When and how did you meet ?
Katie: We met in September of 1948 at a church group meeting that George's mother insisted he go to. It was a horseback riding party, and that's the only reason he went: he loved riding.
He taught me how to ride that night and then he offered me a ride home – with a group of other people. At the first big bump we hit, all the lights went out. We all got out of the car and George took up the floorboards and did something with the wiring and then we all got back into the car and went – to the next bump.
George: I never knew what was going on with the car, but I knew that jiggling the wires fixed it. [Laughs] It was an old car. I was in college and new cars were not available to someone in my economic circumstances.
Katie: He asked me out the next night.
George : You know, propinquity played a big part in all this. We didn't live very far from one another…
Katie: …and my brother had gone to school with his brother…
George: …but we had never met.
So, when did you marry?
Katie: That was two years later. While we were dating, George was getting his master's degree [in experimental learning theory at Kent State University] and I was working at a bank and had started taking a choir master course and was an apprentice organist at our church.
When George was close to graduating, we wanted to get married. He'd written lots of letters for teaching positions, but wasn't getting any responses. My mother said: You aren't marrying someone who doesn't have a job. So he took a job in personnel so we could get married.
George: [Laughs] I was highly motivated to get a job. George, you have degrees in psychology from Kent State. What were you planning on doing with degrees in psychology?
George: I didn't have a plan. Who has a plan at that stage of their life? I thought I might teach, because I had the master's degree. But I wanted to get married, so I took a job at General Motors at what was then the tank plant. Now it's the IX Center.
The job was in personnel. While I was there I became the director of training. There was so much to do there that I kept getting different assignments: I learned about accounting, manufacturing, statistical analysis, quality control. I got a real education in manufacturing.
Within about 4 years I'd become the industrial psychologist for the plant, not so much because of my training in psychology but because of all the focus I was putting on the training and the functions and jobs the 6,000 people who were employed there were doing.
George has had a number of successful – and not necessarily related – careers: psychologist, training director, editor, publisher, trucking company owner, innkeeper. So the question is: Katie, what were you doing while George was evolving into ½ of The Inn at Brandywine Falls team?
Katie : I started out as an organist and choir master. And I got a job at General Motors, too. When I became pregnant with our first child, I became a stay-at-home mom. We had three children in 2 ½ years, so that blew my musical career.
I did a lot of volunteer work, too. And when we moved to Connecticut in 1958 because George took a job as a magazine editor with McGraw Hill in New York City, I was pretty busy setting up another home.
From industrial psychologist to editor, that was a leap. What brought that about George?
George: The job in publishing came because one or our neighbors moved to New York and he recommended me for a job with a McGraw Hill magazine he worked for here in Cleveland, Factory Management and Maintenance. I became a field editor for the magazine here and eventually went to New York to be the magazine's managing editor.
While I was doing that, I was also reviewing manuscripts, on industrial management topics, for one of the publishers on the book side of McGraw Hill. When I reviewed them I'd often suggest changes and revisions for beefing up the book's content. I was invited to move from magazines to books and did so and went on to become editor and publisher of McGraw Hill's Encyclopedia Division. These were specialized encyclopedias covering art, science and technology, religion, and biography.
When did you move back to Ohio, and what brought you back?
George: One of my various bosses at McGraw Hill became president of World Publishing. He invited me to a position with responsibilities for reference, educational, and religious books, plus management of book production. So we moved back to Cleveland in 1964.
Katie: We'd bought a house [in Bay Village], so I decided to take a course in interior design.
George : And the house became a knock-out. That was four houses ago, and she's been putting things together for us ever since.
When did you decide to open and run The Inn at Brandywine Falls. In other words, what was the genesis for this career jump, and what did you both need to do to make it happen?
George: That's a complicated question to answer. By then we'd moved to Hudson and I owned a trucking company, Rocco Trucking in Independence. In 1981 we took a biking tour of Ireland – Katie's 100% Irish – with the kids and stayed at bed and breakfasts. They weren't just good places to stay, they were good places to get information about what to do, where to go, what to see.
A couple of years later we biked the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath – from Cumberland, Maryland to Washington, DC – and as we biked along, we kept saying: Someone should put a bed and breakfast along this towpath.
When we got back home we learned they were creating the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, with the centerpiece being a canal towpath. Because we were then the co-presidents of the Hudson Heritage Association, we had the park architect come talk about the historic properties leasing program in the park, which is meant to save historic homes in national parks.
Katie: When we heard about the historic properties leasing program, I said to George: You know, renovating a property and turning it into a bed and breakfast sounds like an interesting idea.
George: So we started investigating, and in 1986, a historic property right next to Brandywine Falls, came up for lease. I'd already started thinking about getting out of the trucking business [Rocco Trucking was sold soon after the inn opened] so we leased the property for 50 years and we borrowed the money we needed to renovate the house. Here we are, 22 years later, innkeepers.
Katie: It took us about 14 months to get everything ready. We opened in July of 1988.
While you sometimes worked together – for instance at Rocco Trucking – being innkeepers is a 24/7 situation. How have you made your marriage and your business partnership work?
