If you have been following my blogs for a while, you have read about some of my unhappy encounters with airport security. If you do not know me personally—and since there almost 500 of you out there who are reading or subscribing to my blog posts– I assume many do not know what I look like. Well, I look like an old man struggling along in my 85^thyear. Not only that, due to balance issues, I now use a hiking stick, sometimes two sticks, and years ago we discovered that the best way to get through airport security is by reserving a wheelchair. This is what we did this time when flying on Southwest Airlines from BWI to Portland, Maine, where our daughter and her family live and where we will be attending a blue grass music festival.

All was going well until we were wheeled by an attendant to the first of the line to go through the metal detector screening device. Embry sailed through. No problem. When I emerged from the screening device, I was met by a team of three armed security guards, all men and all looking stressed. One took command and gave me a thorough body search, the same kind that I had a couple of years ago when a group of concerned five- or six-year-old kids asked their parents, “What are they doing to that poor, old man?”

This took several minutes. Embry was laughing again on the sidelines. Fortunately, I had checked my bag but did have a briefcase containing a computer, several books and some miscellaneous items, which fell out when they turned the briefcase upside down and shook it. They carefully examined the computer and the books, and then directed me to take off my shoes. One of the guards took the shoes and returned a few minutes later, scowling. “Okay,” he snarled, “You can go now.”

The frisking procedure took about fifteen minutes as a dozen or so other passengers whizzed past, giving me puzzled looks, then breezing off to their gates.

Embry, still giggling, asked, “Why is your guardian angel asleep at the wheel when we go through airport security?”

 What is it about me that causes alarms to go off at airport security? Do I look like a terrorist? But how would they know what a terrorist looks like anyway? When was the last time a plane was hijacked in the United States?

The last time an airplane was hijacked in the U.S. was in 2001 when the World Trade Center was attacked.    And how many flights are there in the U.S. every day? The answer is 44,360 on average.  And the number of people employed to screen passengers? The TSA website says that in the U.S. there are approximately 50,000 security officers, who are involved in screening passengers. So in the United States alone every day you have 50,000 people engaged in an effort to keep something from happening that has not happened for over 25 years. And we are just one country! And according to TSA the annual cost in the U.S. is over $11 billion!

Does this make sense? And just think about how boring this job must be! You work hard every day to keep something from happening that does not happen. I am still not sure why an 84-year-old man like me might be considered high risk, but if there is actually zero risk, your job is meaningless.

Such is life on the Planet Earth in 2026. A visitor from outer space would conclude, “Beam me up, Scotty, no intelligent life on this planet!”

Headed off to the Ossipee Blue Grass festival where there will not likely be any WIFI connections but some good stories should follow.

Stay tuned.

 

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As the saying goes, I have talked (“written”) about myself enough, now it is your turn—to talk (“write”) about me.

No, just kidding, but it is time to return to the times we find ourselves in. Of course, my guess is that you already know what is happening in our country, so perhaps you have already heard or read enough. I promise to weave in more of my favorite stories going forward, but for today my post is all about being apprehensive. We should be scared, even terrified. If you have not read Heather Cox Richardson’s post for today (posted on July 17), you should, but mix yourself a strong drink before you start. She focuses on a book called Unhumans, by Trump loyalists, Jack Posobiec and Joshua Lisec, who make the argument that anyone who opposes Trump is a communist and that makes them “unhuman” implying they deserve to die. Trump is now ranting and raving on Truth Social about the communist threat to take over America and destroy our freedom and way of life, but these are not Chinese communists he fears but Democrats and progressives– home grown Americans, people like you and me.

Richardson observes:

In “Unhumans,” Posobiec and Lisec argue that the United States is under siege by “the left,” which in their view means anyone from communists to progressives. “For the purposes of this book, we will call them the ‘unhumans,’” the authors write, “because they oppose everything that makes up humanity. As they are opposed to humanity itself, they place themselves outside of the category completely, in an entirely new misery-driven subdivision, the unhuman.”

Trump is implying the same thing in his rants on Truth Social.

Most of his behavior can be explained by Trump’s belief that if the Democrats retake the House or the Senate in the 2026 Midterm Elections, it is game over for his agenda and even more important, it will be a huge blow to his fragile ego. Trump in the view of many, including me, is an extreme pathological narcissist obsessed with himself. Stated another way, the dude is nuts, mentally ill, whacko. Yet here we are, with a whacko President, who is followed by an aide carrying his brief case with the nuclear code. And all the guardrails of Trump 2016 are now gone. None of his former advisers like Bill Barr, Gary Cohn, Rex Tillerson, Mark Milley, John Kelly, and John Bolton—are part of Trump’s 2024 team, and there were many others in his first administration who kept him from doing dumb things (like getting into what may now become another “forever war”) who are also gone. Those people have been replaced by sycophants and “yes men and women” who when Trump says “jump,” they ask, “how high.”

And the thing that astonishes me even more is that except for those who have lost in the primaries, in 2026 there do not appear to be any elected Republicans who are in the House or Senate who will stand up to Trump. Certainly, they all can’t be in favor of the Iran War, increasing inflation, the high cost of living, eliminating USAID, global warming denial, and the brutal ICE arrests and killings.

Trump is determined to do whatever it takes to keep from losing Republican control of both the House and the Senate. His main push has been to require “proof of citizenship,” to vote (eg. birth certificates) though this is just a start and remains a long shot. Who knows what he will try next? Some believe he will find a way to cancel the 2026 elections altogether. Others see things even more ominous like arresting and locking up people whom he brands as “unhuman.” This gets us perilously close to Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. If either of these things happen, this will mean the end of our democracy.

So yes, I am apprehensive. In fact, I am scared. This would not be the first time that a mighty country has done itself in. Every great empire in the past had its heyday and its downfall. Germany is just one in a long list. Russia and the Soviet Union have had their days in the sun, so have Spain, France, the Roman and Greek Empires, Japan, China, Egypt, and many others. This seems to be the way the world works. No country is Number One forever. I read somewhere that 250 years is about the average for being at the top of the heap. How close are we to our final days?

