded the West Fernwood Civic Association. But it was a visit to the nearby Scotland community in Potomac that set the course for the work that would define her life.
In late 1964, Siegel drove into Scotland to deliver Christmas toys to children. What she encountered shocked her. Scotland, a historically Black community, lacked basic infrastructure that most Montgomery County residents took for granted. Many homes had no running water or sewer service, roads were poor, and housing conditions were deteriorating. At the same time, developers and public agencies were acquiring land in and around the community.
Siegel did not simply bring more toys the following Christmas. She began asking questions.
Working with Scotland residents, ministers, neighbors and other volunteers, she helped organize Save Our Scotland in 1965. The campaign sought something considerably more ambitious than charity: it sought to give Scotland residents the opportunity to remain in their community and participate in determining its future. A fact-finding survey, church-based organizing, and persistent advocacy helped bring national attention to Scotland’s plight and ultimately attracted federal government assistance.
The results were extraordinary. The first-of-its kind effort in America contributed to the redevelopment of Scotland, including the construction of 100 new homes and improvements to infrastructure. Just as importantly, Scotland remained a living community rather than disappearing beneath the surrounding development pressures. Montgomery History continues to preserve photographs, documents and oral histories from the campaign, including materials donated by Siegel and photographs taken by her husband, Alan.
Siegel’s influence soon extended well beyond Scotland.
Her experience there helped propel her into broader housing advocacy. She served on the board of the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission and later became its public affairs officer. She worked with neighborhood groups to explain affordable-housing policies and helped advance the county’s efforts to expand access to housing for low- and moderate-income residents. She also helped organize a citizens’ Human Relations Commission, an effort that contributed to the eventual establishment of Montgomery County’s Human Relations Commission.
Her commitment to education has been equally enduring. Early in her career she worked as a Head Start teacher. At the Montgomery County Sentinel, she created a Newspaper in the Classroom program, turning journalism into an educational resource for local students. She later became a founding member of the Bernie Scholarship Awards Program, which helps low-income Montgomery County residents pursue college or vocational education. By 2023, the program had awarded nearly 900 scholarships.
Siegel has also found ways to apply her activism to issues that might initially seem far removed from housing. In the 2000s, while serving on the board of her condominium association, she became involved in energy-efficiency issues affecting master-metered buildings. That work contributed to changes in energy policy and earned her recognition from the Maryland Clean Energy Center in 2013.
Across several decades, her awards accumulated: the Montgomery County Board of Realtors' Make America Better Award in 1969; the Smith College Medal and a Community Service Award from the Washington chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews in 1970; induction into the Montgomery County Human Rights Hall of Fame; the Neal Potter Lifetime Service Award in 2013; and, most recently, the Roscoe R. Nix Distinguished Community Leadership Award in 2024. Montgomery County’s citation for the latter recognized her decades of work in housing, education and human rights and specifically highlighted her role in the transformation of Scotland.
Yet perhaps the most revealing description of Siegel comes not from an award citation but from the philosophy she has carried throughout her life: “Apathy is not an option.”
That philosophy helps explain the remarkable breadth of her career. Siegel has been an activist, educator, housing advocate, civic organizer, writer, public official, environmental advocate, and even a community historian. For decades, she and Alan also wrote restaurant reviews under the names Joyce and Alan Rogers and published several editions of Let's Eat Out, Montgomery County.
Now, at 93, Siegel is adding another chapter to that story.
On November 7, she will see the publication of The Noodge: How One Community’s Miracle Helped Push America Forward, a book about the Scotland story and the unlikely chain of events that began she decided that the conditions she encountered in a neighboring Black community were simply unacceptable.
The title is fitting. A “noodge” is someone who persistently prods, reminds and presses until something gets done. Joyce Siegel has spent a lifetime doing exactly that.
She did not set out in 1964 to become a civil-rights figure or to reshape housing policy. She set out to help a community she believed was being treated unfairly. She kept asking questions, kept recruiting allies, kept knocking on doors, and kept pushing institutions to do better.
The result is a legacy measured not simply in awards or titles, but in houses built, scholarships awarded, policies changed, histories preserved and—most importantly—a community that survived.
Joyce Siegel once saw Scotland and asked what one person could possibly do.
More than six decades later, that answer is still a remarkable work in progress.
Paul Boardway Tukey
Paul Tukey: Looking Back, and Ahead
The Pioneering Preservationist
Most of his friends are retired, or already counting the short number of days until they can slow down. He has two grandchildren now, courtesy of his 41-year-old daughter in Maine, and he admits he’d like to see them more often.
In Paul Tukey’s mind, however, another countdown is underway. In early November, he plans to publish his fourth book about a topic that almost none of those friends saw coming: community activism and historic preservation at the Scotland community of Potomac in Maryland. Titled The Noodge: How One Community’s Miracle Helped Push America Forward, the book fulfills a promise that Tukey made in 2022 to then 89-year-old Joyce Siegel to help her finish her memoir. Much more than just polishing Mrs. Siegel’s story about her remarkable work in the 1960s that resulted in 100 townhouses for a Black community, the final book includes nearly 20 magazine-style feature stories about the people who helped Joyce achieve the nationally significant landmark on Seven Locks Road.
“As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to understand the importance of history, and also how compelling it can be if you can bring it forward with provocative storytelling,” said Tukey. “It’s been an incredible honor to work with Joyce. My goal is to help audiences understand how she catalyzed a first-of-its kind community engagement effort that reached all the way to the President of the United States — and how she gave us a blueprint for how we can bring America back together today.”
