It is tough to put into words, some forty years after the fact, the impact that Libby and Douglass Cater had on the Eastern Shore.

Unexpectedly showing interest in becoming the president of Washington College in the spring of 1982, Douglass and wife Libby stood unnoticed in the crowds who had gathered along Chestertown’s High Street to celebrate the bicentennial of the school that year. According to both, it was love at first sight with both the college and its community. 

In many ways, they were the exact opposite of what Washington College and the Eastern Shore had come to expect would lead the small liberal arts college in Chestertown. While the school had a history of superb academic leaders over its 200 years, the appearance of this very sophisticated couple in Kent County was both a shock and a wake-up call; not only with the sometimes sleepy faculty and administrators but for the entire Eastern Shore region. There was going to be a significant change taking place in Chestertown. 

Coming on the heels of that town-gown birthday party, the power couple, complete with resumés that included senior roles in the Johnson White House but also prestigious positions at Wesleyan, Stanford, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Aspen Institute, and the London Observer, had come to reside in the historic the Hynson-Ringgold House relatively late in their careers.

In fact, some in the Washington College community were a bit fearful at the time that the Caters, in their late fifties, had agreed to take the job to “feather one’s nest” before decisively retiring. With Chestertown conveniently located within a comfortable driving distance from their Washington base, it was more than possible, at least to some, that Douglass and Libby would simply “phone it in” for the duration of their tenure.

As it turned out, nothing was further from the truth. The Caters, quickly grasping the significance of Washington College, and its special place in the history of higher education, would make this sadly underfunded school their last cause after a lifetime of causes.

And it was a joint decision for the couple. While Douglass took on the formal title of president, it was a Libby and Douglass Cater enterprise from the get-go.

Our culture sometimes remains fixed on the idea that only one in a couple is expected to take credit when things go well. But from my vantage point, while serving as an administrator during the Cater years, it was clear that Douglass, despite his impressive resumé and education, could not have had any significant achievement in life without his extraordinary collaboration with Libby.

There was little to doubt about Douglass’s intellect, determination, or ambition, but he was also a remarkably pugnacious fellow. Indulged by a family and nurses as a child battling life-threatening rheumatic fever in the 1930s, when the only known cure was for the patient to be restricted to a bed for one or two years, he learned early on that one’s needs could be met by simply shouting his requests from his bedroom. And those characteristics would remain part of his modus operandi for the rest of his life.

A clip of Douglass in action when he testified at a United States Senate hearing on the high costs of private higher education is a stunning example of that grit and determination. It serves as testimony of his raw and relentless fashion even if taking on a powerful, high-ranking public official like Secretary of Education Bill Bennett at the time time. Here is that outtake on Youtube.

Nonetheless, without some sort of balance, Douglass Cater’s most remarkable achievements would have simply been lost opportunities without Libby. 

By the time they met, not in their native Alabama but as two ambitious young people working in Washington, it could have been seen as a very odd match from afar. Douglass, relatively short in height, with a disproportionately-sized head on top of a very modest frame, was already at a severe handicap when he set his sights on Libby.

And adding to that list of liabilities was that he was a product of Montgomery, rather than the more sophisticated Birmingham, where his future wife was born and comfortably placed in that city’s well-established society. It is a well-known fact that in Alabama, those who reside in Birmingham, the New York City of the state, could look down their nose a bit on those raised in the state’s capital.

But far beyond these disadvantages was that Libby, naturally blonde, slender, and standing 6 feet tall, was not only stunning but already a player in state politics well before she arrived in Washington. To the shock of many, she became the first woman to be elected student body president at the University of Alabama. For context, it is helpful to note that this SGA role was long considered an important stepping stone in becoming the state’s governor.

It remains a mystery to understand why couples do in fact become couples, but when I look at this early union of Libby and Douglass, it’s not hard to guess that they both realized they had all the “right stuff” for a spectacular life together.

