By Victor Greto
When Jack Markell finally got up the nerve to ask Carla Smathers out on a date, she said no.
“I didn’t think I was worthy of him,” says the wife of Delaware’s new governor.
Rising from the kitchen table in the sprawling Wilmington home that she shares with him and their two children, Molly, 16, and Michael, 13, she turns away to stifle the choke in her throat.
Carla Markell, 48, still has a hard time fully shaking loose the self-deprecating girl she had been for the first two decades of her life. Her recent victory against breast cancer pales in comparison with her years-long struggle overcoming a childhood spent with an alcoholic and depressed single mother.
“She never felt she was a smart person in high school,” says long-time friend Karen Degler. “But it dawned on her in college that she may not be a book-smart person, but she was smart, intuitive. She has grown into her smartness, realized that she was a worthy person.”
Carla might be the First State’s first lady – but that doesn’t mean she and the life she has created for herself and their two children are going to change all that much.
She and the children will be spending most of their time in their Wilmington home and not at Woodburn, the Governor’s official residence in Dover.
“Her role will be up to her,” Jack Markell says. “But if she wants to choose an issue or two, she can. She’s been a housewife since Molly was born.”
After her parents separated when Carla was three, she and her older brother Scott moved into a Newark apartment with their mother, Joan.
“There were some tough times financially and emotionally,” recalls Joan Smathers.
Joan was depressed, and drank regularly.
Carla, who struggled with ear infections throughout her childhood, latched on to her older brother Scott, and played baseball and with cars instead of dolls.
“He was annoyed at times,” Joan says of her son’s reaction to Carla. “He wanted his own crowd and not his baby sister around all the time.”
When Carla was in the eighth grade, her mother had a nervous breakdown, and the children went to live with their father for nearly two years.
“I moved back in the tenth grade,” Carla says. “It was just her and me.”
But the drinking, depression and bouts of anger had not stopped, and Carla withdrew.
The quiet teenager didn’t go out of her way to make friends, softened her hurt listening to The Cars and Led Zeppelin, and generally only made friends when others approached her.
She never said much, says Degler, who was in the same sophomore homeroom at Newark High School with Carla.
“She was quiet and I just started talking,” she says.
They soon hung out together.
“In high school, we’d get together and make dinners at people’s houses, go to high school parties,” Degler says. “She liked to go, but didn’t party like we did. She wasn’t a drinker. We didn’t know why at the time.”
Carla’s mother made sure her daughter had a dime with her whenever she went to a party in high school.
“She called me a couple of times when she was out with a group of friends and things started deteriorating, and people started drinking,” says Joan, who made sure the nights Carla went out she didn’t drink much
By the time Carla was a senior in high school, she had hit a wall. Her grades were mediocre, and she wasn’t thinking seriously about college – or much of anything else, for that matter.
“We got into horrible fights when she was drunk,” Carla says.
It was not only her mother’s drinking.
“I would try to reason with her because I didn’t understand her,” Carla says.
But when the alcohol mixed with her mother’s anger and depression, she was impossible to deal with.
“I wanted to survive,” Carla says of her decision to attend classes given by Al-Anon, an organization that gives support to people who deal with problem drinkers. “I learned my boundaries.”
So did her mother when Carla finally confronted her.
Joan Smathers still remembers her daughter’s words.
“Mom,” Carla told her, “it’s hard for me to watch you drink. I can’t do it anymore. I’m going upstairs and close the door. Please don’t bother me when you’re drinking.”
“That just about killed me,” Joan recalls. “It just so hurt. It wasn’t long after that I made the decision to go into treatment. She was more adult than I was.”
Joan Smathers has not had a drink of liquor in 30 years.
An unlikely pair
Carla Smathers met Jack Markell through a mutual friend when they were sophomores at Newark High School.
“She had a boyfriend and her boyfriend was a friend of mine, a football player,” Markell says. “I always liked her.”
They also worked together at Friendly’s. She was a waitress – who soon became a morning shift supervisor – and he was an ice cream scooper.
“We talked a lot, but that was it,” Carla says. “Jack was very nice to me. But I didn’t think of him that way.”
Carla dated guys very different from Markell, Degler says.
“It was a little surprising that they ended hooking up,” she says. “Carla never went out with guys like Jack. Her guys were more goofy, not serious. Jack’s a pretty serious guy.”
And way above her, Carla thought.
Markell was set to go to Brown University, while Carla took her SATs because, well, everyone else was taking them.
“Keeping mom straight, I was not a very good student,” she says. “I was distracted.”
But she also knew that college was her ticket out.
