In Search of Calders

It was the perfect opportunity to meet Cleo Calder and to get reacquainted with Francis and Cornelius Montague.  St. John Properties received the "Developer of the Year" award in Washington, D.C. on October 17, 2018, at a conference for NAIOP, the national developers' trade group.  Daniel Thomas, the Utah Regional Partner for St. John Properties, for whom I do legal work, invited me to join the Utah contingent at the awards ceremony.  He also invited me to join him at his home office in Baltimore for a luncheon afterwards.   

The awards ceremony was impressive and I enjoyed meeting the Baltimore staff with whom I do financings and acquisitions, but the highlight of the trip was visiting Ryan and Elise Calder in Baltimore and Mari and John Montague and Toshiko Calder in Washington, D.C.  My brother Kent's son, Ryan, teaches sociology at John Hopkins University.  He and his wife, Elise, who is also a sociology professor, have a new baby.  Cleo is much-loved and adorable.  She lives in a sparkling white home in a Baltimore suburb.  I enjoyed an hour and more chatting with Ryan, Elise, and an intriguing friend of Elise's who has just published a book on alcoholism.  Then Ryan gave me a quick tour of Baltimore's struggling neighborhoods as he drove me to the airport.  I am not surprised that my very interesting brother has such interesting children!

Mari and John live right behind the Supreme Court in downtown D.C.  "We're the house with the orange Halloween lights out front," Mari told me, before my adventure-by-Uber on the evening of October 16.  I arrived just after 5-year-old Cornelius and 3-year-old Francis had been put to bed, but they came bounding down the stairs, all happy grins, at the sound of my voice.  After hugs and slices of Mari's warm pumpkin bread, they bounded back to their rooms.  My sister-in-law, Toshiko, arrived, and we spent a happy hour talking together about law (John and Mari are both Berkeley law grads), learning Japanese (Toshiko is teaching an advanced Japanese course at John Hopkins' SAIS grad school in downtown Washington and my grandson Jono is learning Japanese in Okinawa as an LDS missionary), and new family babies, including my grandson Thomas and John and Mari's new daughter, due at the end of November.   Toshiko then drove me back to my hotel in northwest Washington, with both of us intently navigating the maze of dark, diagonal streets.  I was sad that Kent was in Japan, but it was such a pleasure to spend time with his family!

Edward St. John is nearly 80, yet still the dynamic leader of St. John Properties, which owns nearly 20 million square feet of commercial real estate throughout the United States.  Mr. St. John used the Pleasant Grove, Utah, Valley Grove project as an example of the company's fine development work, as Daniel Thomas and I swelled with pride!