The path from a Mobile family with roots in Coden to the executive editor’s desk at Redbook runs through one woman’s story, and it ends, for now, on the banks of Weeks Bay. Judy Culbreth, the writer, editor and one-time Glamour Magazine honoree who spent 33 years in New York publishing before moving to Fairhope, has spent her retirement doing what she has always done: finding remarkable stories and telling them well.
Her most recent subject could not have been closer to home without being in Alabama at all. “Bedford Garden Club Originals: New York’s Eloise Luquer and Delia Marble,” published by The History Press, tells the true story of two enterprising women who refused to hear the word no and left legacies across America. Culbreth’s daughter lives in Bedford, New York, in a renovated farmhouse once owned by Delia Marble, and a simple question about the property’s old name, Airlie Farm, sent the research-loving gene in full motion.
A Glamour Girl Goes North
Culbreth grew up in an old Mobile family whose ancestor craftsmen built the Carpenter Gothic cottages still standing in the Oakleigh Garden District. She graduated from Murphy High School and earned a BA in History from the University of South Alabama in 1972, working a work-study job at the yearbook, Retrospect, to help pay her way.
The turn came when the dean of women asked her to write an essay for Glamour’s Top 10 College Women contest. Her essay was one of ten selected, and the award carried an all-expense trip to New York City and Great Britain. The winners participated in fashion shows showcasing the season’s new merchandise, and Culbreth made fast friends with two of them. When the trio decided New York was where they wanted to be, Culbreth arrived first and landed a job as an editorial assistant at Seventeen, renting a room at the East End Hotel for Women with a room-and-board package that consumed $45 of her $80 weekly salary.
From there the career climbed steadily: associate editor at Ladies’ Home Journal, where she edited the iconic column “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”, stops at Mademoiselle and Scholastic, then executive editor of Redbook, a management role. A decade as editor-in-chief of Working Mother included a recurring on-air spot on NBC’s Today Show covering the challenges facing working mothers, who by then had become the majority of mothers in America.
Take Our Daughters to Work Day
Culbreth’s most visible legacy from that era is one many readers remember firsthand. Working Mother’s sister publication, Ms. Magazine, set out to inspire young girls who, studies showed, could not envision themselves having careers. Culbreth served on the steering committee alongside Gloria Steinem, Marie Wilson and Nell Merlino as Take Our Daughters to Work Day launched on April 22, 1993, and she promoted it in print, radio and television.
She remembers walking to her Park Avenue office that morning and seeing streams of fathers and mothers holding their daughters’ hands on the way to workplaces across the city. Her own 13-year-old daughter joined her on a national television segment that day. She still calls it a sea-change event that helped young girls feel welcome in the workplace.
Love, and a Book, Later in Life
Her personal life produced an unexpected second career. Married for 20 years, divorced, and single again at 49, Culbreth found the dating scene unfamiliar territory. Then came Walter Kirkland, an Atlanta-born financial professional she met for after-work drinks in New York, a meeting he had planned with a bus-schedule escape route in case it went badly. Twenty minutes in, he changed his bus plans.
The two began seeing each other exclusively on day two of the Millennium and have been together ever since. The experience of re-entering dating as an older adult became “The Boomer’s Guide to Online Dating: Date with Dignity,” published in 2005, a lighthearted guide for the over-35 crowd on how to write a profile and date again with confidence. The idea, she said, began with her own wedding announcement in The New York Times and the number of divorced friends who were back on the market. She knows of at least four marriages that resulted from the book.
Coming Home to the Bay
Culbreth and Kirkland came to Fairhope for her mother’s 70th birthday, and Kirkland, who fell in love with the town, suggested they look for property. Both were freelancing, so where they lived hardly mattered. They bought property on Weeks Bay and hired builder Bill Purvis, first constructing a carriage house to live in while the main house went up, watching the progress daily from across the property.
Not long after, Jacko Potts, founder of Publishing in Mobile, recruited her to consult for a regional magazine. She became its editor and, with art director Kelley Ogburn, is credited with transforming it into a celebrated lifestyle magazine. She and Walter also began hosting house concerts at their Weeks Bay home, with musicians from around the country playing for guests and sleeping in the carriage house, most of the music Irish tunes, Walter’s favorite.
The Originals
Which brings the story back to Bedford. Culbreth’s research revealed that two self-educated friends of 70 years, Eloise Luquer and Delia Marble, founded the Bedford Garden Club and became early leaders in The Garden Club of America. Denied the schooling their brothers took for granted, and without the vote until their fifties, the two women laid out the first nature trail in New York state and inspired trails across the country. Luquer’s wildflower watercolors earned her the moniker “the Audubon of Wildflowers,” and her work is now housed at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
In 1898 the pair were officers in the District Nursing Association, the first organization of its kind in rural America, which grew from one nurse, one horse and one buggy into what ultimately became Northern Westchester Hospital. During World War I, Marble helped spearhead the Bedford Women’s Agriculture Training Camp, the nation’s first prep site for the “farmerettes” who produced record crops during wartime food shortages. Marble’s motto, as Culbreth records it: “If you have an idea, and you’re sure it’s a good idea, just get the people together and go ahead and do it.”
The Garden Club of America, the magazine world and Bedford and New Canaan magazines all recommended the book as a holiday gift, and Culbreth marked its release with a signing at Page & Palette in Fairhope and a talk at Bellingrath Gardens, with signed copies also available at the Chapel Farm Collection in Point Clear. It is a fitting homecoming for a writer who has spent a lifetime celebrating women who got the people together and went ahead and did it.