Carl Hencknell, the Rector of All Saints, and Dr. James E. Dedman, the City of Birmingham health officer in 1911 to start the Holy Innocents Hospital.
Following Birmingham were stints in Greensboro, Alabama, and Clarksville, Tennessee, where he helped organize, put into action, and was chief probation officer of that city's juvenile court.
At the end of World War I de Ovies would accept the position as rector at Trinity Church in Galveston, Texas, and the family would move there.
In spite of the financial concerns of the Depression era the ground for the new Pro-Cathedral was broken at the site between Peachtree Street and Andrews Drive on 18 June 1933.
The Cathedral put forward $45,000.00 to purchase the site in the very desirable and fashionable Buckhead District and de Ovies became a key backer of the move.
De Ovies had begun writing a thrice-weekly column for the Atlanta Journal in 1930, along with the occasional full-length Sunday article, giving him wider exposure beyond the church.
The book was an outgrowth of de Ovies's years of work teaching Sunday school, engaged in childhood psychology, and counseling parents on childrearing.
The book sold well, but with the coming of World War II it was not the best-seller that Somewhere to be Had was, largely as the public's attention was focused on more dire and pressing concerns.
Two years later, de Ovies would serve as officiant at the funeral of longtime friend and fellow Atlanta Journal contributor Margaret Mitchell.
His retirement years were anything but quiet, with de Ovies assisting in setting up the Georgian Clinic for the treatment of alcoholics in 1953, serving in the role as director of religious therapy in counseling individuals undergoing rehabilitation there.
That same April, the magazine Pastoral Psychology named de Ovies its "Man of the Month" for his work as chaplain of the Peachtree Sanitarium and at the Georgian Clinic.
Ten days later, Atlanta would suffer what was likely the most catastrophic loss of the decade, as 106 Atlantans would lose their life in the crash of the airliner Chateau de Sully at Orly Airport, just outside Paris, France.