When Embry and I moved to Washington in the summer of 1972, we had no idea of what kind of neighborhood we were moving into. When we saw an ad about a relatively inexpensive “old granny house” in The Washington Post, Embry and I drove up to DC, looked at the house and the Cleveland Park neighborhood, liked what we saw, then with financial help from my parents bought the house almost on a whim. No shopping around for us. This was the only house we looked at. I had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. We did have one friend from city planning school in Chapel Hill who lived in a nearby neighborhood but that was it.

Little did we know.

We lived in our granny house from 1972 to 2012 and then moved to an apartment house in the same neighborhood where we lived for another ten years before moving to Collington, a senior living community, about a year ago. Talk about hitting the jackpot! That is why I describe our move to Cleveland Park in 1972 as arriving in “The Promised Land.”

So, what made this so special for us? Well, there were lots of things. It was not far from downtown, only a little more than a couple of miles. I walked to my five different jobs over the 40-year period that I had a job on average three or four times a week, and the time it took was around 45 minutes door to door for each one of them. And that was for my entire career! How often does that happen? Plus, it was only a 10-minute walk to the Cleveland Park Metro station, and then only about a six-minute subway ride to downtown. A neighborhood shopping area was practically outside our front door, and our next door neighbor on one side was the Cleveland Park Library. A huge estate called Tregaron was just up the block with grounds open for walking and sledding, eventually becoming the site for the Washington International School, which included a nature conservancy open to the public. Access to Rock Creek Park was also convenient. Good schools–both public and private–were close by, and both our kids walked to their schools from the early grades all the way through high school. We never had more than one car at a time and never needed one. How unusual is that?

All that was great, but what really made Cleveland Park special were our neighbors. When we arrived in 1972 neighbors on both sides of the street tended to fall into one of two categories—old timers, who seemed to us to have lived in the community forever, many living alone having lost spouses, and new arrivals, who turned out to be people just like us, young couples with young children, just getting started on our careers. When we moved in, across the street from us were two sisters in their late 80s, who weeded our front garden when we were away and without being asked took out a huge tree stump. Our next door neighbor with whom we shared a driveway and a garage was a quirky, elderly widow who shared her house with a young family from Thailand, who took care of her. In the house across from her lived another older woman, a retired librarian and intellectual who brought our kids candy and cookies.

But it was the other group that stands out most in making Cleveland Park “The Promised Land”—people just like us. We got to know them because in those early years we belonged to so many groups. We were part of a food coop along with about a dozen other families, all basically our age, with two people (not in the same family) assigned to shop every Monday at the wholesale food market and bring back fresh vegetables to be picked up on the front porch by the others later that afternoon. We belonged to a neighborhood swimming pool where almost every day during the summer one of us would do our lap swimming. Parties and gatherings for members happened regularly. We belonged to a baby sitting coop where another dozen or so families would take care of children whose parents were enjoying an evening out at a good restaurant or a movie or play. And we were active in the Cleveland Park Neighborhood Association. All these groups had informal gatherings from time to time, so you got to meet and get to know a whole bunch of people, many of whom like us were in their early to mid 30s with preschool children.

And there was also the front porch. Most houses in Cleveland Park had front porches and these were used regularly for casual conversations and catching up. It was hard to walk from one end of our street to the other without pausing to greet or chat with a neighbor, occasionally taking time to sit and rock on their front porch.

What stands out most about the people we got to meet soon after we first arrived can be described by one word: engagement. Our new friends were fully engaged in their careers, passionate about what they were doing, and tended to be bleeding hearts like us. No one had grown up in Washington. They had come here to make a difference. They had graduated from good colleges. Many had advanced degrees, mostly from law schools. Some had been in the Peace Corps. Some worked on the Hill as staffers to Senators or Congressmen, or in the White House (if a Democrat was president), some at the World Bank or the IMF. Some were young associates at prestigious law firms, some were doing research at NIH or other institutions, some were reporters, some artists and writers, and some were teachers or college professors—and I am talking about both men and women. This was the first generation of the Women’s Lib Generation. I do not remember a single stay at home mom. And yes, I would say that most of the Cleveland Park cohort were also ambitious—but not to make a lot of money or gain status but to make a difference in tackling the world’s problems.

The thing I remember most about those early days in Cleveland Park were the dinner parties. Every weekend someone was throwing a dinner party, nothing fancy and sometimes potluck. These parties would tend to have four or five couples seated around a table and there would always be people you knew, some you would like to know better and usually someone you did not know. People would linger long after the dessert was finished, maybe sipping on another glass of wine and naturally offering their ideas for changing the world for the better.

Were we naïve and overly ambitious? Of course we were. Did things turn out for all of us the way we hoped they would? Of course they didn’t. Did everyone live happily ever after? Of course not. That is just the way the world is. It is full of hard knocks and disappointments.

But does this mean that our lives have been in vain? Of course not. You give life your best shot and hope for the best. It is the trying that counts.

