“I am unbelievably lucky because I have this really great dog,” Richard Schack says about his adorable little Schnoodle Leia. “As a kid, I always wanted one, but they were prohibited in the housing development where I grew up. I ended up waiting until after I retired – and got this amazing one,” he says. Seven years ago, he flew to Minnesota to pick her up and they’ve been inseparable ever since.

Leia is a central figure in Richard’s charitable work which can easily be characterized as “extreme volunteering.”  

Every Wednesday morning, Richard and Leia can be found at Mount Sinai/Beth Israel’s cancer treatment center doing Pet Therapy, sitting on people’s laps (that’s Leia, not Richard) and soothing people undergoing chemo and radiation. “We’re a team,” he says about him and his pup. “What’s magical is when you see someone who is frightened, sad, or in pain, come alive and start to melt when there’s a little dog in their arms. You can see the tension literally lifted from their shoulders and face.”

Here’s what his extreme volunteering looks like:  On Tuesdays, he’s at God’s Love We Deliver in the kitchen preparing meals. On Wednesdays, he and Leia do Pet Therapy. Wednesdays and Sundays are often volunteer ushering jobs at one or other of the city’s scores of off-Broadway theaters. On weekends in Cherry Grove, Richard is president of the Cherry Grove Memorial Fund and secretary of the Property Owners Association as well as its “trash king” and the East/West Walk co-captain. Richard also serves as president of his NYC condo board.

That’s just right now. During the 90’s, he volunteered for nine years as an AIDS Hotline Counselor at GMHC and even took a sabbatical from his job to volunteer fulltime for six months there.  During that time, he helped create an online database of resource information that simplified the process of putting callers in touch with HIV support groups, doctors, and organizations that could help them.

“When my late partner Gerry Burns was diagnosed in 1990, I felt I needed to do something constructive, to play some role in combatting AIDS,” Richard says.

Later, he volunteered at God’s Love We Deliver at the suggestion of Fire Island neighbor Don Riseborough who worked in the kitchen. He’s been doing that for 15 years.

“Before you canonize me,” Richard jokes, “you should know that I believe much of my volunteerism is an attempt to atone for my many misdeeds recorded in what [his music goddess] Laura Nyro might call The Book of Life.” “I’m extraordinarily judgmental and inordinately impatient,” he says. “Ask David [his partner of 18 years], or any one of my friends, or anyone who’s ever met me.”

Through it all, he found a professional home at American Express, first as a customer service rep and later in various management positions in their travel and human resources groups. “More than just a career at Amex,” he says, “what I had was a home for 31 years. It was a great place to work and I had many, many amazing friends.”  He retired in 2008 but keeps in touch with several of them. One friend just happened to be the former president of the American Express Foundation who helped shepherd our application through the Amex review process and resulted in a $25,000 foundation grant two years ago to rebuild the Community House. She’s been an annual guest at Richard’s house, BurnSchack, for the past 20+ years.

Richard is a born and bred Brooklyn boy; he and his older sister Marcia grew up in Canarsie. His mom stayed at home and his dad was a lawyer.  

Richard enrolled at Hofstra Law but a legal career was not for him, so he dropped out and did a little of this and that. He worked as an intake specialist at NYC’s Department of Social Services -- also not job for him -- and kicked around some more in Carroll Gardens after he moved out of his mother’s house in 1975. “It was one of the best summers of my life,” he says. He came out, met a lot of men and had a great time. His first visit to Cherry Grove was in 1979. He rented in the Pines in the 80s and bought his house in Cherry Grove in 1993.

In 1997, while cruising at Cherry’s, he met his partner David, a day-tripper, that Memorial Day. Today their charming house on East Walk is a gardener’s delight, thanks mostly to Dave, Richard says.

For six years, he served on the Property Owners Association Board, back before it blended with the Community Association, and joined the Memorial Fund in 2011. “Volunteering is in my DNA,” he says.

Part of the infamous “West End Boys” and in the last production of the equally infamous “Golden Girls,” Richard was not a performer. “I was really the assistant to the assistant to the assistant stage manager, which meant I raised and lowered the curtain and pushed around sets.” Although “Golden Girls” is but a memory, Richard remains a theater and music buff.  His taste tends to run to the classics – Sondheim, Bernstein, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb.

Whether his volunteering is really genetic or a way for him to balance what’s written about him in the “Book of Life,” we are lucky indeed to have Richard Schack in Cherry Grove.

Thanks for it all, Richard!