Morning routines, eating habits and ping pong with six people who made Louisville Magazine's Power 50. Included on the list?
Christy Brown, 67, philanthropist, activist, co-founder of the Center for Interfaith Relations
Carolyn Tandy, 40, District Officer, Office of U.S. Congressman John Yarmuth
David Tandy, 41, Metro Council Member, District 4
Kent Oyler, 56, President and CEO, Greater Louisville Inc.
Dave Stone, 53, Senior Pastor, Southeast Christian Church
Erica Lee Williams, 37, District Court Judge
1. “I’m very fond of Old Forester. I love it on the rocks, with just a tiny splash of fresh orange juice. That’s my Christy Special.”
— Christy Brown
2. “Every stoplight is an opportunity. I’ve found myself actually timing it so I can get to a red light and check something on my phone.”
— Kent Oyler
3. “Breakfast? No. God, no. There is not a scenario Monday through Friday that would allow me to eat breakfast. There’s just no time. Sometimes I eat lunch. But it’s not uncommon that I’ll get home after work and say, ‘Did I eat today?’”
— Erica Lee Williams
4. “If I’m cutting the grass, that’s when I think things through. And I have plenty of time because I cut my yard and two neighbors’ yards. I’ve got the music going — Public Enemy, Jay Z, Darius Rucker, Chris Botti, Rascal Flatts. It’s just the hum of the mower. And you don’t have to give mowing a lot of thought, don’t have to be precise. It’s like I’m in a bubble.”
— David Tandy
5. “I normally wake up at 5 a.m. and am on my phone. I have a checklist in the notes section. My co-worker says you need to physically be able to mark through things on your list, but deleting is enough for me. If I didn’t get everything done the previous day, it’s still there as my starting point the next day.”
— Carolyn Tandy
6. “I don’t really relax. When I think of the word relax, I think of doing nothing. And there’s always something to do.”
— Williams
7. “Do I have to use an alarm? No. I can tell myself I need to get up at 5:30, and my internal clock goes into action.”
— Brown
8. “About 22,000 people hear my sermon. Every week, I’ve got as many people listening to me as when the Yum! Center is packed. I’ve got to really make certain I’ve thought it all through.”
— Dave Stone
9. “Coffee? God, no. Could you imagine if I drank coffee? In law school I would eat a Snickers bar and drink a Mountain Dew Code Red. And my criminal-law professor said, ‘If anybody sees her with these items before class, take them from her.’”
— Williams
10. “I fought for so long not to have a smart phone. Now I’m constantly on two phones. I have four email addresses.”
— Carolyn Tandy
11. “If you want to talk to me about something, don’t send me an email. Actually talk to me about it.”
— David Tandy
12. “There’s a full-time person just scheduling my meetings. Before I came to GLI, during the years I spent running companies, I was out the door by 10 a.m. It had been years since I had a W-2 job. I hadn’t had a breakfast meeting in years. Now it’s every day. If you want to have lunch with me, it’s 30 days out — at least.”
— Oyler
13. “My routine has dramatically changed since my dear husband (former Brown-Forman executive Owsley Brown II) is no longer here. It’ll be three years in a couple of days. We were together for 43 years. I was 21 when we were married, 19 when we fell in love. I’m learning to be the new me.”
— Brown
14. “I could visit our Southeast members in the hospital or go to their funerals every minute of every day of the week. But then I’d have no time to work on my sermon. What I’ve finally landed on is that my job is to preach.”
— Stone
15. “Today I got in the car and Michael Jackson’s ‘Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’’ came on. I’m in my car, which has my face on it because I’m running for re-election, and I’m just rocking out. We live out east past Norton Commons, and I like living out there because I have my amp-up time in the car and my come-down time after work.
“What’s that one song? Aerosmith. You know, the one from the movie. Yes! ‘I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.’ And then ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me.’ (singing) Pour some sugar on me! Don’t print that; my husband will kill me.”
— Williams
16. “I went to a wake for my friend’s mother last week and it took — you wouldn’t believe how long it took us to get to the family. Just people stopping us: ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you.’”
— David Tandy
17. “I have the best nanny in the world. His name is David Tandy.”
— Carolyn Tandy
18. “My LinkedIn is backed up 500 requests right now.”
— Oyler
19. “There’s a really great acupuncturist I know. After my husband died, I went to him and said, ‘I don’t know if you do anything about grief, but if you want to, here I am.’ I asked him what he does to relax. He said, ‘I ballroom dance with an instructor.’ I said, ‘What does your wife do to relax?’ He said, ‘She plays ping pong.’ That first Christmas without my husband, I bought a ping pong table as a gift to myself.”
— Brown
20. “I call every time there’s a death in our church. We’ve got 35,000 members, as many as seven deaths a week. I don’t know the majority of these people, but when they get a phone call, this really big place feels really small.”
— Stone
21. “I decided I was going to the University of Virginia for law school. I go to the mailbox on my birthday. It’s a rejection letter. Devastating to me. First time I ever had a plan that didn’t go exactly as I planned.
“But, yeah, I’m over it. No, really I am. I am! Will there be a time when I will be accepting an award and will say UVA rejected me? Absolutely. That will happen. I said it then: They will regret this because I’m going to be somebody, and they’re going to wish I went to their school. I still have my rejection letter, which I’m never throwing away.”
— Williams
22. “I’m an only child. We now have three kids and a dog. This is a very different environment for me. I had to get used to experiencing noise that wasn’t my own.”