But that we did not all live up to accomplishing our dreams or changing the world does not detract from those early days living in Cleveland Park when there was so much positive energy, so much hope and enthusiasm, and so many people we felt compatible with. After a while as we got older and had more distractions, the parties and community involvement tapered off, but the deep friendships remained and still do even to this day though we no longer live in that wonderful neighborhood. I will always be profoundly grateful for the 40 years we lived there. That is why I call Cleveland Park “The Promised Land.”

And in those early days Embry was busy with starting her career in health care policy research. Soon after we moved to Washington, Embry’s boss, a famous health care researcher at Georgetown invited us over to her house in Georgetown for an informal dinner. Her house was a four-story mansion with 10 foot ceilings, fireplaces in every room and located in one of Georgetown’s most iconic neighborhoods. She was single and after leaving I commented to Embry that either she got a bundle of money from a divorce settlement, inherited a fortune, robbed a bank, or the lady had to be using grant money to buy Georgetown real estate. Not a bad strategy, I concluded. Embry was not amused but left her job months later when it became evident that her boss was fudging the numbers.

Over the next several years she worked for two quasi government entities engaged in monitoring hospital and health care expansions in the Virginia and in the District where she made several good friends for life. Her big break came when she got a job with a company called Systemetrics, headquartered in California but with a Washington office and where she engaged in health care policy research focusing on Medicare, Medicaid, and other major government programs mainly in maternal and child health and which led to jobs with increasing responsibilities in two other major health policy research firms, Mathematica (located in Princeton but with a large office in Washington) and finally the Urban Institute, before semi retiring and starting her own consulting work focusing mainly on evaluating health care initiatives in Africa. And, oh yes, in the middle of all this she managed to get PhD from George Washington University, raise two wonderful children and sing in several choral groups. Whew, I get exhausted even thinking how she did all of this.

So yes, we were dealt extremely good hands, “blessed” as they say.

What helped make all this possible was having a full time, live-in housekeeper and nanny. Good friends of ours from Chapel Hill returned from working in India with a young “ayah,” who had cared for their children but had to find a new job here since they were leaving the country for another position overseas. We jumped at the opportunity. Her name was “Precy,” who was a devout Catholic from Goa, a former Portuguese colony in India, which explains why she had a Portuguese name. Precy, whose name was changed to “Punam” a few years later when she married a Sikh from India, became a member of our extended family and still is, along with her two grown children. She went on to work for other families when our children got older, raised two beautiful and successful girls of her own and is now a grandmother of four. Last week we drove with her to Philadelphia to celebrate her oldest grandchild’s graduation from high school.

But the story of one’s life is not only about jobs, careers, and trying to make a difference. It is also about raising a family. Nothing is more important. The next post will be about our own children before returning to career issues and more challenges along the way. Stay tuned….

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I loved working at Gladstone Associates. I loved the people, the work, and the environment. But I was not sure if this was the right fit for a long term commitment. My social conscience kept nagging me quietly, “Is this really how you want to spend the rest of your life, helping real estate developers?” That is why when a new opportunity came up, I jumped on it.

One of the major clients that Gladstone Associates had at the time was the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, which had recently been given a 624-acre tract of mostly wooded land in the far suburbs of Washington by a wealthy, deceased tobacco farmer named Seton Belt. Not knowing what to do with the property, the diocese had hired Gladstone to help them figure it out; and by another stroke of good luck, I was the associate assigned to work on it. Our team was headed by one of the partners, who was my mentor, and included two research associates (entry level positions). I was the associate responsible for managing most of the work. This was in 1973 when the field of planning and urban development was forging new ground as new HUD programs were being introduced to create affordable housing and the idea of building new towns was becoming popular. The new towns of Reston and Columbia were both in the Washington region and were getting national attention.

So we did the usual routine of determining the market area, running demographics, identifying and analyzing the competition, and then making recommendations—of “product, price and pace” (number of units that could be absorbed by the market annually). And voila, we announced our recommendation: why not develop another “new town”? Afterall, 624 acres was a huge site and though somewhat remote from Washington, the site was drop dead gorgeous and included one of the few virgin forests remaining on the East Coast (and which would be preserved in perpetuity if our plan moved forward). A world class architectural firm was added to the team, and the project was off and running.

The final plan called for a community called “Seton Belt Village” containing over 3,500 units accommodating 11,000 people. Some 400 units would be part of a senior living community but one that was not set apart and isolated as is often the case but fully integrated into the larger community. Skilled nursing care and assisted living would also be included along with a large “town center” and all sorts of amenities, with spaces for dining, an auditorium, meeting rooms, swimming pool and gym reserved for seniors. It would be a world class community, which when completed surely would be featured in all the books on urban planning.

