In the summer of 1961, Carmen Cavezza and his bride, Joyce, pulled into Columbus for the first time.
The recent graduate of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C., was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and was reporting to Fort Benning for the Infantry Officer Basic Course.
Columbus, which did not have a four-lane highway coming in or out of the city at the time, made a bad first impression on Cavezza — and Joyce.
“When we were driving into Columbus and my wife said, ‘Where are you taking me?’” Cavezza recalled.
He was taking her on the first step of their journey — one that has now survived 58 years of marriage, a distinguished 33-year Army career and three wars. And, time and time again, that journey would lead them back to Fort Benning and Columbus.
But their first night here was one Joyce won’t forget. They had trouble finding a place to live because they had a cat. So they settled on a trailer park at the end of South Lumpkin Road near the Fort Benning gate.
“Something blew up that night,” Joyce said.
It was the stove.
They were out of there the next morning, finding an apartment on Benning Drive.
But it wasn’t just a rocky first night that caused concerns for Carmen, a New Yorker, and Joyce, a Charleston, S.C., native whom he had met and married while attending The Citadel.
“After we got here and I learned more, I was concerned about crime. Downtown did not have a good reputation, and my wife was a shopper,” he said. “I told her if she wanted to go downtown and shop, ‘You go with me.’ We had a lot of apprehension, not about Benning, but about Columbus.”
That apprehension eventually faded into adoration.
Columbus grew on Cavezza and he grew on Columbus. Over the next 57 years, he became one of the city’s most influential leaders across military, government, educational and volunteer lines.
Columbus has changed since the early 1960s and Cavezza is one of those people who helped drive that change. Today, he’s nearly 81 years old, walks with a slight hunch and has difficulty hearing. But he stands as one of many military leaders brought here through the wisdom of the Army, but ended up making Columbus their home.
Cavezza, a Vietnam combat veteran who was seriously wounded during a January 1966 battle, rose to the rank of three-star general before retiring in 1994. His leadership style transcended the military. He led Columbus 96, the nonprofit organization that ran the softball portion of the Atlanta Olympic Games. He moved from that role to city manager in 1997 and then into a leadership position with Columbus State University after he left the city in 2004.
And he used the same leadership style through it all.
Cavezza wasn’t one to bark or scream orders in the Army and that served him well in the transition to the civilian workforce, said Chuck Walls, who served under Cavezza’s command at Fort Benning and worked closely with him in a civilian role during the Olympic Games.
“He is always calm, measured and professional — and that was as a general officer or as a city manager,” Walls said. “That’s a great leadership quality and for that reason you had a lot of people who wanted to work for him. And a lot of those people did not want to let him down.
“I love the guy.”
An Infantry man connected to Fort Benning
Falling in love with Columbus did not happen overnight for the Cavezzas.
As he moved through the ranks as an Infantry officer, the Home of the Infantry was a frequent destination.
After being wounded in Vietnam and fresh out of Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Cavezza found himself back at Fort Benning where he worked on the staff for a year at Building 4 before going to the Advance Course as a captain. He came back in 1981 to command the 197th Infantry Brigade on a rare three-year assignment. He tacked on a fourth year to the Fort Benning assignment as chief of staff.
“That block really endured me to Columbus because I got to know a lot of people,” Cavezza said. “I got to appreciate what Columbus was all about.”
Joyce was also finding a home.
“Not knowingly, we are putting down some roots here,” she said.
And a big part of those roots were the relationships they were building. Gen. David Grange essentially ordered Cavezza to attend the North Columbus Rotary Club meetings every Tuesday in town.
“I would be in the field and I would say, ‘Oh, God, I got to go change my uniform and go to Rotary,’” Cavezza recalled. “It was kind of a pain, but what it did was establish relationships. With Rotary you meet a lot of people, the movers and the shakers. I soon learned there were some pretty nice people down here.”
Soon, Cavezza, raised in Elmira, N.Y., begin to feel at ease in Columbus.
“Benning has always been held in high regard and people in uniform have always been well received in Columbus,” Cavezza said. “At Rotary I was making more friends.”
Then during his tenure as chief of staff the family seriously began looking to retire in Columbus. He realized it when he got a call from the Pentagon about a possible job in the nation’s Capitol.
“I hated Washington,” Cavezza said.
They wanted him to come up for an interview.
“I said, ‘I just as soon not. I like it here and I would like to stay where I am,’” he remembered. “We were very comfortable. It was four years in one place and I was asking for more. That was crazy. But at that point, it was: Do I get out of the Army now or do I go up for this interview?”
