Chapter 8
Our Years in Washington
With
the acceptance of my dissertation and the consequent awarding of the Ph.D., our
stay in Washington was assured. We
wanted to buy a house, rather than renting, but we needed to accumulate enough
money for a downpayment. Though we had
watched our finances before, now we increased our efforts even more to be
frugal in our quest to save for such a downpayment. Our apartment in Cheverly, Maryland, a
close-in suburb to Washington, was fairly new and air conditioned, something we
never had before, but a necessity in the hot and humid Washington summers as we
found out that first September when 28
days were in the 90s. Still, we dreamed
of having our own home.
I
should make an observation here about frugality. I hope our children and grandchildren will
not disavow it completely in years to come, even though their circumstances
will be different than ours in those years when Dorothy and I sought to reach
for a better life, and earnestly embraced delayed gratification. Being frugal does not mean a less happy
life. Indeed, there is satisfaction in
seeking the best values for your expenditures, to avoid the frivolous, and to
relish the accumulation of savings. It
simply means exploring how you will spend your scarce resources and deciding
what will bring you the most satisfaction.
Will it be costly meals that may give you an hour or so of
pleasure? Will it be a more expensive
brand when a less costly one will do as well, and who will know the
difference? Will it be lawn service and
snow plowing, when at this time in your life you can easily handle such
chores. Or vacations: Are
you going to enjoy the expensive vacation and lodging that much more
than a less extravagant effort? We have
found that the simple things can give as much pleasure, even more sometimes,
than expensive undertakings.
It took us a year to save a little
more than two thousand dollars. At this
time I was still a year away from completing the Ph.D., though we didn't know
it then, and it might have made a difference in our eagerness to buy. We optimistically made a 10 percent
down-payment on a new condominium in Crofton, Maryland, a planned development
thirty miles east of downtown D.C. It
was in a cul-de-sac with others about the same size or a little bigger, and
cost $21,500. It seemed a mansion to us,
with two bedrooms on the second floor, a kitchen, dining room, and small living
room on the first floor, and a partially finished basement that I converted to
an office. It had no lawn in front, but
we could park our cars next to the front door.
The back yard was not much either, but had a fenced space about 10' by
15', where we could have a barbecue grill and sit in some privacy to
contemplate the sky, and listen to the neighbors on either side and across the
way.
The
neighbors were like us, mostly young professionals with small children who had
also invested in their first home. It
was a place to grow friends, and we still exchange Christmas cards and updates
with one couple more than forty years later.
Crofton
was a substantial development, encompassing not only condos but single-standing
homes surrounding a meandering golf course, as well as having a village square
with offices and stores in a colonial decor.
The entrance to this whole development was a winding road coming in from
a busy north/south divided highway (Hy 301).
On still nights we could hear the hum of trucks even though they were
half a mile away. The golf course was a
great inducement to buy here, and was far superior to the public courses I had
always played on. Yet, the fees were
modest compared to courses closer to the city, and Dorothy and I had some of
our finest experiences here, only surpassed years later at Shaker Country Club
in Cleveland.
Besides
the busy truck-filled highway confronting us as we drove to town or shopping or
whatever, a major drawback was the distance to Washington and to my job at GW
in the heart of the city. I was luckier
than most of our neighbors since with my class schedule I could usually avoid
rush hour traffic; still the commute was a drain on time and car expense. Hardly a week went by without traffic coming
to a complete halt, and then only grudgingly crawling forward because of an
accident, car trouble blocking a lane, or construction.
On the
other hand, we found great delight in this country, so unlike the Midwest we
had grown up in. Crofton was midway
between Washington and Annapolis, which was on Chesapeake Bay, and we explored
the byways of this Maryland countryside.
We often would drive a back road over to Annapolis and park near the
harbor with all the sailboats and yachts, and with Connie we would revel in the
activity and the sea gulls wheeling overhead.
We would walk the cobbled streets of downtown and around the preserved
buildings of the state capitol over to the Naval Academy with white-uniformed
midshipmen filling the sidewalks and grassy areas.
Not far
from Annapolis was a state park with a wide sandy beach fronting on the bay and
we often took Connie there for wading in the gentle waters. Seeing my family in this expanse of sky and
lapping waves and soft sand was something I took into my heart, growing up as I
had thousands of miles away from big waters and doubting that I would ever be
so blessed as to have a wonderful wife and family.
We
explored monuments and museums and famous buildings of our nation's capital and
vicinity, and also forts around Washington and Baltimore's Fort McHenry where
the Star-Spangled Banner was composed.
There was so much to see and do and much promise to our lives, but not
until I had the dissertation completed and successfully defended.
The
move to Chaddsford. — After three years at Crofton, we hankered for a bigger
house. Our condo, which had seemed so
large after apartments, was really quite small, especially now that we had
Matt. I was doing a lot of writing,
working on a marketing textbook, and the basement office was dark and
cramped. I thought how good it would be
to have an office with more room and an outside view rather than walls.
Furthermore, the yearly fee for the Crofton Country Club had been substantially
raised and we felt our budget could not afford this. (I had scarcely had a raise since I'd been at
GW, partly because of my high starting salary and long delay in finishing the
Ph.D., but also because the school was facing serious financial problems.)
For the
next eight months we spent weekends visiting model houses of various
developments in Greater Washington.
These titillated our dreams of a better life that could await us.
We
finally decided on Chaddsford, a development of single houses on one-third acre
lots directly north of downtown Washington, still in the Maryland suburbs but
much closer to the city than Crofton.
