In 1948, Al Wheeler began the struggle to get home rule for Washington, D.C. More than a half-century later, this remarkable 82-year-old lawyer, businessman, and citizen-activist is still working to improve life in the nation's capital

B Y - L A U R A - W E X L E R

l Wheeler begins each workday much as he has for nearly 60 years. Dressed in a tie, jacket, and jaunty straw hat, he says goodbye to his wife, and steps out of his Georgetown townhouse onto a quiet street. Strolling along, he marvels at the elegant brick townhouses that line the street, calling them the "catfish village." He's got the right to poke fun; he built them.

Walking on a few blocks—passing stately houses that belonged to politicos past, and are still home to Georgetown's elite—Wheeler (AB '40) arrives at Wisconsin Avenue, Georgetown's main commercial thoroughfare. It's a quaint street, full of boutiques and restaurants. Wheeler can take some credit for the quaintness; he wrote the zoning legislation that bans adult bookstores and roving vendors from the area.

Crossing the street, Wheeler ends his commute at a building he bought for $24,000 in 1960, and rebuilt from a condemned shell. Passing through the door next to a small sign reading "A.L. Wheeler Esquire," he climbs a narrow staircase, enters his modest wood-paneled office, sits down at his desk, and gets quickly to work.

It's 10 a.m., and for the next nine hours, stepping out only for lunch at the Georgetown Club or perhaps a quick tennis match, Wheeler will work steadily, drawing up contracts, advising clients, and working on his latest legal brief; for the past half-century, he's written a brief every three weeks, on average. When one of his grown sons, Jimmy or Tommy, steps into his office to pose a legal question, he goes to the thick volumes that line the shelves in his office, and searches for the answer. Wheeler's sons run an investment company from their own offices just down the hall; together with their dad, they own real estate all over the D.C. area, as well as a phone company in Pennsylvania.

By 7 p.m., after putting in a nine-hour workday—which he considers short, given that he regularly worked 12-hour days in his seventies—Wheeler often attends a civic meeting before heading home. These days, he's active in D.C.'s Association of Oldest Inhabitants and in the Georgetown Kiwanis Club. But in the past, his civic activities have been much higher-profile, as the framed photographs in his office attest.

One photo shows 29-year-old Al Wheeler—newly elected chairman of the D.C. Democratic Central Committee—sitting in the backseat of a car leaving Washington's Union Station. The date is Oct. 2, 1948, and in the car's front seat is President Harry Truman, just returning from an 8,300-mile, whistle-stop campaign trip out west. Another photo shows Wheeler and his wife, Naoma, listening intently as Truman delivers his first public address on Nov. 5, 1948—after a victory that came too late for newspapers to correct the headlines declaring "Dewey Defeats Truman." A later photo shows Wheeler standing behind Truman as he proudly displays the inaugural license plate, and yet another shows Wheeler testifying before Congress in support of the D.C. home rule bill, which he himself had written.

Wheeler's struggles on behalf of home rule were a precursor to the 23rd Amendment, which in 1961 granted D.C. three electoral votes and its citizens the right to vote in their first presidential election.

The photographs on Wheeler's wall document the important role Wheeler has played in the history of our nation's capital—and they're particularly important because he doesn't tell stories; he's more comfortable doing deeds than discussing them. Asked how he's managed to be a successful lawyer, real estate developer, businessman, and citizen-activist for nearly 60 years, Wheeler says only: "I sleep fast."

What Al Wheeler won't say is that he possesses a rare combination of skills, drive, and stamina that enables him to make life better not just for himself, but for others as well.

Entering the University of Georgia as a freshman in 1936, Al Wheeler immediately cultivated the breakneck pace at which he's since conducted his life.

"Somehow I got the idea it was very important to develop my mind," says Wheeler. "So I studied pretty good." But at the same time he was studying "good" enough to make Phi Beta Kappa, he played on the varsity tennis team, worked at The Red & Black, and was tapped in his sophomore year for Gridiron and Omicron Delta Kappa.

After graduation from UGA, Wheeler spent four years at Harvard Law School, arriving in Washington, D.C. in 1944 at the ripe old age of 25. Though he'd been trained in tax law, Wheeler's gut told him commercial airlines—which were just starting to flourish as World War II drew to a close—would loom large in the country's future. So he jumped into aviation law headfirst and, within a few years, he'd become one of the few attorneys in the country with the legal expertise to negotiate the hurdles airlines faced as they strove to expand their routes. By 1949, Wheeler had been named a special partner in the Washington, D.C. firm of Roberts and McInnis—the youngest junior partner in the office—and was well on his way to a high-powered law career.

But then Wheeler took an unusual step: he left a prestigious law firm in which he was a partner, and started up his own shop. "I'm a restless kind of person," he says. "I wanted to get out and see what I could do." When he left the firm, his aviation clients followed, and by the 1950s Wheeler had been named vice president and general counsel for North Central Airlines, which is now part of Northwest Airlines. The job required him to spend three days each week at company headquarters in Minneapolis, but Wheeler didn't let the weekly airline commute slow down his activities at home. He soon started a helicopter company to offer commuter service between Washington's two airports, as well as between neighboring cities. Since aviation law required Wheeler to show his company was operationally fit before it could obtain a commuter license, he came up with the idea to use his helicopter fleet to provide traffic surveillance for the D.C. area. Nowadays, helicopter traffic dispatches are as much a fixture of morning newscasts as the weather report. But, back then, helicopter traffic reporting had never been done in Washington. "We put a policeman in the helicopter and did five broadcasts each hour, during rush hour," says Wheeler. "It became such an institution that other cities wanted it."

