For love of one and y’all

Chuck Cartledge, Ph.D., spent 31 years in the U.S. Navy, retiring as a captain. But he was just a junior officer in 1976 when he met his wife, Mary (M.S.W.’78), a sweet Southern gal with a sweet Southern accent.

As a social worker, she had a personal touch that, perhaps, a career sailor did not.

“Some of the sailors I had working for me, they were having money problems, they were having wife problems,” says Chuck Cartledge, now an adjunct professor of computer science at Old Dominion University.

“I didn’t know how to handle that, so I would talk with her and she would say, ‘OK,you need to do A,B,C and D,’and I would try and help my sailors based on her advice, on her training, her experience.”

“Miss Mary” Cartledge spent more than 30 years as a state social worker in Virginia (in addition to her pro bono work consulting for the Navy, of course). She worked to find meals and places to sleep for at-risk elementary school kids, helped women escape and recover from domestic abuse and counseled people with substance addictions, earning her clients’ trust with patience, empathy and a comforting charm.

“You get some y’alls in there,” Chuck says with a laugh from his home in Virginia Beach. “When she really wanted to sweet talk someone, yes, it would come out. Decades ago, we had a tree come down on our deck. So insurance people came out and said, ‘OK, we’ll replace three or four planks on the deck.’ And the accent came out, and she was able to convince [them] to replace the entire deck.”                                

Her argument?

“If you replace these three or four boards,” Chuck says, “then the three or four boards will look funny because it’s new wood on an old deck.”

To honor Mary’s gracious spirit and her life spent making other people feel better, Chuck, along with the couple’s son, Lane, established a scholarship in VCU’s School of Social Work in December 2022, nine months after Mary died suddenly of congestive heart failure. She was 75.

Starting in 2025, the Mary Dotson and Charles Lane Cartledge IV Endowed Scholarship will be awarded annually to a first-generation VCU social work master’s student from an underserved community. The school’s faculty members will select the student.

“It is a way of helping people that just need a little bit more — and with the hope that they will in turn reach behind them and help others up,” Chuck says.

Mary, who grew up in a National Historic Landmark farmhouse 20 crow-flown miles south of Lynchburg, Virginia, liked chardonnay from New Zealand, modifying recipes she’d find in magazines, traveling the world by cruise ship (it’s how she discovered Kiwi wine), and reading as widely as possible so she’d be prepared to talk to anyone.

“She was outgoing, she was friendly,” Chuck says. “After about 30 seconds of a conversation with whoever it was, she was Miss Mary. That’s what people called her. She had the ability to put people at ease and to establish that very familiar connection with the other person. A hand on the arm was common. Finding a common interest.

“She taught me to be more sensitive to other people’s needs, to their life experiences, to how my interactions with them could have unintended negative consequences — as in not being quick to criticize but being quick to help, being quick to recognize that the words that come out of their mouths may have a different meaning than what I’m hearing. She made me a kinder and more empathetic person, and we spent enough years together that that part of her has become part of me.”