Homes are where the heart is

Rice’s Joe and Ann Hightower give comfort to afflicted at Houston’s Hospitality Apartments

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

How does one define love? Is it a roaring flame? A passing fancy? Or an adventure that unfolds over time?

That last would be a pretty good way to describe what Joe and Ann Hightower share. The Rice professor emeritus of chemical and biomolecular engineering and his wife of nearly 30 years, an alumna, have followed an extraordinary path and touched thousands of lives along the way.

Joe and Ann Hightower and a large staff, all volunteers, have welcomed about 6,350 families from 49 states (all but Rhode Island) and 64 countries and given aid and comfort to families facing the most difficult challenges of their lives.

For 42 years, since about the time he started at Rice, Joe has been the steady hand at the helm of Hospitality Apartments, a Houston institution he co-founded that gives people of slender means a free place to stay while being treated, often for cancer, at facilities in the Texas Medical Center (TMC).

The Hightowers and a large staff, all volunteers, have welcomed about 6,350 families from 49 states (all but Rhode Island) and 64 countries and given aid and comfort to families facing the most difficult challenges of their lives. Patients may occupy an apartment for up to three months while undergoing treatment.

There’s never a shortage of need for Hospitality’s services. Joe estimated the apartments have been filled ”99-plus percent of the time” over the years.

”You could probably have four projects this big in Houston and just barely meet the demand,” Ann said after the organization’s annual meeting on Super Bowl Sunday. ”And then you would uncover another layer of need.”

When you sit with the couple, Ann does most of the talking, though the soft-spoken Joe frequently finishes her sentences or expands on a story.

”Rarely,” Ann went on, ”you get a prospective guest who comes, takes a look at the apartments and sneers and says ‘Oh, no, I’ll just pay.’ And you know those people don’t really need it financially. If you want carpet on the floor and maid service, a swimming pool …”

”You just stole my thunder,” Joe interjected, laughing. ”There was a woman being taken up to an apartment, and she said, ‘Where’s the swimming pool?’ In the end, she didn’t come here.”

The apartments, Ann explained, are ”not posh. But they’re perfectly nice. Totally functional, with linens, dishes, a stove and oven, a microwave, TVs and access to free laundry.”

To many, Hospitality Apartments are a critical link to the care they desperately need. Volunteers — many of them from the Rice community — maintain the buildings, transport patients to clinics, keep the office running and perform dozens of other tasks that ease the burdens of resident patients, who occasionally are children. Too often their tales end in sorrow, but success stories are legion. At the meeting, Joe projected a picture of a young man from El Paso, Texas, in a cap and gown at his college commencement. ”He was 2 when he stayed here, and he wasn’t expected to live,” Joe said. ”Every year since, his granddad has sent me an update.”

It’s a remarkable story by any measure. Hospitality Apartments has grown steadily since its inception by a group of churchgoing ”do-gooders” and now offers 46 small but comfortable apartments in a four-story building on Bertner Avenue.

The nonprofit has never applied for or received money from any government agency. The organization has relied on personal fundraising efforts by the Hightowers and friends and the generosity of Houston congregations, private foundations and hundreds of individual contributors. It has no debt, pays no salaries and operates each apartment for less than $10 a day.

At the annual meeting of trustees this week, more than 75 volunteers detailed efforts to address a punch list of construction issues, landscape and extend the gardens around the complex and install a robust Wi-Fi system for residents with the assistance of personnel from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. The equipment and installation are being supplied by MCA Communication and Cisco at no charge to the foundation.

The new building completed three years ago replaced four two-story buildings cobbled together by Hightower and his team over the decades. M.D. Anderson bought the former apartments five years ago to facilitate a planned expansion; Bertner Avenue now runs right through where they once stood, and the new apartments, 50 yards to the west, stand on land the hospital traded for the original plots.

Joe, who earned his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 1963, was new to Houston in 1968 when the need for such a facility presented itself. ”I started attending a local church (the Bering Drive Church of Christ), which was fairly new and had several young professionals with small children,” he said. ”We had bull sessions occasionally on weekends. The group was half activists and half philosophers.”

Joe was an activist. ”I asked the leaders of the church if they had programs we could get involved in, and they said, ‘We want you to come up with some ideas.’ One of the philosophers – in a fit of derision, we think – said, ‘Look, you do-gooders. There’s a medical center here. Why don’t you go find out about needs for food or transportation or housing.’ And housing seemed to click,” he said.

