Charlotte, not just a name on the honor board

The Charlotte Hawtin Award honors the women who have worked so hard to make the parish a success. Currently we are trying to fix a date to celebrate the latest four honorees: Sara Douglas, Rosa Halbert, Colby Hawks and Martha Miller.

As well as honoring active parishioners, the award also pays tribute to my wife, Charlotte, who for 25 years worked tirelessly to establish and build up St Stephen’s. For many of you today, however, she is just a name on the honor board because five years or so ago she was sidelined by early onset dementia.

Truth to tell, St Stephen’s owes rather more to Charlotte than it owes to me. She founded the Sunday School and Parish Life Committee. She conceived the Cookie Walk and the Annual British Garden Party. And with Annie Hawkins and Cindie Baker, Charlotte was a driving force behind the Silly Summer Summers—a popular outreach to the neighborhood.

Charlotte was, indeed, the perfect parsons wife—energetic, hard-working, a good leader, self-effacingly “unbossy.” And she managed to accomplish all this while holding down a full time job as finance chief, and latterly executive director, of Maryland’s pioneering Joseph Richey Hospice.

But, then, Charlotte excelled at anything she decided to turn her hand to. And, over the years, in addition to being a parson’s wife and raising three children, she turned her hand to a dizzying array challenges: financial journalist, forensic corporate analyst, art market expert, corporate takeover advisor, school board president and health care executive.

Not bad for a girl from Richmond Heights, Missouri, a leafy suburb of St Louis, built just after the 1904 World Fair. A star student at high school, Charlotte turned down scholarships to several of the Ivy Leagues to spare her parents the expense and anxiety of an only daughter living half a continent away. Instead she opted for Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa, where she majored in journalism.

In 1968, having turned down a job as staff reporter with the Des Moines Register, she set off for New York to make her mark in toughest news market in America. Within four years she had landed one of New York’s journalistic plums—appointment as one of Forbes Magazine’s two foreign correspondents, based in London, England.

It was a remarkable achievement. Top jobs at New York’s news magazines were—and probably still are—largely dominated by graduates of the East Coast Ivy Leagues. Applicants with a degree even from a highly respected Mid-Western university like Drake tended to be regarded with condescension, if not contempt.

The prevailing attitude was summed up—unwittingly perhaps—by James Michaels, Forbes’ legendary editor in chief, during a lunch Charlotte had thrown for him at Rules, one of London’s finest restaurants and a favorite rendezvous for the bon vivant King Edward VII and his many mistresses.

“Just think, Charlotte,” remarked Michaels expansively as he sipped a post prandial cognac, “Just think where you could be if you’d only gone to Harvard.”

“Yeah, Jim,” responded Charlotte, laconically, “I’d be sitting here in Rules having lunch with you.”

“Point taken,” replied Jim, unusually chastened. Forbes’ London operation was based at the Financial Times building, a hideous red brick edifice just across the street from St Paul’s Cathedral. It gave the Forbes’ writers access to the newspaper’s coverage of the British political and financial scene. It also gave them to rights to the reports filed by its extensive network of foreign correspondents, of which I was one.

Back in those days all of the major London daily newspapers had bars on the premises, presumably on the grounds that journalists tended (as my grandmother would primly put it) “to be given to drink.” The in-house bar saved editors the bother of scouring local watering holes to locate absent staff.

Charlotte, who had a remarkable talent for picking people’s brains, developed a routine of visiting the Financial Times bar occasionally to socialize with the journalists—particularly returning foreign correspondents—and to glean information about news coming down the pike. This is how I came to meet her.

I’d just returned from a protracted trip to Eastern Europe. My entire wardrobe was at the cleaners and I hadn’t had a haircut for months. (Never send bespoke shirts to the laundry in a communist country. It’s simply begging for them to be stolen. And never get a haircut in a place where the state pays the barbers.)

The only clean clothing left in my closet was decidedly unprepossessing. I recall it vividly: an ancient Suede jacket (once navy blue, but by then an unappetizing shade of puce), a blue and black check flannel shirt, a blue and black polka dot bow tie and beaten up chinos of an indeterminate color.

But what the heck, I wasn’t in the business of impressing anybody. I was simply visiting the foreign desk to let the staff know I was back in town and to catch up with colleagues over a pint in the bar where, as chance would have it, Charlotte happened to be making a visit.

I’d read—in novels. I guess—of people able to light up rooms with their presence, but I’d taken it as hyperbole until I caught sight of Charlotte in the Financial Times bar.

She was slim, svelte and dressed in an exquisitely cut Courrèges suit. Despite looking scarcely out of her teens, she was engaged in animated debate with a group of distinguished financial pundits about the future of coal, natural gas and oil production—a field in which she turned out to be extraordinarily knowledgeable.

I was immediately smitten. But how could I make a decent impression when dressed like a refugee from Barnum & Bailey’s Circus? Luckily, my friend Pam, editor of the Letters Page, came to my rescue.

Never one for gilding the lily, Pam called Charlotte over and said, by way of introduction: “Charlie, meet my friend. Guy. He might look like Beethoven, but he‘s relatively civilized and you might find him useful. He’s a Sovietologist and just back from Eastern Europe.”

We shook hands and, after the usual pleasantries, Charlotte said with a smile, “So you cover the Soviet Bloc? Explain to me where we stand on the question of detent. And please don’t bother to say there isn’t a word for it in Russian. I’m already painfully aware of that.”

Before I knew it, I’d revealed to her pretty well everything I planned to write over the coming few days, if not weeks. Then in a desperate effort to prolong the conversation, I ended lamely: “Tell me about America. I really don’t know much about the place.”

She looked at me with shrewd gray-green eyes and said: “All you really need to know is the East Coast is neurotic. The West Coast is psychotic. And the only normal are of the country is the Mid-West—but, after the places you’ve been, you’d probably find it boring beyond belief.”

“Please don’t give me the brush off,” I replied. Then moving faster than I’d done in my life, I stammered: “How about letting me take you to dinner?”

To my utter astonishment, she accepted the invitation. After that, for me, there was no looking back. GPH✠