And so they became a team. While this was first seen in Lyndon Johnson’s administration, this union became even stronger when LBJ announced he would not run for reelection in 1968. They moved on to Palo Alto, London, and eventually, to the shock of both the Caters and the citizens of Kent County, to the banks of the Chester in 1982.

With traditions and habits coming from their years at the White House, the Caters set a pace and climate never before seen on the Eastern Shore. Not only was there a new sparkle at the presidential home on Water Street, but locals couldn’t do enough to get an invitation to attend one of their functions.

The Caters intentionally made it a point to blend their large Rolodexes of Washington power friends with the best and brightest of the Mid-Shore. Over time, such iconic A-list powerhouses as Lady Bird Johnson, Bill Moyers, Ben Bradlee, Art Buchwald, and Roger Mudd were co-mixed with the likes of Chestertown’s Constance Stuart Larrabee, Princess Anne’s admired country lawyer Sandy Jones, Cambridge novelist John Barth, Queen Anne’s County’s Nina Houghton and Art Kudner, Talbot County’s Tom Wyman, Augie Belmont, or Bill Brogan. Nor was there any hesitation in pairing the likes of Queen Anne’s County’s beloved superintendent Harry Rhodes or Salisbury University’s legendary lacrosse coach Charlie Clark with such political rock stars as Maine’s Ed Muskie, Treasury Secretary Bill Simon, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

For Douglass and Libby, this was not some kind of kumbaya moment for the fellowship of humanity. It was a raw, calculated effort to unite these strange bedfellows in the common conviction that Washington College was one of the country’s most interesting, vibrant, and charming liberal arts colleges. For eight years, they begged, pledged, and more than a few times, would embarrass themselves in this relentless campaign to raise the school to what Douglass called “the higher orbit” of national recognition.

And given this unusual use of what is now called “social capital,” one needs to ask, what did the Caters get out of this exhausting effort? In short, not a damn thing, at least not in the material sense. Surely, money was not the goal. And there was nothing to be gained by their association with a struggling, isolated college, after gigs like the White House or Aspen. In fact, one suspects that their career choice might have been considered a step down given the arc of their experience. 

The truth was that they both had a profound sense of mission to rescue and build up Washington College because it deserved it. From the moment Douglass announced during his inaugural address in that the new college administration’s goal was to save this remarkable endangered species, they teamed up to make that happen.

Douglass, never reserved in asking for what he wanted, had no problem in the middle of a pleasant dinner party at  Hynson-Ringgold to ask one of the unspecuting guests for a $1 million donation. Beyond the pregnant pause this would create around the table, it was then Libby’s job to somehow smooth out the edges of the “big ask” and remind the prospective donor of how they would have so much impact on not only the students but democracy itself. 

This teamwork had remarkable results. And without question, the finest example was Eugene B. Casey and his Washington College alumna wife, Betty. A man who owned much of the land between Washington and Baltimore for most of the late 20th Century, including hundreds of Giant Food Store locations, Casey found the Cater case for support for Washington College so compelling that he and Betty would contribute over $25 million to the school over their lifetime, which is the equivalent of $100 million in 2022 dollars.

But it didn’t end there. Over time, the Caters would win over the likes of Henry Beck, the Texan multi-millionaire at the time, Alonzo Decker, of the Black and Decker fortune, or Talbot County’s John Roberts, who would play a leading role in securing over $10 million from his friend Hank Greenberg’s Starr Foundation. It would be seen in the careful cultivation of Chestertown’s wealthy and eccentric Wilbur Hubbard, developing a relationship with Oxford’s Ted and Jennifer Stanley and Salisbury’s Perdue family.

For the Caters, the search for philanthropy had no limits. Beyond their dogged pursuit of some of America’s wealthiest, they had no hesitation in recruiting some of Chestertown’s devoted gardeners, including Water Street saints Erma and Karl Miller, in working in the Hynson-Ringgold garden once a week. They convinced Henry Kissinger to keynote a fundraising event in Downtown Baltimore for free to benefit Washington College. And it is a matter of record that they badgered Washington high profile personalities such as Lady Bird Johnson, Bill Moyers, Ben Bradlee, George Will, Roger Mudd, Eric Sevareid, Ramsey Clark, Harry McPherson, James Symington, Birch Bayh, Art Buchwald, and beltway comedian Mark Russell to weekend in Kent County to help the college.

