Frequent Fliers: More Fast-Track Couples Living a Tale of Two Cities

“We are not a modern couple,” said Ginny Thornburgh, the wife of U.S. Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh. “I take my marriage vows very seriously and I never would have thought I would have done this.”

Nonetheless, she’s been doing it for eight months--living in a separate city from her husband. Pennsylvania’s former First Lady has been working at Harvard University Monday through Thursday and then lugging suitcases, garment bags and a briefcase on the subway to Boston’s Logan Airport for the weekly flight to Washington, where her husband moved last August to become attorney general.

In Washington, she’ll arrive somewhat bedraggled to find the 56-year-old Cabinet member surviving on peanut-butter sandwiches and lounging on rented furniture. A friend says Dick Thornburgh doesn’t even attempt something as technologically daunting as making coffee.

“I consider it not only important to be home in the evening with my husband but a responsibility to be home,” Ginny Thornburgh said. “We’re a very traditional couple.”

Nonetheless, the Thornburghs have been among more than 700,000 American couples, according to the Census Bureau, who find themselves doing a very nontraditional thing: living in different places for reasons other than military service or marital problems. Increasingly, this type of arrangement involves living elsewhere during the workweek, with weekend commuting moving from interstate highways into the skies. Many couples now spend several thousand dollars a year shuttling back and forth on flights of two hours or less through snow, rain, heat and the gloom of the Eastern Airlines strike.

The trend goes right to the heart of the most resounding change to take place in the American family: women pursuing careers. No longer is it a given that a woman, if she works at all, will have a job that is secondary to her husband’s. No longer is it assumed that the wife will pack up the kids and move if her husband is transferred or finds a better opportunity elsewhere. And, the “Mommy Track” notwithstanding, no longer are women automatically turning down promotions because they involve moving to another city.

Though still affecting only a small percentage of upscale Americans, commuter marriages are more frequently arising as a sometimes painful side effect of equal opportunity. Scaling two ladders of success inevitably thrusts some climbers in opposite directions, and there can be just as much pain deciding not to do it (passing up a good career opportunity) as to do it.

Temporary Situation

Some couples, like the Thornburghs, do it temporarily until a specific job task is completed or a new job can be found in the other city. But other couples, like the dermatologist/consultant duo of A. Paul and Beverly Baker Kelly of Los Angeles/Oakland, have installed it as a way of life. The Kellys, who have two children, have lived apart--sometimes on different continents--for 22 of their 23 years of marriage.

They have been away from each other so often in their marriage that “other people many times are more worried about our relationship than we are,” said Beverly Baker Kelly. “If you need a great deal of social approval, I do not think this type of relationship would work as well.”

And it would seem that living apart could invite infidelity. But the couples say that if the relationship is strong, this is not any more likely to happen in a commuter marriage than in a traditional one.

It doesn’t mean that commuter marriages don’t have their strained moments, however. For Deedie Runkel, the proverbial stuff hit the fan when a bat dive-bombed into her fish tank.

Bat Anxiety

“I was so furious he wasn’t there. I simply don’t do bats. He’s in charge of them,” said Deedie, who remained along with one child in Washington, D.C., at her jobs while her husband, David, was working in Cambridge, Mass. “I was prepared to let him (the bat) meet his maker doing the bat stroke, as my daughter said. But one of my daughter’s friends who is an animal-rights activist was there, and she fished the damn thing out and brought it back to life in a Converse shoe box and set it free.”

True shuttle-couple anxiety occurs “generally at times like that,” Deedie Runkel said, “when you’re completely stretched and going the extra mile, usually with something that has to do with the house or the kids.”

The Runkels are no longer a shuttle couple. David Runkel rejoined Deedie in Washington last January when he became Thornburgh’s spokesman at the Justice Department. But during the Runkels’ shuttle period, he admits there “was a bit” of the job tug-of-war power struggle, as in: You quit your job! No, you quit yours!

Two-Time Commuters

But they survived living in different cities twice: For 1 1/2 years when he commuted from Washington by car to Harrisburg to work for then-Gov. Richard Thornburgh, and again for 1 1/2 years when he accompanied Thornburgh to Harvard. Deedie Runkel had previously moved along with David’s jobs to Baltimore, Harrisburg (in a previous job), Philadelphia and Washington. But in David’s subsequent moves back to Harrisburg and then to Boston, she stayed put in Washington, working first for Peace Links, then for the Peace Corps.

“I think I can admit to some concern that bordered at times on resentment that this was the only way that David could find professional fulfillment,” said Deedie Runkel, who can laugh about it all now.

David is not laughing about the time he fell asleep at the wheel during one of his two-hour commutes to Washington from Harrisburg. The car went off the road and was badly damaged but he wasn’t hurt. He found shuttling easier when he was commuting between Cambridge and Washington. He would take the 7 a.m. flight Monday morning and be at his desk in Cambridge by 9:30.

Logistics may be the single most staggering element of the commuter marriage. Even though Ginny Thornburgh is about to move to Washington, the attorney general said, “We’re kind of a poor man’s Donald Trump these days.” That’s because the Thornburghs have apartments in Pittsburgh, Cambridge and Washington.

The Thornburghs still have trouble keeping track of where the car should be. He misses his collection of books and she can’t find the belt that goes to her brown suit. Airline tickets need to be purchased weeks ahead to save money, and kitchen appliances, televisions, stereos, home computers and furniture are often duplicated.

Jean Lipman-Blumen, a 55-year-old Claremont Graduate Center professor who is married to a 67-year-old Stanford business school professor, Harold J. Leavitt, makes copious lists so she will bring the right books, papers and computer discs on visits.

