A recording of our Jan. 29 webinar, “Chevy Chase DC at 250: Beyond the Burgers and Fireworks,” is now posted here for your enjoyment. It is the first of a three-part series to thoughtfully examine our community’s history century by century through the stories of people whose descendants once lived and raised their families on the same land we do today.

They were people like Caroline Branham and John Hutton, both of whom were born enslaved but by twists of fate and relentless willpower, they ensured their offspring would thrive by the middle of the 19th century as free people. And they did, right here in Chevy Chase DC.

The 90-minute discussion, with an introduction by Carl Lankowski and hosted by Chas Cadwell, both HCCDC board officers, featured lively presentations by historians Jocelind Julien and Mark Auslander. Julien is a descendant of Branham, a woman who was enslaved at Mount Vernon to serve Martha Washington and whose family just a couple of generations later bought land on Broad Branch Road. Historical anthropologist Mark Auslander of American University, shared some of his latest research on the role of African Americans on both sides of the Revolution, including John Hutton, likely the first Black landowner in what became known as the Hepburn tract of land near Broad Branch Road.

Lankowski said that the webinar series is an outgrowth of HCCDC’s work over the past several years to understand how Chevy Chase DC became the community it is today, and what it owes to our future residents especially as community and city leaders contemplate development.

This upper Northwest neighborhood had a unique opportunity to witness much of this history due to its geographic proximity to the seat of the world’s longest-surviving democracy. History tells us that the citizens who shaped Chevy Chase DC literally crossed paths with the founders as colleagues, nation builders, and also as enslaved laborers. We can In fact trace the stories of several early African American landowning families to their economic ties to  George Washington.

The Jan. 29 webinar reflected on the first 100 years of America, from the early 1700s to about 1840, when the land that would become Chevy Chase DC evolved from tobacco plantations to middling farmsteads. Two additional installments –  scheduled for March and June – will draw attention to the re-founding of our republic and its betrayal as we examine the role of Chevy Chase DC in the Civil War, Reconstruction, our suburban expansion under Jim Crow, and displacement of locals who did not fit into the racially exclusive community envisioned by its founder, Francis Newlands.

The final installment examines the local response to a modern democracy, with visionary leaders that included local citizen Walter Tobriner, and how the Great Migration – into and out of Washington, DC – affected life within our neighborhood. The webinar will  look at redemption efforts targeting  the promises of the nation’s Declaration of Independence.

HCCDC looks forward to having you join us, for the next two webinars and will be publicizing the dates soon. We thank all our neighbors, friends, and members for their continued support of our programming.

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Join us this Wednesday, April 23, for a 7 p.m. Zoom webinar being hosted by the Chevy Chase Community Association about the “WINDOWS 250” project that helps frame conversations about future development of the civic core with an understanding of our community’s exclusionary history.

The topic is a new campaign called “WINDOWS 250: A Neighborhood in the Nation’s Capital, 1776-2026” created by the 3/4G ANC Committee on Racial and Social Equity (RASE) and HCCDC. It features a series of posters that celebrate the nation’s coming 250th anniversary with a challenge to redeem the promise of the Declaration of Independence on a local level. The CVS on Connecticut Avenue displays the entire series of eight posters, with individual ones in participating storefronts along The Avenue.

Log in here for the Wednesday, April 23, 7 p.m. on Zoom

HCCDC President Carl Lankowski will moderate a panel for the free, hour-long webinar on Zoom. He is a RASE member and project director of “WINDOWS 250: Building America in Chevy Chase DC.” Joining him will be local historian Cate Atkinson, anthropologist Mark Auslander, and Jocelind Julien, a direct descendant of a family displaced from Broad Branch Road a century ago whose enslaved progenitors also worked for George Washington.

The poster exhibit tells our local story from Colonial times to the present, including the little appreciated stories of free African Americans who participated in the agrarian industry that once defined these rolling acres; the advent of modern suburban development in the 1880s; the building of an exclusive, utopian neighborhood; and the unfortunate history of land dispossession that  gradually displace virtually all Black landowners by the 1940s. We conclude with more recent efforts at restorative justice and truth telling that aim to honor the full multiracial history of our community across the past 250 years.

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Cate Atkinson, vice president of HCCDC and program director of “Eighty, Meet 18: Seniors Talk, Youth Listen, and a Valuable Collection is Born,” said that the project grew out of a desire to engage youth in the important work of neighborhood-based historical research.

Students from six area high schools – Jackson-Reed, St. John’s, School Without Walls, Sidwell Friends, Washington International School, and Walt Whitman in Bethesda  – were selected by essay application for the project that geared up in November. They were paired with residents of neighborhood senior facilities and became immersed in the enthralling experience of listening to someone six or seven decades older tell them about their long lives.

Also featured in the collection are short biographies of the students, all of whom were between ages 15 and 17. They were taught the oral history method that focuses on active listening and gently guiding a conversation. Mentorship, fact-checking, and genealogical research ensured the oral histories are valuable tools for future historians as well as be priceless keepsakes for narrators’ families.

Students also sharpened their writing skills by creating lively, easily digestible abstracts of each oral history. These are designed to share with health-care workers in the event that the subjects lose agency due to illness or age, enabling them to be seen for their humanity rather than just as patients needing assistance.

Atkinson said an equally important goal of the project was to assist in integrating residents of Chevy Chase DC’s five senior residential communities into their rightful place as neighbors, instead of often-overlooked residents siloed away. The five homes are Knollwood Life Plan Community, Ingleside at Rock Creek, The Chevy Chase House, The Regency House, and Sunrise on Connecticut Avenue.

The Narrators

Among the narrators are a retired CIA station chief in Moscow; an actress who gave up on Broadway to become a typist at the newly created National Endowment of the Arts and eventually rose to acting NEA Chair; a woman married to a NIH vaccine researcher who raised six kids then became an expert but accidental DC tour guide for 20 years; and a British woman who survived the Blitz in childhood, came to America during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and took a Greyhound across America – twice! – before remaking herself as a landscape designer who created gardens at the White House and National Observatory.

Students also had the valuable experience of presenting their work at the DC History Conference this past week, where they shared their work with academics, historians, and community activists, captivating these professionals by the caliber of work produced.

The student participants are Amaia Catan, Lucy Carroll, Gardiner Dietrich, Maddy Fine, Caroline Reilly, Phoebe Sood, Charlie Martin and Natalia Weinstein. In addition, the student group included two guest contributors from Washington International School – Celeste Martin and Sofia Vakis – who created a podcast called “Senior Stories” on Spotify that parallels the work by the “Eighty, Meet 18” group and provides an additional medium.Atkinson said the entire collection, which is on the HCCDC website under the “Oral Histories” tab, will continue next year with a new crop of students. Interested student applicants can email her at cate.atkinson@gmail.com.

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Narrator: Elizabeth Jane Pratt MacLeish, age 84

Date of interview: Jan. 25, 2025

Location: MacLeish’s apartment at Knollwood in Washington, DC 

Interviewers: Caroline Reilly, age 17, with Tim Hannapel

Transcribed from audio recording by: Caroline Reilly

Abstract

Born in England in 1940, Jane MacLeish grew up in wartime London, the daughter of a surgeon and a nurse. She remembers the air raid shelters, the blacked-out windows, and the sugar her “naughty” mother  snagged on the black market. Despite the war, childhood was an adventure—digging traps for imagined German invaders and relishing the candy sent by Canadian hospitals.

MacLeish’s education was anything but traditional. Resistant to the rigidity of school, she was instead taught by her father—a Renaissance man who painted, sewed, made fabric, and built furniture, weaving life lessons into everyday skills. By age 21, restless and seeking adventure, she left England for America, sailing across the Atlantic as the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded around her. Her first impression of the U.S. came with culture shock—barbed wire in Florida following the Cuban Missile Crisis, segregated bus seating, and a secretarial job that felt stifling.