There was something that might entice him to retire and stay in the Chattahoochee Valley.
“The county manager’s job of Harris County came open,” Cavezza said. “I called them and said, ‘I might be interested in that.’ I don’t even remember who I talked to, but he said, ‘You know we are a small county and we don’t pay much — maybe around $20,000.’ I said, ‘Never mind, I am going to Washington.’”
As a colonel, who made the decision to ride his military career as far as it would take him, Cavezza left Fort Benning in 1985 for Washington. After that assignment, which included multiple jobs and a brief stint in Korea, he became assistant commander of the 82d Airborne Division at Fort Bragg. He then became commanding general of the 7th Infantry Division and Fort Ord, Calif.
As Cavezza was moving into high commands, Joyce was becoming more comfortable in her role — though she was not as comfortable in her role as an Army officer’s wife early in her husband’s career.
She was working as a secretary when she met Carmen as a 19-year-old and did not like the fact that wives were strongly encouraged not to work outside the home.
She expressed her concerns about the rules concerning mandatory social gatherings and other orders to the wives that came from on-high.
Joyce was ahead of her time in that role, Cavezza said, more like a military spouse of today than one of the 1960s.
“She was part of that transition,” Cavezza said. “She went through that, ‘You got to do this, you got wear a hat to this, you got to do that.’ I basically said, ‘Joyce, if you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. If I can’t make it on my own, I am not going to make it.’”
There was no need to try to pressure his wife into doing things she didn’t want to do, Cavezza said.
There is a lesson in that, Joyce said.
“When you try and pressure somebody into doing something that they don’t feel is right, your marriage is not going to last,” she said.
Commanding general
In 1989, the Army sent Cavezza back, this time with two stars and the assignment as the post’s commanding general. It was a long way from the second lieutenant who reported to Fort Benning just before Independence Day 28 years earlier.
Riverside, commanding general’s residence at Fort Benning, was a couple of miles from the South Lumpkin Road trailer park where they spent their first night in Columbus, but it was now home.
The road the Cavezzas had traveled was not lost at that point.
“It is quite an honor to be the commander of Fort Benning,” Cavezza said.
Cavezza’s Army leadership style and his reputation were well established by the time he commanded Fort Benning.
“You call it servant leadership here, but it’s a little different in the Army,” Cavezza said. “But it’s taking care of people, letting them show what they can do, prove themselves. You drive them and drive them. Some people fall apart when they get driven too hard. I am not sure my leadership style changed.”
Joyce’s style was coming through, too. She threw the parties that are expected of a commanding general’s wife, but she did them her way. None of them were mandatory and she didn’t bring in a staff to handle the cooking or pre-party house cleaning. And there were not formal functions.
“I don’t like formality,” she said.
Joyce was doing the work by choice.
“That’s me,” she said. “It’s got to be done my way. I didn’t want anybody fooling with food but myself.”
And it used to drive her husband crazy, at times
“She would pull out the recipe book and it was something she had never made, and she would say, ‘I think I am going to try this,’” Cavezza said. “I would say, ‘We got 50 people coming in, Joyce. What if it doesn’t work?’ She would say, ‘It’ll work.’”
And it did.
But there was a method to what she was doing.
“We tried to get people to relax and be themselves,” Joyce said.
As the Fort Benning tenure came to close, the roots in Columbus were getting deeper. The couple had purchased a cabin on the Backwaters.
When he got orders to leave Fort Benning in 1991 and become commanding general of I Corps and Fort Lewis, Wash., Cavezza faced another difficult decision — retire or march forward and take the third star and the prestigious command in the Pacific-Northwest.
“My first concern was, ‘How is my family going to adjust to this?’” Cavezza said. “When I thought Fort Lewis, ‘I thought cold, windy, miserable.’ It’s not that way at all, but it sure get marketed poorly. I said, ‘Joy, we are going there for a couple of years.’”
They packed and moved and two years turned into three. And that turned into retirement.
Back in Columbus
If the Cavezzas’ story ends at Fort Lewis, it is an amazing story of a kid from upstate New York who liked to race hot rods becoming a leader in the U.S. Army.
But the story does not end there. In many ways the ending of the military chapter is where the real story starts.
And, like much of the Army story, it is set in Columbus.
Cavezza came back to Columbus with three stars on his resume and a closet full of university degrees.