At their high school graduation, Jack Markell gave the commencement address.
“I had never ever seen Jack before,” says Joan Smathers. “I was so enthralled by this young man. He gave this wonderful speech, and I whispered to Carla, ‘Now that’s a man of substance – that’s the kind of a man, if you choose to marry, you should select.’”
But Carla would not see Markell again for nearly a decade.
While Markell went to Brown, Carla got accepted to the University of Delaware, where she majored in early childhood education. Carla’s father paid her tuition and $100 a month.
More important, she was able to move out of her mother’s house at 17 and get her own apartment near the university.
After graduating, Carla taught preschool for a couple of years at a Wilmington school, but she felt it wasn’t right for her.
“I loved kids but didn’t want to work with them every day,” she says. “I needed to work with adults.”
She found a niche working for four years as a community relations and corporate trainer at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center, Seabrook House, in southern New Jersey.
“The childhood education stuff gave me the tools to be a parent,” Carla says. “It taught me how to really treat a child, with respect and kindness and positive reinforcement.”
Seabrook House used the skills she had learned as an adolescent.
A taste of politics
Jack Markell came into her life by accident.
He and another former Newark High School student were making lists for the class’ tenth reunion. Carla hadn’t made the list.
“I heard about the reunion, and wrote him a letter,” Carla says. “He called me back right away. He said he was moving back to Delaware from DC,” where he had been working for McKinsey and Company, Inc., a management consulting firm.
While Carla developed her skills training people to deal with abusers, Markell had been trying to break into politics.
After graduating from Brown, he moved to Chicago. There, he earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. In Chicago he worked full-time for the First National Bank.
He decided to return to Delaware in 1988 to run state lieutenant governor S.B. Woo’s campaign for U.S. Senate. Woo lost, but it gave Markell a serious taste of state politics.
Meanwhile, he focused on Carla.
After he moved back, he asked her out on a date.
Markell arrived in a Ford Escort, his first car, which he bought at 26. “He had to push garbage from the seat so I could sit down,” she says. And he wore the same clothes he had worn a decade before
They became friends, and hung out a lot at the now-closed O’Freel’s in Wilmington with mutual friends.
Carla continued to date other men. But none seriously. After months of admiring from afar, Markell asked her to date him full time.
Carla said no.
“We were good friends and I didn’t want it to get messy,” she says, but Markell saw the rejection from a distinctly male perspective. “She gave me the typical line about not wanting our friendship to be ruined.”
Carla convinced herself she had a lot of hurdles to overcome before she could get serious with Markell.
“My self-esteem, for one,” she says. “We came from different backgrounds. He was Ivy League-educated. And there was my family. I knew he was not a casual dater.”
But he persisted.
Carla finally said yes.
“It was his sincerity. He believed in me before I did.”
They began dating in 1988, got engaged the next year, and married in June 1990.
Up the ladder
In 1989, Jack Markell went to work for a small company called Fleet Call, which became Nextel – a name he came up with – eventually becoming senior vice president of strategic planning, investor relations and acquisition.
After the company grew, Markell left Nextel in 1995, and the family moved from Basking Ridge, N.J., to Wilmington. Both Jack and Carla wanted to move closer to their parents.
By this time, Carla had given birth to their two children.
Markell landed a job as senior vice president at Comcast, and stayed for two years, before deciding to satisfy his political itch.
For Carla, this seemed as natural as their desire to have children.
In fact, in her letter to Markell about being left of the high school reunion list, she asked him if he was running for anything.
“This was at the end of 1987,” Markell says. “And I was just returning to Delaware.”
Jack Markell was first elected to state treasurer in 1998, re-elected in 2002 and again in 2006.
Carla helped during his 1998 campaign, but the Molly and Michael – born in 1993 and 1996 – were young, and the couple decided she should be home.
The decision to run for governor, when he chose to run in the Democratic primary against the more favored Lt. Gov. John Carney, “was a years-long process,” Markell says. “We talked literally for three years.”
“You can’t stop someone from pursuing his dream,” Carla says. “I think he had to do it.”
This time also marked Carla’s diagnosis of breast cancer, in March 2005.
After a lump was found during a routine mammography, and confirmed by an ultrasound, she had surgery and radiation treatments that summer. She remains cancer-free.
Dealing with her children during the cancer-scare, Carla says she wanted to arm her children early with some of the skills she learned the hard way as a teenager getting past her mother’s illness.
“I was open with my kids about it,” she says. “Some are afraid to talk about it, but I think it’s a hard way to live when you go through things alone. What makes you feel better is when people help take care of you.”