Opportunity, however, had a way of finding MacLeish. A chance call from a friend led her to board a Greyhound bus bound for Canada, only to be denied entry at the border. She pivoted again, this time to New York City, where she found work at St. George’s Church. There, amidst the vibrant energy of young professionals, she discovered the power of community and a city full of possibilities.

One of her most defining adventures fell into her lap and she was bold enough to grab it. A Columbia law student researching poverty in Appalachia needed a photographer. MacLeish volunteered to join him, eager to see the country beyond the city. The trip was eye-opening – coal towns abandoned, families surviving without heat or plumbing. The experience was transformative in many ways: She and the law student, George, fell in love and later married, bringing her to Washington, DC, where she raised two children and reinvented herself as a garden designer.

Washington became the backdrop for the next chapter of her story. When her marriage ended, she sought a new purpose. “Notice what you do, not what you think you should do,” someone advised her. She realized she was happiest in the garden. Without formal training, she immersed herself in landscape design, building on talent that could trump credentials. Over the years, she worked with some of the most prominent families and institutions in the country, shaping landscapes for the Rockefellers, Dumbarton Gardens, vice presidents, and even the White House.

MacLeigh’s life has been one of risk-taking, resilience, and regeneration. Now in her 80s and a resident of Knollwood Life Plan Community, she remains deeply engaged in conservation efforts, leading projects to restore historic landscapes and protect urban green spaces. Reflecting on her journey, she offers simple yet profound advice to younger generations: “Be brave. Keep learning. Love yourself. Trust yourself.”

Caroline Reilly:

We’re here to interview Jane MacLeish, who spent her career designing beautiful gardens in homes and parks all over the country, including at the Washington, DC, Observatory, the home of U.S. vice presidents. Somehow she did it without a shred of a formal education, so we are eager to hear how. I also know that you lived through the Blitz in London, and got an ocean-front view, sort of, to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Plus, you’ve taken a Greyhound bus across the entire United States – twice! – something most Americans can’t say they’ve done. We’ll dive right in. Why don’t you tell us where and when you were born. 

Jane MacLeish:

Ok, well I was born in England on November fourth  – November fifth is a very big day in England – it’s called Guy Fawkes Day.

The year was 1940?

Yes, 1940. I don’t remember it [laughs].

My father, Frederick William Markham Pratt [1898-1965], was a surgeon in London and my mother, Katharine Elizabeth Whistler “Betty” Pratt [1907-2001], had been a nurse. And we lived in Willesden NW2 in London in a sort of Victorian house. And it was the beginning of World War II. And, I always remember, we had long black curtains that came down to the ground because you had to do blackout. And my mother put colored ribbons horizontally at the bottom of the black. Red, orange, yellow, just to give it a piquant.  Read PDF biography of Frederick William Markham “Bill” Pratt »

And I remember the air raids. We had an air raid shelter in the garden. So that was a very square concrete building, half underground. And it had shelves inside, wooden shelves, so you could go and lie in it, you know. And we’d be woken up in the middle of the night with the air raid sirens, so we’d be wrapped in a blanket and taken down and we’d lie on these things and wait for the bombs to stop. And we thought it was great, you know, real fun. And we would dig holes for the Germans to catch them and put twigs over the top, you know. But I remember that vividly. 

And we had a cook from Hungary. And her husband was in a prison camp. He was allowed boxes of food every now and then. And I remember putting the boxes of food together to send to Hungary to him. And you know, Hungarians like paprika – I remember the red pepper and the things we put in the boxes – and sweets. 

And we were also very spoiled as kids because the Canadians were very generous to the hospitals and sent wonderful tins of sweets, candy for the kids, and they couldn’t use it all, so we got it. And we were allowed one candy at each mealtime. A big, big treat for us – myself and my older sister and younger brother.  There was no sense of fear. We were not scared. I do remember looking up at the sky and seeing lights. Those must have been bombs, or balloons? But I don’t remember terror. We thought it was hilarious and we were out to catch the Germans and make holes to boobytrap them.

How old were you at this point? 

About 5 – 4 or 5. Then my mother took us – we had a house in the north of England in the Lakes District – she took us there and my father stayed in London. One of the things the Brits did was take all the road signs down so if the German paratroopers landed they wouldn’t know where they were. And, we were out in the wild and we would sleep under the dining room table and we each had a shotgun [laughs] … to get the Germans. So that’s what I remember of the war. But the worst thing was the cold, like no heat in the house. Damp. Cold, cold, cold. And my hands and feet would blister with it. I remember that, just things called chilblains. Have you ever heard that word? It’s when your skin dries out and you get these sores.

My mother was very naughty and bought what’s called black market sugar in the Lake District, which means it’s under the table. She was born naughty. And my father, because he was a doctor, had what we call “petrol coupons.” Most people couldn’t buy petrol – or gas – for the cars, so he could come up and get us to take us back to London. And we three kids were in the back of the car terrified in case there’d be a car crash and there’d be sugar all over the road. And we’d be picked up. I mean, I remember that vividly. The other thing I’ll tell you is very strange. But the house we had was Victorian. And that meant there was a lot of sort of colored stone and brick on the floors and tile, and I loved to scrub it and keep it clean. 

That’s not strange to me. My grandma used to have me wash the windows or clean the silverware, and I loved it. I would get a broom or a mop and clean the floors. And my parents’ friends would come over and be like, is she okay? Is she being punished? 

Well, we’re kin. Yeah. I don’t know why. I just loved it. So, people would come, there’d be this little four-year-old scrubbing the floor. Yes, that’s really what I remember. 

Tell us about your siblings.

I had an older sister who is not with us anymore. She was two years older than me. She was adopted. My father was a senior surgeon in a major London hospital, my mother was a nurse, and they had a baby. And as everyone stood round he [the baby] strangled on the cord and died. And then my mother was told she couldn’t have any more children so they decided to adopt my sister. [Anna Catherine Pratt Pitt], 1938-???? had the same birthday as my mother. She was wonderful; everybody loved her. She died suddenly [from cancer], about five years ago. It’s a great loss. 

How did you and your younger brother come into the family?

My mother [ended up getting pregant] and I was delivered by cesearean. So was my brother, James Edward Pratt, whom I adore. He was born two years after me.  He’s a tree pathologist in West Linton in Scotland, and he’s a sort of Renaissance man like our father.

What was your childhood like after the war?

Well, I didn’t like school, so I wouldn’t go to school. And so my parents really had trouble with me about that. I would hide all day and not go to school. And finally my mother gave up and took me away from school. And she said, “You can help me run the house.” So I did that – not very well. And then my father, who was a Renaissance man… he was extraordinary. He taught us to paint. He made our clothes. He made the fabrics, he wove the fabrics. He made all our furniture, our school desks. He taught us. There was a polio outbreak in the hospitals in England and he was a surgeon, a children’s surgeon. He didn’t want us to go to school. So, he would teach us. And the local education officer came around and said, You know, Mr. Pratt, we’ll put you in jail! And he answered in ancient Greek that he could well teach his children. So he taught us to paint, taught us to shoot, he taught us to skin the animals, he taught us to make leather. He taught us to sew, he taught us all this. So that was the kind of education I got. It wasn’t academic.

But it’s amazing.

Yes, amazing. It was amazing. And the older I get the more amazing it is. And so, everyday school – sitting in a row in our uniforms – didn’t quite do it for me. And so there was this sense of me being radical and not fitting in. And so my father gave up – I think he was exhausted by the war – and he said, Well, you know — and this is what they said in those days – Just get a secretarial course because you’ll get married, but if it goes wrong, you can be a secretary. This is how they looked at it.

I remember when I was young I was always worried about my father. We had pea-soup fogs and he had asthma and it was aggravated by burning coal and peat and that’s horrible, you know. He would have to go out at night and you could almost not see your headlights, and as a child I was terrified he would die. And every morning I would go to his bedroom door and listen to see if he was alive.

