[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 96 (Thursday, July 1, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1482-E1484]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                   IN TRIBUTE TO CHARLES W. GILCHRIST

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. FRANK R. WOLF

                              of virginia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, July 1, 1999

  Mr. WOLF. Mr. Speaker, I want to bring to our colleagues' attention a 
remarkable public servant who lost a heroic battle with cancer on June 
24. Charles W. Gilchrist, a Democrat, served as the county executive in 
Montgomery County, MD, from 1978 to 1986.
  I never knew Charlie Gilchrist, but I followed his career because 
just by chance, we happened to be on the same train to New York City 
after Election Day in 1978. He was celebrating that day his victory as 
the new Montgomery County executive. I was getting away for a few days 
with my wife after having lost the election to be the representative 
for Virginia's 10th Congressional District.
  I never spoke to him on the train, but I saw his joy and followed his 
career from my vantage point across the river in Virginia. And what 
impressed me the most about this courageous politician is that in 1986 
he walked away from elected office to a higher calling.

[[Page E1483]]

There was no doubt this popular man would have been reelected and 
probably could have gone on to other elected positions. But when his 
second term ended, he announced he would leave and study for the 
priesthood.
  And for the rest of his life cut short by cancer, he served God. He 
worked in the inner city Chicago helping recovering alcoholics and drug 
addicts. Most recently, he devoted his energy to working on public 
housing problems in central Baltimore.
  I would like to share with our colleagues two articles from the June 
26, 1999, edition of The Washington Post which give more insight into 
the life and work of this unique man.

               [From The Washington Post, June 26, 1999]

                    The Miracle of Charlie Gilchrist


         A Humble Man, He Turned From Politics to the Ministry

                           (By Frank Ahrens)