These are the questions that are lurking in the shadows today as Trump continues the Iran War, demeans all who oppose him, shreds social safety nets, enriches himself even more, and threatens our fragile democracy and the rule of law.

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So, what about guardian angels and do you think they really exist? Of course, they do. All you need to do is think about your own life and the close calls and challenges that you have had. No one goes through life without close calls and challenges. It is part of being human. And what if the circumstances had been different, that something terrible happened or that you got wiped out? For the fact that you survived, you can thank your guardian angel. And what I am calling close calls refers to a lot of things, not just near-death experiences—but also things like the right job or career, the right spouse, the right kids, your health, your friends…. The list is long. It has to do with how we humans manage to get through life. Close calls and guardian angels are part of life’s mysteries. One could argue that the fact that we manage to get through life at all is due not to how capable, smart or gifted we think we are but rather to how capable our guardian angel is.

I know what you are thinking. All I am talking about is blind luck. Everyone understands that. Well, I am saying that blind luck may be another way of looking at it, but the same question remains: where does blind luck come from?

But I agree that the big question is why guardian angels seem to help some people more than others. Why do some survive close calls and others don’t? Well, I have thought about this and my theory is the sad fact that some guardian angels are just better at what they do than others. We get assigned one at birth and the angel sticks with us as long as it can; and when the guardian angel gives out, makes a mistake, or does not do its job, that is when we get into trouble. Plus, all guardian angels are not equal. We do not know exactly why, but many have attributed the differences in effectiveness to how smart the guardian angel is, how the angel was brought up, its education, temperament, and its personality.

And how do I know all of this? Of course, I don’t. That we humans get through life as well as we do most of the time remains a mystery and always will.

And doesn’t the mystery of life apply to life on the Planet Earth for all of us living creatures? Of course it does. And there is so much we still don’t know. Look, we live on one relatively small planet in one solar system containing nine planets circling an average star in a galaxy that contains at least 100 billion stars and maybe as many as 400 billion. And how many galaxies are there? Well, scientists now think the number may exceed two trillion. And that our universe may be part of a multiverse. Yet there are many people on our small planet who believe we humans have all the answers. They believe that the only life or advanced life—if you can call human life “advanced”—exists right here and nowhere else in the universe. There are some who will tell you that they have all the answers and that their own belief system—their own “religion”—is the correct one, that all other religions are fake or inferior, and that if you do not believe what they do, you will not go to heaven. They base their beliefs on ancient texts, creeds, and liturgies that have been handed down through the ages as humans have evolved over the centuries. And they base it on their own experience.

Well, people who believe in guardian angels base this belief on their own experience too.

Besides, what do we really know? We humans are newbies. We have only been around a few million years—Homo sapiens only a few hundred thousand—on a planet that began from cosmic dust some 4.5 billion years ago. Life on the planet Earth has gone through five mass extinctions and there are likely to be more. Scientists know our sun will give out in another five billion years and will turn into a red giant “only” in another billion years, making all life uninhabitable on the planet. What is this all about?

So why not guardian angels? Their existence explains a lot of things though it does not explain the ultimate meaning of life. Beyond our pay grade to figure this out conclusively, as they say in Washington. So, we soldier on doing the best we can, groping for straws to find meaning where we can. This is our plight. And whether guardian angels can be proven or whether it is just plain luck is less important than the fact that we made it through another day and are still going. That is enough for many, and it is enough for me. For that we can give praise and thanksgiving for whatever mysterious force might have made this happen. Many people call this force “God.”

Thank you for sticking with all 22 episodes about my life. Now back to the things that are driving us all crazy, the current situation in our country and in our world. And along the way I will be throwing in some of my best stories which have been posted before on my “Gullible’s Travels” series. I hope you will stick with me.

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Life stories are about far more than just careers and work. And for many people what defines them and gives value to their lives is what they did outside of work.

Here are the other major activities that have meant much to me:

Sailing

Over the years Embry and I have owned and enthusiastically sailed six sailboats. My interest in sailing began when I was in high school in Nashville and a friend bought a Sunfish for sailing on Old Hickory Lake and I had my first taste of sailing. My father had talked lovingly about buying a sailboat someday, but it never happened. I suppose in some ways I have been living out his dream.

When I was in planning school at UNC, Embry and I drove to Davidson from Chapel Hill most weekends every summer to spend some time with her parents at their vacation house on Lake Norman. I went in with her brother, DG, and we bought our first boat, a green Sunfish, only about 10 feet long, which never had a name but which we loved and kept for many years. That was followed by a beat up and worn out 16-foot “505,” theoretically a high performance racing boat, which sank in the Potomac River on the Fourth of July 1974. I remained in the polluted water for over four hours with failed rescue attempts by the DC Marine Police, the Virginia Marine Police, the Maryland Marine Police and the U.S. Coast Guard before finally being pulled out of the water and into the marina just as the fireworks were starting. That experience merited an essay, which someday I will post again on the blog. The 505 also never got named and for good reason, given its unreliability, not only on that ill-fated Fourth of July but on every occasion that we sailed her.

Then came our beloved Wayfarer, another used 16-foot daysailer, but in excellent condition, which I named “Mother Courage” after my favorite play by Berthold Brecht. We belonged to a sailing club on the Chesapeake Bay along with six or seven other Wayfarer owners. We loved that boat, which we bought in the fall of 1974 and sailed her on most weekends for over a dozen years. We competed in races with our sailing club and trailered Mother Courage up to Lake Huron to race in three national championships (including one with my father) where we competed against 40-50 other Wayfarers from various parts of the country, camped out, and made new friends. We did not win any trophies but came in fifth in one race and usually ended up in the middle of the fleet overall.