My brother James has compiled a family history about my father. I’ll send it to you. [Read James Pratt’s family history here]

I was really scared of my mother. She was too strong. And that’s why I ran away [to America]. She was just too strong and it’s hard to be strong. I’m strong but luckily my daughter is not scared of me. I’m more scared of her [laughs].

What was it that scared you about your mother?

My mother was very bitter. She came from a distinguished family. Her sisters were part of the Bloomsbury set, very artistic. She was the oldest. Her father drank. She would run away. They put her in school, and she ran away from school. She decided to be a nurse and that’s how she met my father. But when he asked her to marry him she thought he was joking and slapped him and didn’t see him for, like, five years. [But eventually] they met again. She adored him, he adored her.

I think had my mother been able to have [modern medical]  therapy, she would have been a more [balanced] person. She was very strong and very, very weak. In many ways, I’m very much like her – very strong. But I’m not bitter. I just didn’t want her to know me. It’s really, really sad. So I hid myself and I was never able [to open up to her before she died]. It’s so tragic.

So anyway, I did the secretarial course. I don’t remember what work I did in London, but I thought, To hell with this, I’m leaving. I was about 20 or 21. I had a godmother who lived in Fort Lauderdale and she said, Well, I’ll get you a green card and come. My parents were very decent about it. It must have killed them, you know?  They drove me to Southampton and put me on the ship. And off I went. Tumdy tum tum tum. We were in the middle of the Atlantic when Cuba [the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962] happened. 

So they stopped all the ships. Every ship in the Atlantic stopped. And we sat and waited to see if the Russians would turn back, which they did. But it was a pivotal time. The world was on edge. What would happen?  Would the atomic bomb be used?

And then the Russians retreated and so I came into Fort Lauderdale. And that was just—it was barbed wire everywhere and security and all our cameras were taken. 

That’s terrifying.  Did you understand the gravity of it in the moment, or was it just like, distant?

I’d say it was a mixture, sort of amused concern. Does that make sense? 

I equate the amused concern to what I felt during the Covid-19 pandemic. I was a kid, like 11, and every day some new bad news would come in, but we were all isolated, so it didn’t feel close. It felt very far away.

I think that could be a way of protecting oneself, you know, not to absorb it. Or just to be, I think, sort of innocent. I didn’t know anything about the world. I didn’t know much. What I wanted to do was party, you know? So, I don’t know. Yeah, I think I wasn’t afraid. Just … sort of curious. We were having so much fun on the ship – you know, one bonded with other people – and it was all sort of jolly. 

How long were you on the boat? 

Probably about six days. And then we came into Fort Lauderdale and that was really (shocking.) And the worst thing though, was my godmother’s husband met me and he said, Now, I’m gonna give you one piece of advice. Never go to the back of the bus.” And I thought, oh, God, you know? For a free spirit, being told (that back seats were for Black people, and the whites sat up front) the minute I got on land in Florida I was hit by it.

Welcome to Jim Crow. We’re discussing that era in my U.S. history class now. We just finished the Reconstruction Era, and we’re moving into segregation. 

It was shocking to me. That was the first time I’d ever encountered that. So, I didn’t like him. I was with my godmother and this man and I got a job as a secretary. And America’s very different from England. In England, everything is sort of laissez faire and, you know, you muddle along here. He [my boss] said, You know, Miss Pratt, this isn’t typed very well. Go do it again. The standards were very, very different and, you know, I wasn’t too accurate with things. So, then I got a telephone call from a very naughty friend of mine who said, Hey, I’ve got us jobs. Leave that god-forsaken state. We’re going to be cooks in a fishing lodge in North Canada. Get your ass up here! [laughs]

Talk about a change – from Florida to Canada!

Yeah, and I went on a Greyhound bus. So you get on the bus and you go across – I mean, Texas is day after day of this flat… I’d never seen anything like that. Never ever. And when you got to various towns, they had these women’s hostels. So you could stay in a women’s hostel and you’d be safe. Which meant a lot. So you knew when you got off the bus there would be a youth hostel or something and you could spend the night there, because it took a lot of time. And then you’d get back on the bus and you’d chug, chug, chug. 

How did your friend know about the job? 

I’d known her in London and she was just innovative. And youth is innovative, you know? It’s like stepping stones. You step on the first step and suddenly you see the second. And then the third. And, I like the way the Quakers describe it: [Proceed] As the way opens. Because if you can take the first step, even if you’re terrified, something else will appear. 

I do think that’s very universal for people of my age … because there’s not a set path or destination. You just sort of have to keep going. 

Yeah, you do. You’ve got to have faith. And I think helping that faith is probably a solid home. You know, I did have a solid home in England, even though my parents were pretty upset that I’d gone. But I knew that there was somewhere that was safe. And I think that makes a big difference. I don’t know what it would be like if you didn’t have that. 

I worry sometimes that I have too much of a supportive home, that I won’t go out because I love it so much here. 

Well, you’re aware of that then. So that you can deal with it. Because you never grow and you never learn if you’re safe all the time. But you don’t want to be stupid either. And I think times are very different now.  So just be careful.

So I get to the Canadian border. It’s three in the morning, I’m on the bus, and the customs men come. [In a deep voice] Oh, who do you think you are? they said.

So I was a bit stunned. It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. I knew one guy in New York, an old friend of mine, and I called him. And, in England, when you are close to people, often you call them by their last name. He said, Pratt, where are you?  I said, I’m on the border of Canada on the West coast. They won’t let me in.” And he said, Well, get back on the bus and come to New York City.” 

What about your friend?

She was in Banff waiting for me. So, I told the customs people they had to give me enough time to spend three days in Banff, and they said, Yeah, okay. So I went to Banff to get over the shock with her. And then I went on to New York. Which turned out to be another adventure. 

Again, driving across the country in a bus was wonderful. Day after day after day, just incredible. And I always felt safe in the Greyhound buses, you know. Then I remember that someone gave me the name of a man in one of the cities halfway across and said to give him a call and say hello if you stop at that bus terminal. Well, two things happened when I got there. The first was a sort of trolley, you know, loaded with luggage, and on top was a plywood coffin, done up with rope. And – I always remember this – someone had written on it, Help! Let me out! I’m suffocating! [laughs]. Can you believe it!? Very naughty. 

So, I’m gonna tell you [the second thing]. I have this number and I thought I’d call. This voice answered and I said who I was and who gave me his name. He said, You stay right there. I’ll be there in 10 minutes.” And he came in a car and picked me up. We went to his house and he fed me and got me back to the bus on time. Now, if you’d done it in England, it would go like this: Brrring, brrring. That’s a telephone. Hello, is this John Sykes?

Yes.

Well, this is Jane and your friend has given me your name.

Oh, how is my friend?

It’s very well.

And did she send a message?

Yes, it was that if I was in a town near you, I should call you.

Well, that’s nice. When you see her, give her my love. Bye.

It’s the epitome of the difference between Britain and America. I tell you that because it’s so deep. Americans: Welcome! Welcome! Come in, we’ll look after you. You’re part of us. We’re here for you! England: Who are you? Very different.

You were very brave on that whole trip! And you were not even taking a train, you were riding a bus!

But everyone did. That’s what young people did then. I felt very safe on the bus but it is risky [today] – I don’t know what the bus system is like now. And there were the odd people to come and sit next to me and try and pick me up or whatever. And there were, you know, these houses [along the cross-country bus route] like some of the religious Salvation Army’s houses that were throughout the country, that were set up to house you. You know I don’t know that they’re there anymore. But [I was] vulnerable and young and innocent. 

But as you said, maybe you were innocent, but you were stepping to the next stone. What happened when you finally arrived?