To move forward, the diocese needed someone to manage and direct the development effort. With my seminary degree, Episcopal Church connections, and experience in real estate development, I thought I had a good shot at getting it, expressed my interest, and landed the job. I reported directly to the chief executive officer of diocese, a very smart, but also driven, Episcopal priest. Managing a complex real estate development, it turns out, is very different from doing market research and financial feasibility analyses, so it was another opportunity for on the job training.

And in the case of Seton Belt Village, the ambitious undertaking would be a heavy lift. The early 1970s was a time of idealism, reform, anti-Vietnam War protests, and civil rights initiatives, which much like today pitted conservatives, evangelicals, and malcontents against liberal Democrats and progressives. The Episcopal Diocese of Washington—considered by some to be elitist—was clearly on the progressive side. The county government at the time was in the camp of what would be today’s MAGA Republicans. To complicate matters further we carried additional baggage of unapologetically supporting what now falls into the category of DEI. Seton Belt Village was to be fully integrated according to race and class as well as age. Great idea but the deck was stacked against us. Two years and over twenty meetings with county officials, the final vote by the county council came in regarding rezoning the property, and it was unanimous. The eight members, all white men, most privileged sons of tobacco wealth, cast their final vote: there was no place in the county for a project like what we were proposing. (The property was eventually sold to the Nature Conservancy and remains undeveloped.)

What to do next? As the saying goes, when one door is slammed shut, the Lord opens another. When the final vote happened, we had no choice but to throw in the towel, lick our wounds and call it quits. At the same time an historically Black Episcopal church in the elite Foggy Bottom neighborhood in downtown Washington approached the diocese asking for help in developing an affordable senior living community on a vacant site next to the church and adjacent to the campus of George Washington University where once stood one of the first public housing projects in the District of Columbia. This was in 1974 when a brand new program had just become law, a revision of Section 202 of the National Housing Act, which provided deep rent subsidies for low income seniors living in properties developed and owned by not for profit organizations. We jumped in and submitted a proposal to HUD for the first round of selection.

And we won! That meant not only that I still had a job but an opportunity to learn how to get projects designed, financed and constructed. And I loved the work, figuring out how all the numbers fit together and working with the architects and engineers and the construction company. We called the project “St Mary’s Court” in honor of the Episcopal Church that sat adjacent to the site and which had the original idea. And this community was—and still is—truly special. The 144-unit building was positioned as a “congregate housing” community, which included a central kitchen and dining area where one meal a day would be provided for all the residents at a reduced fee subsidized by a local Episcopal foundation. Free lunch was provided under a federal nutrition program. The George Washington University was given space for a free health care clinic for residents and there were plenty of common areas. Under the HUD Section 8 Program, residents pay no more than 30 percent of their income for rent and utilities. In those days affirmative action was both legal and encouraged, and the initial lease up accommodated a mix of races which reflected the racial and ethnic population of the District of Columbia at that time and has remained diverse since its opening in the late 1970s. (I continued my involvement after leaving the Diocese of Washington and have served on the board as “the bishop’s representative” since that time.)

And the big surprise–and payoff– for me was that because of Saint Mary’s Court, soon after the project was under construction, I got a call from the largest affordable housing developer in the country at the time, The National Corporation for Housing Partnerships, which offered me the position of “Director of Development,” responsible for developing all the properties that the company undertook without a local partner. My guardian angel had not forgotten about me.

More on that later.

But what about Embry and her career path, our two children, and our lives in Cleveland Park, the neighborhood where we lived in Washington? That is the subject of the next blog post.

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My job search had taught me several things—never tell anyone that you wrote a book that has no policy recommendations, don’t be destroyed by rejections, and most of all this: Understand that that you need to develop a skill set that someone will pay you money to put to use. I had a lot of education, true. Davidson was–and is even more so now–an excellent school with a great reputation. But a liberal arts degree in history (my major) or English (my minor) maybe will count for something if you want to be college professor, for which a PhD is also essential, and which I had absolutely no interest in; but in the workaday world, having a liberal arts degree in history does not get you very far. Plus, the MDiv I got from Union was clearly a liability. Many people were highly suspect, thinking I might be one of those Jesus freaks, holier than thou types, or even worse, a bleeding heart, or a goody-goody. A master’s degree in city planning you would think might help my job search, but few people really knew what city planners did, and most of the jobs were in city planning agencies. Having worked for the New York Department of City Planning, I knew a public agency job was not for me. In other words, I was doomed.

Now it is not true that a college degree is totally useless. You must have one if you want a law or medical or business school graduate degree. You can use it to get an entry level position in many businesses, large corporations, and government agencies with their own training and career tracks. However, I had no desire to work for a business, or a large corporation. My father’s and grandfather’s career of banking was definitely out, after I had talked with the guy who at that time was president of the bank where my father worked. What counted most to him were passion for banking, drive, and ambition—traits sadly lacking in me. And I had already ruled out law and medicine. So, I was in desperate need of a way out of the mess that I found myself in. Help!