AN ENTREPRENEURIAL CHAMELEON who has influenced generations of change in America across multiple fields, Paul Tukey has been known at various times as a journalist, publisher, broadcaster, filmmaker, and environmental thought leader. In the decades before he recently became involved in historic preservation efforts in Maryland, he had already built an international reputation by identifying emerging issues, creating innovative platforms, and persuading others to join him in pursuing solutions.
Born and raised by a farming and gardening family in Maine, Tukey graduated from the University of Maine with a degree in journalism and began his professional life as a sportswriter and editor. He won multiple Associated Press Awards for both writing and page design in the 1980s. At age 29, he stunned family and friends by walking away from that career and — despite having no formal training as a gardener – launched a landscape and home maintenance firm, Tukey’s Home & Land, that quickly grew to become one of Maine’s largest companies of its kind.
Just five years later, he combined his two professional loves of gardening and journalism and launched People, Places & Plants, a regional gardening publication that would grow into one of the largest and most influential horticultural magazines in North America. Never content to remain in a single medium, Tukey expanded the brand into television. In 2002, he created People, Places & Plants: The Gardening Show, serving as executive producer, director, and co-host with Roger Swain, the long-time host of The Victory Garden on PBS. The PPP program was first syndicated independently before being acquired by HGTV, where it aired nationally from 2004 through 2007. The show and magazine established Tukey as one of the nation’s most recognizable voices in horticultural communications; in 2006, he earned the nation’s Communication Award from the American Horticultural Society.
The success of the magazine and television program reflected a broader characteristic of Tukey's work: an ability to anticipate cultural shifts before they become mainstream. Years before sustainability became a widely discussed topic, he was introducing audiences to environmentally responsible approaches to landscape management and conservation.
THAT FORSIGHT LED to the next major chapter of his career. Concerned about the environmental and health consequences of excessive pesticide and fertilizer use — something he learned from first-hand experience as a landscaper — Tukey founded the SafeLawns Foundation in 2006. The organization quickly became one of North America’s leading voices advocating for safer and more sustainable approaches to lawn and landscape care. Under his leadership, SafeLawns moved beyond education and into public policy, community engagement, and large-scale demonstration projects, including an organic makeover of the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
At a time when many environmental advocates struggled to communicate complex scientific issues to the public, Tukey’s background as a journalist proved invaluable. He became a sought-after lecturer, consultant, and commentator, appearing in thousands of media outlets and delivering more than 1,500 presentations to audiences ranging from Harvard University and Yale University to the Environmental Protection Agency and international environmental organizations.
His influence expanded further through filmmaking. As founder of PFZ Media, Tukey produced A Chemical Reaction, a feature-length documentary exploring the environmental and public health impacts of conventional lawn care practices. The film earned multiple awards and three Emmy nominations, helping bring national attention to issues that had previously received little mainstream coverage.
Throughout these years, Tukey also authored books, including the bestselling The Organic Lawn Care Manual, which became a leading reference work in the field and helped popularize environmentally responsible lawn management among homeowners across North America.
His reputation as a sustainability innovator eventually led to a long association with the Glenstone Foundation in Montgomery County, Maryland. For nearly 15 years, Tukey played key roles in sustainability planning, communications, environmental restoration, government relations, and community engagement for the internationally recognized institution. His work included watershed restoration, regenerative land management, and development of one of the most environmentally efficient museum campuses in the world.
WITH THAT ACCOMPLISHED by January of 2022, Glenstone asked Tukey to change the course of his career once again. The task was to help raise money to rebuild and expand the flooded Scotland African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Potomac, Md., that had been built a century early by settlers recently descended from enslaved Africans. More than raising money, however, the museum challenged Tukey to create authentic community awareness in the process.
One notable example of those efforts became the recent Scotland Juneteenth Heritage Festival in Montgomery County, Maryland. Initially developed in partnership with Tukey and Glenstone, community leader LaTisha Gasaway-Paul, and former Montgomery County Councilmember Bruce Adams, the festival has grown into a significant regional event celebrating African American history, culture, and resilience. More than simply an annual celebration, the festival represents Tukey’s belief that preservation succeeds when history is brought to life and made relevant to contemporary audiences.
“The Juneteenth festival idea was really taking a page out of Joyce Siegel’s playbook from the 1960s,” said Tukey. “Joyce was always conceiving new ways to be newsworthy, to attract community attention, because that attention leads to action and to fundraising. We have a chapter in our book, The Noodge, about a fundraiser that Joyce put on with Scotland featuring Roberta Flack in 1968. All the local media covered the show, both before, during, and after. Thousands of people came and, for a while, it helped put the Scotland community of Potomac on the map.”
In more than a year since the ribbon was cut for the re-opening of the Scotland AME Zion church, Tukey has served as the founding Chief Advancement Officer of The Potomac Trust, a new public philanthropy focused on education, workforce development, and historic preservation. The goal is to continue the kind of work he started at Scotland for the benefit of other underserved communities — by bringing together the skills he has spent four decades developing in journalism, storytelling, fundraising, strategic planning, coalition building, and public engagement. The book, for Tukey, underscores why community engagement matters.
“I honestly feel this new book is some of the best work I’ve ever been involved with, because it represents Joyce and a host of other selfless people who were trying to good things for their neighbors,” said Tukey. “I already have a long list of other ideas for books, films, education programs that I’d like to launch. I take my cues from Joyce Siegel. She’s now 93 and gets out of bed every day thinking about how she can help people. Like I tell everyone who knows me well, ‘I’m too old to move too slow.’”