— Carolyn Tandy
23. “I wrote four handwritten notes today.”
— Stone
24. “Golf. That’s the way I compete now. My knees are gone.”
— David Tandy
25. “If I read a book, it’s a business book. The last novel? I don’t know.”
— Oyler
26. “Tonight I’m having a fundraiser for Angela Leet, who’s running for Metro Council. She’s a registered Republican; I’m a registered Democrat. But I said I would do it because she’s extremely smart, extremely caring. I have some Democrat friends who don’t think I’m doing the right thing.”
— Brown
27. “I print off my sermon and use colored markers on it. It’s weird, man. My main points are in green. All scripture verses are in blue. Anything humorous is in pink. Any key word is in orange. I can spread 12 pages out and, at a glance, I’ll know if I don’t have even humor or enough scripture.”
— Stone
28. “There’s really not a time I go to bed. There’s a time I just shut down — 2 a.m. or 4 a.m. Like last night, I was up scrubbing the floors. They were gross and it needed to get done. Then I’m up at 6. My family hates me on vacation. It’s 6:20 in the morning, and I’m ready to go with my itinerary.”
— Williams
29. “We watch the political shows: Scandal, House of Cards, West Wing re-runs.”
— David Tandy
30. “I was inspired by Nelson Mandela and Maya Angelou. A lot of their quotes keep me going. I have a cousin in Louisiana who inspires me. His favorite quote is, ‘We don’t major in minors.’ It’s good for me to remember to focus on the big things.”
— Carolyn Tandy
31. “Protect your day off.”
— Stone
32. “If it doesn’t work on a spreadsheet it sure as hell won’t work in real life.”
— Oyler
33. “My heart and brain are more in balance in the morning. A clean palette.”
— Brown
34. “I do 5-hour Energy sometimes. I know that’s bad for you.”
— Stone
35. “I’m not a fool. I don’t keep making the same mistakes.”
— Williams
36. “A lot of people think prayer has to be a long, formal, drawn-out thing. Even just walking into the Metro Council chamber: ‘Give me wisdom.’ It can be as simple as that.” — David Tandy
37. “It was implicit that Mayor Fischer didn’t have confidence in GLI when he cut our funding. But now that the decision has been made — I don’t like it; if I had a time machine and could undo it, I would undo it — but now that it’s there, we’re working with it. One of the unintended consequences is that we can focus on the region instead of only Jefferson County. The other thing is advocacy. In the entire history of GLI, they didn’t take a position counter to the Mayor’s Office.”
— Oyler
38. “Greg, our mayor, is a good friend.”
— Brown
39. “Here’s what I tell my mind: If I get more than three ideas, I have to get out of bed. So I’ll grab my sermon and a pillow and sit in the closet. I don’t turn the light on and I dim my computer screen, so I don’t wake up too much. And I’ll just crank for an hour and a half.”
— Stone
40. “I do get my hair done every week. That’s something I do for myself. I have a membership to Massage Envy. I have like 28 or 29 massages — it’s prepaid, so they just keep rolling over. I don’t want to cancel it because I got a really great rate and eventually I’m going to go.”
— Williams
41. “I didn’t realize how tired I was until (the 2010 mayoral primary) was over. I was going on straight adrenaline for months at a time. For the first week or so after, I just slept. My parents came and got the kids and told us to get away. We went to Orlando. We’ll go to Disney World with or without the kids. But of course I still think about that primary. Every day.”
— David Tandy
42. “I have lupus, and my pregnancy was not going well. I was on bed rest in the hospital. My blood pressure was not good. Somebody would come and talk to me about work, and my blood pressure would go down. So they let me do paper work. And when I didn’t have work to do, I wrote on a notepad all the ways the hospital could improve the maternity ward. Like, it made no sense that there were these small towels for pregnant women.”
— Williams
43. “I’ve set up channels that will help me say no or have somebody say no for me. People will say, ‘I’d like to meet with you sometime.’ And I’ll say, ‘I’ve got five minutes right now.’”
— Stone
44. “I am a fast walker. It probably comes from being short and being married to someone who is 6’4”. I’ve been this size since the fifth grade: 5’1”. And that’s if you don’t smush my hair. I’ve had to walk fast my whole life.”
— Williams
45. “Running is a poor choice of word because I’m not fast. But my wife walks really fast, and I run really slow. We go to the Parklands of Floyds Fork together, pray as we walk.”
— Stone
46. “If you walk around downtown enough you’ll get in your 10,000 steps.”
— Oyler
47. “My husband Jason and I have written down our goals in journals since we met in law school at UK.”
— Williams
48. “My wife started watching something on the Hallmark Channel — gosh, this is being taped. We got in the habit of every Saturday night watching this show together. It’s not on right now; it might come back this fall. It’s the goofiest show. Set in the 1800s or early 1900s. It’s called When Calls the Heart, which is the stupidest title. We don’t know what it means. But I’ll be getting ready to preach on Saturday, and I’ll text her, ‘We’re gonna watch our show tonight.’”
— Stone
49. “My dad, he was my best friend. He died when I was 27, when he was 57. If I’m my dad, my life is more than half over.”
— Williams
50. “Is that on? Are you still recording? Yeah, turn it off.”
— David Tandy
Images courtesy of Chris Witzke.
This article appears in the October issue of Louisville Magazine. To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, click here.