Then along came the Gladstone Associates job, which probably I would not have gotten were in not for the fact that Bob Gladstone, the firm’s founder, was a Carolina planning school grad. And why do I call it hitting the jackpot? Because the firm did stuff that people were willing to pay for. Finally, if I realized that if I could just learn what that stuff was and learn how to do it, I might have a shot at a decent career. I am talking about doing mundane stuff like market studies, financial feasibility studies, the mechanics of real estate development and real estate financing. Market research and feasibility work are not the same as nuclear physics or rocket science or for that matter, systematic theology. These skills that Gladstone Associates offered clients were not all that hard to learn. And surprisingly, I found that I was pretty good at it and that I loved doing the work. Developers with site control of a property would come to Gladstone and we would tell them what to build, how much it would cost, the seed money they would need to pull it off, assess the risk, and–what they all were really looking for—give them an idea of how much money they would make– in other words the “keys to the kingdom!” And at Gladstone Associates, you could get help if you were a single family developer, a multi-family developer, or wanted to build a shopping center, an office building, industrial park, convention center, arena, or a senior living community. In fact, just about anything. It turns out people pay big bucks to help them get going on these projects, and many lenders require the studies before they will lend money. Bingo! I had hit jackpot. At last, a foothold and chance to make something of myself! A much needed break for a poor soul for whom making “definitive policy recommendations” was a heavy lift.

And the other surprise was that I really liked the people who were my fellow workers. The firm probably had between 40 and 50 employees, many of whom had city planning degrees or MBAs, and while there are always a few jerks, I found that I respected and genuinely liked most of the people I worked with. In those days most of the higher ups were men, but women were beginning to make inroads. One guy became a lifelong best friend.

Two other very important things happened when I was working at Gladstone Associates. The first was that along with a couple of my coworkers I began the discipline of long distance running, which became an important part of my routine and my self worth for over 30 years until my knees wore out in my late 50s. Along with two or three officemates at Gladstone I would run between three and four miles, three or four times a week, mostly during our lunch period, changing and showering in the nearby YMCA. I would run longer distances on weekends. As a polio victim, while there was not a lot that I could do physically, running was something I could do, and it contributed to my sense of self-worth and my self-identity.

The second important thing was my introduction to sailing, which also became a life-long passion. For $600 another Gladstone friend and I bought from our Gladstone running partner an old, beat-up, 16-foot racing dinghy called a 505, the first of seven sailboats that Embry and I would own over the next 40 years until we sold our last boat a few years ago when I turned 80. The 505 sadly sunk in the Potomac River on the Fourth of July 1974, and I was in the polluted water for over three hours before I was rescued by the DC marine police an hour before the fireworks were to start. But that is a story to be told later.

While I attribute my experience at Gladstone Associates as a major turning point in my life, I was a short timer. In just a little over two and a half years, another opportunity turned up, which also fits into the category of a life changer. My guardian angel stepped in again. That will be the subject of the next post.

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At the end of the summer of the second year when the research was completed, we packed up and headed north again though we now drove a Toyota station wagon and paid to have a mover. Our son, Andrew, just over a year old, was in the back in his car seat. Embry and I had made a deal. Since she now had a master’s degree from UNC in bio statistics, which she got at UNC the second year when I was writing the Clay Street book, we agreed that we both would apply for jobs and whoever got a good job first should take it and that would determine where we lived. We applied for jobs in Atlanta, Boston, New York City and in Washington, DC. Naturally she got the good offer first, as a research assistant for a noted professor at Georgetown University, who was studying maternal and child health. So, the city we would move to would be Washington.

While in Chapel Hill we saw an ad in The Washington Post for a “old granny house” priced at $41,000 in Washington in a neighborhood called Cleveland Park (located near the National Zoo). I immediately drove up to Washington to take a look, liked the house and the neighborhood; and with some help from my parents plopped down money for the down payment. In those days, starter housing was much more affordable than it is today. Before we moved in, the house had been an illegal rooming house for about a dozen Thai Embassy employees, had dark drapes, dark walls, smelled like an Asian restaurant, and was showing its age. No wonder that it had been on the market for over six months! But it had good bones and potential. We loved living in that “old granny house” and lived there for over 40 years!

Now it was my turn to find a job. I tried again with public sector planning and housing jobs and made little progress. I was reluctant to try the private sector, but when I heard about a position with a private, city planning consulting firm owned by several North Carolina planning school alums, this seemed to be a natural, especially since most of their clients were cities and towns. I was able to schedule an interview with one of the partners, a guy in his mid-forties, who greeted me warmly. The interview went well until he asked me to describe my job doing the research in the Clay Street neighborhood. (At the time of the interview I did not have a publisher.)

The interview went like this:

Him: So, what were your specific policy recommendations?

Me: Actually, I did not make any specific policy recommendations.

Him: You must be kidding. None?

Me: No, I am not kidding. My “report” was about the people who lived there, hoping I suppose to better understand the needs and issues of working class white people.