       In 1984, Charlie Gilchrist--halfway through his second term 
     as Montgomery County executive and seemingly poised to run 
     for governor--shocked everyone around him by announcing that 
     he was training to become an Episcopal priest. Once ordained, 
     he lived in the lost neighborhoods of Chicago and Baltimore, 
     ministering to the wretched, walking streets that had no 
     trees but plenty of guns and drugs. He was so happy in the 
     Lord's service, he was sometimes described as ``beatific.''
       Over the past 35 years, Gilchrist transformed himself from 
     a tax lawyer into a politician, then from a politician into a 
     priest. Over the past few months, he was trying to become a 
     recovering cancer patient.
       He didn't quite make it.
       On Thursday night, at around 11, Gilchrist lay in a bed at 
     Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and quietly exhaled one 
     final time. He was 62. Phoebe, his wife of 37 years, was at 
     his bedside, along with his sister, Janet.
       No one was kidding himself--everyone knew Gilchrist was 
     terminal when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 
     February. He was so weak that doctors suggested hospice care 
     for the dying cleric. Since then, though, Gilchrist had 
     responded well to weekly chemotherapy treatments, which 
     bought him some time and comfort.
       But last week, death accelerated toward Gilchrist with a 
     shuddering velocity.
       I last saw Gilchrist 10 days ago, when a Post photographer 
     and I visited his new art studio, inside a sturdy brick 
     building in a south Baltimore neighborhood called Pigtown. A 
     dynamic St. Alban's high school art teacher had unlocked 
     young Charlie's talent for painting. Now, he had rented this 
     high-ceilinged, plank-floored space and was preparing to 
     paint again. He hoped to render the children of Sandtown, the 
     neighborhood where he and Phoebe had lived and ministered for 
     the past three years.
       We began to climb the stairs to Gilchrist's second-floor 
     studio. Without saying so, we all wanted him to go first, so 
     we could back him up. But he was having none of it.
       He propped himself against the door jam and shooed us past. 
     One foot was in the alley outside; the other was on the door 
     sill, a good 12 inches higher.
       ``Go on, go on.'' he said, in a soft, weary voice. ``I can 
     make it.''
       We filed past--first me, then the photographer, then 
     Phoebe; all of us reluctant to leave him.
       ``Charlie . . .'' his wife began.
       He was getting impatient now.
       ``Go on!''
       ``Okay,'' Phoebe said, with a practiced combination of 
     cheer and exasperation. ``Do what you want.''
       Up we went. Toward the top of the dark stairs, I turned and 
     looked down at Gilchrist, a silver-thin silhouette 
     backlighted in a shadowy doorway. He was rocking back and 
     forth, readying to vault himself up into the door. He was 
     all angles and lines and fierce concentration.
       I turned away, unable to watch, and kept climbing. I 
     flashed back to a similar scene a couple of weeks earlier in 
     the same stairwell.
       Coming down the stairs that day, Gilchrist's left foot had 
     overshot the last tread and lunged through empty space. The 
     next two seconds were an agonizing eternity. Before anyone 
     could reach for him, he was headed for the floor. The air 
     rushed from Phoebe. Though he had not strength to stop 
     himself, he contained the fall and landed on all fours.
       ``Damn!'' he cursed, under his breath.
       ``Oh, Charlie!'' Phoebe blurted.
       ``I'm all right,'' he said, still down.
       I reached down to pull him up, putting one hand under each 
     armpit. I felt: The corduroy of his tan jacket. And ribs. 
     Nothing else. I lifted him as if he were a papier-mache man.
       This time, though, he made it up the stairs without help. 
     At first, he was probably proud that he'd made it by himself, 
     then immediately furious that his life had been reduced to 
     such tiny victories. This was a man who jogged during his 
     lunch hour; who was personable and charming but exited lazy 
     conversations that had no point. His whole life had been 
     about ``do''; now, he could not.
       One wall of the studio was filled with his artwork--ink 
     drawings of street scenes in Chicago and Baltimore, charcoal 
     sketches from a drawing class, an acrylic self-portrait of a 
     sober-looking Charlie.
       ``You look so happy,'' Phoebe teased.
       He smiled.
       Their marriage was about quiet smiles. They had locked eyes 
     across a Harvard Christmas party when Gilchrist was in law 
     school. ``Who's that?'' he asked his buddies. On the other 
     side of the room, she was asking the same thing. More than 
     once, Phoebe was asked how she put up with all of Gilchrist's 
     career changes, all the moves, the ever-declining income. 
     When you get annoyed with someone, she said, you remember 
     what brought you together in the first place.
       Once, Gilchrist was as tall, sturdy and handsome as a 
     Shaker highboy. Now, so thin, so frail. His glasses, even, 
     too big for his face. Phoebe Gilchrist saw the desiccation, 
     but she saw more. What was it, she was asked, that attracted 
     you to Charlie? ``Well,'' she said, smiling. She looked 
     across a cafe table at him and saw the face she saw four 
     decades ago. ``You can look at him.''
       When his friends looked at him, they saw this:
       ``A good man.'' That was the first thing everyone said 
     about Gilchrist.
       They also called him a private man who shunned publicity. I 
     went with Gilchrist to his church in Sandtown and to the 
     National Gallery. I watched them pump poison into a valve in 
     his chest during a chemo treatment. Friends wondered why he 
     was giving a reporter so much access during such a difficult 
     time. So I asked him.
       ``I guess I just want people to know that `cancer' doesn't 
     mean the end of everything,'' he said, smiling. ``That you 
     can still be productive.''
       Gilchrist lived the last months of his life the way he 
     lived most of the years before--by constantly questioning his 
     own behavior. Sometimes, friends considered it self-
     flagellation.
       ``Charlie would always say, `If they say I'm guilty, I must 
     be guilty,' '' recalled Montgomery Circuit Court judge and 
     longtime friend Paul McGuckian. ``He was always lashing 
     himself on the back for something he had never done.''
       More than a lot of people, Charlie understood damning 
     hubris--the inability of humans to humble themselves before 
     others and God. Through intelligence and will, Charlie had 
     transformed himself many times. He had accepted that he would 
     soon die. Any other thought would have been arrogant.
       I prodded Gilchrist once. Why don't you shake your fist at 
     God? Is this the thanks you get for turning your life over to 
     Him?
       Gilchrist refused to take the bait. If he was made at God, 
     he would not tell.
       He once said, ``I've never seen a miracle.'' He did not 
     expect one for himself.
       Instead, he simply shrugged his shoulders.
       ``People say to me, `Why you?' '' Gilchrist said.
       ``I say, `Why not me?' ''
                               __________
                               

               [From the Washington Post, June 26, 1999]

              Montgomery Prototype Charles Gilchrist Dies


           County Executive Left Politics for the Priesthood

                           (By Claudia Levy)

