Joe Loved Women for Grace and Strength

It’s clear to anyone who appreciates Eichler homes that their creator, Joe Eichler, had an eye for beauty. Besides their efficient use of space, their clever touches like exterior doorways from bathrooms and atriums, the homes have an elegance that is rare.

Joe appreciated grace in all things, from athletics to dance. He enjoyed a good play in a baseball game, and he loved to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance.

It’s no surprise then to be reminded that Joe appreciated beautiful women.

His son, Ned, recalled one telling incident in a 2012 interview. He’d be with his father in a restaurant, or on the street, and a beautiful woman would pass by. Ned would feel a nudge from his dad.

“Did you see that dish?” Joe would ask.

No.

“Jesus, what kind of son am I raising?”

So was Joe just another cigar-chomping, Me-Too-provoking sort of a guy? Not if you listen to Ned, who passed away in 2014 but left behind interviews and memoirs.

Ned said his father had great respect for women, employing many in his firms and at upper levels – at a time when relatively few women played important roles in merchant home building.

“He treated women as if they were equals to men, intellectually,” Ned recalled. He treated them as people.”

Joe also abided by a piece of advice he learned very early in his pre-homebuilding career, back in New York City, where he grew up.

Joe was in his early to mid-20s, and either recently married, or soon to be. He had graduated from New York University with a degree in business and was working for “a guy in investments, a guy with a small office.”

His boss told Joe something that he never forgot, Ned recalled. “Never go into an office with a woman and close the door, or you will be accused of something.”

Throughout his years running Eichler Homes and its successor firms, Joe worked with many women, including the firm’s head accountant and treasurer, Ruby Rose Germaine; her assistant, Lisa Boyd, who was married to Joe’s in-house architect, Joe Boyd; Josie Graham, who stepped in with a smile and a solution when home buyers came in with complaints.

Eichler Homes was a bit of a family-run operation, and for a time Joe’s sister-in-law, Mollie Moncharsh, processed loan applications for buyers.

Very few women were working as architects during the period, and even fewer in lead roles. But Joe did work with at least one woman in a lead design role, the landscape architect Kathryn 'Kay' Imlay Stedman. Stedman, wife of the Palo Alto architect Morgan Stedman, began working for Joe very early – designing the landscaping for the Anshen and Allen home Joe built for his own family in the early 1950s.