Our deeper contact commenced six years ago. It was just after my husband died. I was sitting in my Hillsborough kitchen, feeling more than a little sorry for myself. My children had flown the coop for college, perpetual grad school and, at long last, jobs. The game of bridge, eventful and statistically challenging though it can be, had begun to let me feel a bit abandoned too. Nothing seemed enough. Nothing actually meant anything. Tad had a curious way of being at the right place at the right time. Or as someone later put it, “at the right time, for the right place.” Right for the salvation of noble houses and their sometimes mopey occupants.

This gift of timing secured, for our grandchildren and for theirs, the continuing presence of churches, two of them African Methodist Episcopal, one major 19th-century courthouse, the German-carved carousel at High Point, and an entire downtown district slated for destruction only 10 days after Tad’s first inquiries to save it. (Few of us will forget a 24-hour vigil that felt like getting the heroine untied from the railroad tracks!)

I was not the only old “widow woman” in Tad Worth’s Morocco-bound, paint-splattered address book. There is a natural law that allows us, the ladies, I mean, to have an extra decade or three. There is some justice in that, I believe. Even so, many of these widows confess to feeling like ramshackle old “historic” homeplaces themselves. I felt myself to be some house suddenly emptied of all its occupants and, despite possessing fairly decent dentil moldings, fallen into disrepair beyond the help of Elizabeth Arden, the National Trust, or the Holy Spirit!

The moment my husband died, I became such a crumbling “prestige property.” Well, imagine the pleasure of this old homeplace upon being turned, half against her will, into an office, then upgraded into Action Central till, through being an unsalaried Bed and Breakfast, I finally found myself having become, to quote my Trekkie children, “The Mother Ship.”

All on behalf of Historic Preservation, and all on account of this extraordinary, very down-to-earth type of person who gave me “the call.” Like that Caravaggio depicting the tax collector’s being summoned from his counting table to Duty, to Care, and to, at last, a Cause.

This “number” of our periodical must be different from any other. We must all reflect some of what we’ve lost in a person of Tad’s moral and artistic talents. This issue will offer you, our loyal donors and supporters and readers, Tad’s fellow carpenters and archivists, snobs and friends, something like his own last will and testament.