The same was true for trustee recruitment. Demanding such people as intellectual Mortimer Adler, Houston Post heir Jessica Catto, Kettering Foundation’s David Matthews, Dartmouth College president David McLaughlin, Lawrenceville School headmaster Si Bunting, Alex Brown Managing Director Jim Price, Baltimore civic leader Walter Sondheim, and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s Will Baker.

Nor was this treatment limited to those only having fundraising potential. The Cater address book was the source of the country’s leading intellectual leaders of the time. Friends like writer Toni Morrison, journalist Lou Cannon, poet Wilbur Wright, columnist Meg Greenfield, historian John Hope Franklin, Washington Post editor Phil Geyelin, academic Adam Yarmolinsky, Claremont Graduate University’s John Maguire, and the United Nation’s environmental leader, Maurice Strong all came to Chestertown for some Cater hospitality. And those Cater salons and workshops, including the Aspen Institute Wye Faculty Seminars, made this small college one of the brightest intellectual hubs on the East Coast at the time. 

That name-dropping exercise did far more than add a certain panache or pride with students and faculty; it was the Cater calculation that this flow of America’s best and brightest would produce what Washington College needed most – money. And they were right.

As the school’s profile rose in the New York Times and Washington Post pages, so did its funding. The Caters found financing for a new Decker science building, the Larrabee arts center, a Chester River pavilion, a new aquatic center, six new dormitories, and the school’s flagship Casey Academic building. They restored the school’s historic William Smith Hall, the O’Neil literary center, and renovated its administrative Bunting Hall. And with the help of notable board members such as Chestertown’s Christian Havemeyer and Turner Construction’s Henry Turner, the campus was physically united with the closing of Gibson Avenue with Mayor Elmer Horsey’s blessing. 

The school’s endowment and scholarship funding also saw that growth trend. With only $14 million in principal at the start of the Cater years, an embarrassingly small number for a school over two hundred years old, that number was close to $100 million in the year they retired. Dozens of new scholarship funds opened up, many addressing the need to support minority students to improve the school’s painful lack of diversity significantly.

And finally, the Caters challenged the school’s alumni to step forward with operational support. From having only 25% of the school’s graduates donating in 1982, that number grew to 54% over time. Not only was this one of more satisfying accomplishments for Libby and Douglass, but it also set records. In their last year, the school joined the company of Dartmouth and Princeton in the top five schools with the highest percentage of alumni giving. It was also when WC alumni like the head of Bell Labs William Baker, CEO Bill Johnson of IC Industries, and even Hollywood’s Linda Hamilton came back to the fold to help a school they had long forgotten. 

With news of Libby Cater’s passing last week, an essential chapter of Eastern Shore history has come to a close. Like most institutional memory, the Caters years have invariably faded over time. Still, it is hard for those of us who were fortunate to witness this extraordinary act of stewardship not to believe that for one brief shining moment, the stars had aligned for this unique school, and it was finally getting what it had always deserved.

Dave Wheelan served as Vice President of Development and College Relations during the Cater years of 1984-1990. He now is the publisher of the Spy Newspapers. 

 

It is always curious why certain people enter the field of special education. In many ways, this subuniverse of teaching can be the most demanding. Teachers must try new approaches, almost daily, to reach and encourage their students, most of whom have been diagnosed with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or executive functioning challenges.

Teaching these young people requires a full complement of patience, empathy, confidence, and, most importantly, creativity to successfully engage and prepare students for their adult lives. To be fair, many of these characteristics can be found with all teachers, but not with the same abundance as those in special education.

