[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 11] [Extensions of Remarks] [Pages 15386-15388] [From the U.S. 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. 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, [[Page 15387]] 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 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. [[Page 15388]] 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. ____________________