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.