”One of the other members of our congregation knew another member who owned the Army barracks where we started. We rented it and ended up buying it because of its strategic location.”

The barracks sat alone on three lots south of the TMC, just across Braes Bayou. The tax-exempt foundation arranged loans to buy the building for $500 and the land for $49,500. ”The barracks had four small, furnished apartments, and they literally were held together by paint.”

”Paint and love,” Ann said.

”When I met Ann, she helped me on apartment workdays with some of the painting and cleaning the Army barracks.”

”Which are still in existence,” Ann said. ”It’s now a fishing shack somewhere down on the coast.”

Over the years, the foundation purchased adjacent parcels of land and erected more buildings. ”There’d be a lull of a year or two,” Ann said, ”and then Joe would get antsy and think, ‘I wonder who owns that lot?’ He’d track down the owner, tell the story and figure out a way to get them to sell him the property.”

When she met Joe, he was well into his career at Rice and had built a reputation as an expert in catalysis, the process by which certain substances can be used to facilitate chemical reactions. He’s noted for his early work on exhaust control systems that are now part of every vehicle on the road and earned the American Chemical Society’s George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon or Petroleum Chemistry in 1973.

Ann was a graduate student in the same department.

”We knew each other for the four years it took me to get my master’s degree and got married the day after I graduated,” said Ann, who enjoyed a long career as a chemical engineer at Exxon. Since retirement, she has volunteered at The Branch School in Houston, where she has served as president of the board and has taught nature studies and science.

Joe: ”Let me back up a minute. We both had been married (previously).”

”Each of us had come out of a failed marriage,” Ann confirmed. ”I was 30 when I came to Rice. Joe and I are exactly 10 years apart – we both have the same birthday, Sept. 14. That was really how we met. Early in the year there was a party for the chair of the department on the 17th, and Joe and I were commiserating over the fact that they had missed our birthdays.”

”She came up to me with the proper attitude: ‘Professor Hightower, excuse me, did you say your birthday was the 14th?’ ‘Yes, so?’ And she said, ‘That’s mine,”’ recalled Joe.

”After we got married,” Ann said, ”Joe kept on teaching, and I went to work for Exxon.”

Joe’s passion for his avocation knew no bounds, she said. Until he suffered a mild stroke in 2005 that slowed him, just a bit. “He was a perpetual motion machine,” Ann said. ”When I married him and realized what it was going to be like, there were times I wondered if I was going to be able to keep up. He was so busy. He needed less sleep than I did, and he got more done during the day.”

For years, Joe answered calls to the apartments at all hours of the day and night. ”He was basically responsible for the entire day-to-day operation,” Ann said. ”From Hurricane Alicia to somebody getting mad at the guy above him who’s making too much noise, Joe would have to hop in the car or on his bicycle, go over and fix it.”

Now, two larger apartments at the new complex are reserved for resident managers who handle day-to-day operations while their family members are in treatment at TMC. They often stay longer than the three-month limit in return for their services.

But the couple’s commitment to the cause has not waned — a fact the city recognized when it declared Feb. 15, 2007, as ”Joe W. Hightower Day” in Houston. From the start, Joe has sent personal letters to individual donors, often several a day, to thank them for their gifts. ”I made him buy a computer about two years after we got married,” Ann said.

”She took away my slide rule!” Joe said.

”No, I didn’t! I took away your typewriter.”

She described the folder on his computer containing his Hospitality files as ”horrifying.”

”Every time I go into it, I just itch to subdivide it because it’s so huge,” she said. ”But he saves all the letters, and if someone who’s donated before donates again, he can see what he said the last time and thank them for their prior contributions.”

”It works,” said Joe, who continues to teach laboratory experiments for undergraduate and graduate students at Rice and, with his wife, sponsors the Hightower Superior Award in Chemical Engineering, the highest academic award given by the department to a graduating student.

You wouldn’t think the couple had time for anything else in their lives, between their careers, the apartments and helping raise Joe’s daughter, Amy Hightower, from his first marriage. (”The real gift of the relationship,” Ann said. ”I’m so grateful to have her in my life.”)

But then there’s the bread — a delicious sourdough that is another pride and joy for Joe. ”I stopped baking when I married Joe,” Ann said. ”There was no point. There was no way my bread was going to be anywhere near as good as his.”

Each year, Hightower bakes his famous loaves by the ton, and every new guest at the apartments receives one on the day he or she arrives. What could be more loving than that?