By Alan Suderman
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
The walls of Carl and Jo Shannon’s apartment home at Eagle’s Trace are a testament to the couple’s love of adventure. From Mexican paintings to Eskimo masks, the couple’s treasures are small tokens of the bounty of exciting memories they have from living and traveling to exotic places.
And lots of residents have seen those walls. Carl and Jo Shannon are among many at Eagle’s Trace who invite other community members over before going to dinner together in the restaurants on campus.
“We enjoy having people over for some wine and cheese, or going over to someone else’s apartment,” Carl Shannon says. “It’s very common here to socialize a bit before dinner.”
Living globally, at home in Texas
Socializing and exploring are two activities that have brought the couple together and which continue to unite them.
Carl Shannon is a retired Episcopal priest who has never really retired; Jo Shannon is an award-winning social worker who likes to stay involved.
They met at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he played football, and got married after his first year of seminary school in Austin. On their fourth day of marriage, they reported to a mental hospital for pastoral training.
“We put about five years on our marriage in three months,” Carl Shannon says.
The couple traveled to many other interesting places—Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Mexico—where Carl Shannon helped churches get off the ground and Jo Shannon worked in high schools and with foreign adoptions.
“We’ve lived in Puerto Rico, Costa Rica, Mexico and Michigan—all four of them are foreign countries,” he jokes.