       Charles W. Gilchrist, 62, a popular Democrat who was county 
     executive of Montgomery County for eight years and then left 
     politics to administer to the urban poor as an Episcopal 
     priest, died of pancreatic cancer June 24 at John Hopkins 
     Hospital in Baltimore.
       The former tax lawyer and Maryland state senator succeeded 
     Republican James P. Gleason, who first held the post after 
     Montgomery changed its style of governance in the early 
     1970s. But it was Gilchrist who came to be regarded by many 
     as the model for top elected officials in the affluent 
     county.
       Gilchrist ``set the standard for good government'' in 
     Montgomery's executive branch, said his friend and follow 
     Democratic activist Lou D'Ovidio, a County Council aide.
       In an administration that began in 1978 and ended in 1986, 
     Gilchrist plowed money into social services such as programs 
     for the mentally ill, a foreshadowing of his work in church. 
     He also worked to build housing for the elderly poor and to 
     unclog commuter roads.
       At the same time, ``he was opposed to government growing 
     out of control,'' D'Ovidio said. ``He was very, very careful 
     to make sure that government was doing its job with only the 
     resources it needed. . . . He was not your big government 
     kind of guy.''
       It was a period of significant growth in county population, 
     and Gilchrist went head to head with an adversarial County 
     Council over establishing controls over an annual budget that 
     had grown to more than $1 billion.
       One effect of his efforts to control spending was that key 
     departments were not expanded. His successor, Democrat Sidney 
     Kramer, had to find ways to pay for additions to the county 
     payroll.
       At his own inauguration, Kramer praised Gilchrist for his 
     ``decency and humanity . . . strong leadership and 
     competence,'' saying that he had headed one of the county's 
     ``most effective and popular governments.''
       The current county executive, Democrat Douglas M. Duncan, 
     called Gilchrist a mentor and role model who had presided 
     over ``a period of tremendous change and progress'' in the 
     county. He credited Gilchrist with being ``largely 
     responsible for having established Montgomery County as one 
     of the top high-technology centers in the world.'' He said he 
     had left ``an exceptional legacy of vision, service and 
     caring.''
       Gilchrist once said in an interview that he had liked the 
     public service aspects of the

[[Page E1484]]

