When I returned to Washington
after graduation from college, I lived for a while in a room of a house belonging
to a suburban lady who insisted on giving me coffee and details
of her current ailments every morning. It was cheap and convenient
-- I was able to ride a bike to work -- but I quickly accepted
the invitation of my friend Larry Smith to move in with him on
Capitol Hill.
101 5Th Street taken in 2005 during the shooting of a 1950s era film
starring starring Matt Daimon
Larry had grown up at 101 5th St. NE in a tall Victorian row structure that for many years doubled as a boarding house for congressional pages, eventually 1500 of them. Larry's mother, Olive Smith, a 1920 graduate of Smith College, ran the boarding house, raised three sons and, from the late fifties on, served as ad hoc den mother for a succession of Harvard men passing through Washington. Larry's father, a native of Ireland, was an engineer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. George Smith worked in leather in his spare time, earning the nickname, Pocketbook Smith.
Years later when my family and I stepped aboard one of Amtrak's new Metroliners - then with its engineer's cab in the front car - I asked the conductor whether he had known Pocketbook Smith. He had and it was a magic question because shortly after departure our two small boys were invited to sit on the engineer's lap as he drove the train at 100 miles per hours. Everyone liked Pocketbook Smith.
Olive Smith had values, opinions, wisdom and specific knowledge in the manner of any good den mother. The opinions she would offer on request or otherwise. Somewhere in my files is a note from her complaining about my use of the phrase "nearly unique" and another arguing that one can not have shades of black and especially in writing about it.
You learned to ask her things as well. I remember one evening watching Mrs. Smith in her early 20th century dining room explaining to my friend Warren Myers, then teaching classics at Groton, how to get across some fine points of Latin grammar. Many more times I remember her laughing at her son's friends' jokes and antics, joining in heated discussion between Larry and the oft-visiting Father Petrini, or recounting her own stories. Like the time her exhaust fan overheated and she called the fire department. When she apologized for having bothered them, the fire lieutenant had said, "It is better, ma'am, to not need us and call us then to need us and not call us." The idea of not calling the fire department when you needed it struck Olive Smith as very funny. It was something she would never have done.
The Smiths also owned a boarding house at the other end of the block at 125 5th Street NE. When I first moved there, Larry was on the top floor. Larry, employed by the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company, had the haircut and build of the ex-high school varsity basketball player he had been, but the library of the Harvard English instructor and Ph.D. he would eventually become. His collection already comprised about 600 volumes, all carefully cataloged on 3 by 5 cards. He had, according to his calculations, read two-thirds of the books. And Larry had already developed the habit of carrying on a conversation with his books through extensive scrawled green ink marginalia that varied from the profound to the merely obscene.
Later, Larry took a job out of town and Bill, a reporter for the Washington Post and later a network news executive, moved in. Bill carried himself with a great southern dignity that had the curious tendency to reinforce itself the more he drank.
One night we were at the Carroll Arms Hotel, sipping whiskey and listening to a young, popular Hill comic named Mark Russell. The hotel, just steps away from the Senate office buildings, offered rooms by the hour. As Russell later put it, he got his start in a brothel.
Outside, one of those rare but deep Washington blizzards was underway. Despite our considerable consumption over the evening, Bill carried on a normal conversation. It should have been a clue. As we left the hotel, Bill without warning threw himself against the revolving door and hurtled face down into a magnificent snow bank that had blossomed on the sidewalk.
We had walked from the apartment, a half dozen blocks away, and there was no choice but to raise Bill upright, sling his arm over my shoulder in the classic grasp and started slogging back to 5th Street. On a couple of occasions I tried to flag down a car, but there was little interest in assisting a couple of inebriates on an all too snowy night.
With no little exertion I finally got Bill back to 5th Street. By this time he had virtually passed out and I was not far behind. I laid him out in the snow at the edge of the street, and went inside to find another boarder to help me carry him to the third floor.
Bill drank no more than the rest of us, which was a lot. The parties at 125 5th Street were frequent and flowing, one I described in a letter:
The grill, open from 6 am to 10 pm, was run by two Greek brothers, Pete & Sam, who split the shift. They never took a vacation and put at least one boy through collage through their unflagging provision of braised short-ribs, chicken Greek style, and "I Hear a Symphony" calling from the juke box.
