Judy Culbreth’s career has taken her from a Mobile public high school to the top of the New York magazine world, onto NBC’s Today show and into the planning of a national movement for girls. Along the way she wrote a guide to online dating for baby boomers, then came home to the Gulf Coast to build a house on Weeks Bay. In late 2023, the writer and editor added another title to her resume with “Bedford Garden Club Originals,” a history of two determined women whose collaboration left a mark across America.
Mobile Roots and a Glamour Magazine Honor
Culbreth was born into an old Mobile family with roots in Coden, the fishing community in south Mobile County. On her grandmother’s side, ancestors who worked as craftsmen built some of the Carpenter Gothic cottages that still stand in Mobile’s Oakleigh Garden District, one of the city’s best-known historic neighborhoods.
She attended public schools and graduated from Murphy High School before earning a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of South Alabama in 1972. To help pay her way through college, she held a work-study job at the university’s yearbook, Retrospect.
It was South Alabama’s dean of women who set her career in motion by asking her to write an essay for Glamour magazine’s Top 10 College Women contest. Culbreth’s essay was one of the ten chosen. The honor came with an all-expense-paid trip to New York City and Great Britain, and a set of friendships that have lasted decades; she remains close with the other winners, and they still get together as often as they can.
Making It in New York on $80 a Week
During the Glamour trip, the winners took part in fashion shows featuring the season’s new merchandise. Culbreth hit it off with two of the other women, and the three decided New York was where they belonged.
She arrived first and quickly landed a job as an editorial assistant at Seventeen magazine. “I rented a room at the East End Hotel for Women, waiting for my friends to move. The hotel package included breakfast and dinner. I made $80 per week and the room and board was $45 per week, so I wasn’t living the glamorous New York lifestyle,” she said.
Once her friends arrived, the three shared an apartment. From Seventeen, Culbreth moved to Ladies’ Home Journal as an associate editor. “It was a switch from copywriting to editing. I enjoy both,” she said. Her career continued at Mademoiselle and Scholastic, and she became executive editor of Redbook, a management role at one of the country’s best-known women’s magazines.
Working Mother, the Today Show and Take Our Daughters to Work Day
Culbreth later spent ten years as editor-in-chief of Working Mother. During that time, she appeared regularly on NBC’s Today show discussing issues facing working mothers. “At the time, working mothers had become the majority of mothers in the U.S., and I covered topics about the challenges of balancing a career and raising a family,” she said.
Working Mother had a sister publication, Ms. magazine, and one of its missions was to inspire young girls, who studies showed often did not picture themselves having careers. Culbreth served on the steering committee with Marie Wilson, Nell Merlino and Gloria Steinem for what became Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which launched on April 22, 1993. She promoted it in Working Mother and on radio and television.
“It was so gratifying to be a part of that. My daughter was 13 years old at the time, and we were on a segment together on a national television network that day. It was a sea-change event that helped young girls feel welcome in the workplace. I remember walking to my office on Park Avenue that morning and seeing streams of fathers and mothers holding their daughters’ hands and heading to workplaces. It was an amazing time,” she said.
A Second Chance at Love, and a Book About Dating
After a 20-year marriage that produced two children, Culbreth found herself single again at 49 and navigating a dating scene that had changed considerably. That is when she met Walter Kirkland, an Atlanta native who attended the University of North Carolina and worked in finance in New York while living in New Jersey.
Their first meeting was drinks after work on Manhattan’s West Side. Kirkland warned her he had only a short time before his bus back to New Jersey. “About 20 minutes after meeting me, he switched bus schedule plans. I was amused that he had factored in an escape option if he hadn’t liked me,” she recalled.
The second date was built around the food and music the two Southerners had discussed by email: blue crabs in black bean sauce in Chinatown, followed by a group performing Civil War ballads in the Village. But at the end of the night, Kirkland told her he had been seeing someone else and could not date two people at once. He resurfaced in late November, single, only to learn Culbreth was seeing someone new. “But deep down, I knew he was not the one,” she said. “Walter and I began seeing each other exclusively, on day two of the Millennium.” By 2023, they had been together for 24 years.
Those experiences became her first book, “The Boomer’s Guide to Online Dating: Date with Dignity,” published in 2005. The lighthearted guide aimed to help singles over 35 navigate the internet with confidence. “The idea started with our wedding announcement in The New York Times. So many people we knew were getting divorced and were ‘back on the market,’ so to speak,” she said. “The book was about how to date again, and how to write your profile to attract the right person. I know of at least four marriages that resulted from the book.”
Coming Home to Weeks Bay
The couple visited Fairhope for her mother’s 70th birthday, about two years into their relationship. “I had been in New York for 33 years, and Walter, who fell in love with Fairhope, suggested we look for property and move to Fairhope permanently. We were both freelancing at the time, so where we lived wasn’t an issue,” she said.
They bought property on Weeks Bay and hired builder Bill Purvis, starting with a carriage house where they could live while the main house went up. “Bill is such a fantastic builder,” she said. “Once we moved into it, we were able to see the progress to the main house every day.”
Back on the Gulf Coast, Culbreth was recruited by a Mobile publishing company to consult on a regional magazine and soon became its editor. She and art director Kelley Ogburn are credited with transforming it into a polished lifestyle magazine. She has since retired. The couple also began hosting house concerts on Weeks Bay, with touring musicians playing for guests and staying in the carriage house. “Most of the music was Irish tunes, which is Walter’s favorite,” she said.
The Women Behind Bedford Garden Club
Her latest book grew out of family visits to New York. Culbreth’s daughter lives in Bedford, New York, in a renovated old house once owned by Delia Marble on what was known as Marble Farms and is now called Airlie Farm. Curious about the name, Culbreth began digging, and her research led her to Marble and her lifelong friend Eloise Luquer, founders of the Bedford Garden Club and early leaders in The Garden Club of America.
What she found was a story of collaboration against the odds:
- Growing up in late-Victorian Bedford, the two women were educated at home while their brothers attended boarding schools, Columbia College and the U.S. Naval Academy.
- Friends for 70 years, they laid out the first nature trail in New York state and inspired nature trails across the country through presentations promoting conservation.
- Luquer, a respected painter, earned the nickname “Audubon of Wildflowers,” and her work is housed at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
- In 1898, both were officers in the District Nursing Association, the first organization of its kind in rural America. Starting with one nurse, one horse and one buggy, it cared for patients through outbreaks of cholera, tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough and later polio, and grew into Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco.
- They championed the 4,000-acre Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, persuading Bedford Garden Club members to fund a naturalist there for three years.
- During World War I, Marble helped lead the Bedford Women’s Agriculture Training Camp, training “farmerettes” who produced record crops during food shortages. Some lived at Airlie Farm until 1940.
Many locals initially opposed the nursing association. “They said it would be all right in the city, but not here in the country,” Marble reported. Her motto summed up the book’s theme: “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.”
Published by The History Press, “Bedford Garden Club Originals” features detailed history, art and photographs. It was recommended as a holiday gift by The Garden Club of America and Bedford & New Canaan Magazine. Following its release, Culbreth held a book signing at Page & Palette in Fairhope on December 14, 2023, and was scheduled to speak at Bellingrath Gardens in January 2024. Autographed copies were also offered at the Chapel Farm Collection in Point Clear.
A Life Built on Collaboration
There is a thread running through Culbreth’s own story that mirrors the women she wrote about: friendships formed early that endured for decades, a career spent in collaboration with other women, and a role in a campaign that changed how a generation of girls saw their futures. From Coden and Murphy High to Park Avenue and back to Weeks Bay, it is a Gulf Coast story with a national reach.