Mother Courage was followed by “Amazing Grace,” an Alberg 30, a 30-foot cruiser owned by the friend from whom I bought the 505. We kept her at a marina on Herring Bay on the Chesapeake where we raced her on Wednesday evenings during the warmer months and on weekends cruised to rivers and creeks all over the Bay. Embry and I once counted all the anchorages we had cruised to and anchored overnight on Amazing Grace and ended up with 75.

The highlight was a cruise I took with my son, Andrew, and several of his friends to celebrate his graduation from college, in 1992. We sailed all the way up to Cape Cod and had several close calls along the way up and back, which I have already written posts about years ago and hope to post again.

We kept Amazing Grace for about ten years before moving on to a racing boat. I loved Amazing Grace, but she was a full keel boat, which meant she could not point as well as the newer, fin keel boats, which most of the members of our sailing club, were then racing. When I could not take getting creamed in Wednesday night races and weekend regattas anymore, I bought a J-30, a high performance racing boat, which we named “Carolina Blue” because of the light blue color of the hull. Finally, we were competitive and I proudly display 25 trophies on the walls and in bookcases in our cottage in Collington, the retirement community where we now live. If you are impressed with 25 trophies, keep in mind that I figure that I have raced in more than 1,000 races over the years. So 25 trophies is a modest number though trophies were usually awarded only to winners of 3-race regattas or 6-race series. Embry was not interested in the racing part of sailing, so I recruited crew members, who were terrific, many of whom became and remain good friends.

In the late 1980s a good friend and fellow consultant in the seniors housing world asked me to join him and several other guys in the senior living industry on a weeklong cruise in the British Virgin Islands. It was a fabulous week of sailing, which turned out to be the first of over a dozen cruises with senior living professionals and friends. I loved the experience so much that I ended up buying a 39-footer, which was part of the Sunsail charter fleet, which entitled Embry and me to charter (at a discount) one of their sailboats in any of their 90 plus locations throughout the world. I named the boat “Second Wind,” and when the lease with Sunsail was up after eight years, I paid a couple of Brits to sail her up to the Chesapeake to Herring Bay, where we would keep her until 2024. Chartering with Sunsail enabled Embry and me, along with friends and family, to sail on some of the best cruising waters on the planet— the South Pacific (Tahiti), the Mediterranean, the Adriatic, other parts of the Caribbean (Granada and the Grenadians), and Puget sound.

I have already written and posted many sailing stories over the years and will repost them in this blog from time to time. And to give credit where it is due, my guardian angel, GA, has intervened on more than one occasion to prevent disaster.

We sold Second Wind in 2024 just after Covid had passed. What an existential moment that was! To say goodbye to a life pursuit that had provided so much joy and meaning over the years and defined to a certain extent my persona was not easy. The truth is we were getting too old to handle the boat by ourselves and it was time to move on. But what a run we had and how blessed we have been! Thanks, GA!

World Travel

Embry gets full credit for this one. Before we met each other we both had had experience traveling and living abroad. I had participated in a summer long work camp in the mountains not far from Mexico City and sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee in 1960 for graduating seniors in high school and in 1962 had worked all summer in the mountains of Japan near Mount Fugi in another Episcopal-sponsored work camp. Embry had spent two full summers when she was twelve and sixteen living with a family in Paris and became fluent in French. We both cherished these experiences and liked to travel.

Our first big trip lasted the entire summer of 1967. My grandmother had died and left me a few thousand dollars in her will, and to the dismay of my parents we used the entire amount to allow us to spend the summer traveling throughout Europe. We hitch hiked, stayed in cheap hotels and youth hostels, did a lot of sightseeing, stayed with Embry’s French family in Paris for a week, and spent several days with her older brother’s  French wife (who later became and remains a dear friend) and small child, then living in Germany. We visited the UK, France, Germany, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Greece. It was tiring and occasionally stressful but a fabulous trip.

The next trip was a couple of years later when we visited close friends from Chapel Hill and Davidson who were stationed in Lima where my college friend was the Associated Press Bureau Chief in Peru. We visited Machu Pichu and would have traveled down the Amazon had we both not gotten a severe case of the “tourista.”

We did not travel every year, but we surely traveled a lot and visited by last count some 74 countries over the years, almost half of all the countries in the world. One of my favorites was our three weeks in Russia taking the trans-Siberian Railroad on a trip to Lake Bakal with several of our friends and arranged by our son, Andrew, who was stationed in Moscow working for Deloitte on a world bank contract. I posted this account years ago and will repost if I can find it. We also visited India on a trip where we reunited with our Indian “ayah” (babysitter), visited most countries in Southeast Asia, took cruises to New Zealand, Latin America, Iceland, and Scandinavia, and went on safaris in Kenya and Tanzania where Embry was working at the time as a consultant following her retirement from the Urban Institute. Embry planned and organized every one of these excursions, often involving friends, and gets full credit for this part of our life together. The most impressive trip was in 2014 when we traveled around the world without taking a single airplane on an adventure that took four months and involved crossing the Pacific from Shanghai to Seattle on a container ship.

We are booked on a tour in Morocco in October, which will likely be our last big trip. The list of the 74 countries we have visited is at the end of this post.

Nonprofit Board Work

I have spent an inordinate amount of time serving on boards of nonprofit corporations, mostly in the affordable housing field in Washington. I have served on about a dozen of these over the years and have been president of four. I have generally enjoyed the work, especially in getting to know people who are racially diverse, and upon occasion feel like I have contributed to these organizations. One of these, Seabury Resources for Aging, surprised me last year by dedicating a conference room in my honor complete with a portrait of me in my sailing attire.