Given all that, the Spy was interested in talking to the new Head of the Wye River Upper School, Stephanie Folarin, about her own decision to pursue a career working with students with special needs. With an impressive background, including degrees from Bates College and Johns Hopkins, with additional work at the London School of Economics, Spillman College, and a management certificate from Harvard, it’s pretty clear that the Folarin could have entered any profession with a high degree of certainty for success.

Stephanie’s response was a relatively simple one; her mother’s example planned that seed. Watching as her mother would seek out those in her classes requiring special assistance in the Connecticut public schools, and also the satisfaction that came from investing that extra time with those students, Folarin resolved to follow in her mother’s footsteps, which led to her working in Washington DC’s Sheraton School, Maret School, and Bishop John T. Walker School for Boys, before accepting her position at Wye last summer.

In her Spy interview, Stephanie talks about the unique challenges parents face with children who require a different approach to secondary education. She also talks about how Wye River Upper School can work with those students to fully prepare them for college or other vocational choices they may choose to pursue.

Folarin also makes it clear that one of her primary goals in her new position will be to ensure that a Wye River education is affordable. While she freely admits this objective may take years to achieve for the Centreville school, which will be celebrating 20 years of existence this year, there is little doubt that this conviction to make her school free for all will be a driving force during her tenure.

This video is approximately five minutes in length. For more information about Wye River Upper School please go here

I first met Bob Day in Miss D’s coffee shop beneath the dining hall on the Washington College campus. It was 1970 and the 60s weren’t over. The war in Vietnam spread to Cambodia, and the Beatles broke up.

Bob was slouched in a booth with a few students and wore his famous cowboy boots. I believe it was just before he began his official role as creative writing professor in the English Department, maybe even the day of his interview with Dr. Norman James, Chair of the English Department. I don’t recall the conversation, but I’d bet by the end of it we knew more about Lawrence and Hays, Kansas than we did about Annapolis and more about Vladimir Nabokov and poet William Stafford than we ever would about John Milton and Chaucer. And that was just over cokes.

Suddenly, our literary landscape had been altered. Contemporary literature came teeming across our transom like the cattle drives Bob wrote about. Toto was wrong. Knowing Bob Day was to be forever in Kansas, although a meta-Kansas he inhabited and brought to us in his writing, that intersection of place and imagination.

Poet Richard Hugo wrote about the importance of “place” as he argued against the creative writing workshop bylaw that writers should only “write what you know.” Hugo believed that writers should use towns as points of entry into the realm of the imagination and should take emotional ownership of an imagined town rather than the actual place where “the imagination cannot free itself to seek the unknowns.” Bob’s Kansas, from his The Last Cattle Drive to his last Collected Works, is more akin to a state dreamed by Voltaire’s Candide, sometimes edited by David Sedaris, other times by Raymond Carver. He was wry without being cynical, alternately rhapsodic and terse, and a storyteller of the first order in print and in life.

Anthony Burgess said about The Last Cattle Drive, “…his novel is like the man himself—ebullient, precise, Rabelaisian, witty.” True enough.

I knew Bob as my writing teacher for the last two years of my college life. It didn’t take long to be caught up in the physics of his momentum and mission to make Washington College a kind of mothership for writers, to both instruct young writers and to bring published authors to read on campus.

He was as instructive outside the classroom as well, which led to many animated evenings at The Tavern and countless anecdotes about the literati. Somewhere between Faulkner and Joyce, he would tell a story about a cat-lady in Ludell, Kansas. I can’t remember if that was instructive or not, or even if she was real. He had an encyclopedic memory of literature and biography, along with a childlike glee telling his many ribald shaggy-dog stories, the ones he didn’t write. In fact, for twenty years, his phone calls to me would begin with “A nun and a porcupine walked into a bar…” I would often wince but knew it was a prologue to greater things.  

Bob was a connector, a conductor of literary events, and a master of introductions. When he brought the poet David Ray to the campus, there wasn’t even an available space for the reading—it was held in a biology classroom. Then came Diane Wakoski and William Stafford, and dozens of some of the finest writers in the world who took the time to engage with writing students. For a long time, the walls of the Rose O’Neill Literary House were covered with broadsides announcing those events.

