What is the perfect job for someone who is fiercely independent, likes to work with artistic people, has no desire to be fabulously wealthy, and has "a mouth with a death wish"? Give up? "My friends who have known me the longest tell me that running a flea market is really the only job I could be doing," says Judy Gehrke, executive director of Greenflea, Inc., the operator of two flea markets just north of midtown Manhattan, whose proceeds help support the city's public school system.

Every week, Gehrke, a level-headed Baker Scholar with a penchant for efficiency, imposes order on roughly four hundred purveyors of the market's assorted handmade crafts, antiques, second-hand clothing, artwork, fresh produce, and exotica. Of these many merchants who set up shop - weather permitting - each weekend morning on the blacktopped playgrounds of Public School 183 and Intermediate School 44, only 50 to 60 percent are regulars. The rest change weekly. "It's like running a hotel with quirky guests who have a variety of weird demands," she notes with a wry smile.

Raised in Milwaukee, where her father worked at the Miller brewery, Gehrke grew up with four brothers who taught her "how to be assertive." As an undergraduate at Northwestern, she discovered an aptitude for design while working in the college print shop. Following that path to New York's Pratt Institute, she earned a master's degree in package design. "At Pratt they always made me Ôteam leader,'" she says. "I was not the most talented, artistically, but I was good at managing creative types."

After sharpening those management skills at HBS, Gehrke held a succession of marketing jobs with big companies but never stayed in one place too long. "I need to run things, I have strong opinions, and I have no political skills," explains Gehrke. "I am definitely not the type to climb the corporate ladder." In 1978, she launched Design Lines, Inc., a small housewares business. When the company failed in 1980 ("a textbook case of being unwilling to let anybody come in for equity participation"), Gehrke was devastated. "To fail as an entrepreneur is a personal failure," she observes. "It takes a long time to bounce back, and that's not something they teach at the Business School."

The silver lining to this dark chapter was the tremendous support she received from her husband, Louis Rodriguez, whom she met in 1978. "That's when I realized he was someone I could always count on," she recalls. Gehrke was back in the corporate world working for AT&T when their son Luke was born in 1984. Her work with his elementary school parents' association led to her position at Greenflea, which she has held since 1993.

Owned jointly by the parents' associations of two West Side schools and the New York Council on the Environment, the market had outgrown its volunteer managers when Gehrke took over. She has since automated almost every aspect of the reservation and financial record-keeping systems, worked to balance the weekly mix of vendors, smoothed neighborhood relations, and hired logistical help on weekends. Greenflea will contribute nearly $500,000 this year to fund educational enrichment programs, and Gehrke says she could expand the operation to include two or three additional markets in Manhattan "with no trouble at all."

"It's a win-win situation," she states. "We are empowering a lot of people - many of whom have just arrived in this country - with the ability to become entrepreneurs. We attract customers every weekend who patronize the local shops and restaurants, and we give lots of money to the schools.

"On top of that," she adds, "I'm using my skills in a way that makes me happy to come to work every day. What career could be better than that?"

- Deborah Blagg