Reset time. “Free at last, free at last”! Finally, I could start to breathe easier and to move in a different direction. But which direction? What career options were there for seminary dropouts? For some reason, the usual suspects—law, medicine, and being a business executive didn’t seem quite right. Somebody mentioned social work and that sounded like a possible option, but I really did not know much about it and associated it (incorrectly) with a woman’s career. Teaching? Well, what would I teach?

The good news was that I had a year to try to figure this out. I was officially enrolled in MUST (“Metropolitan Urban Service Training” program) where disillusioned or confused seminary students were taking a year off from seminary and placed in a group of five or six others along with a leader and an assistant. The group met every week for a full year when we talked about important issues related to our careers and our lives. We were expected to secure secular jobs on our own, to attend religious services regularly, to be part of a faith community, and to participate in the weekly discussion sessions.

This was Embry’s junior year at her new school, Barnard College, located across Broadway from Columbia University and a 15-minute walk from our first real home, a studio apartment in an old, rundown, rent controlled apartment house near the edge of Harlem. (We had lived in the Union dorm reserved for married students after we married.) Our rent was below $400/month including utilities.

That 12-month period from the fall of 1966 through the summer of 1967 was one of the best years of my life.

It was a time for Embry and me to begin to get to know each other and for us to get to know New York City. Embry loved her classes at Barnard, made straight As, and made some new friends at Barnard. The other lost souls participating in the MUST discussion group, all men, were from various seminaries in the city and beyond. They were good people, and the leader of the group, a streetwise Episcopal clergyman with a fabulous sense of humor, was an inspiration, who helped me move in a new direction.

Embry and I explored New York neighborhoods like Chinatown, the Lower East Side, Greenwich Village and Tribeca. We visited parks, got free tickets from Union to various plays and concerts that wealthy donors could not attend. We rented bikes in Central Park, ice skated in the huge outdoor rink near Central Park South, explored the trails and walkways there and in Riverside Park, took the ferry to Staten Island and back, window shopped on Fifth Avenue, and loved our tiny apartment, though the only view we had was an air shaft and a fire escape.

We did not waste any time in adopting our first kitten, “Minette,” part Russian Blue and part Siamese, who would live to be 18 years old and was a much loved part of our early family. Over the sixty plus years of our marriage we have adopted eight felines, but none ever quite compared to this extraordinary creature, who effortlessly could jump from the floor to the top of a door.

I ended up over the course of the year with five different jobs, two that fell into the suitable category. The first job was billed as an editor’s job. When I responded to an ad in The New York Times for “editor/proofreader” thinking I had managed to nail a job in the literary world, I was directed to an enormous room with at least 500 desks and found my assigned spot in row 15, seat six. My job was to check off numbers when the employee across the desk from me read them off a long list. At break time when I asked him which publishing company this was, he laughed and said, “Are you kidding me? Publishing? This is the bookkeeping department of one of the largest retailers in New York!”
When I replied that this must be a mistake since I was hired for an editor’s job. He chuckled, “Yeah, they always do that so they can get someone who can read.”

That job lasted two days, then the next one a couple of weeks, editing the memoir of a retired, 80-year-old, barely literate, multi-millionaire, who founded one of the largest drug companies in the country. He fired me when I corrected his capitalization of every word he wanted to emphasize, just like Trump does now.

Then I managed to get a job as temporary assistant sales manager in the toy department at Macy’s over the Christmas rush, a job which I liked though it almost cost me my life when I had to stay late one evening to clean up the accounting. The lights suddenly went out, and I could hear dogs growling. It turns out that most shop lifting happens after the department store is closed, and unleashing vicious Dobermans was Macy’s solution. I raced to the front door in a panic, barely escaping being torn to shreds by these monsters.

And then came Shelly’s All Stars. I saw an ad in The Times for a counselor-driver, called the number, and set up a meeting with Shelly Weiner, an energetic, ambitious and charismatic guy in this early 30s, who was just starting his business–picking up and entertaining grammar school age boys after school, mainly in Greenwich Village and the Upper West Side. He drove one huge station wagon and I drove the other. I mostly had the first and second graders, whose families lived mostly in the Village. Many were in show biz or the media. Shelly had the older kids, mostly from the Upper West Side. We picked the kids up–seven or eight kids each–at their fancy private schools, usually took them to Central Park for games and fun, and then returned them to their fancy apartment buildings.

My favorite activity in Central Park was “dinosaur hunting,” asking puzzled walkers or embraced couples if they had seen a large green creature in the park that I and my young charges were hunting. After a puzzled initial response, they would usually wink and respond, “Oh, he headed off in that direction, green and scaly, and about 20-feet tall? Yeah, you can’t miss him.” And off we charged. Driving the kids home I kept them amused by inventing the “Freddie M. Freenball” stories, which years later I retold to my own children and grandchildren.

At the beginning of the summer, Embry and I departed for a long vacation, leaving New York City for a summer of touring Europe. My grandmother had died earlier that year and left me about $1,500, which to the dismay of my parents we decided to use for a summer of exploring Europe. Embry was totally fluent in French, having spent two summers in France (when she was 10 and 12) living with a French family where no English was spoken. And she loved adventures.

So, for almost three months we hitchhiked our way through most of Europe, staying in cheap hotels, youth hostels and the equivalent of bed and breakfasts. Given her language skills and her love of travel, she was the real leader of this effort, which was more challenging for me, but an experience of a lifetime and the first of our many travels in interesting and exotic countries, highlighted by our 2014 trip around the world without flying.

