People attending today’s open house for the 40th anniversary of the Carbon County Environmental Center will see a new media center, thanks in part to a longtime volunteer who just couldn’t throw away good wood.

The center now features three flat-screen TVs showcasing videos, slideshows of resident birds and rehab animals, staff bios, and more.

“It’s one of the things we wanted to do to modernize the center and bring it up to date for the 40th anniversary,” said naturalist Franklin Klock.

The screens are mounted on a wood backdrop framed from old cedar fence planks that Fred Merluzzi donated about 20 years ago. A retired wildlife conservation officer, Merluzzi salvaged the wood when helping his son replace a fence at his first home.

“I thought it would make really nice frames,” said Merluzzi, of Lehighton.

“The only other choice was to burn it, and he just would not do that,” Klock added.

Merluzzi figured the planks would prove useful someday. “That’s good wood,” he said. And he was right — two decades later, Klock remembered the cedar when deciding a coat of paint wouldn’t do for one corner of the center.

“All I did was trim, section, brush it with a stiff brush and vacuum,” Klock said. The project took about three days to complete.

For years, Merluzzi has supplied whatever the center needs — first as a wildlife officer conducting student programs, now as a retiree.

He insists he doesn’t help “as often as I’d like to,” but Klock disagrees. “If we need him, we’ll call and he’ll be here.”

Klock said the center has rescued “literally hundreds of animals” using a fine mesh net Merluzzi designed. The old fishing net the center once used had holes too large, so Merluzzi took it home and made a new one with proper netting and an extended pole, skills he learned from his family’s garment business.

“We’ve been using that net for 30 years,” Klock said.

With his old factory Singer sewing machine, Merluzzi still sews boat covers and even made harnesses for trapping bears during his years as a conservation officer.

“The only thing I miss from being an officer is trapping bear,” he said.

Merluzzi believes in giving back. “The idea is if you rest, you rust,” he said.

Humor, helpfulness

A longtime friend of the Carbon County Environmental Center, he began helping with the birds and even taught chief naturalist Susan Gallagher how to sharpen a knife and quarter a deer.

When he worked for the Game Commission, he supplied roadkill for the center’s resident birds, and even stored 80 pounds of frozen rats in his basement freezer when needed.

As a Game Commission officer, Merluzzi also helped with the annual Envirothon, sharing wildlife knowledge that helped students compete statewide. Since retiring in 2012, he’s been a fixture at conservation camp.

“We couldn’t have conservation camp without Fred in the kitchen,” Klock said. “He always comes up with recipes.”

Klock recalled calling him to help rescue waterfowl with his truck and kayak. “That was a wild-goose chase,” joked Merluzzi, a self-described comedian.

“Fred’s ability to talk to anybody is one of his best qualities,” Klock said. “He’s really good at weighing a situation and getting people to understand. He knows everybody. When people come in, he chats.”

Those people skills served him well as a wildlife officer, where he excelled at undercover work — and even played a role in uncovering evidence linked to one of the nation’s most notorious bank robbers, Carl Gugasian, who committed 50 robberies, including ones in Carbon and Monroe counties.

He made off with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and officials said he shot a bank manager in a Penn Forest Township robbery in 1991.

In 2002, after two boys found a bunker near Radnor with diagrams pointing to Carbon County, Merluzzi and state police Cpl. Clair Borosh spent hours studying the hand-drawn maps and searching the woods. Their efforts uncovered 15 bunkers in total. Merluzzi was later featured in news articles, a training video and the Pennsylvania Game News.

These days, he’s best known for his humor and helpfulness. “Always in my career I had a goal — every day I had to make people laugh,” he said.

“What’s the difference between a Zippo and a hippo?” he asks. “One’s a lighter and one’s a heavier.”