Katie: I wasn't sure how things were going to work out. But when we got into this, everything just seemed to fall into place. For example, when we decided to open the inn we knew we'd be living here, so we knew we'd need to sell our house in Hudson. The first people who came to look at it bought it.
I went on a 14-month shopping spree to furnish the inn. And I also took a course at the University of Akron in food safety because I felt it was needed.
George: We have specialties. I'm probably better at dealing with the unexpected. Katie is much better at making sure that all the documentation and regulatory stuff – the details – gets taken care of. And she's the one who's responsible for how the inn looks and feels while I take care of the house maintenance and the outdoor things – the barn, the grounds, the animals – and the marketing and the promotional stuff.
Katie: George is really good at the business planning and management aspects of inn keeping…
George: ….and Katie takes care of the inside things.
Katie . We always did a lot of entertaining, and we always cooked together. George was always ahead of his time in that respect, he was always in the kitchen, and he loves making bread. [Laughs] He was probably a better cook than I was before we opened the inn.
George: I think you'd say that things have evolved so that the person who's best qualified to do something is the one who does it. And that's something that's happened over time.
Both of you run the inn, yet it's George who seems to get the recognition and notoriety. Why is that? And how do you deal with it, Katie?
George: I don't know that that's true. I do the marketing and the PR, so I get the credit from the call with the magazine writer. But people who really know how things work know that Katie is the one running things. She's the president of our company [National Historic Inns, dba The Inn at Brandywine Falls]. I'm just the vice president, reporting to her.
Katie: [Laughs] I don't even see that kind of stuff. It's not important to me who gets credit.
You both have long histories of volunteering – in local and civic organizations. Innkeeping is a 24/7 job, so the question is: Where do you find the time for volunteering?
Katie: I used to do a lot of volunteering. We both volunteered with the Cuyahoga Valley National Park Association, and I'm still on a couple of committees there, and with the local historical group, too. And I was in the Women's Health Initiative's low-fat diet trial, for nine years. That was something I felt was really important: I wasn't just contributing to my own health, I was doing something that was going to contribute to the health of my children and grandchildren, and I also realized that what I learned in the trial would be useful here at the inn for planning and serving healthy meals.
George: I'm working on books number 4 and 5 right now – our other three books are Inn Good Taste, Inn Joy Ment , and The Peninsula Python – so I'm not as involved in volunteer activities as I used to be.
Both of you are in your early 80s, yet you look at least 10 years younger. What do you do to stay physically fit and mentally sharp?
Katie: As I said before, as part of the Women's Health Initiative I learned to eat healthier. I'm still following the dietary guidelines from the trial and we do all our cooking. There is seldom ever any processed food here.
George: I've taken it further than that, though. I had prostate cancer and in my research I stumbled upon the book, The China Study. The premise of the book – based on the historically low incidence of things like cancer and diabetes and heart disease in some parts of China – is that you will live healthier and longer if you don't eat animal products. Three years ago, on St. Patrick's Day, I became a vegan. It wasn't hard to do. I haven't had a craving for a burger or roast beef for, well, at least two-and-a-half years.
I've created a vegan mix: lentils, lima beans, brown rice, onion, olive oil. The staff calls it “the good stuff,” and I'll cook up a pot and have it as a burger or for stuffing peppers or cabbage rolls. It's not just a tasty protein substitute, it's nourishing, too.
Today my motto is if it's a plant, eat it; if it's made in a plant, don't.
Katie: [Laughs] We definitely have a very healthful diet.
But good health isn't just about what you eat.
Katie: Right. We live in a house with lots of stairs and we are going up and down all day long.
George: I've learned over time that if I have a dog, I'm in better health because it's my “job” to walk the dog – vigorously – twice a day. Plus, I'm outside a lot, too, working on the property, going up and down ladders fixing things. I'm busy all the time.
Katie: We don't sit in our living room unless there are guests that we are entertaining. And you have to remember that we've been looking after our health for a long time. We've always biked and hiked…
George: …because we have always liked the outdoors and have never been averse to using our bodies to get around.
Katie: Mentally, we are constantly solving puzzles, new things that come up with the inn, with life.
George: And we stay tuned in to what's going on in the world. We maybe watch 20 hours of TV a week, and most of that is PBS.
Katie: Except for 60 Minutes .
I know this is a pointless question, but I've got to ask: Are you ever planning on retiring? And if so, what are you planning on doing in retirement?
Katie: No.
George: No. Thought we have, these last couple of years, let guests and certain people know that if they are interested in taking over the inn, we would be interested in talking about it. A couple of couples have expressed interest. But right now it's just at the talking stage.
If someone did step in, my game plan would be to find a fixer-upper condo on the edge of a wooded area or park and devote more time to writing. I've got an archeology book I'm working on and a vegan book that Katie will have to help me put together.
Katie: He knows what he wants to do, but I'm not sure what I want to do when I grow up. But I do know that I'd do something more with my music. And definitely take more music courses at Kent State.
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A Summer Treat