THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150672
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
James Wilson Rouse, who twice changed the face of America, will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Sept. 28.
Rouse is a daring dreamer and doer with a rollicking grin. He relishes an exchange of ideas as his mind is working on how to put them into action. His gear is always in go.
His regard for the underdog and his strength derive from roots in the Depression on Maryland's Eastern Shore. ``I had a very bad year in my life,'' he once explained.
``My mother died in February. I was 16 in April and graduated from high school that June. My father died in August and the mortgage was foreclosed in October. I can remember thinking, `This is tough, but this is good for me.' It's always stuck with me. I knew somehow that I was going through a period that was strengthening.''
The boy from Easton, Md., devised the closed shopping mall.
The Rouse Co. built four before many other developers caught on. In a second entrepreneurial leap, it built Columbia, a garden city between Baltimore and Washington.
When flight to the suburbs, which Rouse had helped trigger, left downtowns bereft of people, he sought to counter that by creating festival complexes in urban cores.
In Boston, it was Faneuil Hall Marketplace; in Philadelphia, the Gallery on Marketplace East; in Baltimore, Harborplace. They checker the map.
In 1963, he failed to recruit a major department store for Norfolk. In 1979, he was vacationing in Sandbridge with Patty, his Norfolk-born wife. Civic leaders conferred with him there and he agreed to try again in Norfolk.
Saltwater runs like blood in Norfolk's veins; and this time, through a festival place, Waterside, the city found its way back to the Elizabeth River, where it began.
In Washington, D.C., he helped guide Jubilee Housing, fostered by the Church of the Savior. It renovates slum tenements and lives. Man, Rouse believes, is God's instrument in the continuing process of creation.
He founded the nonprofit Enterprise Foundation to help produce low- and moderate-income housing.
After that pivotal 16th year, he worked his way through the University of Virginia and entered the University of Maryland Law School in Baltimore. Paid to park cars, he learned on the job how to drive.
While in law school he worked for the Federal Housing Administration in 1935. In 1937, at 22, he headed a mortgage department in a trust company. Three years later, he formed his own company in mortgage banking and moved into development.
Of failures, he said: ``All you have is an obligation to do your best, think your best, work your best and be faithful, hopeful and optimistic. Then failure doesn't matter.'' ILLUSTRATION: FILE PHOTO
James W. Rouse is a rare combination of a dreamer and a doer.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE by CNB