When I get to New York City I get a taxi. And the first thing the taxi driver says is, Wait here, I’ve got to take a leak [laughs]. When I tell him where I’m going he says, Oh, that’s not a very good neighborhood. But it’s where I’ve got friends. So, I moved in with this friend whose name I don’t remember now, and he lived with three other guys. And I thought I’d better get a job. So I was out walking and I see a sign for an employment agency. I go in and say, My name is Elizabeth Jane Pratt.” Now, in England, they would say, “Miss Pratt,” but I’m sitting there waiting and this voice calls, Liz! Liz! So I take no notice, you know? I’m not used to that. And then he finally says my whole name and I go up and tell him I thought I could be a secretary and he asked where I was living. When I told him he said, That’s not a very good neighborhood. I told him, No, I’m fine. I’m living with four guys. He said, Four guys! You’re living with four guys? Now Liz, if you go for an interview, do not tell them you’re living with four guys!

So, he comes up with a job allright. This was a very big law film in New York, he said, and one of the big-time lawyers needs a secretary. Lord Day & Lord. Very big firm. And I get ushered into Mr. Lord’s office. And I’m sitting across this table. He says, “Well, Miss Pratt, I see you are living on the Upper West Side.” I said I was. He said, “Are you happy with your living arrangements?” I said, “Very, very happy!” But I thought, I can’t – I’ll die here. I’ll die. I’ll die. This is not me. So I told the agency and they said, “Well, we’ve got one where you could be secretary in a big Episcopal church downtown.” So I went down there – got hired [clicks her tongue and gives a cheeky nod].

And, it saved my life. The church was very well known – St. George’s on East 16th Street down in the Village at Stuyvesant Square – mostly because of the senior priest, if that’s what you call him – because he was known for wonderful sermons and very good music. And there were two junior clerics, and I was to work for those. But, what it had, which is totally unique, was two brownstone houses. One was for male students and one was for female students. These were for American students coming to the city to work from across the country. So, it gave them a start in the city. And these were beautiful houses. You had to be in on Tuesday night for dinner – we had a cook – because they had speakers come to talk to us. And you had to do one night of community service a week to pay back the community. You could do it anywhere – I went to the Red Cross.

So you moved on from the four guys in favor of this somewhat more cloistered living?

Well it was very free and easy. And I made wonderful friends. It was like God looked after me. 

Karma, God, Fate, Kismet. This is an incredible story. How many of you lived there? 

Sixteen girls and 16 guys. And so you met each other. We had parties. I mean, really, think about how things fell into place! 

I was just going to say: Think about that guy at the appointment agency. At first he sends you to this stuffy office, but you knew that wasn’t for you. Something about you wanted to leave London and Britain, you had this godmother. and then you got on the bus to Canada. And you just kept going.

I think first of all, you have to survive. So I had to get a job. I’m sure there’s luck in there – probably a lot of luck. But why does luck come to someone and not to someone else? And then it’s being able to pick up when you’re given that chance. And I think that is part of the essence of me. That right from the start, there was this sort of rebellion, you know, the scrubbing of the floors and this refusal to go to school and this refusal to be like others.

Like with my job with the two ministers. One was called Ron and he was a very good photographer. One day a Columbia law student named George Krumbhaar called for Ron to say he was doing a paper on the war on poverty and planned to go to Appalachia where the mines were closing and he needed to talk to Ron about how to photograph. And I just said, Well, can I come with you?

Oh, well, whoa, he said. I said it sounds really, really interesting, and I’m new to this country and I should widen my knowledge of it and I probably could help you. So he says he will call back in the morning to talk to Ron about it. And Ron tells him, George, the best thing you can do is take Jane with you. She will see things with a different eye, she’s traveled, she’s experienced, and from a different country.

So George decides he has to meet me before deciding and we go to lunch and he says, Well, can you change a tire? I said, Of course, I can change a tire. I hadn’t a clue. Anyway, off we went in his Mercedes – fancy! And the first evening we’ve got a sort of picnic supper and we’re sitting on a slag heap in the coal mining area and I see this light. Is that someone on a bicycle? But it was a firefly. I had never seen a firefly before! Really, never. 

The trip to the West Virginia mining area was one of the most extraordinary things I’ve ever done, and it was very useful that I went because I could get people to talk. [Their stories were] absolutely shocking for me. We found towns where the mine had owned the town and paid people in the mine money called script. And when the mine closed, the young people left, the young men went to Baltimore and the young women came to DC, but the elderly couldn’t move and they were caught so we’d find these little towns where people lived with no heating, no plumbing, peeing in the fireplace, children with no shoes. In the jails [there was] straw on the floor.

One day we stopped at a little house up on a hill and we walked up and said, could we talk to you? There was this couple sitting on the porch. The people [in Appalachia] used to chew tobacco and they’d spit but never hit you. [The wife] asked us if we would like to see inside the house. It was an armory! There was nothing but guns. When they asked us where we were going next we told them the name of the village. Oh, they don’t have a sheriff there, they said. They explained that this place once had a sheriff but he was “hard on the boys” and didn’t ease up so he was shot. Well, I think perhaps we won’t go to that place, I said. They said, Oh, they wouldn’t shoot you. They wouldn’t shoot anyone they didn’t know.

He reserved that just for people that they knew! Shocking. If it was bad in the summer, we thought we should go back in the winter. And it was even worse. I mean, I had to throw all my clothes away. The conditions were terrible. This was only five hours from New York! So we came back and he did his thesis of that and then we actually got married. We fell in love [during the research trip]. And so that brought me to Washington, where he worked for the Treasury Department as an economist.

That was your first time in DC? 

I  hated it. Oh, God, the city was dumpy and a swamp. We lived in an old Black neighborhood in Southeast. We bought a house for $14,000. We lived through the [1968] riots, then we moved near the Cathedral. We bought a house on Upton Street, which I still own. That’s when the marriage fell apart. We’ve been married for seven or eight years by then. He was a good man but I was bored [with that life], to be honest. But I thought, What’s Jane going to do because she didn’t go to school? She’s not going to be a secretary. What am I gonna do?

Someone said to me, Notice what you do and not what you think you should do. And I noticed that I was gardening a lot. So I thought I can be a gardener, I can design gardens. I’ll do that. Someone said there’s a course at GW [George Washington University]. But I thought, well, they’re gonna give you an intelligence test and I’ll never pass it. But I  took the test and I got in, but then we did something called percentage slopes. When you do a slope, it can’t be over six degrees. And how do you [calculate] six degrees? I couldn’t do the length over the height over the whatever. So I pulled out, I quit. 

I got a job at a plant nursery and asked to learn everything they could teach me. So after a while, people would come in and want a little design. So I’d do a little design. I then asked to join this small contractor, and the [owner] said, You’ll have to work with the crew, the boys. That’s fine. I started doing “take offs” [landscaping design bids] and I did that for about a year. Then I got my first job, a garden in Georgetown. Then I got another one, and another one. 

At some point I met Roger Burch, an English gardener. I would work on his jobs and he would work on mine, and he taught me so much. He was a good man. We worked together for about 10 years, but then he just sort of disappeared. But all that time I was building, building. Then architects got to know me and I started to get written about.

It’s all a fluke – it’s all chance! The thing is, you’ve got to take your chances when they happen. I’ve worked for the cream of America. I’ve been flown all over the country [to work on garden designs]. I’ve worked for Rockefellers. I’ve worked for vice presidents. I’ve worked for the White House. I’ve worked for all of them. I try and use what I’ve learned because success is not boom, boom, boom [instant and certain], the way Americans want it, or maybe Brits or everyone wants it. But it’s that we are given opportunities and are open to the opportunity. Never give up on that. It will always be there. There will always be an opportunity.

Tell us about some landscape or garden designs you’ve worked on.

In 2010 I started a conservancy to save Dumbarton Oaks Park [in Georgetown]. In 1950 the park – which is behind the Gardens at Dumbarton Oaks – was given to the [U.S.] Park Service and it was falling apart. And a friend of mine and I started this consultancy to restore it, and it’s going beautifully. There’s a stream in it. It has 14 waterfalls. Bridges, meadows – we found the best meadow man in America who comes in to advise us.

