Copyright 2002 Dolan Media Newswires
                                                 The Daily Record (Baltimore, MD)

                                                   October 19, 2002 Saturday

   SECTION: NEWS

   LENGTH: 3663 words

   HEADLINE: Interviews with gubernatorial candidates' spouses

   BYLINE: Nancy Kercheval

   BODY:
   David Townsend

   David Townsend probably unwittingly taught Kathleen Kennedy one the most valuable lessons of her life -- a successful campaign requires
   more than the Kennedy name and subtlety.

   David was a teaching assistant in the Department of History and Literature at Harvard University -- a PhD. candidate in the classics -- when he
   first met the undergraduate Kathleen.

   A confessed "straight arrow" type of guy who never considered fraternizing with a student, David was constantly scheduling tutorials for
   Kathleen, who kept insisting they should meet more often.

   Finally, after a course on the Mississippi Valley writers -- Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Mark Twain and Eudora Welty among them -- Kathleen
   suggested they should do something practical.

   "She suggested in the summer we should build a raft and float down the Mississippi River," David recalled. "I said that sounded like a good idea. I
   got some other students together and we went to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and built a raft and floated 500 miles down the Mississippi River." Her
   subtleties went right over David's head.

   "She planned very cleverly," he admitted. "But I just didn't get it."

   Finally, he realized that trip down the Mississippi on a small raft with a lot of other people was his first date with his future wife.

   "It really was a great adventure. That's what Kathleen is like -- she's a great adventure."

   There and back

   Townsend strolls across the serene, tree-lined campus of St. John's College. He jokes with the photographer who asks him to remove the
   pencils from his front pocket.

   "Don't want me to look like a nerd," Townsend laughs.

   Townsend has been a "tutor" -- there are no professors at St. John's where students study the Great Books -- at the school's Sante Fe and
   Annapolis campuses for nearly 30 years. In fact, it was his decision to begin his teaching career in New Mexico that dictated his wife's decision
   to attend law school at the University of New Mexico, a year after she graduated cum laude from Harvard.

   It was also his roots that brought the couple back to Maryland.

   His parents were born in Baltimore -- his dad Ray raised on Stricker Street in West Baltimore, and his mother, Delores, the product of Baltimore
   orphanages.

   Ray and Delores met in high school and stayed together for the next 67 years.

   "Then it was called a mixed marriage," Townsend said. "My mother was Irish Catholic and my father was a straight-laced Methodist. He wanted
   to be a minister, but they wouldn't let him because he had a withered arm from polio. He couldn't even go to school until he was nine and could
   prove he could walk down the steps to the bathroom."

   Townsend said the couple had "certain needs" that each was able to fill -- each had childhood experiences they needed to conquer -- Ray had
   a disease and Delores had been abandoned by her parents.

   Eventually, they both ended up working in different Baltimore County schools -- he a teacher and principal, and she a secretary -- and raised
   two sons, David and Larry. Delores, now 89, lives in a retirement home. "She fell apart after my father died," Townsend said.

   "My father was a wonderful teacher because of the challenges he faced in his own life," Townsend said, sipping on a water in the coffee shop
   at St. John's. "He never gave up on any kid. He made sure they all had the best opportunities."

   Townsend started out in the two-room Timonium School, and graduated in 1965 from Dulaney High School. Then scholarships started falling into
   his lap, allowing him to attend Loyola College in Baltimore, Harvard and Yale University's School of Law.

   "I wasn't aware of being pushed but there was a sense that you did the best you could. I was lucky. I got scholarships I hadn't even applied
   for," he said.

   Disappointment

   But for all the luck that came his way, he experienced a major disappointment in his life. He wanted to go to West Point and got all the way to
   the congressional appointment. All that was left was to pass the physical. He failed -- too nearsighted.

   "It was a real heartbreaker," he said.

   Ranger training was the attraction for Loyola, one of only six schools in the country that offered Green Beret training in the late 1960s.

   It was his admiration of President John Kennedy and his own intense desire to fight Communism that sparked his desire to participate in the
   Green Beret training for two years.

   "I admired him because he was for civil rights. He had a sense of bringing the country together -- a sense of strengthening."

   Little did he realize in seven years he would be married to the niece of the man he so respected.

   As he contemplated the war in Vietnam and his forthcoming graduation from Loyola College, one summer he hopped a Norwegian freighter to
   France -- chipping paint and painting for his passage. There, after getting in touch with Vietnamese residents of Paris and exchanging ideas
   with other college graduates, "I realized we didn't understand what was going on in the war."

   Direction change

   Townsend applied his Yale law degree at the U.S. Attorney's Organized Strike Force in New York City. But he gave up his practice when Kate,
   the couple's third child, was born.

   "It just didn't seem possible for both of us to be lawyers. I went back to St. John's. My vacation coincided with the children's," Townsend said.

   And that was the start of his Mr. Mom career.

   "I still do the nuts and bolts in the house. It was all part of the bargain, let's say," he said.

   "The children have a lot of independence," he said. "My 10-year-old has been making her own lunch for the past three years and she's very
   good at it. In a way they're self-supporting, but I do most of the shopping, cooking, taking the kids to the doctors.

   "I'm the go-to guy in that respect, especially since Kathleen's been lieutenant governor. But that's worked out well," said the 54-year-old
   Townsend. "It's actually been a privilege, as a male, to be that close to the children. A lot of fathers don't have that opportunity."