Writing and Photography

As has probably become evident I like to write and post blogs. I also have written three books. Hard Living on Clay Street, was published by Doubleday in 1973 and still in print, and Real Estate Syndication, a book about developing low income housing, was published by Praeger in 1983. My third, book, Civil Rights Journey, was published in 2011 by Authorhouse, a self-publishing company. And for better or worse, the blog speaks for itself. I have been posting for over fifteen years.

I am still taking photos and plan to expand the photo website soon.

Family

This should probably go first. I am deeply thankful for Embry, my life partner in adventure, and I am so proud of and grateful for our two children, their spouses and the four wonderful grandchildren they have produced. Exhibit A that my  guardian angel has been at work. 

It has been a good run. And special thanks to GA, my guardian angel, for stepping in from time to time to avoid catastrophe. But are guardian angels real? The last post in the Day in the Life series will address this question decisively.

Here is the list of the 74 countries we have visited or worked in over our marriage of 60 years and counting:

Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belarus, Brazil, British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Bermuda, Belgium, Bosnia, Croatia, Costa Rica, Cuba, China, Czech Republic, Cameroon, Cambodia, Chile, Canada, Granada, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Ethiopia, France, French Polynesia, Egypt, Finland, Falkland Islands, Greece, Gabon, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iceland, Israel, India, Kyrgyzstan, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Kenya, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Mali, Mexico, Mongolia, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Peru, Panama, Portugal, Russia, Sweden, South Africa, Serbia, South Korea, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Switzerland, Scotland,  Thailand, Trinidad, Turkey, Tanzania, United States, Uganda, UAE, Uzbekistan, Yugoslavia, and Vietnam.

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I think it was Groucho Marx who once said something like, “Any club that would have me as a member, I would never consider joining.” Or in my case, “Any company that would be so stupid as to buy Howell Associates, I would never consider selling to.”

In many ways the two companies–and the two CEOs– could not have been more dissimilar. ZA was a down and dirty company whose services included helping private owners maximize profits from Medicaid and avoid going to jail for Medicaid fraud. Their clients were mainly nursing home providers. Howell Associates clients were mainly nonprofit CCRCs, mostly faith-based. The ZA staff mostly had accounting degrees from second tier colleges. The Howell staff had degrees in history and English and most had gone to prestigious colleges and universities. The principal owner and CEO of ZA, Steve Fishman, was from a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia and the first in his family to graduate from college. I was the fourth generation of Southern gentlemen who except for me and my brother were all clergymen or bankers. He was a towering figure and overweight. Though there was still much I could not do because of polio, I was a physical fitness fanatic and weighed about half of what he did. He talked with a strong Philly dialect. I had a Southern drawl.

When the merger happened many in the senior living consulting world rolled their eyes and said, good luck.

Chalk up another one for GA. The merger worked. The one thing I value most in people is authenticity. I felt that Steve Fishman if nothing else was authentic. He was comfortable in his own skin, smart, and had a big heart. Two people could not be more unlike each other than the two of us, but I respected him and admired his gumption, honesty, and ambition. And I had to admit he appeared on the scene when I was reaching the desperate phase. I had run out of steam and there was no one else who was willing or able to step up to the plate. Having to wind down Howell Associates would have depleted most of the money that we had made that year, leaving me with essentially nothing to show for twenty years of blood, sweat and tears.

The first two years with ZA were great. The merger had expanded our market, and we were thriving and making good money for ZA. I reported to a very smart man, who was not much older than my own two children. He was the one person who could have made my life miserable, but he didn’t. He was very supportive of everything Howell Associates did and gave me all the respect that I thought I rightfully deserved. The company had weekend retreats once a year at major resorts where spouses were also invited. The first three years, I, Embry, and most of the Howell senior staff and their spouses joined the ZA staff in Mexico, Maimi and Puerto Rico for bordering on over-the-top weekend retreats, which were lavish and fun, and where Howell Associates was welcomed as part of the ZA family. In a word, I had lucked out.

But it was not always to be so. Storm clouds were lurking on the horizon. During these early years of the merger, Fishman had his eye on other companies, and several had joined ZA as affiliates like us. It had been the best of both worlds for Howell Associates. We had our own identity but were part of a larger group, which at that time had a pretty good reputation. Then toward the end of 2002, we got the word that the affiliation was to be dropped and that the brand, “Howell Associates” would be retired. Now we were just another business line within ZA. This would not have been so bad except that we were not compatible with some of the new firms that Fishman had acquired. The Howell Associates director of marketing services clashed with the head of another marketing company Fishman had bought and left the firm, which was a huge loss for us. Others at Howell Associates left as well due to “culture differences” and morale problems. Our revenues plunged. My guess is that many of the new affiliates were experiencing the same thing.

I think that we could have handled the situation were it not for Fishman’s decision to move Howell Associates to be under the umbrella of a firm which was part of another recent acquisition and that company was losing money. Our work remained steady but the revenue we generated from our efforts went to cover the losses from the other company. It was too much for me to take, and I quit in 2004 when my five year commitment to stay on expired though I remained on good terms with Fishman and his chief finance guy. This was important because ZA still owed me money for the buyout.

Now if anyone thinks I got rich on the sale of Howell Associates, sadly you are mistaken. The initial price offer was one million dollars but half of that was in stock in another venture that never materialized and half in cash. But of the cash part, I got half of that up front and half as a note to be paid out over a 10-year period. Hey, I am not complaining about getting a check for $250,000, but not long after I left the company, ZA stopped payments on the note. It did not take much time for many of the acquisitions to get into financial trouble, and I figured the company was running out of cash. However, following the advice of a good friend in a similar business, I retained the meanest, nastiest, junkyard dog lawyer I could find and sued ZA, hoping the squeaky wheel would get the oil, which it did and the payments (with interest at ten present) resumed. In another five years the note was paid off in full.