But that wasn't all. In addition to running both his own law firm and helicopter company, and commuting to Minneapolis each week, Wheeler became a builder and developer. Though his initial goal was just to build a house on a quiet street in Georgetown where his wife and young children could live safely—his youngest son had developed the dangerous habit of bolting out the front door, straight into traffic—he ended up building an 18-home townhouse development that later won a prestigious Journal of Homebuilding design award. "Here I am a lawyer, practicing law, building houses for an avocation," he says, "and they're voted the best townhouses in the country."

From there, Wheeler went on to build housing developments throughout Washington, D.C., as well as apartment buildings, commercial storefronts, and hotels—all in his free time. "All this is going on at the same time," he says, with characteristic understatement. "Kept me kinda busy."

At this point in Al Wheeler's life story, his quip about the importance of "sleeping fast" takes on new meaning. Because even as he was tending to his thriving legal practice and expanding his real estate business, Wheeler continued to serve as chairman of the D.C. Central Committee of the Democratic Party, a tenure that began when he represented the committee at the 1948 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia—where the Southern wing of the party defected, giving rise to the Dixiecrats. That was also the convention in which young Al Wheeler made sure that, for the first time ever, the Democratic Party platform included a plank supporting home rule for the citizens of Washington, D.C.

Best known for his political contributions, Wheeler is also a successful developer—and his helicopter fleet started airborne traffic reports over D.C.

The U.S. Constitution, as written in 1787, ceded all power over the nation's capital to Congress, denying D.C. citizens the right to vote for either their local government or the national government. The struggle for home rule had started long before Wheeler arrived in D.C. But when he got it into the 1948 party platform—via an "old back-scratching deal, I'm afraid," he says—he gave the movement a crucial boost.

Indeed, when Truman won the presidency in 1948, and it came time to draft the home rule bill, Wheeler—a Harvard-trained lawyer as well as the chair of the local Democratic Party—was the man of the hour. He was appointed chief counsel for the District of Columbia Committee of the United States Senate and, over the course of several months in 1949, he wrote the first home rule legislation. "There was no precedent for this," he says. "You really had to watch your Ps and Qs."

Writing the bill, as exhausting as it was, turned out to be the easy part; getting the bill passed was a different story altogether. Though the Senate approved the bill, a powerful South Carolina representative named John McMillan wouldn't allow it past the committee level in the House of Representatives. "We worked on it every week out of my office," says Wheeler. "Everybody used their friends and contacts. We got labor help, civil rights help, Democratic help, even young Republican help." But the congressman wouldn't budge, and when the session ended, Wheeler's home rule bill died with it.

Asked how he gets so much done, Wheeler has a simple answer: "I sleep fast."

Four more times between 1949-60, Wheeler and his allies faced the same situation: victory in the Senate, stonewalling in the House. Then, in 1961, their struggle for home rule finally began to pay off when Congress passed the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting the citizens of Washington, D.C., three votes in the electoral college—which meant they could finally vote in the presidential election. Responding eagerly to their newly granted right, D.C. residents broke a historic voter turnout record in the '64 presidential race. After more than 15 years of voting in his native Georgia via absentee ballot, in November 1964 Wheeler was finally able to vote for president in the city where he lived. He had, at least in part, his own home-rule efforts to thank for that newly granted right.

Then, in 1973, came another victory: Congress granted D.C. citizens the right to elect their own local government. Wheeler headed up the Georgetown campaign office for mayoral candidate Walter Washington, who, with his 1974 victory, became the first African-American chief executive of a major city. Years later, Washington, who'd worked alongside Wheeler in the fight for home rule, would commend Wheeler's lifelong dedication.

"Al Wheeler was one of the best local Democratic chairmen we've ever had," says Washington, who served as mayor until 1978. "When people asked him to help, he did whatever he could. He's proven himself to be an outstanding citizen."

At an age when he should be long retired, Wheeler still puts in nine-hour days, writing legal briefs and keeping tabs on the real estate and phone company holdings he and his two sons share.

The struggle for home rule was the lengthiest of Wheeler's career, but it was far from his only public service activity. He was a member of the D.C. police department's Committee on Crime Reduction and Prevention and the D.C. Tax Revision Commission. He was one of six people chosen to testify before the Senate regarding the creation of the D.C. Convention Center. And he was appointed director of the congressional committee charged with planning the 200th anniversary of the founding of Washington, D.C. And that's just to name a few.

Wheeler's efforts haven't gone unnoticed. In 1987, the D.C. city council passed a resolution commending him for his public service. In 1992, he was again commended for his civic activities, and placed in Georgetown's Hall of Fame. And, most recently, in June 2001, the Federation of Citizens Associations of the District of Columbia gave Wheeler their Award for Outstanding Leadership and Achievement.

"We don't have more active Washingtonians like Mr. Wheeler," the award's presenter said, "because they couldn't stand the pace."

Guy Gwynne, a retired diplomat and longtime community activist, sums up Wheeler's role in a single statement:

"Washington would be a poorer place without him."

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