Him: That was it? No policy recommendations? And the study was financed by a grant to my alma mater? This is a disgrace! First, you will never get it published. Second, I am embarrassed that UNC would undertake research without policy recommendations, and finally there is no place for you or people like you in this firm, or any legitimate city planning firm. Now get out of my office!

His smile was replaced by a frown as he pointed to the door.

Well, I thought, that did not go well.

So here I was with no job and no job leads. What to do next? There was one other planning consulting firm owned by a North Carolina city planning school grad. This firm, Gladstone Associates, called itself an “economic consulting firm” focusing mainly on private real estate developers, helping them make money. Good heavens, how could I ever work for a firm like that? It would be a sellout. After a couple of more leads resulted in disappointing interviews, I decided to send them my resume and to my surprise got an interview. My interview concluded, when the interviewer responded, “What you have been doing up to now hasn’t gotten you anywhere, Joe. And here you are talking to me about an entry level job. I am the executive vice president of Gladstone Associates. I am 29. You are over 30 years old. Buddy, you got a long way to go to catch up!” He said he would think about it and get back to me. And I had not even mentioned my Clay Street “report.” That would have killed any possibility.

Days passed and no response. Failed again, I concluded. I was beginning to get the idea that maybe I was in the wrong profession and that I should have stuck with becoming an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Oh well, I told myself, I did not want to work for a money grubbing firm like that anyway, helping private real estate developers get rich.

Several more days had passed when I received a thin envelop in the mail from Gladstone Associates. Just as I had thrown the Doubleday letter in the waste basket, I was ready to toss this one as well but with stoic resignation opened it to find to my complete surprise that I got a job offer for a position as associate in the firm.

I accepted immediately.

And it turned out to be one of the best decisions in my life. Why that was the case and how it changed my life will be the subject of the next post.

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Sometimes the most significant things in life turn out to be surprises that come out of the blue. Stuart Chapin, the revered, senior faculty member of the UNC School of City and Regional Planning, had just received a federal grant to study the behavior, lifestyles, and values of the white working class. The study was mainly qualitative, using survey research. But to keep the research honest, the budget included funding for the position of a “participant observer.” The job description called for someone to live in the research area for one full year, get to know people who lived there, and to dictate daily observations, which would be transcribed and then read by the principal researchers in Chapel Hill. It would involve a second year in Chapel Hill reviewing the transcripts and contributing to the final report regarding the research. Professor Chapin called me into his office on a hot day in May, and asked me if I would consider being the participant observer.

He went on to say that the area being studied was the lowest income, almost exclusively white neighborhood in the Mid Atlantic region, located just outside of Washington, DC and included four white working class, small towns in Prince Georges County, Maryland, adjacent to the District of Columbia. Of course, I had no experience in doing anything like this, had never taken a sociology course, and was somewhat concerned that it would throw my job search off track. I was hoping to find a job working in one of the new HUD initiatives associated with the Model Cities Program or in the New Town Movement. In fact, I had applied for some of those jobs but had not been successful in landing anything yet. So maybe this might be an interim option or a placeholder that would not upset my career path.

I talked it over with Embry, who encouraged me to take the job. This would also affect her career path as well, but she said being a stay-at-home mom appealed to her if it meant only one year. Besides, her focus now was on our next child, who would be born in midsummer.

I took the job.

Andrew Martin Howell was born by natural childbirth on July 6, 1969, in Watts Hospital in Durham. Three weeks later we rented a small U-Hall truck, packed it with our meager belongings and headed to the Washington area and the study area neighborhood. I drove the truck. Embry drove our VW Beetle with Andrew strapped into the backseat. Professor Chapin had managed to find a modest apartment for us to rent in Mt. Rainer, Maryland, the ground level of a modest two-story house with another apartment on the second floor. Our adventure was underway!

So, the question for me was how on Earth to go about this job. Over the summer in preparation for the assignment, I had taken an urban anthropology course in the UNC summer school and had done a good bit of reading, but to describe this as a seat of the pants operation is an understatement. I was clueless.

Basically, what I did was to hang out in the neighborhood for one full year. This meant sitting on front porches and talking to folks, attending neighborhood gatherings, joining a bowling league with Embry and our next door neighbors, joining a fishing club and a community swimming pool, hanging out at the local bar, and attending town meetings and various church services on Sundays.

There is no way I could have done this job had I not been married. Having an infant child was an additional benefit. A lot of my conversations were with women when their husbands were away at work. A single person would have been suspect spending so much time with their wives and would be risking his life. I got to know two families very well, whom I called “the Mosebys,” our next door neighbors, and “the Shacklefords,” a family up the street. All names are fictional. These two families ended up being the main families in the “report” that I would write when I returned to Chapel Hill the following year.