These three-story houses were in the mid-40s, double the price of our
place in Crofton. But we were able to
sell the condo for $26,000, tripling our initial down payment and now could
afford the downpayment at Chaddsford.
Such was the strategy of many home buyers in those days of rapidly
appreciating home prices. As we know
now, this continued for decades, until beginning in 2006 the housing boom (now
they call it a bubble) began fading, to the point of complete collapse and
spearheading a recession. But those
days, home buyers could keep trading up with the growing equity in the present
home used as down payment, thus riding the surge in available credit until some
could reach millionnaire homes in such booming housing markets as Boston, New
York, Washington, Florida and Arizona and California.
Like
Crofton, Chaddsford was a development of young upwardly-mobile families, and we
fit in nicely with our neighbors. I did
miss the golf course at Crofton, but was very busy writing. Even had a golf
course been easily available, I would have begrudged the time commitment of
golf.
I had
the entire third floor, a finished attic, for my office, and relished such
space and the windows that looked out in three directions at rolling fields of
trees and meadows nicely interspersed with houses. But I found my attention straying and
sometimes wondered if I would not have been more productive in my former
basement with windowless walls.
We had
new territory to explore in these Maryland hills, and I became fascinated with
nearby Civil War battlefields, notably Antietam, the site of the bloodiest
single day of the War, and Gettysburg, with the bloodiest carnage of all, but
spread over three days. I became so
intrigued with these fields where thousands had died that I started writing a
book, "Civil War Battlefields Revisited," that would combine a
present perspective to the deadly past.
I submitted three chapters to publishers, but none were interested
enough to take on the project.
It took
me about as long to get to work from Chaddsford as it had from the more distant
Crofton. But I could route myself for
most of the way through the winding greenery of Rock Creek Park, and not on the
crowded freeways from Crofton. This made
for a better quality of life, and the large four-bedroom house on such a big
lot seemed a dream, until it came time to cut the grass. Our earlier aspirations had almost been
realized, and years before we ever expected such. But a few years later I became dissatisfied
with my lot at GW.
My
later years at GW and the first book. — Despite having disappointed Dean
Dockeray by my dissertation delay, I was well liked at GW, and was promoted and
given tenure only two years after finishing the dissertation and receiving the
Ph.D. (This was my fourth year at GW,
since I had been two years in getting the doctorate.) My naivete was such that I did not realize
the full meaning of what they had done for me in giving me tenure and promotion
to associate professor so soon without my even expecting it.
Only
later at Cleveland State did I learn of the stress of junior professors trying
to get tenure. For many years at CSU, I
was on the Promotion and Tenure Committee, reviewing junior professors in their
quest for tenure. To have a chance at
tenure they had to have at least six articles published in professional
journals, and these journals were graded according to their acceptance rate and
prestige. It was not easy to get
published in prestigious journals as these could be very selective. Worse, it could often take six months or
longer for a manuscript to be considered, and even if not rejected might still
require substantial rewriting to satisfy the editors.
Such
publishing had to be done within six years; otherwise the candidate could no
longer stay on the faculty. This was an
up or out situation—either qualify for promotion and tenure or you had to
leave. At Cleveland State only one-third
made tenure. In more research-oriented
universities the requirements were more stringent and the attrition
greater.
After
getting tenure I turned my attention from journal articles to writing
textbooks. It seemed better to write for
money rather than simply researching and writing arcane articles where at best
you could expect to receive several copies of the article when it finally came
out.
I began
a rather ambitious project for a first book.
I wanted to write a basic marketing textbook but with more of an
environmental and socially responsive flavor than anything on the market. I quickly interested a major publisher in the
book proposal and worked on it every chance I could get—nights, weekends,
Christmas and summer vacations. I became
obsessed with writing to the point of begrudging time away from it. Dorothy quickly dampened my full obsession by
citing the need for family time and I settled on a more balanced work
commitment.
It took
two years to finish the manuscript and send it to the publisher for editing and
the production that took another year for the book to come out. It was 716 pages and included an instructor's
manual and a test bank that I had also done.
International Textbook Company published it late 1971 with a copyright
of 1972. The title was Marketing:
Management and Social Change.
Some
critics called it too different from the conventional treatment of marketing
principles, having an overemphasis on social and environmental issues including
consumerism, criticisms of marketing, ethics, social responsibility and
marketing responsiveness. Others said it
was in the vanguard of the new and desired approach to marketing. But it was not very successful saleswise.
However,
the book brought me enough visibility and impressed enough people that I
suddenly found I had mobility and was attractive to other schools. My major complaint with George Washington
University was the low pay scale. At
that time, 1972, after seven years at GW and a promotion to associate
professor, I was still only making $14,000, well below the average pay at other
universities for similar rank. GW, being
a private university rather than state supported, was always short on
finances. At the same time, in order to
attract new faculty it needed to pay the market rate. This meant that new hires were coming in with
higher salaries than more senior faculty who had been there for years. I remember one year I was given a $300 raise,
but the university raised the parking rates by $460 a year.
So in
early 1972 I began investigating other possibilities and interviewed at a
number of campuses. I accepted a
position at Cleveland State University with a promotion to full professor and
$21,500, a $7,500 gain for over 50% more than I was making at GW. The new book was the major reason for the
attractive offer, but CSU also was actively seeking faculty as it had recently
been taken into the state university system and was expanding rapidly.
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