And whatever happened to Steve Fishman? I tried to track him down and found little online except for several lawsuits and legal proceedings by the Securities and Exchange Commission. He apparently was dismissed from being the head of Genesis Health Care and was being sued by his former partner at Formation Capital. He had not posted on his Linked In account for years. ZA Consulting had long since disappeared. When I queried AI about Steve Fishman, this is what I got:

Steven Fishman faced personal financial difficulties and subsequently became the target of an SEC Cease and Desist Order in February 2020. He was penalized for using outside investment capital to covertly meet his personal funding obligations to Formation Capital funds. He later founded and served as CEO of Eagleline Acquisitions.

ZA Consulting LLC, a Jenkintown, PA-based healthcare and nursing home consultancy, ceased its operations and disbanded due to a combination of market forces, systemic Medicare revenue shortages, and complex vendor liability issues.

The closure was closely tied to these factors:

• Medicare and Industry Crises: As a primary consultancy and management partner for long-term care and nursing facilities, ZA Consulting was deeply impacted by rising healthcare costs and Medicare payment cuts. These macroeconomic shifts created widespread financial distress for their clients, eventually rendering operations—such as their management of 22 Acquisition Corporations—untenable, leading to massive vendor obligations.
• Vendor & Liability Disputes: The collapse of ZA Consulting’s associated nursing home portfolios resulted in high-profile financial and legal fallout. The consulting arm became entangled in litigation concerning the financial priority of vendor payments and bond obligations during the distressed sell-offs of healthcare properties.
• Business Restructuring: In the early 2000s, as a result of shifting healthcare market demands and the fallout from these operational failures, the firm disbanded and restructured. Following its dissolution, real estate and development clients who previously relied on ZA Consulting (such as Essex) were forced to replace them with alternative marketing and management companies.

Not a happy ending though given what I observed during the period we were part of ZA I must admit I am not surprised. Saved again by GA, my guardian angel, having gotten out when the getting was good. But also, how sad. He was a smart guy from a working class family who had pulled himself up by his own bootstraps and had a big heart. At the time I believed that he was fundamentally a nice guy though I thought some of his actions were reckless– like paying a lot of money for a company like Howell Associates!

So in 2004 I was free at last, free at last. But what to do next and how to make the most out of my retirement years? I was only 62, still had my marbles and some energy. That will be the subject of the next post, the penultimate one, so stay tuned. The Day in the Life series is almost over. Thank you for reading and hanging in there with me!

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(To be clear: “Associates” as used here is a noun not a verb.)

If you are asking the question, how did this guy ever think he had a chance at creating a successful company, you are probably not alone. I had no previous relevant experience. I had never started a business. I was never in a management position in a business. I had attended seminary and planning school, for heaven’s sake, not business school, and I had never had a class in anything related to starting up or running a business. What was I thinking?

Against all the odds, Howell Associates was formed in 1980 and sold in 1999 when it became an affiliate of ZA Consulting. I stayed on for another five years before retiring in 2004—a good run lasting almost 25 years. How did this happen?

In 1980 when I realized that the Section 8 Program was coming to an end, I had to do something else. But what? It occurred to me that there was stuff I could do that clients were willing to pay for. Most developers needed a feasibility study before they could get a loan. From my Gladstone Associates experience I had learned how to do market studies, and I was pretty good at that and at determining whether a proposed project was financially feasible. This was the first service that Howell Associates provided and remained the primary service that the company provided throughout our twenty year history along with development management for startups or expansions of senior living communities, skills I had learned from my experience working at the National Housing Partnership and from my work developing St Mary’s Court.

And over the years as the business grew, we added a marketing service where Howell Associates provided clients assistance by marketing, selling or leasing units in senior living communities, primarily to large, nonprofit, continuing care retirement communities (“CCRCs”). While our clients were mainly in the Mid Atlantic area, we had clients in more than a dozen states.

I was the only employee of Howell Associates for the first year and a half, then added an assistant, opened a new office in a downtown office building in Washinton, and added people over the years so that during our peak years in the late 1980s, the total staff at Howell Associates numbered in the mid-20s (including on site staff at communities we were marketing), about half working at our downtown DC office.

Some might also observe that an important factor in becoming a viable going concern is luck. When I threw my hat in the ring, the senior living industry was just getting started. That my company was able to ride the wave and twenty years later I was able to sell the consulting practice to ZA Consulting at the peak of the assisted living boom could fall into the category of luck—or even Divine Intervention.

Thanks, Guardian Angel (to be referred to from now on as “GA”).

My task of creating and maintaining a going concern was not easy but it was not rocket science either. My goal was to get visibility in the senior living and affordable housing industries so that if someone needed help in determining whether a project was feasible or needed marketing or sales help, Howell Associates would be on their short list. I did that by attending annual meetings of relevant trade associations, particularly Leading Age (named at the time “American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging”) though there were a host of others—National Association of Home Builders, National Investment Conference, and the National Leased Housing Association—whose conferences I often attended. At the Leading Age annual meeting Howell Associates usually had a booth and I or someone from Howell Associates was often on the program. Whenever given a chance I put in a proposal to make a presentation. I also sent out a newsletter every so often to clients and major companies involved in developing CCRCs, rental senior living communities, assisted living facilities, and affordable housing.

While our clients were mainly nonprofit organizations, often faith-based, I was never one to turn down business. We did some work for Hyatt when they were trying to enter the seniors housing sector, and for almost a decade were the only company that Fannie Mae allowed owners to use to provide the required market analysis to secure financing for their properties. We completed over a dozen market studies for companies trying to get refinancing through Fannie Mae.

I once got a call from a shopping center developer who said he had heard about the boom in seniors housing and wanted to develop a “one of them conjugal care retirement communities.” What he was referring to, of course, was “congregate housing” where meals, housekeeping and other services are offered in rental seniors housing.

“Conjugal care for the elderly. Really? I think you may be on to something!” I replied, passed on the request for a proposal, and gave him the name and telephone number of one of our competitors to call.

