831 Orleans Road Was Falling Down. Then Roz Started Paying Attention.

The buildings at 831 Orleans Rd. were falling down when Roz Coleman started paying attention to them. Most people heading toward North Chatham saw a cluster of tired structures and kept going. She saw one of the original spots where Guglielmo Marconi worked out how to throw a human voice across an ocean with no wire in between — and she saw what it could be if somebody refused to let it collapse.

Somebody refused. As founding president of the Chatham Marconi Maritime Center, Roz drove the whole thing into being: the organization, the rehab of the old wireless-station buildings, the slow work of digging the site's history back up. The campus landed on the National Register of Historic Places. The buildings turned into a working museum — the Marconi-RCA Wireless Museum — a meeting place, and, every July and August, rooms full of kids taking summer STEM courses a few feet from where the transatlantic traffic once crackled through.

Then she did it again, on the water. Roz believed every kid on the Lower Cape ought to get the chance to sail, and she was there at the start of Pleasant Bay Community Boating — from a program run off the beach to the waterfront campus it holds now, one that today serves thousands of people of all ages and abilities each season. Two institutions, both built substantially on her stubbornness, both open this summer.

None of it came out of nowhere. Dr. Roslyn Bayha Coleman earned her doctorate from Boston University in 1980, while raising three children and working full time. She spent her career as a school psychologist in the Wellesley public schools, where she was known for taking students' sides — and occasionally taking students in, putting up wayward teens in her own home for months at a stretch. In 1996, Massachusetts school psychologists named her their School Psychologist of the Year.

She and her husband Bill bought their Chatham house in 1966 and spent the following decades enlarging it themselves, under what her family calls Roz's architectural direction, until it had tripled in size and held three generations. They moved down full time in 1997, and Chatham felt her attention right away: eighteen years on the finance committee, which she called "a great catbird seat from which to see what makes Chatham tick." By her family's telling she was a reluctant first mate aboard the couple's 22-foot Marshall Cat, Grayling, and a devoted spectator at sailboat races, cheering her daughters and granddaughters around the courses while mixing up starboard and port.

She died peacefully at home on June 14, her family beside her, at 90. Bill, her husband of 65 years, and their son Stephen went before her; two daughters, three granddaughters, and a great-granddaughter survive her. "She changed the face of this corner of the Cape," Michael and Ann Westgate of Chatham wrote in the Chronicle. That's the plain truth of it.

The museum is open this summer. The sailboats are out on Pleasant Bay most mornings. She built her own tribute. The rest of us just get to use it.