Deedie Runkel says one logistical argument they never did settle was David’s insistence on making up for his absence by doing all the family laundry during his weekend visits.

“This is really airing our dirty laundry,” she laughed, “but I resented that he was doing the wash when he could be doing other things with us. He’s very serious about the wash, folding it, hanging it.”

Miss the Good Times

Many couples say what they miss most are the good times, the sharing that comes at the end of every day.

“It’s been a little bit of a downer for us,” Atty. Gen. Thornburgh said, “because there are exciting things going on in both our lives and we’re not there to share it. You can’t re-create them or describe them in a way that even comes near to experiencing them.”

Dick Thornburgh said he “just really ached” when Ginny was unable to accompany him to a midweek white-tie reception for foreign diplomats at the White House that she would have enjoyed. But flight tickets between Boston and Washington that are not purchased two weeks ahead of time cost $200 more, and with about $7,000 already budgeted for eight months of her weekend commutes, “We have to count our pennies,” she said.

Ginny even felt compelled to take the subway to the Boston and Washington airports in the rain, hauling her bags, rather than spring for more expensive cab rides. Their shuttle-couple experience comes to an end today, when Ginny leaves her job as Harvard’s coordinator of programs for persons with disabilities. In the fall, she will become a consultant to the National Organization on Disability in Washington.

Looking forward to her new job “definitely eases the pain of leaving” her job at Harvard. “But mostly I want to be with Dick,” she said.

Need to Finish

The Harvard job was the first paying job Ginny Thornburgh had held since teaching third grade in 1962 and she was glad to stay long enough to finish an important handbook on the project.

“If he had said when he moved to Washington, ‘Well, aren’t you coming?’ I can’t imagine that kind of agony,” said Ginny, who took the job originally to spend more time with her husband, who was then working at Harvard after completing his last term as governor of Pennsylvania. “My staying was a given. I didn’t have to appeal, ‘What about me?’ ”

Said Atty. Gen. Thornburgh: “It kind of introduced us into what I think is probably more the normal path that’s followed by younger people. She has been a mom and raised a family and we hadn’t been a two-career family. She’d always been a volunteer but there’s a certain worth certification that comes out of drawing a paycheck.”

Even so, he says they never considered making this a permanent arrangement.

Mutual Love

“Why did we end it? Come on! We love each other very much,” he said. “I don’t want to sound soupy but that’s really it. We just don’t like being apart from one another.”

Said David Runkel, “I think you’d have to be crazy to do it on a permanent basis.

“Maybe it’s possible for some people. But no matter how much time you spend talking about things and sharing things you still tend to build independent lives in different cities. Why do that?”

The Kellys’ answer to that may be: We love each other, but not each other’s cities.

A. Paul Kelly is chief of dermatology at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles, and Beverly Baker Kelly is a public-relations consultant who found Oakland a better place to live. She wanted her children to have contact with Oakland’s large professional, upper-middle-class black community.

Integration Victims

“My children are victims of integration,” she said by telephone from her Oakland home. Her daughters were among the first generation of students “after ‘Brown vs. Board of Education’ who were the only black children in white classes,” she said. “We felt they needed a community to be around other black people.

“Los Angeles has a large black population, but it’s spread out. Here there is a sense of community.”

For Dr. Kelly, a move to Oakland was not considered because he feels loyal to the hospital where he has worked since 1973. The couple has been split almost all their marriage, although they were both living in Detroit when their second child, Kara, was born 17 years ago.

“I think the children do not like to be different, so I think they experienced some discomfort in having to explain our lives,” said Beverly Baker Kelly. “I’m happy they have been able to live in three different countries. They feel more equipped for modern life. They feel self-sufficient. I don’t know how this will affect their emotional relationships. So far they have been able to handle them easily. When he comes home on the weekend, he’s with us almost entirely.”

Lynn and Julie Wright of Phoenix and West Los Angeles spend much of their precious weekend time together at a health club. “We work out, take a sauna and a steam, have coffee, see friends and relax,” said Julie Wright, 44, a public-relations specialist for TRW. Lynn Wright, 51, moved to Phoenix three years ago when his employer, the McDonnell Douglas Helicopter Co., moved from Culver City to Phoenix. Lynn’s sons from a previous marriage are grown, and they have no other children.

“We all go through times of stress. There are times when it would be nice to be there to share those moments,” Lynn said by telephone from Phoenix. “I think it has strengthened the relationship.”

Said Lipman-Blumen, the Claremont professor: “I think if you had to live with someone all the time, that would be hard. You have a different view of each other this way.”

Depleted Savings

One thing it does not strengthen is the savings account. Although air commuters are people with high-paying jobs, much of the extra money that would otherwise be saved or spent on special things gets poured into airline tickets. The Wrights even have to pay taxes in two states. Between that and two mortgages and air flights, the Wrights figure the arrangement will cost them at least $15,000 this year.

“It’s more expensive to run two households and it’s more expensive in terms of physical and psychic energy to live the way we do,” said Lipman-Blumen. They spend one quarter of the year in their Claremont home when she teaches, one quarter in their Stanford campus house when he teaches, and another quarter shuttling back and forth while they both teach. The rest of the year they travel around the world and touch base with their six children from previous marriages.

It is a constant whirl of house-sitters, suitcases, airports and lists, but Lipman-Blumen says, “we both have work that we love and we have each other. In order to combine those things we are willing to pay the prices that come with this kind of life.”