The most important requirement for achieving and maintaining a good reputation is to do good work. And the most important thing in doing good work is to hire good people. Because the company did not have the resources to pay high salaries I focused on the research side mainly on hiring young, smart people who had attended a good college or university, ideally already having had one bad job (so that they would be more likely to appreciate working for Howell Associates). I would tell them that I required a three year commitment but would settle for two. Most were terrific hires, who did good work, gave Howell Associates three years, and then went on to get a law or city planning degree or MBA and ended up having successful careers, often in other fields. On the marketing services side of the business, the person responsible for heading up this service line was a superstar and the best in the business. He tended to hire seasoned professionals with a lot of experience in selling units in seniors housing and hit the jackpot most of the time. Most were older women without a college degree.

But the business had its challenges. In a small company like Howell Associates we couldn’t afford to keep people who were not doing a good job. I hated firing people, but I did not have a choice if they were not contributing, and over the years I had about a half dozen or so people for whom Howell Associates was not a good fit. Almost all were very nice people, but the job at Howell Associates was not right for them and certainly not right for Howell Associates. It was a painful process but had to happen if we were to stay in business.

I also made mistakes along the way. The worst was trying to get into the facility management business. Surprisingly without any experience in facility management, we were able to land a couple of facility management contracts. We learned the hard way that it is a very different business from consulting! Also, I had hired the wrong person to head that up, the CEO of a major CCRC but without any experience growing a business. We did not do a good job, our reputation was affected, and we lost both the contracts. I let the employee go and called it quits but not before we had lost a good bit of money. A second near death experience happened during one of the downturns in the economy, especially the real estate sector, when we lost several of our private developer clients who had retreated from seniors housing. The thing I remember most was our consulting accountant informing me after the fact that it was a miracle that we had survived. During these difficult times I had to let some people go, who were very good, just to keep the boat from capsizing.

These two near misses with bankruptcy and continued stress of trying to run a small company took its toll on my health. There also were always ongoing smaller crises to deal with and that is where I ended up spending a lot of my time. So, after about twenty years, although I loved the work, the people I worked with, and even the challenge of keeping the business going, I realized I no longer had the energy or drive that was needed. It was at this low point that out of the blue, I was approached by a buyer, another consulting company, called ZA Consulting from Jenkintown Pennsylvania.

GA (“Guardian Angel”) to the rescue once again!

ZA Consulting had grown from an accounting firm to become one of the leading companies helping nursing homes deal with regulatory and Medicaid issues and had expanded into the senior living industry. Howell Associates would be their first acquisition as part of a rollup strategy.

The ZA offer seemed about right to me, even generous given our shaky recent history, but to be sure, I hired a specialized accounting firm to analyze the financial performance of Howell Associates and tell me what they thought the company was worth. After a couple of weeks, the accountant came to my office with his assistant to deliver his report. The conversation went something like this after the introductions and small talk:

Me: Well, what is the bottom line? How much do you think Howell Associates is worth?

Accountant: Nothing.

Me: No, I think you misunderstood my question. I asked you to tell me how much I should try to sell the company for.

Accountant: I told you, nothing.

Me: Paron me. I don’t think we are communicating.

Accountant: We are communicating just fine. I understood you and gave you my answer. Your company is not worth a goddamn cent.

(period of silence)

Me: How can you say that? I have an offer on the table.

Accountant: Hell, Mr. Howell, your company has never made a nickel.

Me: Oh, is that how it works?

(another period of silence)

Me: Okay, I get that, but in our case that is not true that we never made a nickel. Because we are a C Corp, that means we must pay taxes on profits. So that I do not have to pay taxes twice—on corporate profits at the end of the year plus personal income taxes, I take for myself what money is available and then loan the company money for working capital until income from new contracts come in. I have been doing this for years.

Accountant: It still is worth nothing. I have seen what you pay yourself and frankly it is not all that much. If you have an offer, take it, whatever it is, and I assume it is not much.

At that point, I told him that the meeting was over and that he and his young associate should leave, which they did. They never sent me a bill.

And that is how the deal got done and I would add, Exhibit A, proving that GA was not asleep at the wheel.

But so many deals like this do not turn out well for the seller. There is usually a non-compete clause, as was the case with me, and an obligation to stay at the firm that buys the company for a minimum of several years, five in my case. I had heard horror stories from others who had sold their companies about how bad they had been treated by the new owner and how they regretted selling.

How the transition went will be the subject of the next post.

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Toward the end of my teaching semester at GW in 1980, I made the decision not to return to the National Housing Partnership. There were two reasons for this. The first was that since my two bosses were my age and were very good at what they did, there was no obvious path for a promotion. I probably could have handled that, but the other factor put the nail in the coffin. The HUD Section 8 Program for new construction and substantial rehabilitation was at risk of being axed. Reagan had just become president and was threatening to kill the program. Without Section 8, the development of affordable housing would be very difficult. That all came to pass in 1983 when the program was terminated. The National Housing Partnership went out of business a few years after that.

But what next? Developing affordable housing was no longer a job option. Finally, I had developed an expertise in an activity that I could get paid to do, and now this expertise was no longer needed. Well, I thought, I am not getting any younger. In April of 1980, I had turned 38. If I was going to make a career change, it was now or never. And I realized that some might ask whether I even had a career in the first place.

Then when I thought more about it, I realized that I did have several skills that I had learned that I thought might have value. At Gladstone Associates I had learned how to do real estate and housing development research and accompanying financial analyses. And working for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington I had learned what large scale housing developments entail in the failed effort to develop Seton Belt Village. I also had learned a lot about developing market rate seniors housing. In addition to developing St. Mary’s Court, I was responsible for exploring how the diocese could develop a “lifecare” community for more affluent seniors, and we got pretty far down the road by making a down payment to purchase a 300-unit apartment complex in northwest DC near the National Zoo to convert it to a lifecare community. That effort was also stopped in its tracks when the DC City Council passed a law in the spring of 1979 making it illegal to convert rental housing to another use.