Our neighbors invariably would get up their courage and ask me exactly what I was doing in the neighborhood and what kind of job I had. My answer was that the federal government wanted to know more about how ordinary people lived to make better policy decisions. My job was to live in the community for a year and then report back about how “real people” lived. This would always get a skeptical look with a response like, “You mean to tell me that the federal government is hiring you just to live here and report back how we ordinary people live?” They would repeat the question two or three times, then smile, chuckle and reply, “Goddamn, ain’t that just like the federal government!”

What I did not tell them was that every day I would retreat to our apartment and dictate my observations, then send off the tape at the end of the week to Chapel Hill to be transcribed. I had a hint that I might be on to something when in November following a two-week bout with the flu, I got a nervous phone call from the person doing the transcribing asking me what was going on and why she hadn’t gotten the usual tape in the mail. She confessed that every Sunday a group of about a dozen of her friends gathered in her apartment over beer and pizza to listen to the tapes.

At the end of the assignment, the transcriptions totaled more than 2,500 pages. Professor Chapin encouraged me to see if I might be able to get a book out of the research I had done and encouraged me to write it all up and then mimeograph my draft and send it off to five publishers—Random House, Harper and Rowe, Wiley Interscience, Little Brown, and Doubleday. It took me the better part of the year to do this. I had titled the manuscript “Hard Living on Clay Street: Studies of Blue Collar Families.” It was not long before I got the first rejection, then a second and a third. Two publishers remained, Little Brown and Doubleday. I figured that Little Brown was by far the best bet since they had recently published Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Street Corner Men by Eliot Liebow, which had been a huge success. When I got a call from the executive editor of Little Brown, my hopes sunk. His first comment was, “Mr. Howell, we are not going to publish your manuscript. It does not meet our high standards, but the reason I am calling is to ask if you could tell me more about the characters in the book. First, what about Barry and Bobbi Jean?” It was one of the most bizarre conversations I had ever had. The guy was obsessed with these characters and wanted to know about all of them and then had the nerve to ask if I would mind giving him a call in a few months if their lives had changed. I thanked him for the call and hung up in disbelief. Of all the nerve!

Well, that was it. I knew I had no chance with Doubleday, the biggest of them all; and when the Doubleday rejection letter came, I tossed the thin envelope in the waste basket without opening it. When Embry asked why I would not even open the letter, I told her I had suffered enough disappointment and was moving on. By that time, I had landed my first job in my new field of housing and real estate development and wanted to put the entire “Clay Street” experience behind me. I sighed and gave in, opening the letter. The exact wording of the letter was this: “Mr. Howell, we have read your ‘Clay Street’ manuscript and will publish it. We will be in touch with you shortly.” It was signed by Loretta Barrett, editor-in-chief, Doubleday Books.

I didn’t faint on the spot but came close.

It took the usual nine months for the book to come out, renamed by Doubleday. Hard Living on Clay Street: Portraits of Blue Collar Families. I had no idea what to expect. Then the reviews started to come in –around 25 in all– and all without exception were positive. It was the first Doubleday Achor paperback original to be reviewed in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, which triggered dozens of interviews, mainly on the radio via phone interviews, but I also had a long interview on the CBS television morning news.

The ethical crisis I faced was this: how to assure that the two main families could benefit financially from the book sales. The idea of “privileged guy writes book about poor people. Privileged guy benefits, poor people get nothing,” was too much, so I asked Doubleday to give each family a 10 percent cut of the royalties. They said they had never heard of such a thing and could not accommodate but for the next ten years I did it on my own anyway, which assuaged my guilt and put some money to good use. It also made the two main families my biggest book promoters.

There were some other issues. I once got an angry call from a woman who said she lived in the neighborhood and that she was “going to sue my ass” for using her name, “Bobbi Jean Shackleford” as a main character in the book. All the names I had used of course were fictional. Doubleday assured me not to worry since it is basically impossible to come up with a fictional name that someone did not already have. The aggrieved lady never got back to me.

Before I sent the manuscript off to publishers, I had sent a copy to my favorite English professor at Davidson College to ask him what he thought. It took a few weeks for him to get back to me, but when he called his first comment was, “Joe, how does it feel to have written a book people will be reading 50 years from now?” Hard Living on Clay Street was published in 1973. It is still in print today. That makes 53 years and counting (though for the last few decades the publisher has been Waveland Press.)

The book, of course, is something I am deeply proud of; but when it was published in 1973, I had already moved in a completely different direction, a career in the real estate development field. Getting a foothold in that new direction was not easy. How that happened—and the challenges associated with it—is the subject of the next post.

Stay tuned.

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When our daughter, Katherine, was born, she had a heart murmur. The pediatric cardiologist at the hospital in Chapel Hill alerted us to this at the time of Katherine’s first checkup, comforting us that this was not all that uncommon and likely to clear up on its own. As Katherine’s first year progressed, the murmur persisted. Even more unsettling was that at times Katherine would have a bluish complexion and seem to lose her breath. This would last only a minute or two but still was unsettling. The cardiologist admitted that this was a concern and needed to be monitored closely.