     county executive's job, but otherwise found it ``difficult, 
     frustrating and often thankless.''
       His first administration temporarily was bogged down in 
     allegations that aides had breached county personnel rules. 
     The accusations centered on their having pressed for the 
     appointment of a candidate close to the county executive as 
     deputy director of the county liquor department.
       Gilchrist also was faulted for permitting a former Schenley 
     liquor salesman who was working in the liquor control 
     department to buy liquor from his old employer.
       After an 18-month controversy, dubbed by the media as 
     ``Liquorgate,'' Gilchrist was exonerated by an independent 
     investigation. The affair came to be regarded largely as a 
     tempest in a teapot. But at the time, it took its toll on 
     Gilchrist, who briefly considered not seeking reelection.
       He was easily returned to office for a second term, 
     however, and began aggressively seeking more money for road 
     and school construction.
       Gilchrist had first come to office as a moratorium on land 
     development was easing and growth was exploding. Tax-cutting 
     fervor was gripping neighboring Prince George's County, and 
     an initiative called TRIM threatened to do the same in 
     Gilchrist's county.
       Gilchrist tightened his reins on the government, firing 
     several Gleason appointees and establishing the first county 
     office of management and budget.
       He used the increased tax revenue that was the product of 
     the county's explosive growth to help encourage high-tech 
     research firms to flock to Montgomery.
       He got the state to increase its reimbursement to the 
     county for public building projects. He expanded his office's 
     influence over crucial development decisions, through state 
     legislation granting the executive the right to appoint two 
     of the five members of the independent county planning board. 
     The county council previously had appointed all of the 
     board's members.
       The measure Gilchrist sponsored and the legislature passed 
     also gave the county executive veto power over mast plans, 
     the basic planning tool used to map growth.
       During his tenure, the annual budget for family resources 
     more than doubled, to about $14 million. Programs were 
     established for child care, and the number of shelter beds 
     for the homeless increased dramatically.
       Gilchrist's family resources director, Charles L. Short, 
     said in an interview that the county executive's first order 
     to him was to ``keep people from freezing and starving . . . 
     and he never wavered.
       ``When we were sued or took heat over a shelter, he never 
     called me in and said, `Well, can we find another site?' ''
       Short said Gilchrist's administration was distinguished by 
     his strong feeling that all people should have an opportunity 
     to share in the affluence of Montgomery, one of the country's 
     wealthiest counties.
       When he left office at age 50, Gilchrist had endowed the 
     county executive job with unprecedented political powers. He 
     left a multimillion-dollar legacy of social services and 
     public works projects.
       The man he had defeated for the job in 1978, Republican 
     Richmond M. Keeney, said Gilchrist had operated as a 
     lightning rod for the county.
       Gilchrist said in an interview with Washington Post staff 
     writer R.H. Melton that he had accomplished nearly all that 
     he had hoped for.
       Melton wrote, ``In many ways, Gilchrist's eight-year 
     odyssey from his time as an insecure, even fumbling first-
     term executive to his recent ascension as Montgomery's 
     leading Democratic power broker is as much a story of the 
     county's profound changes as it is about the maturing of the 
     man.''
       Considered a shoo-in for re-election in 1986, Gilchrist was 
     expected to dominate county politics for decades. He was 
     being touted for Congress or state office when he suddenly 
     announced in 1984 that he planned to abandon politics.
       He said that when his second term was up in 1986, he would 
     study for the priesthood.
       His years at the helm of the county had taken their toll, 
     he said. Relationships with the seven members of the County 
     Council were frequently adversarial, so much so that both 
     branches of government hired lobbyists to advocate before the 
     state legislature.
       ``One of the clues to Charlie's personality is that he 
     takes any criticism of the government personally,'' council 
     member and Gilchrist antagonist Esther P. Gelman said at the 
     time.
       More distressing than his relationship with the council, 
     however, was the illness of his son Donald, who spent two 
     years battling a brain tumor. After he recovered, Gilchrist 
     said the illness had helped him turn in a more spiritual 
     direction.
       He wasn't rejecting the political scene, he added,but 
     substituting one form of public service for another.
       Charles Waters Gilchrist, the grandson of a Baptists 
     minister, was tall and craggy, and his biographers delighted 
     in describing him as looking like a churchman out of Dickens.
       He was raised in Washington, where he attended St. Albans 
     School for Boys and became involved in religious activities. 
     After graduating magna cum laude from William College and 
     receiving a law degree from Harvard University, he returned 
     to the Washington-Baltimore area to practice tax law. He soon 
     became involved in Democratic politics.
       In the mid-1970s, he resigned as partner of a medium-sized 
     law firm in Washington to run successfully for the state 
     Senate.
       After Gilchrist left politics, his wife, Phoebe, took a 
     full-time job as a corporate librarian to help put him 
     through Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria.
       His first church assignment was at St. Margaret's Episcopal 
     Church in Washington, where he worked with homeless people in 
     the Hispanic community and helped immigrants deal with the 
     government. He also helped raise money for St. Luke's House 
     Inc., a mental health facility in Montgomery County that he 
     had assisted as county executive.
       His story, of a shift in career to a relatively low-paying 
     profession, fascinated the media, and he was often 
     interviewed about the change in his life.
       In 1990, he told an interviewer: ``People who have known me 
     will see the collar and that says something to them, that I 
     am a servant of God. They may not understand why I did it, 
     but the fact is, I did.
       ``It's a very full life, I am happy and I have no regrets. 
     I am very much doing what I should be doing, and what I want 
     to be doing.''
       He and his wife sold their large Victorian home of 25 years 
     in Rockville and moved to a grimy neighborhood on the West 
     Side of Chicago, where he took over as manager of the 
     Cathedral Shelter for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics.
       The religious committee that picked Gilchrist regarded him 
     as having the potential to be a bishop or head of a large 
     parish, one member told a Chicago newspaper at the time. But 
     Gilchrist said he was more interested in curing inner city 
     ills.
       He returned to the Washington-Baltimore region in the mid-
     1990s to work on housing problems in the Sandtown 
     neighborhood of central Baltimore, where he resettled. He had 
     lived in that city early in his law career while working for 
     the firm of Venable, Baetjer and Howard.
       He was director of operations for New Song ministry, which 
     runs a Habitat for Humanity housing rehabilitation program 
     and a church, school, health center and children's choir.
       In 1997, Gilchrist was named to oversee a court settlement 
     designed to move more than 2,000 black Baltimore public 
     housing residents to mostly white, middle-class 
     neighborhoods. U.S. District Judge Marvin J. Garbis appointed 
     him a special master in the suit brought by the American 
     Civil Liberties Union of Maryland against Baltimore and the 
     U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
       In addition to his wife, of Baltimore, Gilchrist is 
     survived by three children, Donald Gilchrist of Rockville, 
     James Gilchrist of Pinos Altos, N.M.; a sister, Janet Dickey 
     of Reston; and two grandchildren.

     

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