They fed the old Capitol Hill roomers, the guys from the union hall down the street, and a few young singles like myself with good plain food that varied no more over the years than the shade of brick on the school across the street. One of their sons would come to own his own restaurant on Capitol Hill.
After I became engaged, I bought a house just a few blocks away. It was one of the toughest sections of town but we would experience relatively few problems. Which is to say that only two cars of friends were stolen from our block. Our house was broken into several times. Once, a half gallon of vodka was returned to us by the police, complete with blood stains and evidence tag. I kept it like that in my bar. Some months later, the house was broken into and the bottle stolen again.
There were also a few break-ins that were less than routine. One afternoon I came home and found my front door busted open. Through the void, two friends were pushing an ugly old mantle piece they thought would look nice around my fireplace.
I had assured my fiance that the new neighborhood was safe. It was, after all, only about four blocks away from where I was already living. The neighborhood kids who helped me move weren't so sure. Over lunch at my new abode, one observed that he "wouldn't come over here with the whole US Marines."
"But," replied another, "it's better than Death Alley."
"Death Alley?"
"You know, Sam, that alley behind your apartment." I had never thought about it from a kid's point of view, but he was right: the dead end of Death Alley would not be a pleasant place to be trapped.
starring starring Matt Daimon
Larry had grown up at 101 5th St. NE in a tall Victorian row structure that for many years doubled as a boarding house for congressional pages, eventually 1500 of them. Larry's mother, Olive Smith, a 1920 graduate of Smith College, ran the boarding house, raised three sons and, from the late fifties on, served as ad hoc den mother for a succession of Harvard men passing through Washington. Larry's father, a native of Ireland, was an engineer on the Pennsylvania Railroad. George Smith worked in leather in his spare time, earning the nickname, Pocketbook Smith.
Years later when my family and I stepped aboard one of Amtrak's new Metroliners - then with its engineer's cab in the front car - I asked the conductor whether he had known Pocketbook Smith. He had and it was a magic question because shortly after departure our two small boys were invited to sit on the engineer's lap as he drove the train at 100 miles per hours. Everyone liked Pocketbook Smith.
Olive Smith had values, opinions, wisdom and specific knowledge in the manner of any good den mother. The opinions she would offer on request or otherwise. Somewhere in my files is a note from her complaining about my use of the phrase "nearly unique" and another arguing that one can not have shades of black and especially in writing about it.
You learned to ask her things as well. I remember one evening watching Mrs. Smith in her early 20th century dining room explaining to my friend Warren Myers, then teaching classics at Groton, how to get across some fine points of Latin grammar. Many more times I remember her laughing at her son's friends' jokes and antics, joining in heated discussion between Larry and the oft-visiting Father Petrini, or recounting her own stories. Like the time her exhaust fan overheated and she called the fire department. When she apologized for having bothered them, the fire lieutenant had said, "It is better, ma'am, to not need us and call us then to need us and not call us." The idea of not calling the fire department when you needed it struck Olive Smith as very funny. It was something she would never have done.
The Smiths also owned a boarding house at the other end of the block at 125 5th Street NE. When I first moved there, Larry was on the top floor. Larry, employed by the Chesapeake & Potomac Telephone Company, had the haircut and build of the ex-high school varsity basketball player he had been, but the library of the Harvard English instructor and Ph.D. he would eventually become. His collection already comprised about 600 volumes, all carefully cataloged on 3 by 5 cards. He had, according to his calculations, read two-thirds of the books. And Larry had already developed the habit of carrying on a conversation with his books through extensive scrawled green ink marginalia that varied from the profound to the merely obscene.
Later, Larry took a job out of town and Bill, a reporter for the Washington Post and later a network news executive, moved in. Bill carried himself with a great southern dignity that had the curious tendency to reinforce itself the more he drank.
One night we were at the Carroll Arms Hotel, sipping whiskey and listening to a young, popular Hill comic named Mark Russell. The hotel, just steps away from the Senate office buildings, offered rooms by the hour. As Russell later put it, he got his start in a brothel.
Outside, one of those rare but deep Washington blizzards was underway. Despite our considerable consumption over the evening, Bill carried on a normal conversation. It should have been a clue. As we left the hotel, Bill without warning threw himself against the revolving door and hurtled face down into a magnificent snow bank that had blossomed on the sidewalk.