In the Gardens at Dumbarton Oaks Park I designed the Ondine garden. I also did some early landscaping at Glenstone, have you heard of this museum in Potomac, MD?  I put the lake in for [owner] Mitchell Rales and his wife. He bought the land I got called in and so I put the lake in. One day this assistant of mine went to put in bulbs and I got a call from someone on the site who said, Jane something really awful happened. They told me the dam went and the lake emptied in about 20 minutes.

Well, when my assistant – she was unflappable, she knew how to deal with [adversity] because she married a man with terrible depression – when she hadn’t called me I wondered if she got washed away, you know? But she answered her phone when I called her. I asked, How’d it go today? She said, I got all the bulbs in. I said, Oh, anything else happen? Oh yes, she said, um the dam broke and the lake’s empty, but I got the bulbs in.

What happens when you design something like that is that the corps of engineers come in and they do the engineering and the building. So I was absolved, you know, I’d just did the layout. So it was never mentioned. But anyway, [Glenstone] has changed a lot since then, but  it is beautiful and you should see it.

You did several gardens at the National Observatory?

I did gardens for [vice presidents] Gore and Cheney. I designed the swimming pool garden for Gore. The last one I did at the Observatory was for Cheney when they decided to take down the greenhouses and put in a helicopter pad [which she ringed with concentric circles of plantings, including cherry trees]. But the gardens are redesigned all the time, so it has probably changed.

Do you design according to your style or what the client wants?

It’s never about me. But they’ve got to be fun, unexpected.

An example?

In Georgetown I put in a dead tree and painted it blue. Do you know about bottle trees? It’s hard to find them now because people are so boring now! It’s so hard to find eccentricity!

What’s something that you would have considered challenging?

I think Glenstone was very difficult … and terrifying in many ways. But [the current landscape design] is so different now.

OK, I believe we left off in the chronology of your personal life back in the 1960s. Can we go back to your first marriage, to George Krumbhaar. Did you have children?

Yes, we had two children. My daughter, Ruth Stevens Krumbhaar, is about 57 or 58 years old now. She went to Sidwell Friends School. She and her partner live in San Francisco and have a son at Berkeley. She’s a therapist but is now buying houses – properties – and fixing them up. My son, Frederick William “Fred” Krumbhaar, is two years younger than Ruth. He went to the Maret School. He is a businessman in Boulder and has two children.

At some point you married again?

I married a man who is very well known, and very pompous. He was a filmmaker and did radio and television, and I couldn’t resist. And so I married him. His name was Rod MacLeish [1926-2006]. He was an extraordinary man, brilliant and very full of himself. But we had a lot of fun, we went all over the world as guests of presidents and what have you. But in the end he got blocked. He couldn’t write anymore. Sometimes writers get what’s called writer’s block. He was totally blocked, but I was being written about [for my landscaping and gardening work].  I had magazines coming to interview me and talk to me and photograph me and then they’d say to Rod, do you want to be in the picture? And one day he just left. he just couldn’t take it. It was incredibly painful. And he would never speak to me again. So I lived through that. 

How long were you married? 

Probably five or six years. Oh, it was wonderful. And he was fascinating, but it was just one of those facts of life. And there wasn’t anything I could do. So that ended and I kept going and wonderful jobs came. I loved my work. 

And then [several years later] I met another man on a job in Virginia. He was an architect, Joe Handwerger [1931-2018]. He was so pissed at me at our first meeting because I said, Well, we could do the lake here and then we could do the prairie there, and he was very upset because he could just see his budget disappearing [into my grandiose vision]. It was terrible.

And then on a Sunday about three weeks later I was at the National Gallery of Art and was walking by the cafeteria and he [Joe Handwerger] was sitting there having coffee, and he said, Jane, come and have some coffee. And that was the beginning of a really beautiful marriage.

I did have this one problem – he’d gone to Harvard architecture school and here is Jane, no education, no training, terribly successful, equally as impressive. He was lovely, but it made it difficult sometimes.

He has since died?

He died [in 2018] in a hospital after hitting his head at home. He was an extraordinary man. He was the one husband that all [my family in England] liked the most. He had wonderful humor. And it’s so unfair he should go out like that.

Did the two of you move to Knollwood together?

No, I moved here about four years ago. I’d always wanted to live here because of the grounds – 17 acres! They have a goldmine here! But when I came to look they weren’t taking anyone who wasn’t military. Then one day they [opened up] to non-military applicants and showed me this apartment. It would have been crazy not to take it! [Jane turns to look at two walls of windows overlooking an old stone country home from last century surrounded by gardened terraces that she designed]. I work on the back terraces where [residents] sit to enjoy the landscape and I did the walkway Knollwood employees use to get from the parking area.

So you are still working in gardens?

I’m still busy. I’m also involved in the Rock Creek Conservancy [a watershed organization protecting Rock Creek National Park]. And I’m working on the rebuilding of the Carter Barron Amphitheatre. We’re starting to raise money for that. I’m not very good at raising money. I’m terrified of it actually.

I’m kind of in awe of the sort of constant theme in your life to just go out and do it – to take the initiative and take the opportunity when it comes. You didn’t really mention – was it constantly scary? Or were you not even thinking about it when you took chances and opportunities?

It was very scary a lot of the time. And I was ridiculed a lot because, you know, [people would wonder] how come you’re so successful? I was aware that I didn’t know a lot, but I worked with wonderful people and I had a good team. I had to survive, I had to make it and be responsible for myself. So I had to get on with it.But I think I’ve been very lucky that I’ve had that inner energy to survive.  I think that was a great gift.

The secret is to always be respectful of what you don’t know. You’ve got to be up front about that. And also, sometimes things just don’t work. You just can’t do it the way they want and so you [need to be able to] shake hands and walk away.

Being English helps [wry grin]. I think it was very useful to be English because if you’re English you’re meant to know about gardens [laughs].

Speaking of England, did you sister Anna, live in London for her whole life?

She became a nurse in the Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps. She met a surgeon in the British Army, Peter Pitt, and they went to Nepal and they lived in Nepal for years [to provide healthcare for the military members of the then Nepalese royalty].

Then they moved back to England where she lived in a huge, huge house with a moat. There was a little church on the property and the vicar came every third week, which meant if you were staying with them it didn’t matter who you were, what you were – you got your ass to church to make the numbers up and they had a great big bell they rang.

Joe, my last husband, was Jewish and we went to church and after the service there’s a sort of Army chap as we were coming out the door. He gets to Joe and he says, I hope you liked the service, and Joe said, Well, I’m a bit perplexed.

Perplexed?

I listened to the sermon and it said if you hadn’t been baptized, you couldn’t go to heaven. I’m Jewish and I really want to go to heaven.

Oh, come and have some coffee. Pish-posh, he wasn’t really serious about that. You can come.

My final question is, about what’s going on today in society and our country in general. What do you see as the best role for young people like me? And what insight can you give about what young people should be focusing on based on lessons you learned?

The first thing is to be brave, to keep learning, to be open, to be terribly open. Keep getting educated. Keep following your instincts. Love yourself – really love yourself. Trust yourself, and be dignified. There’s a great dignity to life, and to just love people. This is a very difficult time in America, and it’s frightening. But it will change. So get educated and follow your instincts.

But there’s something else. In America, people are meant to be perfect. And in many ways, I fit that picture, but I don’t want to come off as looking like a glory girl. Like most people, I am extraordinary vulnerable, and there are parts of me that has felt a great deal of pain. We ought to be able to talk about it. It’s not all perfect, but that’s life.

END

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The post Elizabeth “Jane” Pratt MacLeish, age 84 appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

Link to the Senior Stories podcast here.