And then there were the literary sojourns. “Mr. Dissette, send three poems to Miller Williams c/o the University of Richmond. We’re going down there in 8 days.” He was always formal when he gave us instructions, less so at The Tavern. So, of course, I did and went and ended up drinking a bottle of wine with Anthony Burgess on a screened summer porch where we talked about Dylan Thomas and his struggle writing Enderby.

Each of Bob’s students has stories of this sort. Those kinds of spontaneous and cryptic inclusions continued throughout his life. Just six years ago, he called. “Mr. Dissette, pack a change of clothes, coat, and tie. We’re going to Kansas City to honor Bob Stewart’s PEN Nomination for Editing. Stewart was the longtime editor of the prestigious New Letters and BkMk Press. Decades later, I’d learned not to decline these bizarre orders. So, his wife, Kathy Day, and I flew to Kansas City, Missouri—Bob drove, and I never asked why—for the dinner honoring Robert Stewart. Once again, I made good friends, which led to introductions to other writers and even connected long-lost associations: David Ray had been editor of New Letters before Stewart. With Bob Day one thing always led to another.

I lost track of Bob during my life on the west coast, although I remember a directive that came to me via postcard in 1979. “Write to Miller Williams (again!) at Arkansas. Go there as soon as you can.” I did consider his ‘advice’ and looked into it. The writing program at U of Arkansas at that time was on fire, but classes were filled for the year. Plan B was studying with Cherokee poet Ralph Salisbury at the U of Oregon in Eugene.

Of course, it was during the twenty-something years I was away that Bob Day gave one of his greatest gifts to Washington College: the Rose O’Neill Literary House and Press on Washington Avenue. One of Bob’s cardinal traits was as a deal-maker. He was a natural-born horse-trader, and if you were ever engaged in one of his conspiratorial transactions you walked away wondering what repercussions might be in the offing. He was constantly pushing beyond the academic comfort zone to further the cause.

Bob conceived the idea of having a “literary house” two years before I left in 1973 with a ramshackle old building next to the WC Maintenance building. It should have been demolished—a bathtub even fell through the floor—but instead became home to the newly formed Writers Union, Associated Writing Program (AWP) and to wayward writing students embracing the dry rot and springless couches as a creative sanctuary and bell jar hermetically sealed with the spit of William Carlos Williams, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.

After a second incarnation—Dorchester House—another literary enclave, Bob in 1985 orchestrated the purchase of the house on Washington Ave. and became its founding director. Soon, he would add a press, another stroke of his genius, that continues to operate today as a teaching press and sometimes publisher of limited-edition books.

One story exemplifies Bob’s eternal quest to make Washington College the home of a creative writing center of the highest order:

. . .

Bob wrote, “The students wanted Toni Morrison. I doubted we could afford her but didn’t say so. I told them I’d check it out, which I did through a contact I had at her publishing house: her fee was beyond our reach. Enter President Douglass Cater who, full disclosure, was always something of an unindicted co-conspirator to my Literary House schemes. When I told him the problem, he suggested we not offer her money, but an award.

“What award?” I asked.
“The Washington College Literary Award,” he said.
“We don’t have a Washington College Literary Award.”
“Then we’ll make it,” he said.

And he did. We offered the first Washington College Literary Award to Toni Morrison and—again, at President Cater’s suggestion—created a scholarship in her honor. She dropped her fee, came to campus, met the student who would get the scholarship, gave a reading, had lunch with students, and accepted the award, which was a letterpress broadside excerpt from her novel Beloved. Students of literary history will discover Toni Morrison’s vita lists The Washington College Literary Award along with the Nobel Prize she got the following year.”

. . .

Toni Morrison was in good company. Dozens of writers answered Bob’s invitations: James Dickey, Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Burgess, Edward Albee, Richard Wilbur, Gwendolyn Brooks, and a list too long to appear here.