While troubling, this did not keep us from enjoying our daughter. Embry bonded with the child, and I had never seen Embry so happy. As time progressed, however, the blue spells got worse, and after several visits to the cardiologist the decision was made to have a “Blaylock Shunt” operation, which would allow the vessels to bypass the dysfunctional part of the heart. The cardiologist assured us that this was a relatively routine operation and would get Katherine through the next several years when a more complex procedure would be performed to “cure” the situation when she got into her teenage years. The success rate of the Blaylock Shunt was above 90% overall and the surgeon at the hospital was considered the best in the business. Not to worry.

Well, of course, we did worry but had confidence in the kind, gentle, and highly respected cardiologist, who advised us. Besides, we really did not have a choice.

The operation was performed in late October. We briefly met the surgeon just after the surgery and he assured us that all had gone according to plan. Katherine would be fine. We breathed easily for the first time in months. Good friends from planning school had invited us over for dinner that evening and we had accepted. It was a relaxed evening of storytelling and good vibes. All would be well.

Just before we were to have dessert, the phone rang. The call was from the hospital, and it was for us. We were not expecting a phone call from the hospital. Besides all had gone well. I took the phone.

It was the cardiologist. His tone was very different from when we had talked to him following the surgery. He did not go into detail but said we should come to the hospital immediately. There had been some complications. Embry saw the expression on my face and immediately jumped up from the dining table. We apologized, thanked our hosts, and drove frantically to the hospital. I could see from their worried looks that our friends sensed the gravity of our situation.

I have erased from memory most of what happened that evening, but as we were waiting for the cardiologist to meet us, etched in my mind forever is the image of the cocky surgeon breezing past us in a hurry, not making eye contact. He knew damn well who we were and why we were there.

Embry and I looked at each other in fear.

I could not fathom how much of a tragedy this would be if we lost Katherine, especially for Embry. There is something about the bond between a mother and a newborn that we men can’t fathom. And even with Embry’s stoic Presbyterian upbringing, I knew this would be devastating for her. I had never seen her so happy and so content as she had been over the past year.

When the cardiologist arrived a few minutes later and took us into his office, he did not have to say anything. The expression on his face said it all. She had not made it. She died just a few weeks short of what would have been her first birthday. It was never clear exactly what happened or if the surgeon had screwed up. Essentiality all that was said was that Katherine’s heart condition turned out to be much worse and more complicated than anyone had expected. His advice was not to let this tragedy destroy us or our marriage and to have another child as soon as possible. Nine months later our son, Andrew, was born in the same hospital on June 6, 1969, and delivered by natural childbirth.

Five alarm fire for family and close friends! My parents immediately flew over from Nashville to be with us. Embry’s parents were on a cruise in the Mediterranean, which they left early, and arrived a couple of days after my parents. The day after Katherine’s death food started appearing on our doorstep, tons of it. Fried chicken, potato salad, casseroles of every variety, and jugs of iced tea. And people started dropping by. Almost every classmate in the planning school came by our house as did a couple of my favorite professors and the head of the city planning department and his wife, who headed up the school’s social work department, and I think was largely responsible for mobilizing the support effort. Several of our neighbors, all African Americans, also stopped by though we did not know any of them well. This went on for several days and made a huge difference. People did not have to say anything. Their presence was enough.

Katherine’s funeral was held the following week in Davidson, NC, where Embry grew up and where her parents still lived, over a two-hour drive from Chapel Hill. When Embry and I arrived at her mother’s house, I was astonished to open the front door to find the living room packed with my classmates, most of them sitting on the floor. I had no idea that anyone was coming, but almost everyone? My goodness! I was overcome with appreciation and gratitude.

So, we got through the service and the burial, which was in the “Martin plot” in the Davidson Cemetery. But a full semester remained before the next chapter in our lives could begin. We still had to get through the mourning period after family and friends had departed. The period of grief gradually diminished though for many months following Katherine’s death it still lurked in the shadows of our home. Losing an infant child is more difficult, I think, for the mother than for the father—especially, for mothers like Embry, who had natural childbirth and nursed their babies. But life must go on and we managed to stagger through the next few months as best as we could. When Embry found out that she was pregnant again, it was like a huge dark cloud had been lifted, at least partway.

Another silver lining in this dark cloud is that someone in the planning school announced to us that the medical bill which was associated with the ordeal had been completely covered by state insurance program, a pre Medicaid program called “The North Carolina Crippled Children’s Fund,” designed for people like us— low income and no health insurance. I did not remember filling out any forms or even thinking about the financial implications, which could have forced us into bankruptcy. The guardian angels who made this happen remains a mystery.

But life must go on. I was to graduate in only a few months. What kind of job might I be able to get? Would both of us be able to get good jobs? Where would we live? And what would our second child be like?

