James W. Rouse*

Jim Rouse was born in 1914 in Easton, Maryland. He grew up the youngest in a family of six children and lost both of his parents when he was 16. After his parents' death, he hitchhiked across the country and booked steerage on a ship to Honolulu to live near his sister.

He attended the University of Hawaii, and then earned a scholarship to the University of Virginia, but with the Great Depression at its height, he decided instead to go to Baltimore, where he could attend law school at night and work during the day parking cars in a garage.

After jobs with the Federal Housing Administration and the Title Guaranteed Company, Rouse began a mortgage banking business, which became The Rouse Company, a real estate development firm. In the 1960s, the company constructed the planned city of Columbia, Maryland. It later revitalized Boston's Faneuil Hall Marketplace and built Harborplace along Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

Among other accomplishments in government, Rouse was a member of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Advisory Committee on Housing in 1953, a member of President Ronald Reagan's Task Force on Private Sector Initiative, and chairman of the National Housing Task Force.