To get a sense of what shaped Kevyn Orr and what drives Detroit's emergency financial manager, the Freep speaks with people who know him best -- including Dorothy Orr, 80.
At her Presbyterian Church is Oakland Park, Fla., the successful attorney's mom explained why she didn't spell his first name "Kevin."
"The Y sounds the same as an I," she says. "But when you see it, it's distinctive."
A three-reporter team led by Brian Dickerson also presents these insights and comments about the man who Monday tackles far-reaching decisions about Detroit's future:
- Early dream: As a first-grader at Ft. Lauderdale's Sunland Elementary School, the precocious 7-year-old "would mention certain things that were going on in the media, and then he would tell me what he would have done if he had been the attorney at that time," recalls ex-teacher Margaret Larkins, who says Kevyn already spoke of plans to be a lawyer.
- Segregated suburb: He grew up in Oakland Park, which the Detroit journalists describe as "an almost exclusively African-American suburb of tidy but modest one-story houses just northwest of Ft. Lauderdale. . . . a magnet for black professionals like his parents."
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JFK impact: Kevyn Orr says in an interview that interest in the law was kindled the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.
"I was about 5, and I kept wondering what's going on, because the whole city went quiet, and everybody was crying, even my dad," he recalled. "And that evening I went to bed and I wanted to sleep with my dad, in case there were people going around killing dads. I needed to protect him from that."
He didn't know the difference between a murder and a political assassination. But somehow Kennedy's killing "struck me as particularly lawless and heinous, and I wanted to do something about it. ... That started my interest in law."
- Making a splash in Miami: After graduating from UM Law School, Orr worked at a Miami law firm, lived in Coconut Grove, was featured in a Miami Herald feature on eligible bachelors and became the first African-American in the Key Biscayne Yacht Club -- securing his place, he told friends, in "the shortest book ever written: 'Negro Yachtsmen I Have Known.' "
- Series of tragedies: "The '90s were a rough time," Orr tells the reporters, with ample reason. "As his professional life hit cruising speed, he was rocked by a succession of personal tragedies," they write.
The first casualty was a former girlfriend, Tracy Paules, who was finishing up her senior year at the University of Florida in 1990 when she was murdered. . . . Less than two years later, Orr's big brother, Allen Eugene Jr., died at 37 after a brief diabetes-related infection. . . . Kevyn blames the shock for the premature death of his father . . . in 1995.
The following year, 26-year-old Eliot Jerard [another brother] was killed in a car crash.
The lengthy profile also features the voices of law firm partners, former classmates and Donna Neale, the physician he wed in 2004.
Like Orr, Neale -- who works at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore and at the Hopkins-affiliated Howard County General Hospital -- was an overachiever who moved easily across racial and social boundaries.