But I felt that with all this experience I had a shot at making it on my own. I took a deep breath and announced to Embry over dinner in the spring of 1980 that I had decided to start my own company.

I can’t remember her exact response, but I do remember that I did not get what you might have expected: “You what? Are you out of your mind, do you have any idea of how hard that is, and by the way, how are we going to meet our mortgage payments with you not working?” Embry in fact, though a bit surprised, was supportive. She had a good job which made enough income to support our family of four for a while. But still, it would be a heavy lift.

Before making the decision to start Howell Associates, I had talked with several colleagues in the housing development field, all of whom were cautiously supportive. I told Embry that I would not pull the plug until I had at least one contract. When one of my former clients at Gladstone Associates hired me to do a market study for a large multifamily complex, that was enough for me to tell my bosses at NHP about my plans, and they too turned out to be supportive. I rented a small office for about $600/month from a company that provided support services for people starting up a business or shutting one down, printed out some business cards and stationery, and “Howell Associates” was up and running.

Then my first and only contract fell through when my client could not secure financing. Oops. Guardian angel, where are you?

Within a couple of weeks of desperate phone calls to friends and former associates I got a phone call from my former boss at the Diocese of Washington. They had been approached by a wealthy shopping center developer in the Washington metro area who owned a 125-acre parcel near the Beltway in Prince Georges County near the site where Seton Belt Village would have been located. For tax purposes he needed to dispose of the property and was prepared to give it away to a nonprofit owner. The lawyer that the diocese had used for the Seton Belt rezoning effort was also the shopping center owner’s lawyer who had recommended the diocese to the shopping center developer as a possible recipient. The diocese, my former employer, needed a feasibility study before taking the property.

Bingo! A job again. Thanks, guardian angel.

Howell Associates was selected as the consultant. I did the study, ran the numbers, and recommended a 350-unit “lifecare” community (also called a “continuing care retirement community” or CCRC) modeled after Kendal, a Quaker community outside of Philadelphia. The proposed community would include cottages and apartments, a large community dining room, auditorium, library, meeting rooms and a large indoor swimming pool. Skilled nursing and assisted living were also part of the recommended development program. I then eased into the job of being the community’s development consultant. I assisted them in hiring an architect, builder, and lawyer, identifying a possible CEO, prepared a marketing plan and filled out forms for zoning approval and for approval by the Maryland Office on Aging. This time with no baggage regarding DEI initiatives, we sailed through although the process took more than a year.

While the assignment turned out to be a life saver for Howell Associates, it was not the long term business opportunity I had expected. Near the end of the first year of my consulting as development adviser for developing the property, the lawyer that I had recommended to be part of the development team gave me a call and asked for a meeting “about a serious matter.” He came to my office in downtown Washington and announced that the board of directors had no confidence in me and that I was fired. When I asked him who was going to take over my job as development consultant for the project, he smiled and said smugly, “I am.”

I was stunned. How could this have happened? And what did the lawyer know about developing a lifecare community anyway? I should have suspected something was up because several weeks before the decision, he had spent several days in my office going over all my work and brought in his “accountant” to review my financial model and projections. I searched for answers which pointed to a couple of key board members whom I did not get along with. I never was sure why but suspected it was because I refused to get down on my knees in the lobby of the Ramada Inn where we often met for breakfast meetings. They would pray loudly asking Jesus for help in developing the property. That was where I drew the line. Good heavens, who were these people? Episcopalians do not do such things. But there was nothing I could do to change the outcome. I recalled that the lawyer who had just delivered the bad news was on his knees praying with them big time.

So, I was back to square one, needing to find clients to replace the Diocese of Washington contract to manage the development of “Collington,” the name given to the community (and ironically where Embry and I now live). There was much work to be done to make Howell Associates a going concern. How that happened and how the company grew from a one man show to a viable business is the subject of the next post.

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In the fall of 1979, I got a call from the vice president of George Washington University, informing me that I had just been awarded the opportunity to become the first “Benjamin Banneker Professor for Washington Studies” at the university. This came as a complete surprise. I had never heard of this position, nor did I know that I was being considered for it. This “prestigious honor” was described as having the following benefits and expectations: The university would match my salary. The position would involve my being on campus for the entire spring semester beginning in January 1980 where I would be provided an office, a research assistant, and access to the university library. I would teach one course of my choosing, engage in relevant research, and make one address to the university community.

“Good heavens!” I remarked, “Why me and what is this all about?”

He answered that it was due to Hard Living on Clay Street, a book I had written, which had been published in 1973, six years earlier, and which was about a neighborhood in the Washington metro area and had become a staple of many sociology and cultural anthropology courses at GW.

I was speechless. Then I answered that I was deeply honored but that there was something that they needed to know. It was that I had moved on. I was not a sociology professor nor an expert in such matters nor was I an academic or a researcher. In fact, I had moved on to a very practical field, which was developing affordable housing. Plus, I would need to see if I could get a leave of absence from my job at the National Housing Partnership. He said that the university understood all that; and for a variety of reasons, the decision makers at GW felt that at this time I was the right choice for this position. He gave me 48 hours to decide.

I discussed the opportunity with Embry, and she encouraged me to take it, then checked with my two bosses at NHP about a leave of absence and they approved. The HUD Section 8 Program was in jeopardy anyway, so that made their decision a little easier. I then got back to the vice president and accepted the offer. The GW vice president agreed that I could teach a course in the department that I had requested— in the GW Graduate School of City Planning and that the “original research” I was expected to do could be in affordable housing development, not sociology or anthropology. In January of 1980, I packed up my stuff at NHP and moved to a large office in the GW city planning school.