Created by Celeste Martin and Sofia Vikas, who are completing their Senior year at Washington International School, “Senior Stories” is a podcast on Spotify that records the poignant memories of retired people in Metropolitan Washington DC. The stories are about lived experiences – such as what it was like to attend Woodstock in August 1969, or how it felt to be a therapist at an abortion clinic in the 1980s.  According to podcast creators Celeste and Sofia, the podcast “bridges the generation gap one story at a time.”

The idea to start a podcast came from their own experiences talking with grandparents and others whose memories of childhood or early career years are time capsules of eras long gone. Sofia recalls listening raptly to her grandparents talk about their childhood in Ecuador, and Celeste was so moved by what was intended to be a 15-minute interview for a school assignment with a 97-year-old neighbor that she spent “many hours in enriching conversation” with him instead.

The resulting collaboration, “Senior Stories with Celeste and Sofia,” won their school’s Community, Equity and Justice Award in 2024 when they were juniors. The podcast, they reasoned, will “increase crossover between generations and reduce negative bias against the elderly community.” They used the award’s grant money to buy professional microphones, and the podcast took off.

They began by working with Sunrise Senior Living residents, and soon realized the rich vein of humanity is virtually untapped all around them. In addition to building their podcast, they are structuring its future, taking pains to ensure that interviewers who take over honor its intent of amplifying the voices of the nation’s senior citizens.

“It doesn’t really feel like we are doing a service. We are the ones who benefit by hearing these stories,” Sofia said.

The post Senior Stories: The Podcast appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

Narrator: Robert “Bob” Brewer Norris, age 93

Date of interview: Jan. 19, 2025

Location: Knollwood Life Plan Community 

Interviewers: Gardiner Dietrich, age 15, with Mark Auslander

Transcribed from audio recording by: Gardiner Dietrich

Abstract

Robert “Bob” Brewer Norris, a 93-year-old retired lawyer, was the seventh of eight children in a Catholic family in Kalorama in Northwest DC. His father, a doctor, delivered healthcare and babies, increasing the population of the neighborhood. His youth and teenage years were spent as an altar boy, a messboy on a tanker, and eventually the next son in line for the nightly chore of shoveling coal into the family furnace. Childhood memories include playing pinball and patriotic wartime scavenging. 

After attending Landon School and graduating from the University of Virginia, Norris joined the Marine Corps before studying law at George Washington University. He clerked for U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McGuire then joined the U.S. Attorney’s office, where he admits to actually enjoying the writing of legal briefs. One notable case he recalls involved a pre-Roe v. Wade abortion prosecution in the 1960s in which the would-be mother was made to testify as a victim against the two defendants who carried out the abortion.

Norris has a deep admiration for Abraham Lincoln and describes himself as a “Lincoln man.” Personally transfixed by the moral quandary the 16th U.S. president experienced while deciding the fate of 303 Dakota natives in the infamous 1862 “Dakota Uprising,” Norris wrote an article for a legal magazine about the incident. On the comment by a friend that the story had the ingredients for a play, he sought the counsel of a university drama teacher and wrote a  play called Lincoln’s Dilemma, which speaks to Lincoln’s moral struggle in deciding whether to sign execution orders for the Native Americans, none of whom had fair trials. Norris, who says he never intended to be a playwright, describes his process of writing the play that allowed him to explore the historical conflict more dynamically than merely authoring a book of historical fiction. He is working on getting Lincoln’s Dilemma performed while tackling play number two.

Norris has a daughter, Reid, with his former wife Barbara Jean Lockhart. He spent 30 years with longtime partner Joyce Hoffman Sargent until her passing in 2009. He now lives in Knollwood Life Plan Community, where he is a ubiquitous presence with his silver-white hair and trimmed beard.

Norris traces his family’s connections to various military events. The family’s military history spans multiple generations, with stories of an uncle who died in the command of victorious Buffalo soldiers in Nogales, AZ, to relatives involved in World War II, including his brother, an aviator in the South Pacific. 

Although Norris is busy living to his full potential now, he shared how he’d like to be remembered after his death: He simply hopes that he is forgiven by mistakes or slights he might have made in life. Meanwhile, he’s got another play to write.

Gardiner Dietrich:

We are at Knollwood, a senior residential community in Northwest DC, to talk with Robert Norris, a retired lawyer who is 93 years old and has, in the previous decade, become a playwright. Let’s start from your childhood. You grew up in a large Catholic family in Northwest Washington, DC?

Bob Norris:

I was born at the old Georgetown University Hospital then located at 36th and O streets on Dec. 2, 1931, and I grew up in an area called Kalorama. My house was in the 2200 block of R Street, about half a block from Sheridan Circle, named after General Philip Sheridan, a Civil War general. He was very late getting married. He married a very young lady, I think he was about 45 and she was about 20 [laughs].

They had, I believe, four children. When that circle was developed with the big statue of Sheridan on a horse, his widow bought a house within eyesight of the circle. And the story is that every morning she would open the window and say, “Hi, Phil!,” or words to that effect [laughs]. I knew two of their daughters; I think they might have been twins. I was an altar boy at St. Matthew’s Cathedral [at 1725 Rhode Island Ave. NW] when the Mass was said in Latin, and I frequently saw them at church.

What was it like growing up there? Have things changed much?

It was a very interesting neighborhood when I think about it, and there were a lot of interesting people. It was three blocks from Connecticut Avenue, which had a lot going on. I remember a drug store called the Empire Drug Store. The entrance was on Connecticut Avenue, but it went all the way through to 21st Street in the rear. In those days, it was all connected. Today it’s two separate entrances, one on Connecticut Avenue and one on 21st. I was there on April 12, 1945, [because] I remember that day.

Somebody had drilled, with a brace and bit, a hole through the wooden hull of the pinball machine. Normally you’d put a nickel in, in those days – I mean, today, it’s whatever, I have no idea. We would shoot this wire through (the drilled hole), and all of a sudden, we’d have ample games. It was –  theoretically, we were stealing – well, we all sort of thought it more as a prank than a theft.

Aha.

We were playing with that pinball machine when the Doc – the pharmacist was always called Doc – came over and said, The president is dead. This is Franklin Roosevelt. And I mean, I remember it, you know? I remember it very vividly. We stopped playing the machine. Since I knew nothing about Harry Truman, I thought Henry Wallace would make a better president. What did I know, I was a kid.

What else? We lived across the street from the [Supreme Court] Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes [served from 1930-1941]. The 2100 block was where Franklin Roosevelt lived when he was assistant secretary of the Navy [under President Woodrow Wilson during the outbreak of World War I]. I think that’s where he started his romance with, you know, Lucy Mercer Rutherford [hired by Eleanor Roosevelt as her social secretary in 1914]. That lasted, unbeknownst to Eleanor, right up to the day he died.

I understand you went to a neighborhood Catholic school through sixth grade then went to Landon School before enrolling in the Unviersity of Virgina?

We attended St. Matthews Cathedral. It had a school called Calvert School on Rhode Island Avenue that I attended. Believe it or not, the nuns could inflict corporal punishment in those days, sometimes for practicaqlly nothing. The school went through the eighth grade. I skipped seventh grade and went straight to eighth grade at Landon School. Because Landon was more academically rigorous, I ended up repeating eighth grade and graduated from high school in 1950. I went from there to the University of Virginia and graduated in 1954. I then went into the Marine Corps and thereafter law school at George Washington University.

I love the Marines [but] my family was Navy. My father was a medical officer at the end of the first World War. He had just graduated from Georgetown University Medical School in 1917. He went right into the Navy as a medical officer. He was assigned to the battleship, the USS Minnesota. He used to joke and say, Well, I was involved in the Battle of Yorktown [the last major battle of the American Revolution].” That’s because the battleship would land at Yorktown, then sail up the Chesapeake Bay, turn around, and come back to dock again. He said the full “voyage” was going up and down the bay on the battleship. And then he got out of the Navy. He and my mother got married almost immediately.

Your father was Leo Brison Norris [1892-1955], a family medical doctor?