We had walked from the apartment, a half dozen blocks away, and there was no choice but to raise Bill upright, sling his arm over my shoulder in the classic grasp and started slogging back to 5th Street. On a couple of occasions I tried to flag down a car, but there was little interest in assisting a couple of inebriates on an all too snowy night.
With no little exertion I finally got Bill back to 5th Street. By this time he had virtually passed out and I was not far behind. I laid him out in the snow at the edge of the street, and went inside to find another boarder to help me carry him to the third floor.
Bill drank no more than the rest of us, which was a lot. The parties at 125 5th Street were frequent and flowing, one I described in a letter:
I found a group gathered around the stove in our kitchen. On closer inspection, it appeared that one of the crowd had his head in the oven. He was, it was explained, Caryl Chessman and a game was being played in which the drunkest person present was to be declared Governor Pat Brown and allowed to pardon the convicted kidnapper, robber and rapist - or turn on the gas. I was sober enough to end the game.In my neighborhood, the Age of Aquarius often looked more like a war zone. Many of the people there were not part of a counter-culture but of an abandoned one. Even the jukebox at the Stanton Grill -- purveyors of Greek and American food to white Appalachian boarding house residents -- played the Supremes and the Temptations, not Bob Dylan.
The grill, open from 6 am to 10 pm, was run by two Greek brothers, Pete & Sam, who split the shift. They never took a vacation and put at least one boy through collage through their unflagging provision of braised short-ribs, chicken Greek style, and "I Hear a Symphony" calling from the juke box.
They fed the old Capitol Hill roomers, the guys from the union hall down the street, and a few young singles like myself with good plain food that varied no more over the years than the shade of brick on the school across the street. One of their sons would come to own his own restaurant on Capitol Hill.
After I became engaged, I bought a house just a few blocks away. It was one of the toughest sections of town but we would experience relatively few problems. Which is to say that only two cars of friends were stolen from our block. Our house was broken into several times. Once, a half gallon of vodka was returned to us by the police, complete with blood stains and evidence tag. I kept it like that in my bar. Some months later, the house was broken into and the bottle stolen again.
There were also a few break-ins that were less than routine. One afternoon I came home and found my front door busted open. Through the void, two friends were pushing an ugly old mantle piece they thought would look nice around my fireplace.
I had assured my fiance that the new neighborhood was safe. It was, after all, only about four blocks away from where I was already living. The neighborhood kids who helped me move weren't so sure. Over lunch at my new abode, one observed that he "wouldn't come over here with the whole US Marines."
"But," replied another, "it's better than Death Alley."
"Death Alley?"
"You know, Sam, that alley behind your apartment." I had never thought about it from a kid's point of view, but he was right: the dead end of Death Alley would not be a pleasant place to be trapped.
The One Iota In Front of Gloria
When I returned to my new but yet unoccupied house one morning, I found that a prized possession was gone already, an eight-foot styrofoam sailing dinghy precisely named the One Iota. It was barely more than a beer cooler with canvas, rudder and a dagger board, but at forty pounds, it was easy to flip on top of Gloria and drive down to Roach's Run at the end of the National Airport runway for a late afternoon sail. Gloria was my ten year-old Chrysler New Yorker. I called it Gloria because it was sick transit.
Sailing on the Potomac was something of an exercise in maritime masochism. The down draft of a landing plane could flip a small sailboat using the end of the runway for home port. On one occasion I beached the boat and took refuge during a thunderstorm in my swimming suit under an Anacostia freeway overpass.
There wasn't much wind in summer and it was said that if you fell overboard you should get a tetanus shot. I tried, however, to provide some elegance to the experience: I placed a jack staff on the transom from which I flew a tiny yacht ensign and added two cocktail glass holders mounted on gimbal rings.
One day, Jerry Cabel, press secretary to Senator Phil Hart, joined me for a late afternoon sail. We were lolling about the Potomac drinking Myer's rum when Jerry proposed that we have dinner at Hogates, a waterfront restaurant,.
"I don't think we're dressed for it," I demurred.
"Leave it to me."