   The daughters include, Meaghan, 24, who coordinates after-school programs in Los Angeles; Maeve, 22, who is serving in the Peace Corps in
   Mozambique; Kate, who is on leave from Brown University to help her mother campaign; and Kerrie, 10, the only one still at home who makes her
   own lunches.

   While Townsend stepped back from his own law career to make way for his wife's -- an attitude grounded in his youth when he watched his
   mother gain satisfaction from working outside the home and, at the same time, experience some frustration because she couldn't advance -- he
   has never looked back.

   "I suppose I could have been a corporate lawyer," he said. "But life is a journey, you're on a path, you don't know what's around the next
   corner. So I look at myself as a spiritual being have a material experience. I've had a lot of opportunities. I don't feel deprived."

   At the same time, he cherishes the teaching experience at St. John's.

   "I like the unity of the program and the democracy of it. It's a very American curriculum in the sense that there's not the nobility lecturing down
   to the peasants which is kind of the model, for some reason, of American education, even though we don't have that kind of society anymore,"
   he said.

   "It's less professional than other schools, in that way where your success often is built on being an expert in a very narrow area. We're all
   tutors. No faculty ranks. No departments," he said.

   St. John's teaching method "is something you learn to do. It takes years to get some real accomplishment. You're taught to show off and
   perform," he said. "This is more commercial intelligence rather than intellectual intelligence. It's building the group."

   Despite the great books curriculum that consumes his days, Townsend said his favorite pastime still is reading. Right now he's into spiritual
   books -- "Meditation on the Cloud of the Unknowing," by his friend William Meninger, and Thomas Keating's "Open Mind, Open Heart."

   And when he wants something just a bit lighter? "Art Spiegelman comics," he said. Spiegelman, a frequent illustrator of The New Yorker cover, is
   the creator of Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust comic book narrative in which the Jews are mice, and the Nazis are cats.

   At the wheel

   Even though Townsend had married into the Kennedy family, politics was far from his mind. His only brush with politics was as student
   government president at Loyola College.

   After all, his wife had started out as a serious artist -- a potter. In fact, she took a year off from school to study the art.

   "Her bridesmaids gave her a potter's wheel," said Townsend, who adds some of her pieces still adorn their Baltimore County home -- at least
   those that weren't broken by the children. "She made some beautiful pieces."

   "There was always a public interest, but the notion of Kathleen actually being a candidate wasn't something she ever thought of," he said. "It
   sort of evolved.

   "It's odd. You would think growing up in a political family ..., but it was something the guys did. It was not something the women were ever
   encouraged to do or ever did."

   He remembers when U.S. Rep. Clarence Long was defeated and there was no one to run as a Democrat for Maryland's 2nd congressional seat.

   "Kathleen said, 'I'm going to do it,' I said, 'Go for it,'" he remembered. "She just plunged right in. She was 34 years old and never put on makeup
   -- maybe lipstick once or twice. But this was a whole new ballgame."

   She lost in the general election. Her gubernatorial opponent this year later won the congressional seat that she lost.

   The decision to seek the governor's post was a "family decision," Townsend said. "I don't think any family could do something like this without it
   being a total project."

   If she wins? Townsend isn't thinking that far ahead. If they move into the governor's mansion, he could walk to work instead of battling the
   highways that link Baltimore and Anne Arundel counties.

   "I assume my interests and passions would become something I could advance more. I'm very interested in education. I might be able to
   advance education and to help educate the next generation that I wouldn't have had otherwise. That would be a good thing."

   Life of his own

   Still, Townsend has a life of his own that embraces the education of people beyond those who attend St. John's.

   He's coordinator of the Corporate Council on Africa's Task Force on HIV/AIDS, which recently published a report to raise the profile on the
   deadly disease. The trade organization represents about 85 percent of the investment interests in Africa.

   "What we did was try to raise the profile of the issue and come up with case studies of best practices that some companies are doing in Africa
   as far as education or prevention," he said. "I think it is just the biggest health issue in the history of the world in terms of people dying."

   He and his St. John's colleagues also participate in Touchstones, a nonprofit organization that takes the great books curriculum to those who
   might not otherwise be exposed to the classics -- such as prisoners.

   Townsend leads discussion groups at Jessup where he offers mini-versions of the great books "that can be read out loud so there's no
   discrimination against people who are illiterate. Everyone listens to the text and then we have a discussion. They learn a personal responsibility
   to educate themselves."

   Francis Bacon's essay on "Revenge" is condensed to a page and a half for the inmates. "These are people who really understand about getting
   even," he said. "Conversations are pretty serious and profound."

   On the side, he is a senior advisor for seminars at the Aspen Institute, which conducts sessions on value-based leadership and conflicts of
   values for executives. Plato and Aristotle often are on the reading list.

   As the election nears, Kerrie takes her place at events, waving, handing out bumper stickers, while Kate makes signs and engages in meet and
   greets.

   Townsend, meanwhile, just takes it all in stride and waits for the outcome. The only plans for the family are a trip to Mozambique to see
   daughter Maeve.

   Oh, yes, and to set the record straight about his innocence with Kathleen when she tried to court him. According to his wife's Web site, he
   ignored her advances because he was dating one of her friends.