With his 90th birthday almost at hand and a pandemic at his back, Bill Carew easily could have taken the windfall, sold his vacant lots a block from the new Weidner Field to developers, and called it a win.
But that’s not how the longtime Colorado Springs attorney was raised.
That’s not how he and his wife, Ruth, raised their children.
Carew’s career legacy, including representing clients fighting for social and racial justice during the civil rights era, was well established.
He didn’t want his personal coda to be a parking lot or high-rise, but a space that could keep giving back, seeding the values that defined his military, professional and personal life, as a father of three daughters.
“Call it ‘A garden grows in Colorado Springs,’” Carew said on a drizzly Friday in early June, standing amid nascent crops sprouting in a place that progress preferred to pave, his smile like the sun through rain.
It takes a village to raise the bar, truly.
And sometimes, it takes your kids to remind you what you taught them about the heaviest lifts.
Carew was a Depression baby, a time in America when goodwill to others came with a very real price at one’s own table.
Such was the case at the Carew home in Gary, Ind.
“My father used to walk to work instead of spending a nickel to get on the trolley,” said Bill, who turns 92 in August. “He probably had to walk about 5 miles there and (5 miles) back. He saved a dime.”
A gifted study, Carew was just 16 when he was accepted into Indiana University, earning a bachelor’s degree in education with plans to become a teacher. By the time he’d pivoted to law and enrolled at Valparaiso, he’d tied the knot with his sweetheart, Ruth, a courtship that provides an early glimpse into how devoted the future litigator and El Paso County Municipal Court judge could be once he sets his mind, said Ruth.
She was an intern at the library, one of four daughters in a devout Catholic family with a strict “no dating” policy. He worked at the drug store across the street, and first fell in love from afar.
“He comes into the library … seeking such and such a book,” said Ruth. “He got the book, sat and read it, but didn’t take it. Next day, he came in again and wanted the same book.”
Ruth soon realized the young man wasn’t there for reading material. Bill eventually earned both her nod and her father’s permission for a date to the prom, but it took work.
“He was very pushy,” said Ruth, the memory bringing an even bigger smile to her face. “But I got to go to the prom. And now, here we are.”
The couple recently celebrated their 71st wedding anniversary.
“One of the things we say is Mom and Dad are living on love fumes,” said their youngest daughter, Mica. “They’re just so kind to each other, and there’s a kindness in this household … no fighting, no yelling, this sense of respect that they hold for one another, and I think that that trickles out.”
Modest homes on El Paso Street
Growing up Carew meant witnessing the power of that kindness, she said, at home and everywhere it could be carried.
At Thanksgiving, “we could eventually get to our turkey dinner, but not until we did the soup kitchen and delivered turkeys to the jail,” Mica said.
Her dad had sent many of those inmates there, but that didn’t make them bad people.
“They just did a bad thing,” Mica said. “Both our mother and father taught us that.”
Bill Carew was drafted into the Army in 1958 and commissioned into the Judge Army General’s Corps, whose members provide legal services and assistance to military personnel and their families.
A propensity for allergies led to a posting at Fort Carson, where the family began planting the roots for future chapters they couldn’t yet fathom, in a city that still felt eons away from metropolis aspirations.
Bill and Ruth bought the adjacent lots on El Paso, with modest single-family homes built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for what now would be considered a pittance.
“I think he knew that was probably going to be a linchpin. He was going to save it to pay for his kids’ college or something,” Mica said. “Then he went active duty and we moved away, but he kept the properties.”
The children were mostly grown by the time Bill and Ruth returned to the Springs in the 1980s, settling first in the old spot on El Paso Street before later moving to a more modern home in the city’s southwest.
Bill started practicing law at a nearby office on Cascade Avenue, with his good friend, mentor, and World War II veteran Thomas Birch.
As with much of Carew’s work with the JAG corps, he often supported the underdog.
“He spent his whole life working for social justice,” said Mica, whose father’s curriculum vitae includes a number of divorce cases in which he represented the wife of a service member in the fight for spousal support from military benefits. “This is about the goodness of my father, and my mom. And it wasn’t easy. He wasn’t always looked upon as positive in the ’60s and ’50s here in Colorado Springs.”
Bill is tight-lipped about the details of his long legal career; what he’ll divulge about his involvement with Cotton Club owner Fannie Mae Duncan and her legal crusade to integrate the city rarely goes deeper than a single, telling, phrase, even when reminiscing with family.
“‘Everybody was invited,’” Mica said. “He’ll just say, ‘Everybody was invited.”
That ethos always reigned at the Carew home.
It also helped explain the scene Mica was greeted with four years ago, when she moved back to the Springs from Portland, Ore., with her husband and daughter, to live with and help take care of her parents, especially now that her mom must use a wheelchair.
“I drove down El Paso Street and saw the state of the properties,” she said, of addresses where she’d grown up but since had turned to tumble-down and blight.
“The renters weren’t paying, and the land had been entirely disrespected, Mica said.
Like the Depression had generations ago, the chaos of COVID changed everything.
The El Paso Street properties had long been in developers’ crosshairs.
One hopeful buyer/agent showed up at her dad’s law office on Cascade Avenue “every week for 30 years,” with coffee, in hopes of a change of mind, Mica said.
When Carew finally felt on the verge, he called a family meeting.
The bungalow next door to the old Carew home was too damaged and overrun structurally to save.
“He was, like, ‘I’m overwhelmed, exhausted and I just need to get this off my plate,’” Mica said, recalling that moment roughly two years ago.
Bill asked the family what should be done with the properties. Should he tear the house down, pave the whole stretch, and charge for parking. Should he sell, and let others decide what’s to come for the neighborhood?
His wife and children reminded him that his gut already knew the answer.
Neighbors growing gardens, too
The rows spread over three lots, covering about 100 by 150 feet across from Shuga’s Restaurant, in the shadow of a growing city.
“I like to think of it as a victory garden,” said Bill, referring to the homegrown plots that propagated around the nation encouraged by leaders in a bid to help fill the gap of rationing, and civilian workforce cuts, of farm workers and others, during World War II.
The house where Mica and her sisters grew up is still there, now occupied by renters that seem to have arrived there by providence.
“You look around, and so many other neighbors have started growing gardens, too,” said John Paul Tacaks, who just happens to be a skilled gardener and landscape architect. “We’ve met people because of the garden, and I do feel like it’s helped bring the whole neighborhood closer together.”
Last year’s crop was the first yield, and something of a test run, to make sure the peppers, squash and fruits not only grew, but tasted good.
“This year is going to be 10 times better,” Bill said.
They will give some to food banks including the Marian House, and of course to the neighbors and the couple who rent the Carew’s former El Paso Street home, and whose landscaping skills helped make it all possible.
“And hopefully run education programs, with schools in the city, let classes come out and get hands on experience,” said Mica, a naturopathic physician who now works out of her dad’s old law offices on Cascade.
Bill likes to stop by the garden least once a week, to check out the progress, take a moment to reflect on a life well-lived, and — he hopes — well-shared.
“When we’re gone, we’ll leave it to the kids, and they can do with it what they choose,” he said.
All one can do is try to instill values, that stick.
There’s nothing wrong with padding a nest, but if you don’t need it to survive and an option exists to hew to a greater ethos, that’s always the road better taken.
Be a good neighbor.
Be a good person.
The fruits of nurture aren’t measured by the pound.
And a victory garden doesn’t require a war.
“It’s probably the best garden I’ve ever seen,” Carew said, taking in the verdant scene, and the decades, in a long gaze before turning to his daughter, who stood by his side.
The wetness on his cheeks wasn’t just from the rain.