The return from our European adventure got off to a shaky start. In early September of 1967, we returned home from shopping on a Saturday in the middle of the day to find the window to the fire escape open, the bars pulled apart and our tiny apartment in shambles. We had been robbed!
Now in those days in New York City practically everyone we knew who was living off campus had had their apartment robbed. So, you might say we had now joined the club, a kind of badge of courage. Thank heavens, our cat was still there, quivering in a corner under the bed. But still we felt violated. I immediately called our insurance agent. Here is the way the conversation went:
Me: Mr. Green, we are in deep trouble. We have been robbed, wiped out, destroyed!
Agent: Calm down, Mr. Howell, don’t worry. This happens to a lot of people in New York, and we are here to help you. I will need to get our adjuster involved and it may take some time, but I assure you that we will be able to help you. We will need to visit your apartment, of course, before we can come to the final amount. Do you have an idea of what was stolen and the value of your claim?
Me: Everything of value. Wiped out! They took everything of value.
Agent (after a pause): Well, it sounds like this could be a big claim. Do you have a rough estimate of how much money you will be asking us for?
Me: Three hundred and fifty dollars.
Agent: Excuse me?
Me: Yeah, they took everything of value, our TV, some clothes and my camera.
Agent: That’s it? You got wiped out and all you are asking for is $350?
Me: Yes, it is awful.
Agent: I am writing you a check as we speak. You should get it in the mail in a couple of days.
So that is how our return to the Big Apple started. This would be Embry’s senior year at Barnard and my last year at Union. We wanted to make the most of it. But in my case, the challenge was how to make the transition away from theological studies to something else, but what would that something else be?
That something would turn out to be urban planning. Now I had never heard of urban planning or city planning, let alone having considered this as a career path. But in one of the MUST discussions one of our participants talked about this exciting new career path he had discovered, and the more I heard about it, the more interested I became. It would provide the opportunity to “do some good” and seemed broad enough that I might be able to find a niche. I decided my senior year at Union to take my elective courses at Columbia University, which had a strong School of Urban Planning, and was hooked. I took a class in both the fall and spring semesters, and both were terrific. Even more remarkable was that Union Seminary had just provided a new opportunity for field work for several students who could choose to work in the Department of City Planning in New York City. Now what kind of coincidence was that! I applied and got the job along with three classmates who were friends. It was, as they say, a “game changer.”
My job involved representing the Planning Department in a satellite office in Bushwick, one of Brooklyn’s most distressed neighborhoods. I was the main part-time staff in a storefront office that the department intended to be a place where residents could drop in, voice their concerns and participate in the planning process to rejuvenate their neighborhood. The main issues were related to trash pickup, policing, crime, poor schools, police brutality and the need for more public housing for large families to be built on vacant sites where small buildings–“vest pocket housing” –could be erected. I got to meet interesting people, loved the work, and discovered a new career path.
The big story was that in the spring of that year, Embry announced that she was pregnant with a due date of late November. She was elated. She also finished Barnard at the end of the first semester in 1967 and managed to get a job as a computer programmer–a brand new field–for a large company called The Corporation Trust Company, which she never figured out exactly what they did. The classes I had at Union were pretty good and for the required senior thesis I wrote a paper entitled something like “Using Creative Playgrounds to Rejuvenate Public Housing.” I still can’t believe that Union allowed me to get away with this, but I guessed that by this time they could tell which way the wind was blowing and just gave up on me. I applied to several planning graduate schools and chose The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where the planning school was highly rated and where I got a free ride for both years on a social policy fellowship.
Graduation ceremonies did not happen at Barnard that spring due to the student unrest and the protests at Columbia against the Vietnam War. At Union they were able to manage a low-key ceremony at Riverside Church though the mood was grim there as well due to the student protests and the assassination of Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. in early April of 1968. We said goodbye to classmates and old friends, not even one of whom ended up in the ministry long term.
Looking back on all this now, I still can’t believe how lucky I was that all this seemed to fall into place as if by Divine intervention. We packed up our meager belongings and headed down to Chapel Hill at the end of the summer of 1968, cat in hand, in a beat-up Volkswagen bug, which we purchased at the end of the summer. It would turn out to be the best of times and the worst of times.