FOUR COUPLES, EIGHT CAREERS

Cece Smith and Ford Lacy are a corporation. Really. They have separate careers -he as a lawyer for Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, and she as an executive vice president for Searle Optical Group -they have a marriage, and they have a mutual investment in the Dallas franchise of Le Sportsac, a line of versatile baggage. Their priorities are not in that order. They have been married almost five years, and in that time, they’ve watched each other flourish in their respective careers and have become involved in various local organizations. He is a member of Dallas Symphony Orchestra Guild and the Dallas Bar Association and is a charter member of the Dallas 500 Club. She’s director of the Texas Society of CPAs, has been active in Junior Achievement and various political campaigns and is on the associate board of Edwin L. Cox School of Business. Now the tides are changing. As a result of their active lives, Ford and Cece were spending days “together” but apart; Monday nights he would have such-and-such meeting, Tuesdays she’d be gone, and so on. Now they’re cutting back. Cece says she’s “learning to say no” when approached by an organization; they’ve both decided to continue supporting various efforts with money but not with time. Time, they say, is their main interest now, and they’re pooling their efforts to spend more of it together. They spend Saturday and Sunday mornings eating a long, lazy breakfast and reading the papers. They run errands together on Saturdays, even though it would be much more efficient to run them separately. And often, rather than eating dinner at home – where the mail is stacked between them on the dining room table and paper work is beckoning from the study – they escape to a secluded restaurant.

It wasn’t supposed to happen, this marriage between Laurent restaurant manager Don Sisemore and KAAM/KAFM newscaster Nancy Jay. Logistics were definitely against the whole deal -she works from 4: 30 a. m. until early afternoon, Monday through Friday. He works from 10 a. m. until after midnight, Monday through Saturday. The only feasible time to see each other would be a few hours stolen in the afternoons and at midnight. Sunday would be their only day together. But they met last July and logistics went out the window – along with many preconceptions and set patterns. She imagined him as a suave, finicky, almost stuffy individual, and she bought new wine glasses and expensive wine to impress him on their first date. He likes ketchup on his hamburgers. He never dreamed of getting married, and he liked his Sundays to himself. They met, and three months later he asked her to marry him. Now Don wakes up before dawn to walk Nancy to her car, even though she did it by herself for three years. They talk on the phone between her morning traffic reports. Some afternoons they sneak a couple of hours together. Sometimes she’s sleeping so peace-fully when he gets home that he doesn’t wake her. On Sundays, well, they do nothing. Sunday nights, they grill hamburgers-with ketchup. After one month of marriage, Laurent burned, and for the past couple of months Don and Nancy’s pace has changed. Don has many nights off now, but until the restaurant reopens, he’s under tremendous pressure to pull things back together. Nancy says they won’t keep up this pace forever. Don agrees. They want children, a home on four acres and hours and hours and hours together. But in the meantime, she has her career; he has his. Their life together is masterfully orchestrated in between.

When E. G. Hamilton and EAnn Thut met 17 years ago, they weren’t thinking about marriage. They were thinking about careers. He was president of Harrell and Hamilton Architect group, now Omniplan, and his company needed an interior-design specialist. She specialized in interior design and interviewed with his company. EAnn was hired, and they worked together for almost eight years and became close friends. Then they fell in love. They’re still close friends and co-workers, but they’re also married. Working in the same office doesn’t seem to be any trouble for the Hamiltons. They usually drive to work together but often go for days without seeing each other until it’s time to go home. They almost never have lunch together. When they first married, EAnn kept her maiden name for work because she didn’t want to “ride his coattails. ” Recently, she changed her letterhead to “Hamilton”; almost everyone she works with now knows that she and E. G. are married, and it doesn’t matter to them. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t matter to her. Sometimes, one or the other must work late or on weekends; generally, they agree, they’re both understanding of this fact of two-career life. When they’re alone together, she says, they rarely talk about work. They’re both getting choosier about what accounts they’ll work on, and although they aren’t officially cutting back on work, they are trying to free up more time to spend together. And what will they do with that extra free time? Travel, eat, read, relax and enjoy their favorite pastime: wandering the streets of faraway places such as Paris and Venice and looking at the architecture.

Federal Judge Robert Hill has a reputation for keeping in touch with his law clerks after they’ve moved on to greener pastures, so his former law clerk Patricia, who is 17 years younger than he, wasn’t surprised to hear from him. But after seeing each other for a year, the recently widowed judge and the recently divorced clerk-turned-lawyer married. That was eight years ago. Now the judge and the lawyer are living happily ever after -their way. A typical day for them starts about 6 a. m. when she awakens to walk a few miles. When she returns to the house after her exercise, Robert usually has breakfast ready. Typically, they drive to work together and meet at the downtown YMCA after work, where he plays handball and she practices karate. When they return home about seven or so, dinner (prepared by their maid) is awaiting them. In January, their routine was broken a bit -Patricia began work at the Texas House of Representatives, and now she’s in Austin Monday through Thursday until the end of May. Robert is proud of her work, and Patricia says they’ve been married long enough and their relationship is strong enough to handle the separation, adding that they’re “lucky they don’t have children to consider”- if so, her decision to run for office would have been “impossible. ” Now that weekends are a precious commodity, the Hills just want to be together. Sometimes they travel, often they work in their yard, but always, they try to keep their leisure time unstructured.