And so two slightly damp sailors in t-shirts and jeans walked up to the maitre d' and as he crinkled his nose, Jerry announced haughtily, "A table for two, please. We came by sea."
Now my beloved yacht had been stolen from the backyard. The window in the basement was broken and mast, oars, rudder, daggerboard, lifejackets and sails were all gone. Nothing else in the house had been touched. Clearly a ruthless gang of cheap sailing dinghy thieves had been at work.
I walked down to the 9th Precinct -- then claiming the city's worst crime rate -- and reported a stolen boat. The desk officer looked intently at the Polaroid photo I had brought along. "Would you like to keep it?" I asked. "No," he replied. "I wouldn't know where to file it."
Later that same day, Thomas Glasgow Smith, attorney at law, part Cherokee, all alcoholic, and about the foulest-mouthed, craziest paragon of decency I ever met, called to say that he had borrowed the One Iota and would soon be returning it. It seems he had been on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay the previous evening and had decided at about two in the morning to go for a sail and thought I wouldn't mind.
Which is one of the reasons I was less than totally surprised by the subsequent forced entry by mantle piece. One of the perps, after all, had been Tom Smith. Tom was beloved in the neighborhood until about the third drink after which almost anything was possible. He had, as chair of the local recreation council, once called a 6:30 am emergency meeting to deal with the just discovered gross misplacement of several pieces of play equipment in an unprotected corner of a park only a few feet from a freeway entrance ramp. We quickly gathered in a nearby home as Tom awakened the recreation director with a torrent of obscenities. The equipment was moved later that day.
Sailing on the Potomac was something of an exercise in maritime masochism. The down draft of a landing plane could flip a small sailboat using the end of the runway for home port. On one occasion I beached the boat and took refuge during a thunderstorm in my swimming suit under an Anacostia freeway overpass.
There wasn't much wind in summer and it was said that if you fell overboard you should get a tetanus shot. I tried, however, to provide some elegance to the experience: I placed a jack staff on the transom from which I flew a tiny yacht ensign and added two cocktail glass holders mounted on gimbal rings.
One day, Jerry Cabel, press secretary to Senator Phil Hart, joined me for a late afternoon sail. We were lolling about the Potomac drinking Myer's rum when Jerry proposed that we have dinner at Hogates, a waterfront restaurant,.
"I don't think we're dressed for it," I demurred.
"Leave it to me."
And so two slightly damp sailors in t-shirts and jeans walked up to the maitre d' and as he crinkled his nose, Jerry announced haughtily, "A table for two, please. We came by sea."
Now my beloved yacht had been stolen from the backyard. The window in the basement was broken and mast, oars, rudder, daggerboard, lifejackets and sails were all gone. Nothing else in the house had been touched. Clearly a ruthless gang of cheap sailing dinghy thieves had been at work.
I walked down to the 9th Precinct -- then claiming the city's worst crime rate -- and reported a stolen boat. The desk officer looked intently at the Polaroid photo I had brought along. "Would you like to keep it?" I asked. "No," he replied. "I wouldn't know where to file it."
Later that same day, Thomas Glasgow Smith, attorney at law, part Cherokee, all alcoholic, and about the foulest-mouthed, craziest paragon of decency I ever met, called to say that he had borrowed the One Iota and would soon be returning it. It seems he had been on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay the previous evening and had decided at about two in the morning to go for a sail and thought I wouldn't mind.
Which is one of the reasons I was less than totally surprised by the subsequent forced entry by mantle piece. One of the perps, after all, had been Tom Smith. Tom was beloved in the neighborhood until about the third drink after which almost anything was possible. He had, as chair of the local recreation council, once called a 6:30 am emergency meeting to deal with the just discovered gross misplacement of several pieces of play equipment in an unprotected corner of a park only a few feet from a freeway entrance ramp. We quickly gathered in a nearby home as Tom awakened the recreation director with a torrent of obscenities. The equipment was moved later that day.
That wasn't Tom's only victory. Sometime later Lady Bird Johnson got famous landscape planner Larry Halperin to come up with a whole ecological and recreational layout for the neighborhood based in part on our committee's survey of possibilities - much of which was eventually completed. Which is how a mantle intruding, boat napping character helped me learn that there was a lot more to getting things done than what became known as "the proper process."
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