Bios:  Lenore Monello Schloming M.A. & Skip Schloming Ph.D.

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Our intellectual career began in academia and took unexpected turns. We met and married while graduate students in sociology at Brandeis University during the tumultuous Sixties – anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-civil-rights, and hippie communalism. Skip wrote his dissertation “Centralization and Decentralization” and received his Ph.D. in 1974. Lenore wrote her dissertation “The Geometry of Social Life,” had it reviewed – and receive twin sons.

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Our doctoral research and the 1970s oil crisis led us to 60 acres in rural Maine where we homesteaded for 12 years and operated a small private elementary school. Skip wrote one-act musicals for our students and subsequently wrote the book and lyrics for a full-length adult musical based on The Emperor’s New Clothes, “That Emperor’s Fool,” www.thatemperorsfool.com.

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From our marriage onward, we managed rental housing in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, owned by Lenore’s parents and eventually by us. This property brought us back to Cambridge in 1989.

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In 1996, we became president and executive director, respectively, of the Small Property Owners Association, a group of small landlords that had suffered for 25 years under Cambridge’s stringent rent control system. Having failed in all its efforts to reform Cambridge's system, the group launched a statewide referendum in 1994 and ended rent control in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline – by popular vote in this very liberal state. For 23 years as this group’s leaders, we drafted over 200 monthly newsletters, critical of nearly every aspect of landlord-tenant law in Massachusetts. We resigned from our roles in this group in October 2021. We are now drafting a work “Rents in America: The failure of rental housing policy in Massachusetts and nationwide,” in progress. Portions of it appear in the Small Landlord Letter, www.smalllandlord.com.

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Throughout our ventures, our doctoral work remained salient. We have lately developed our ideas more fully in a website-in-progress:  "Wild to Civilized: Human movement patterns from the prehistoric African wilderness to today's global industrial civilization," www.wildtocivilized.com