These were all the questions floating around in my brain when in late March a professor from the city planning school called me into his office and made me an offer I could not refuse and which turned out to be life transforming.

Stay tuned for the next post.

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We packed up our meager belongings in our Volkswagen Beetle and made the long drive to Chapel Hill in the late summer of 1968. I was very excited about going to city planning school and Embry had managed to land a job as a computer programmer, working for one of the planning school professors.

A good friend of ours had been living in the area and asked if we might be interested in taking over his lease of a small house located in neighboring Carrboro. The house was located on a quiet street in a modest neighborhood in the Black section of town and only a 10-minute bike ride to the UNC campus. It sounded perfect to us and we took it. It was our first real house, about three times the size of our New York apartment, and we loved it.

We soon met my classmates and I was very impressed. There were about 25 students in my class, and they came from all over the country. About a third had taken time off to get a breath of fresh air after college, spending time in the Peace Corps, working for nonprofits, trying out another graduate school (like me), or working in interesting jobs. Unlike at Union where most students were men, over a third were women. Many of my classmates had graduated from elite colleges, and they were just as sharp as my Union Seminary classmates but without the angst and theological baggage.

One of my vivid memories of planning school was when a guest professor in “social planning” from Boston College showed up and admitted he had not been to the South or ever met anyone from there. He started off his first lecture by asking “How many of you Southerners have ever heard of a newspaper called The New York Times?” When no one raised a hand and we all feigned ignorance by giving each other bewildered looks, he said that he understood and went on to describe the newspaper, adding that we should not feel too bad about never having heard of it; and if we continued with his class, he promised he would teach us ignorant Southerners a lot. At that point I walked out of the class and never returned. My exhausted classmates, who universally disliked the condescending professor and resented my absences, shook their heads in disbelief when at the end of the semester I got the same grade, a “pass,” as everyone else.

The faculty was more practical and less erudite than the professors I had at Union, and several seemed close to my age. They were all bright and enthusiastic about the field of city planning. Most classes were small and generally engaging. It felt like the right fit for me.

The big event for us the fall semester of 1968 was the birth of our daughter, Katherine Lindsay Howell, a six-pound baby girl, born in Watts Hospital in Durham, NC on November 19,1968. Al Lowenstein, the charismatic civil rights activist and future congressman from New York, was staying with us at the time along with his wife Jenny, sleeping on the sofa bed in our living room. We squeezed our way out around them just after midnight as they wished us good luck as we headed to the hospital.

Embry had enrolled in a class preparing expectant mothers for natural childbirth and gave birth to Katherine without any medication as I provided moral support and stood by her bed. The delivery was not without pain, of course, and made me appreciate being male and not having to go through anything like this. I was especially proud of Embry for her courage and determination to have a natural delivery, personality traits that have remained with her to this day. I had never seen Embry happier or more content than she was as a young mother in those early days of Katherine’s life. She loved that baby with all her heart and soul. We were able to find a great childcare arrangement with a kind, Black woman who specialized in providing childcare to infants of planning students. Life was good.

Well, more or less. There was one incident. During the second or third week after the birth of Katherine, we were in our new home and I was at my desk in front of my computer. I heard something scratching at my window and was startled and astonished to see the face of an aging Black woman with her nose pressed hard against the window, staring at me. She announced, “Get out, get out of my house, white trash! Get out!” I quickly pulled down the shade and tried to get my wits about me. Could I be experiencing a ghost?

Embry pointed out that she had seen this old woman going in and out of the garage behind the house.

The next morning, I called our landlady in New York to try to figure out what was going on. She apologized and explained that before we moved in, she had recently renovated the garage for her mother to live in and was sure nothing like this would happen again though she confessed that her mother did have some memory problems. This routine happened several nights in a row . I tried to ignore her, pulling down the shade each time.

Then soon after the appearance of this strange woman all the laundry we had put outside to dry on the clothesline disappeared. We knocked on the door of the renovated garage to ask the elderly lady if she knew what might have become of the laundry and saw it neatly folded on a side table in her vestibule. We grabbed the laundry and charged back to our house, locking the door behind us.

I called the landlady again to complain. Several weeks passed without incident. Just as we were beginning to relax, we returned to the house after working in the garden in our front yard to discover to our horror that our daughter, Katherine, had disappeared from the crib in her room. Panic! We immediately raced to the garage and pounded on the old lady’s front door. As she opened the door slowly, I peaked in and saw Katherine lying on her bed. Embry forced her way in and grabbed the infant.

This was the last straw. After I called to relate the incident to landlady, she drove down the next weekend, taking her mother home with her. We never saw the landlady or her aging mother again.

This was the best of times and a new beginning for us. Despite our ordeal with our landlady’s confused mother, all was right in the world. New home, new career track for me, new job for Embry, and our adorable first child. This had to one of the best years in my life and in our marriage.

It would not finish that way. What happened next will be the story of the next post.

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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.

 

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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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