When I returned to Chestertown in 2002, Bob and I picked up our old friendship, but with new roles. I was to design his books, an effort that brought us together frequently in town or at dinner with his wife Kathy on their porch overlooking Still Pond Creek.

Looking back on it, I’m convinced that Bob thought I was eternally near starvation or without funds enough for rent, an assessment occasionally not without merit. He provided me with countless book design jobs, his own and others. His last large endeavors were Let Us Imagine Lost Love, For Not Finding You, and Collected Works. With each project, he rounded up previous students of his who had become editors and writers to help with edits: Kathleen Jones, Katherine Streckfus, Meredith Davies Hadaway, and Diane Landskroener were often roped into these projects, sometimes kicking and screaming but relenting and finally embracing the quest.

I recently looked at some of the more than 1800 emails between Bob and myself and wondered how I would ever write about him or describe him to a casual reader. His legacy at Washington College speaks for itself and the characters in his books are available to all, but what I will miss is his life-long contagious celebration of the arts, how they are meaningful to us and how void our lives would be without the telling of stories in word, music, or painting.

At the end of his short story, The Four-Wheel Drive Quartet, Bob writes, “We glow like algae split and rearranged by a great sailboat chased by the fall. We are components of music. We see ourselves in the maps we have made, and we draw lines with our movements. We are the paintings of flowers and windows. We are the electric soup. Nothing is mundane…”

The last line of both The Last Cattle Drive and its 2021 sequel For Not Finding You is “There is nothing more to write.” I understand.

For more about Bob Day and the founding of the Rose O’Neill Literary House, a ‘zine of recollections may be found here.

Every Thursday, the Spy hosts a conversation with Al From and Craig Fuller on the most topical political news of the moment.

This week, From and Fuller discuss the political impact of the January 6, 2021 attack on the United Capitol on the 2022 midterm elections and the possible consequences the Republican Party might face as the country prepares for more disclosures on what happened that day and the planned public hearings from the House Select Committee charged with investigating those events.

This video podcast is approximately sixteen minutes in length.

To listen to the audio podcast version, please use this link:

 

Background

While the Spy’s public affairs mission has always been hyper-local, it has never limited us from covering national, or even international issues, that impact the communities we serve. With that in mind, we were delighted that Al From and Craig Fuller, both highly respected Washington insiders, have agreed to a new Spy video project called “The Analysis of From and Fuller” over the next year.

The Spy and our region are very lucky to have such an accomplished duo volunteer for this experiment. While one is a devoted Democrat and the other a lifetime Republican, both had long careers that sought out the middle ground of the American political spectrum.

Al From, the genius behind the Democratic Leadership Council’s moderate agenda which would eventually lead to the election of Bill Clinton, has never compromised from this middle-of-the-road philosophy. This did not go unnoticed in a party that was moving quickly to the left in the 1980s. Including progressive Howard Dean saying that From’s DLC was the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.

From’s boss, Bill Clinton, had a different perspective. He said it would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.”

Al now lives in Annapolis and spends his semi-retirement as a board member of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (his alma mater) and authoring New Democrats and the Return to Power. He also is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School and recently agreed to serve on the Annapolis Spy’s Board of Visitors. He is the author of “New Democrats and the Return to Power.”

For Craig Fuller, his moderation in the Republican party was a rare phenomenon. With deep roots in California’s GOP culture of centralism, Fuller, starting with a long history with Ronald Reagan, leading to his appointment as Reagan’s cabinet secretary at the White House, and later as George Bush’s chief-of-staff and presidential campaign manager was known for his instincts to find the middle ground. Even more noted was his reputation of being a nice guy in Washington, a rare characteristic for a successful tenure in the White House.

Craig has called Easton his permanent home for the last five years, where now serves on the boards of the Academy Art Museum, the Benedictine School, and Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum.  He also serves on the Spy’s Board of Visitors.

With their rich experience and long history of friendship, now joined by their love of the Chesapeake Bay, they have agreed through the magic of Zoom, to talk inside politics and policy with the Spy every Thursday.