What to do? I had never taught before at any level and was far from being a real expert in anything except the HUD Section 8 Program, which was starting to be on life support. How would I get by for an entire semester? Well, I thought, I might not be the expert that I was supposed to be, but during my career up to that point, I had worked with a bunch of people who were. So, my plan was to bring in a lot of seasoned realexperts in real estate development for presentations to the class, which ultimately included many of the movers and shakers in the real estate and housing development world in the Washington region. Bob Gladstone, the founder of Gladstone Associates where I got started in my career, came to the class along with his son, and so did a bunch of other experts—a condo conversion guy, a community development guy, a single family housing developer, a multifamily housing developer, a major shopping center developer, and the head of the DC Department of Housing and Community Development. They all seemed to enjoy the experience of give and take with a very impressive bunch of GW graduate students and some very sharp juniors and seniors. I led the sessions on affordable housing, seniors housing, new towns and the fundamentals of real estate finance. I also divided the class into six five-person “development teams,” which had to present development proposals before a “zoning commission” composed of several class members, with other members of the class role playing as NIMBYs and elected officials. I gave an exam at the end of the semester and most students did well. It turned out to be a good class, which got high marks from the students, and was a great experience for me.

But all was not wine and roses. For some reason the head of the GW School of City Planning fought hard to keep the school from putting me in one of their offices and was furious that his department was where I ended up. I did not even know the guy, and was never introduced to him. Yet when I asked if I could join him and several of the planning faculty for one of their weekly lunches, one of the professors told me that the chair of the department had vetoed the idea. “The planning school director said that you would not be able to understand our conversation or fit into the group.” But it remains a mystery as to why he did not like me, especially since we had never even met.

But what really got to me was when the secretary of the director of the planning school came into my office a few weeks later and told me that the director had told her to tell me that by inviting so many students to come to my office, I was disrupting the life of the city planning department. I told her that if he wanted to keep my students out of my office, he should get his candy ass in here and tell me that face to face. He never did and we never actually met the entire semester that I was at GW.

But overall, it was a terrific experience for me. I had a spectacular “research assistant,” who was a planning school student who did a terrific job in helping me in class and was a champion sailboat racer, who gave me a lot of tips about racing Embry’s and my new sailboat, a 16-footer I named “Mother Courage.”

I had to do two other things to fulfill my obligations as the first Banneker Professor at GW. The first was to do original research and try to get that published. I did that and wrote a book called Real Estate Development Syndication, which was about the issues related to financing and developing affordable housing and which was published by Praeger in 1983. Not exactly what they had in mind, but, hey, I had warned them. The second was “my address to the university community,” which I did but which now I believe was a mistake on my part. Even though I had moved on from Hard Living on Clay Street to real estate and housing development, I should have talked about my “Clay Street” experience. Instead, I talked about a zoning battle in Prince Georges County, an error for which I remain apologetic. Afterall, that is why I got the position in the first place and that is what most people who came to the lecture expected.

But what to do next? Should I return to the National Housing Partnership or try something new. That will be the subject of the next post. My decision was life changing.

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The last two posts have been about Embry’s career and raising our children. Before that I posted about my experience working for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, working on the ill fated Seton Belt Village, an ambitious, proposed 3,500 unit “new town” in the Washington metro area, which did not move forward due to political opposition, but my experience was salvaged when the diocese was awarded HUD Section 202 financing for a 144-unit subsidized senior living community near the Kennedy Center in Foggy Bottom. That experience led to my being recruited by the largest affordable housing developer and syndicator in the country, the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships.

Bingo! Finally, a dream job! I reported to two very sharp guys about my age and who were very supportive of the work I was charged with doing. The primary role of the National Corporation for Housing Partnerships (also known as the “National Housing Partnership” or NHP) was to bring equity capital to the affordable housing industry by selling limited partnerships in multi-family, low income rental housing developments to investors seeking tax shelters. There was a staff of over a dozen associates in the firm whose job was to seek out developers all over the country who had been awarded HUD Section 8 contracts and then take over ownership as general partner, assume property management of the properties, and raise equity capital by selling limited partnership shares.

Section 8 was the federal housing program created in 1974 whereby HUD allowed private developers to charge market rents for affordable housing and provided the subsidies that covered the difference between what the low income tenant paid (25% of income, later increased to 30%) and the market rent for the unit. The Section 8 Program for new construction and substantial rehabilitation produced over a million new units before it started to be phased out on the early 1980s due to the high cost involved and changing politics in the country. (Beginning in the early 1980s, the program was changed so that the Section 8 subsidies could only be used for existing housing and was administered by local housing authorities).

The early program that was designed to produce more new affordable housing was a highly technical business that at NHP involved lawyers and accountants along with a team of experts, seeking out developers who had Section 8 contracts, matching them with high income investors, and providing equity financing. NHP was set up by an act of Congress as a public/private venture, led by a charismatic though cranky CEO with plenty of private sector finance experience, and functioned as a private company with the goal of remaining a going concern, in other words, making money. The informal motto of the company was “doing well by doing good.”

Before I was hired, however, NHP did not develop properties itself. Its primary clients were real estate developers who had managed to get Section 8 commitments and secure financing. I was hired to be the in-house developer. I loved the job. I had a staff of four people, all experienced and smart, who after the Section 8 new construction initiative terminated ended up having very successful careers in the affordable housing industry. Our job as the in-house developer at NHP was to do what all real estate and housing developers do—find and secure site control of suitable sites, hire architects and civil engineers, oversee the design process, battle NIMBYs, obtain permissive zoning, secure the HUD Section 8 commitments, close on the financing and monitor the construction and initial lease up. I found the work interesting, challenging, and rewarding. Over the four years that I worked for NHP, my team developed something like eight or nine properties containing close to a thousand units, located mainly in the Washington and Baltimore metro areas. I could not have asked for a better job. I gained the job training and experience that would open all sorts of other doors.

So why on Earth would I leave a dream job like that after being there for just under four years? Stay tuned for the next installment and find out.

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