My father was never called Leo, he was always called Brison. He was named after his father, Brison Norris. Leo – for then-Pope Leo XIII – was added partly at the suggestion of his mother. My father’s specialty was internal medicine and he did everything [including] delivering babies. He also taught at Georgetown Medical School for several years [along] with his practice. He taught practically every subject that you would take [in medical school]. I hope this doesn’t sound braggadocious, but my father was a really smart man. He was the star of his family. He had three brothers – one was a dentist, two were lawyers – but he was the star. They all looked up to him. In fact, my mother, Marion Hungerford Norris [1900-1970], was also the star of her family. Anytime something came up, her siblings would say, We better ask Marion.

You have quite a few siblings I believe?

I’m the seventh of eight. Leo Brison Norris Jr., the oldest, was an aviator in World War II and retired as a Navy Captain. He became a commercial pilot. Mary Theresa Symington – she was always called “Peter,” the origin of this is still a mystery to me  – was a secretary in the OSS in 1942 and was stationed in London during the “buzz bomb” period – airplanes loaded with explosives that would ran out of gas and fall to the ground; a terrible weapon. She went to Paris after the liberation and reconnected with [a friend who became her husband]. Next were two sisters, Marion Hungerford Smith and Laura May Grayson. Laura May went to Finch College in Manhattan. Next were Joseph Esten Norris and Charles Walter Norris, who became doctors. Then there was me, and last was Suzanne Shearer Norris Weigert, who went to Bryn Mawr College. My younger sister Shearer and I are the only two siblings still living.

So, wow, a big family! Were you close?

There was a certain degree of friction among my siblings, and it turned out that I was the one who was the go-between. In other words, if my oldest brother had some complaint – if that’s the right word – with one of our sisters, I was, and to some extent, I think I was instrumental in bringing them together a lot. At the time, I wasn’t thinking I was doing that, but looking back on it…

Although my brother Charlie [Charles Walter Norris, 1928-2016] was my closest sibling [in age] we disagreed on practically everything. Looking back on our relationship, Charlie always seemed to be disapproving. I think he disapproved of my choice to attend Landon School, rather than Georgetown Prep where he and our two older brothers had graduated. I always felt Charlie’s personality was too rigid. His adherence to all the tenants of the Catholic Church was unbending. There was no room for disagreement. And I don’t think he was ever even an altar boy! I was an altar boy from the time I was six years old through [sometime] before I went to Landon. And when I went to Landon, that was the end of my altar boy activities.

For example, Charlie absolutely rejected the proposition that abortion is ultimately the choice of the woman. He also supported the church’s condemnation of birth control, asserting that those who practiced it had an “abortion mentality.” Moreover, he never questioned the church’s refusal to even consider ordination of women or an end to mandatory celibacy of priests. 

Speaking of religious differences, were you aware of any anti-Catholic prejudice growing up in the District?

No. Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954, and in ’48 the Archbishop of Washington put out the word to Blacks that anybody’s free to come to our parochial schools. I felt good about this. Lots of Black people who were Protestants regarded the parochial schools as a better education for their children. That’s part of the answer. I’ve always been opposed to segregation. Politically, I’m a liberal. I mean, I think the government is here, frankly, to serve people… not vice versa. So you know where my politics are.

I guess that could explain your passion with Abraham Lincoln, about whom you’ve written a play. 

I’ve always admired Abraham Lincoln. Like thousands of Americans [I think he] was… our best president. I mean, you probably feel that way. There’s George Washington next, and then probably FDR. But Lincoln was … the best. You’re thinking about a play I wrote [titled “Lincoln’s Dilemma,” copyright 2018]. Have you read it? 

I read a couple of scenes.

Oh, well, did you like what you read? Why didn’t you finish it? 

I just didn’t have time because I was studying for exams.

People say they’d like to [read it], and I say, well, what you should do is block out about an hour and a half and then you go through the whole thing and you get the dramatic effect of the play. Frankly, I think it’s a very good play, and I’m working on trying to get it produced.

Tell us about it.

It’s obviously a play about Lincoln and his moral dilemma in signing off on death warrants for 303 Indians from the 1862 Dakota Uprising. Here he was, dealing with the Civil War and slavery, but the play opens up with Native Americans. I’m sure that if I ever get it produced, there’ll be people sitting in the audience who will say, What’s going on here? The play was inspired by an event depicted in a Lincoln biography by Harvard professor David [Herbert] Donald, a Lincoln scholar. He came out with his one-volume biography [in 1995] titled, Lincoln – clearly the best biography of him. [From that] I wrote an article published in 2014 in The Washington Lawyer magazine. It’s about the Indian uprising in Minnesota and the fact that 303 Dakota Indians were not only convicted but sentenced to death. The play is about how Lincoln handled that.

A friend of mine read it and called me up and said, You know, you’ve got all this conflict … you’ve got the ingredients for a play. After I hung up, I thought about it, so I went over to Georgetown University, and [asked for] the drama department and they said, Well, we have the Department of Performing Arts. I sat down with an associate professor, and discussed the article with her and gave her a copy. She called me about two weeks later and said, Your friend is right. It’s got the ingredients for a play. And then she suggested I enroll in a course at Georgetown.

I wrote roughly five or six scenes while I was taking the course. But everything changes. If you ever sit down to write a play, you’ll be making changes all the time. In fact, when a play opens, just after two or three rehearsals, there are changes. It’s basically the same story, but I made lots of changes. Someone suggested to me that I get the play copyrighted, saying “it’s a pretty amazing idea for a play.” That had not occurred to me until that day. Well, if you get something copyrighted, it only costs about 50 bucks. You do it online. It’s very simple and then about six months later, you send in a hard copy. The play is then protected. You don’t need a copyright, but the copyright strengthens any kind of dispute. 

What, exactly, was Lincoln’s “dilemma?”

Early on, you’re given the impression that [Lincoln] didn’t think much about Native Americans, or  Indians as they were called then. The Anglo Saxons who came here treated them very badly. By the end of the play, Lincoln is… he’s helped along by Horace Greeley, who’s a character in the play, and Walt Whitman, another character in the play. [By the end of the play] Lincoln’s attitude towards Native Americans changed enormously, and that’s to some extent, well – I think it’s why the play has some relevance to what’s going on right now. That’s a sales pitch! [laughs]. Lincoln’s resolution to the problem – this is the question I want people to ask: Was it correct or not? I mean, he let 38 [people be executed] and pardoned 265. 

Another character in the play, Whipple, was the Episcopal Bishop of Minnesota. He had a huge influence on Lincoln. And at the end, he says, “You know, it’s great that you’ve let 265 live, but the ones that have been sentenced to death didn’t get a fair trial.” And that, by the way, is exactly how Native Americans feel about that today, that those people were denied a fair trial. And of course, they were.

So why did you choose to write a play and not a history book?

If you’re writing history, you’ve got to stick with the facts. [A play allows one] to write about all the conflict between characters. In other words, I was not a playwright, but I think I immediately grasped what [my friend] was saying about the ingredients for a play. The professor reinforced the thought of trying to write a play. By the way [laughs], I’m working on another play right now, which is very different and a much more challenging play. 

Is it also historical?

Have you ever heard of a journalist named Agnes Smedley? This play is to a large extent based on her life. She was an activist journalist… and I’ve got this play set up so that her life (story) is developed from scenes within the play involving people like Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Joseph Goebbels. I mean, [laughs], it’s all over the place! And then, at the end, she’s interrogated by Roy Cohn. You can imagine that scene!

Do you have a title yet?

Agnes Smedley wrote a book – a novel, but really it’s an autobiography – called Daughter of Earth, and I thought that would be an appropriate title.

Let’s back up to hear about your career path. After college you joined the Marines before going to law school.

I was in a program in college called Platoon Leaders Class that made you a second lietenant upon graduation. And so I joined the Marine Corps after graduating from Virginia. I was in for close to three years. After that I went to [George Washington University] Law School.

