Hang Onto Your Reeboks--Here Comes a New Baby-Boomer Moniker : The Hectic but Happy World of Three Couples
Don’t bother trying to reach Ron Rogers and Lisa Specht at their Mulholland Drive home today. “Usually Sunday is the one day we keep to ourselves,” Specht confessed. “So we spend the day together, take the phone off the hook and refuse to talk to anyone.”
It’s not that Ron and Lisa are unsociable sorts. It’s simply that Sunday is the one day that both their offices are closed, so they can stop concentrating on their fast-track jobs and start paying attention to one another. After all, there are no babies, toddlers or teen-agers around the house to distract them. “So that time is all ours,” Rogers said. “And God knows, with our crazy careers, we need every minute.”
Typical Dink Pair
Welcome to the hectic but avowedly happy world of a typical dink couple. Rogers, 44, is the president of Rogers & Associates, a Century City corporate public relations and marketing firm, whose time is taken up largely by clients. Specht, 41, an unsuccessful candidate for city attorney in 1985, is a partner at the West Los Angeles law firm of Manatt Phelps Rothenberg & Phillips as well as a twice-a-week legal reporter for KABC-TV news. “And that’s only about two-thirds of what I do,” she said, referring to her heavy involvement in Democratic Party politics. Add to this the couple’s extensive community and philanthropic work. And don’t forget their growing contemporary art collection, already so extensive that it was included on a recent Los Angeles County Museum home tour.
It’s all enough to make even the busiest person feel like a sloth by comparison. Married for four years--the second time around for each--they seem to thrive on living life on the run. Take last weekend, for example. Specht was in Sacramento on Friday, Rogers in Las Vegas on Saturday, and the pair managed to meet up Sunday night in time to attend a dinner party. “Now, that weekend happened to be a little unusual,” Rogers admitted. “But if you try to explain the way we live to people who don’t know us, they think we’re from Mars.”
Better Than Most
“Our secretaries call each other several times a day to keep us in line,” Specht said. It’s the old L.A. saw, dink style: “ My people will call your people. Oh, and don’t forget to put the cap back on the toothpaste, dearest.”
The way Rogers and Specht see it, they have it better than most. After all, they don’t really have to worry about money with two sizable incomes. They never get lonely, as singles do, because they have each other. Then there’s the excitement factor to consider. Unlike couples where one spouse isn’t working, Rogers and Specht contend that their mix of careers serves to make their relationship more interesting. “It’s actually fun,” Rogers enthused. “We’re constantly learning from one another and growing together.”
Before taking that walk down the aisle, Rogers and Specht talked about having children. It turned out that neither wanted them. “I didn’t think I’d be a good parent because you have to devote substantial time and energy to it,” Specht said. “Some women who are superwomen can do it all. But, frankly, I’m not one of those. My life is already so full that I don’t know how I could introduce another element into it and stay sane.” In fact, Rogers and Specht see their lives as relatively streamlined because of the absence of children. “It’s one less set of obligations,” Specht said. “Sometimes my friends who have kids feel they have to do certain things, like join the PTA or go to school plays, when they don’t really want to. We have fewer responsibilities in terms of the things we feel we have to do.”
Still, their life may not be everyone’s idea of Nirvana. “I think our married friends with kids have a difficult time understanding us,” Rogers acknowledged. Is the grass always greener at someone else’s house? “I think it’s a trade-off,” Specht said. “I don’t think they’d trade places with us and I know I wouldn’t trade places with them. But I think some of them are probably envious when I run off with my husband for a vacation.”
Attorney Ron Peterson and developer Linda Griego don’t mind being labeled dinks. Not if it means having the freedom to indulge their wildest whim--to go from sitting in their Baldwin Hills home to standing atop the Throng La pass 17,800 feet high in the Himalayas.
In 1985, when a friend suggested that Peterson and Griego just pick up and go hiking on Annapurna in northern Nepal, “we just went,” Peterson said. He was able to arrange a three-month sabbatical from his law firm, while Griego was ready for a breather after wrapping up a year of complicated property negotiations.
They rushed around getting the necessary shots and clothes. They exercised to the point of exhaustion to prepare for the grueling climb. “I went into a complete panic,” Griego said. “I hadn’t been to a gym in three years.” With one day to go before they had to leave, their visa arrived by Federal Express. “I think we were a little amazed ourselves at how quickly everything was done. But it all fell into place,” Peterson said.
Even now, as they shyly display their souvenir snapshots, what is most amazing to this couple, married 17 years, is not just the experience of the trip but the fact that they were able to go at all. “Nothing prevents us from pursuing the adventure in us,” Griego noted with a touch of pride. “We’re just not encumbered.”