But what about my last year at Union? How would I negotiate that and then what? None of these questions had answers, and this was 1967 when the fires were beginning to burn in urban ghettos in large cities and the student anti-Vietnam War protests were just getting started. Who had any idea that in a few months Columbia University would be under siege and both Barnard and Union would shut down? That Martin Luther King would be gunned down in Memphis and that RFK would be assassinated in California? How we managed to get through that period will be the subject of the next post.

 

 

 

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I was discussing the idea of continuing with my recent autobiographical posts when my wife, Embry, timidly inquired, “Is there going to be anything about me?”

Good heavens, I thought, of course there is!

Susan Embry Martin and I were married by her uncle Jack, a Methodist minister, on December 28, 1965, mere children at a time when it was not all that unusual for child weddings like ours (pre sexual revolution of the 1970s). She was 20. I was 23. We celebrated our 60th wedding anniversary last year with our two, now middle aged, children, their spouses and our four teenage grandchildren at a resort in New England. Our marriage has been a partnership as well as a love match since we have grown up together, travelled the world together, and have had parallel careers.

It is fitting and proper to introduce Embry to those who do not know her.

Embry was the third child of Lousie and Grier Martin. She was born in 1945 in Bethesda, Maryland, where her family lived during the war when Grier was finishing up his duties as a naval officer. They returned to Bristol, Tennessee, for several years before settling in Davidson, North Carolina. Her father went on to become the President of Davidson College from 1958-1968. Some readers may recall that I graduated from Davidson in 1964. So, yes, I married the president’s daughter! This was considered a coup at the time—since she was eyed by many Davidson students, who upon occasion could not miss seeing a pretty tomboy walking or skipping across the campus barefooted. That I, of all people, should be the one to win the hand of this extraordinary person was a long shot. Afterall, I was the “student radical” at the time, who organized and led a civil rights march in Charlotte the spring of my senior year in 1964 and was persona non grata with the college administration. (I did meet with Embry’s father as was required by such actions and found him to be surprisingly neutral, almost supportive. “The Board of Trustees has ordered me to tell you to stop your march but I do not have that the authority to do that.” A couple of years after that he became instrumental in welcoming African American students to Davidson. I was a big fan of both of Embry’s parents.)

While I had watched Embry play pickup basketball with several of Davidson students (one of whom was her boyfriend), I did not really meet her until a last-minute, blind date arranged by a mutual friend for the Davidson Spring Frolics weekend my senior year at Davidson. If it was not love at first sight, it was close to it. She was a freshman at Randolph Macon Women’s College at the time the romance began. We shared many of the same values and aspirations to try to make the world a kinder, fairer, and gentler place. I was hooked from the day we met.

Our wedding was held 18 months later in the Davidson College Presbyterian Church with close to a thousand people attending (practically the entire town had been invited, along with the Davidson faculty, Board of trustees and benefactors.) A reception followed with not a whole lot of food, a long receiving line, no band, no dancing, no music or alcohol, and lots of good will. That was the way most Presbyterian weddings in the South were in those days. Since we had no money, we spent our honeymoon at the Martin lake house about a half hour’s drive away on Lake Norman. For me the whole experience could not have been better.

Here is what you need to know about Embry Howell. First, she grew up with the nickname of “Mimy.” That is not the same as “Mimi,” which many people have incorrectly called her since few people have ever heard of anyone by the name of Mimy. In fact, I was not even certain that there was anyone else living on the planet with that name until I checked with AI. The answer came out that there are about five girls in the world each year named “Mimy,” due mostly to the misspelling of “Mimi.” The reason she got that name was that this was her early pronunciation of her middle name, “Embry,” that her parents wanted her to be called by. When she got to college, she dropped the “Susan” completely and was known as Embry Martin, becoming Embry Martin Howell after we were married and she transferred to Barnard, the women’s college next to Union. She is still known as Mimy by her old friends and by me when we are not with other people.

Second, she was brought up as a Presbyterian. By nature, Presbyterians are hardworking, unpretentious, modest and stingy. Even if they have a lot of money—which many do—they do not let on that they do and are penny pinchers. They can’t help it. This is in sharp contrast to Episcopalians, who tend to spend money whether we have it or not. Plus, Presbyterians are extremely competitive. And if you need proof of Embry’s competitiveness, just ask anyone who has ever played tennis or pickleball with her.

And there are other characteristics that distinguish Embry. She has always been very secure in her own skin and never tried to be someone she isn’t. She is also incapable of telling a lie. But even when she tells an unwelcomed truth that might upset someone, she does it in a way that does not offend. And finally, she is very smart and driven to do the very best she can albeit in school, career, volunteering, or parenting. In a word, she is one tough cookie and has been a wonderful life partner.

Embry graduated from Barnard College as a Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in math. She got a masters in biostatistics at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, followed a few years later by a PhD in public policy at the George Washington University and is a widely respected (now retired) health care researcher specializing in maternal and child health. She has been and is a terrific mother to our children and a doating grandmother to our four grandchildren.

This does not mean that our marriage has been perfect or without its challenges. This is true of all marriages, especially when you have two people with strong personalities, who are driven in trying to find their place in the world and have stressful and challenging careers. But it has been a great marriage for which I am deeply grateful.

You got it. I lucked out.

But what I have not told you is how life changed for us after we got married. When we first met and all the way to our marriage in late 1965, we both understood that I was going to be an Episcopal priest and that Embry Howell was going to be the mother of our six children. Six! That was her idea, not mine. I envisioned a stay-at-home mom —as most women were in those days. But she has corrected me more than once that even at that time she wanted to pursue a challenging career and have six kids. She now admits that her goal was a bit unrealistic and says even though she loves infants and small children, she has no regrets.

My, how the world—and our place in it—changed starting in the fall of 1966 after we returned from our civil rights experience in Southwest Georgia!

What happened next and how we made our way in the world will be the subject of future posts. Stay tuned.

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