When San Francisco jazz pianist Don Friedman performs in a beachside home in January, the soirée may strike a familiar chord with Carol Ludwig and Warren Obluck.
Such evenings were a part of their lives together as career diplomats in the U.S. Foreign Service.
Today, they quietly lend their support to Vero’s rich cultural offerings. Obluck coordinates the Film Studies Program at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. Ludwig, who at the end of her Foreign Service career trained in giving spiritual direction to others, now runs Vero’s Center for Spiritual Care, a gathering place for a wide range of classes and interest groups focusing on creativity, spirituality and healing.
That space has recently opened its main meeting room as a gallery to some of Vero’s top artists.
Among the many prominent supporters of the arts in Vero, few could match the couple’s worldliness. Both served at U.S. embassies in Tokyo, Manila, Mexico City and Rome, Obluck as cultural attaché; Ludwig as press attaché. Together they entertained many of their host nations’ best-known artists, writers, musicians, and journalists.
They also prepared for visiting American artists, as when Alvin Ailey’s dance troupe came to Manila, and the couple entertained them for two weeks, often in their home, along with a host of Filipino dancers. And actor Alan Alda and his wife stayed with them a week in Tokyo, arriving with Robert Redford and a contingent from the Sundance Film Festival. Susan Sontag hung out with Obluck; so did Helen Frankenthaler. “Helen was a hoot, but we loved her,” says Obluck.
Sylvia Poggioli befriended Ludwig, and they remain close today.
And then there were celebrities in over their heads. “I once made the mistake of escorting the old Boston Celtic coach Red Auerbach through a particularly challenging conceptual art exhibition we had produced at the Tokyo American Cultural center,” says Obluck. “I’ve no idea what I could have been thinking.”
At the pinnacle of his career, Obluck was deputy director of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, a department with a multi-million dollar budget overseeing programs involving some 50,000 American students abroad, including Fulbright scholars.
During much of her tenure, Ludwig was in charge of coordinating the international media. In 1983, after the Soviets shot down a KAL passenger jet over the Sea of Japan, Ludwig found herself “bobbing around in the ocean in a rubber boat full of Japanese reporters, presumably looking for wreckage,” Obluck recalls.
Ludwig specialized in preparing for U.S. presidential summits, including in 1991 when she was called to Spain to prepare for the Middle East peace talks.
At the time, she was learning Italian for the couple’s posting in Rome, where she, too, would serve as cultural attaché, succeeding her husband after his retirement.
It was their first time living in Europe, and what a time they had: after Tokyo, “it was like Fellini,” says Ludwig.
They lived in an embassy-owned apartment at the top of a 15th century building that had served as a hospital during the plague. “It was fantastic. Phenomenal,” recalls Obluck. “We lived just outside the heart of Rome, and from our roof you could see across the river to the Vatican. It was hard to imagine we were really there.”
They chose that view from the terrace as backdrop for a portrait by an American artist, one of Obluck’s Fulbright scholars. Today the painting hangs along with dozens of other artworks from their travels in the home they built in 1993 in western Vero. Like so many of their postings abroad, the choice of locale for their retirement was more or less by default. Obluck’s ailing aunt lived in Vero; his mother moved here to be near her. Visiting, the couple found it a fine place to retire.
“We were sitting around the pool, and it was blue skies and 80 degrees in January. We thought, why not here?” recalls Ludwig.
Both she and Obluck are used to snowy winters. Obluck was born in Milwaukee, later moving to Chicago. His father was bookkeeper for a traveling circus, and when his parents got divorced, Obluck would spend his summers on the train with him. “It was wonderful,” he recalled, enumerating a few of the bawdier characters as his wife whispered in jest, “Off the record!”
Obluck’s mother eventually moved to Los Angeles. It was at Los Angeles City College that Obluck, a budding saxophonist, met Don Friedman, the pianist scheduled to play in Vero. Daunted by the musical talent that surrounded him, he switched majors to journalism, graduating from the University of Southern California and then earning a master’s at Columbia University. Then came a vacation to Spain that changed his life.
“A USC classmate was working at the American Embassy. I thought it was the most amazing existence I could imagine.” He studied a year for the foreign service exam, aced it, and was posted to Caracas. It was not a cushy assignment in 1961.
“Cuba was fomenting a revolution in Venezuela. Americans were fair game,” Obluck recalls. “The week before I arrived a bomb had gone off in the men’s room on the embassy’s top floor. For a couple of weeks, cars would drive by and strafe the building with machine guns. It always happened at night, though, so it just seemed surreal, not truly dangerous.”
Obluck says that over the years, security at embassies “improved hugely and continues to do so,” despite being shortchanged by Congress. “And I think deep down we all were adventurers and we stayed in the business because it could be not only exotic but incredibly exciting and fulfilling.”
Meanwhile, Ludwig would have her own defining moment in college: she broke her back sliding down a snowy hill on a cafeteria tray. Growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, one of nine children including six brothers. Though she “spent a lot of time in the library,” she was also athletic, an all-city softball pitcher and high jump champion.
Hers was a deeply spiritual Roman Catholic family, concerned with what today would be called social justice issues, Ludwig recalls. One brother would become a priest, another a lay minister, and Ludwig herself expected to pursue either theology or psychology in college.
She was at Dubuque’s Clarke College, playing on the women’s basketball team, when she smashed into a tree, breaking five vertebra.
“It changed everything,” she says. “I was kind of a hot-shot kid. It taught me a lot about being king of the hill.”
After she recovered, a mentor suggested a year abroad at the East-West Center in Hawaii. There she lived in a dorm with eight Asian women, each from a different country.
The experience left her eager for more. She earned a master’s degree from the University of Dayton in Asian and American history. She would later earn a Ph.D. in international communications at American University in Washington, DC.
First, though, she took a job on the World Campus Afloat, which led to a job teaching English in Tokyo. There, she met Obluck. They were married in 1974.
In 1998, two years after moving permanently to Vero, Obluck approached the museum about the film studies series. Today the five-week Tuesday screenings, with Obluck’s commentary, are often sell-outs.
In 2000 Ludwig signed a lease on a house north of the Main Library, and opened the Center for Spiritual Care, a non-denominational meeting place for a range of pursuits from meditation and alternative healing to grief counseling. When photographer Aric Attas, battling cancer with the help of his art, came to Ludwig’s attention, she invited him to show at the Center. Ellen Fischer had a show in October; Deborah Gooch has one now. Sean Sexton is on the schedule for January.