Certainly not by finances, since both are at the high level of the income spectrum. Peterson, 42, is a commercial litigator with the Los Angeles firm of Tuttle & Taylor, while Griego, 39, is an entrepreneur renovating a 1912 firehouse into a downtown restaurant and office complex. They live in a showplace home designed by noted architect Raymond Kappe, which boasts a panoramic view of Los Angeles through the windows of every room. Though Griego is the food maven of the family, Peterson is the gourmet cook as well as the legal adviser for his wife’s project. “It’s a good thing Ron loves food,” she said. “It makes him an even better sounding board.” Griego, meanwhile, has helped her husband with his political work. As general counsel to Sen. Alan Cranston’s presidential and latest senatorial campaigns, Peterson took his wife, a former Cranston aide herself, across the country to help with fund raising.
Time Away From Work
Travel remains the thing they love best to do together. Aside from the Himalayas, the couple have enjoyed other lengthy trips and time away from work: touring through France and Scotland, skiing in Colorado or Switzerland, and discovering the entire African continent. “The longer the trip,” Peterson said, “the longer the block of time to be alone without a phone ringing.” Sometimes, if Peterson has to go abroad for a case, Griego will miss him so much she just hops on a plane and joins him. “One time, I walked into the TWA office and asked to buy a ticket on a flight leaving for London that day. ‘Today?’ the ticket clerk asked me. ‘Yeah,’ I said. I have to admit that it felt really good to be that impetuous.”
Reluctant to Rock the Boat
All in all, they feel their life together is so good that they’ve been reluctant to rock the boat even a little. Their not having children was something they never agonized about. It just happened, or so it seems. “We decided it by default,” Griego noted. “We didn’t decide to have children. But we didn’t decide not to have children.”
The couple also don’t let their careers eclipse their marriage. In 1979, Griego was a rising executive with Pacific Bell. Then she was offered a move to San Francisco to be followed by a transfer to the East Coast and finally a return to Los Angeles. Griego turned down the promotion and left the company soon afterward. “My husband, my family, my community are all here,” she explained. “I wasn’t going to sacrifice all that.”
At first, Nancy Kendall and Patrick McCabe found themselves going to wedding after wedding on weekends. “We’d go to Westwood and buy six sets of candlesticks,” Kendall said. “Now, our friends are having baby showers, and we’re buying infant blankets by the gross. It hits a little close to home.”
Married for 10 months after four years together, the couple feel slightly overwhelmed by the so-called “dink dilemma”: how to have it all--kids as well as careers. “It’s a very hard subject to get a handle on,” admits McCabe, 31, director of the cable division of Western International Media and an avowed family man. “We definitely want to have children. But it’s not something easily intellectualized. Part of us wants to plan it. And part of us wants to just leave it up to chance and hope for the best.”
Kendall, 30, knows her life would be changed the most by kids. As the director of dramatic development at Viacom Productions, she already brings home 20 hours of reading each week. That wouldn’t leave much time for child care if she ever got pregnant. Naturally, something would have to give. “You come to a point where you realize that having children will never be convenient in a career. But I’m sure I don’t want to be 50 years old and president of a production company and not have any kids,” she said.
Instead, Kendall is counting on having enough clout in her profession to allow her to make the transition from dink to dik (double income, kids) someday. “I’ve been working to reach a level of competence and expertise so that if I decide to have kids, taking time off would not be as traumatic to my career.”
Thinking about kids is especially hard for Kendall and McCabe because they like their life just the way it is. “This has really been a fantastic year for us,” McCabe said.
‘It’s Just Been a Delight’
“We’re challenged at work. Our marriage has really been in sync. It’s just been a delight,” his wife agrees. And why not? After all, they’ve got all the trappings of the successful double-income couple: the two-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath cathedral ceiling condo in West Los Angeles, the designer furnishings in trendy cottons and pastels, the five-day-a-week gym and tennis habit, the vacations in Maui and Cabo San Lucas.
But what really makes their marriage work is the fact that Kendall and McCabe have agreed to put it first. For instance, if one of them were to get a huge promotion, the kind that requires 23-hour workdays and bicoastal traveling, “we would definitely both pass it up,” McCabe confessed. “OK, so we’d make a lot more money. But what’s the point of that if we have to sacrifice our relationship?” Adds his wife: “It might be glamorous. But all that gets old really fast. Almost all of our friends who have done it are burnt out.”
And then what happens? Laughs Kendall: “We buy presents for their divorce showers.”