Bits from the Past: DC in the 1950s

Sam Smith - I returned to my hometown of Washington in 1957 to work for the summer as a radio newsman for WWDC. It was, on the surface, a quiet, rarely air-conditioned southern town. When I first got to Argonne Place, I noticed that the Ontario Theater was playing Love in the Afternoon. At the end of the summer it still was. The radio stations were playing Pat Boone's Love Letters in the Sand. At the end of the summer they still were. When I worked the late night shift, I would drive to the station listening to a program on WOL called The Cabbie's Serenade -- dedicated, said the host, Al Jefferson, "to all you guys driving the loneliest mile in the world."

Despite the apparent somnolence, DC was actually undergoing a mass migration of blacks from further south. Almost from its beginning, DC had been the first stop in the black promised land. Now the city had just turned into a majority black town.

Despite the demographic trend, however, there was nothing remotely approaching black power. More than once, when calling the DC police dispatcher from the radio station to check on overnight action, I was told, "Nothin' but a few nigger stabbings." It had, after all, only been twelve years since the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell arrived to take his seat in the House of Representatives. Stepping into his office for the first time he found a memo on his desk headed "Dos and Don'ts for Negro Congressmen." One was "Don't eat in the House dining room."

The local papers routinely listed the race of victims and perpetrators in crime stories. A Washington Star veteran recalled "the grieving widow who called me one day after I'd done an obit about her late husband, in which I had referred to him as a D.C. native. 'He wasn't no native,' she shrieked. 'He was as white as you or I!'" And when I went to cover the annual Brotherhood Week luncheon at a local hotel, a reporter leaned over and said, "Do you notice the only Negroes in this place are the waiters?".

This same reporter called me at 2 a.m. the morning after the funeral of Sweet, Precious Daddy Grace, the colorful bishop of the United House of Prayer for All People. "I'm down here waiting for them to choose Daddy Grace's successor," he whispered into the phone, "and I'm the only white person here. How about coming down?"

I had covered the funeral earlier that day and had been struck by the jewelry bedizening the lifeless and red, white and blue long finger-nailed form of the late charismatic - who one paper said resembled Buffalo Bill. I got dressed and joined my friend at 601 M St. NW -- two young, unwelcomed white guys sitting quietly in the pre-dawn darkness of a church basement hallway waiting for the end of a seven-hour deliberation.

In much of Washington  not much was happening. This was a town, after all, where the leading department store had only begun Sunday advertising after WWII. This was a town where Mrs. Eisenhower's secretary had trouble charging a pair of gloves for her employer at the White House. The Eisenhowers had, after all, been out of DC for some time and their account had been closed. The clerk, the secretary was told, would have to check with the manager.

Only a handful of restaurants, such as the just opened Anna Maria's on Connecticut Ave.(with the most costly item being veal scallopini at $4.25), the A.V. Ristorante on NY Ave, and spots along U Street stayed open after midnight. It was still illegal to drink standing up or to carry your drink from the bar to your table.

My own late night snacking choice was the DC Diner, which squatted in a parking lot near Vermont & L NW. The silver diner had a conventional counter filling about two thirds of its length, with a little paneled nook at one end just large enough for several tables and a display of race track photos. Into the DC Diner came cops, drunks and prostitutes and, on early Sunday mornings, congregants from the midnight "printers' mass" the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception thoughtfully provided late shift workers at the Government Printing Office as well as for the Catholic young men returning from dates.

My routine was to order the steak and egg breakfast. A beefy cook would grab a couple of eggs and burst them on the grill. The steak followed. He then reached over to grab a handful of home fries from the foot-high pile that sat nearly cooked in a cool corner of the stove. Almost simultaneously the chef lunged for a fistful of salad from a five gallon potato chip can resting under the counter and plopped it into a side dish. During the whole procedure no kitchen utensil touched his hands, yet few meals have tasted as good.

It was then, as now, exciting to be young and living in the capital, perhaps more so because, as with late night restaurants, there was less around to be excited about. Only three television networks. Only one movie at the Ontario Theater all summer long. Only the set of values your parents, your schools, three networks and the local movie house had given you. And, increasingly in the 1950s, only one way to be a good American.