He had a master’s in government from the University of Miami — one that he earn while he was an ROTC instructor still recovering his Vietnam wounds. He picked up a second master’s in international affairs from George Washington University during one of his D.C. assignments and completed a doctorate of philosophy from George Washington while commanding I Corps at Fort Lewis.
“He was always working, but if there were little spaces of time, he was going to school,” she said. “He’s got all these degrees on the wall.
“Here is he, going to Florida right after being wounded in Vietnam, he’s doing ROTC, and yet he’s going back to school to become a city manager,” Joyce added.
But continuing his education was about more than the degrees, Joyce said.
“It wasn’t getting the degrees, it was just staying up on things,” she said. “When he went to the college, he was studying every night. He was reading and studying. When he was doing the Olympics from the ground up, he was teaching at night. There’s no free time.”
But even with all that there was uncertainty as he moved back to Columbus without a job.
As the boxes were being brought into a home in Brookstone that was purchased a few years earlier, Cavezza got a phone call from Mat Swift, who at the time was an executive at the W.C. Bradley Co.
“It was poor timing, here the moving truck was here and all that chaos, and I looked at Joyce and said, ‘You are in charge. I got a meeting downtown,’” he remembered. “She was like, ‘What, not again.’ I went to see Mat and we talked to about the Olympics job. My first thought was, ‘This is too good to be true.’”
Joyce was used to sudden changes of plan.
“That was just kind of the way everything always went,” she said.
Her husband’s investment in the community while still in uniform was starting to pay dividends.
“Once you get into Columbus, you get to know people and treat them right, good things start to happen,” Cavezza said.
His first job in Columbus could not have been any different from his command posts in the Army. His new aAmy was mostly volunteers eager to make Columbus look good in front of the world, while at the same time pulling off the Olympic softball competition for the 1996 Atlanta Games.
Columbus was a late addition to venue lineup, was 100 miles removed from the heart of the games and had a lot of work to do.
“He was the perfect man for the perfect time,” Walls said.
And it worked for a number of reasons — because Cavezza knew how to build consensus, said former deputy city manager Richard Bishop.
“He invests a lot of effort and time into his people,” Bishop said. “That served him well when it came time to make those decisions.”
Retired Columbus State University President Frank Brown was one of those people in Columbus who knew Cavezza when he was a colonel making himself known in the community. Brown was still climbing the ladder at CSU, at the time.
“The first thing that I see when I see Carmen Cavezza is he’s such a human being,” Brown said. “For so many people the adjustment from the military to civilian life is difficult. And it may have been difficult for Carmen, but he never showed that.”
Brown said he admired Cavezza’s ability to delegate the most.
“He is extremely clear in his expectations,” he said. “And if you understand those expectations and are doing your job, he’s going to stay out of your business.”
Throughout his retirement, the jobs continued to come, much like an Army officer going from station to station on assignment.
“He didn’t get out of that job before they are asking him to be city manager,” Joyce said. “And he’s not even out of that job before they wanted him over at the college and then they wanted him down at the museum.”
Once the Olympics were over and the softball venue had been one of the most successful efforts of the Atlanta Games and the Sports Council had been established, Cavezza got a visit from then-Mayor Bobby Peters.
“He came over and said, ‘I would like for you to be my city manager,’” Cavezza said. “I said, ‘Bobby, you got a city manager.’ And he said, ‘Not for long.’ He evidently had a plan.”
Peters calls it the “the best decision I ever made.”
“And I never had to make another decision for seven years,” he joked.
Cavezza talked to the council and told them it was an honor to be considered.
“I told them I don’t have any experience in that, but it all boils around leadership,” he said,
Peters and Cavezza made a good team for nearly two terms.
“We never had a problem,” Peters said. “He used to say that one of the reasons we got along so well was he couldn’t hear half of what I said.”
Bu the city manager’s job was still demanding.
“Somebody came to me and said, ‘How does it compare with being the city manager to commanding a corps?” he recalled. “I said, ‘Well, commanding a corps, I say forward march and thousands of soldiers step off with their left foot. Here, I say, forward march and you get three nays and a motion for denial.’ So, it’s totally different leadership you have to use.”
For nearly 25 years after leaving the Army, Cavezza served in key roles. Now 80 with his health in decline and his best days in the past, ask Cavezza if there is anything he would change and he takes a long pause.
“I sure wouldn’t go back to New York,” he said. “Nah. Probably not. Joyce and I talk a lot about this. ... Things just kind of fell into place. One good thing led to another good thing.”
And many of those things led to Fort Benning and Columbus, Cavezza said.
“It’s a nice place to be.”