Is that also when you got married?

I married Barbara Jean “BJ” Lockhart in 1959. We first lived on 31st Street below M Street below the canal, when I was clerking for the judge. We were married for sixteen years, until the mid 1970s, and had one daughter, Barbara Reid Norris. She was born in 1962. She now lives in Annapolis, and her husband, unhappily, got one of those horrible, aggressive cancers. My son-in-law [Charlie Buckley] was a very successful real estate broker who did very, very well. Charlie was a wonderful father and husband and later, my daughter continued his [business]. And now one of her daughters – one of my granddaughters – has joined her. So the two of them are now doing this work together. The other granddaughter is getting a Ph.D from the University of Chicago in June.

Where else did you live before you moved to Knollwood. And did you ever remarry?

We lived on 34th Street near the Cathedral when my daughter went to Beauvoir School and then National Cathedral School. After the divorce, I moved to an apartment on Cathedral Avenue. I was there until I met  Joyce. I called her my wife, but she was my partner for 30 years, a long time. Joyce Hoffman Sargent [1933-2009]. When we met she was a widow. She was a very successful real estate broker. She died of heart disease in 2009.

Before we get too far ahead, let’s go back to your career. I understand you were an Assistant U.S. Attorney in DC for many years. And that you actually enjoyed writing, like, legal briefs.

Most lawyers do not like to write briefs. [But] I’m one of those weird guys. When you read a case, there’s always a factual basis in the case. And I always found a lot of these very interesting, especially criminal cases. My first job out of law school I clerked for a year for U.S. District Court Judge Matthew McGuire. It was one of the best jobs! Then I went to the U.S. Attorney’s office for seven or eight years. I tried a variety of cases before juries, both criminal and civil.

We had one abortion case. At that time – in the 1960s – it was hard to get an abortion because it was against the law, a criminal offense. But the statute was written so that the woman who sought the abortion was considered the victim. As a result, she couldn’t take the ffth and so she had to testify. It involved these two back-alley [abortion providers]. The woman got an infection, was near death, and went into the hospital. She identified the two men and they were arrested and prosecuted. She recovered. She was, of course, the one who sought the abortion, but the statute regarded her as the one who was victimized. If it wasn’t written that way, everybody would take the fifth. These cases were very rare. Looking back, in those eight years, I don’t think I ever heard of another one. Mr. [President Donald] Trump talks about punishing women, but it would result in no trials because everybody would take the fifth.

I loved the U.S. Attorney’s office – that was excitement and fun. I also did quite a bit of appellate work and [was sought after] for writing appellate briefs for the U.S. Circuit Court in DC But I had the idea of going into private practice and I formed a partnership. After a couple of years the Attorney General of the Virgin Islands called me and invited me to be the Deputy Attorney General in St. Thomas and St. Croix. It sounded pretty good to me.

But I couldn’t convince my wife to move to the Virgin Islands. [Instead] I went to work for the National Consumer Finance Association, a trade association, for six or seven years. I testified several times on the Hill, wrote articles and testimony for witnesses. My title was legislative director and general counsel. During that time I divorced. Later, I met Joyce.

How about other memories of your childhood?

Something that I don’t think people in Washington are aware of, maybe you aren’t either… and that is that in 1940, in practically everybody’s house, the fuel was coal.

The boys [in my family] had to stoke the coal furnace every day. That’s what we, and most people, had in our house for heat – anthracite coal. It was delivered as small chips and would be funnelled into the coal room in the basement. And then we would fill a hopper with coal every day in the winter. An auger would carry the coal to the flames. So when the temperature dropped, the auger would turn on and start dumping the fresh coal. This was a great big furnace.

I took over from the brother before me, and I had that job for about four years. Every night about 10 o’clock I would fill the hopper with enough coal to make sure that it would feed the fire all day. Then I would shovel out the ashes into large metal containers and I would take them out to the alley behind the house. Because there was so much dust and dirt, I had to take a shower before I went to bed.

Once a week the ash truck came. I would watch these guys – one was up there catching the metal containers and dumping the ashes and of course, there’s dust going all over the place. It was a totally open truck. I guess the guy must have been standing on some kind of a platform because it was fairly deep –  I would estimate that the height of that box was maybe eight feet. I don’t know what they did with the ashes. I guess they dumped them somewhere. 

When I left to go to the University of Virginia my dad had this huge furnace removed, and he put in a gas furnace that wasn’t any bigger than a large trunk to heat the whole house. And shortly after that, nobody’s burning coal. The whole city had been heated by coal – much of it would arrive on the C&O Canal. A train track would bring the coal up by 27th Street. 

To the old power plant?

That’s right.

Now, you know, that’s fascinating. What a great piece of Washington history.

I thought that was something that might be interesting. That was how houses were heated in the winter. And by the way, we didn’t have air conditioning. My father installed a big fan on the roof of our house, and [when] you opened your window this fan would suck in. So it was a breeze – it didn’t make it any cooler – but a slight breeze was something,

Were winters more severe when you were younger?

No, I think they were milder. I kind of looked forward to snow. I made a fair amount of money shoveling people’s sidewalks.

The Phillips Gallery is pretty close to where you lived, right? 

That’s another story. I used to go to the Phillips Gallery all the time, and I remember when people were allowed to smoke cigarettes. Can you believe that? And people say, what? And I said, it’s true. The only admonition was, please don’t drop cigarettes on the floor and stamp it out. And so the house – this was before, when it was still just the house – had ashtrays everywhere. I used to go over there. When I was 16 I had a girlfriend, and that’s where we would go to smooch [laughs]. There was a big room that at one time had two Van Goghs, plus a lot of other paintings. I just remember smoking in front of those paintings.

I smoked from [age] 15 but it’s been close to 50 years since I’ve had a cigarette. I wouldn’t be here if I’d kept smoking. I was a very heavy smoker, two or three packs a day. 

Kissing in the Phillips, that’s pretty exciting.

Smooching. 

A year ago, I ran into a former girlfriend’s sister. She said she’d talked to her sister recently and she’d mentioned that I had introduced her to art. I said, oh, and I kept thinking, ooh, and all I remember was the smooching [laughs]! Well that was about 70 years ago. Yeah, I did take her to museums. I loved going to them.

Other memories of teenage years?

Did I mention to you that when I was 16, I worked on an oil tanker in the summer. My father knew the commandant of the Coast Guard. And the Coast Guard was responsible for issuing papers, ordinary merchant seamen papers, and so I became an ordinary seaman. I Googled this recently – it did start at 16. So when I was 16 years old, I worked on an oil tanker and made three trips from Marcus Hook, PA. It’s near Chester, PA, on the Delaware River. We went to either Port Arthur or Beaumont [in Texas]. We would go down to Texas empty, so we were high in the water. Then when we came back, we were loaded, and I made three trips. I remember when coming back, low in the water, we would catch flying fish. The main cook and I would stretch this net-like material and they’d fly into it. They were delicious. It was a week down and a week back. So I was on that tanker about six weeks altogether. That was a very interesting experience.

This was a Sun Oil Company (Sunoco) tanker. The Pennsylvania Sun was the name of the tanker. It was non-union; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to work there. I was what is known as the “saloon mess.” In other words, I was the mess boy for the officers on that tanker. You had the skipper, and then first, second, and third mate, and then first engineer, and maybe one or two others, and a purser.

But I do remember the ordinary seamen. Most of their job was chipping and painting. There was constant maintenance of these ships, otherwise they wouldn’t last. That particular tanker incidentally was torpedoed in the Gulf of Mexico, fairly near Key West [on July 15, 1942] by a German U-boat. These U-boats came from Germany or France. They would go all the way down across the Atlantic Ocean to our coast. And they torpedoed lots of ships on our coast, and this particular one got all the way into the Gulf of Mexico. The tanker that I was on had been torpedoed, severely damaged, but repaired and sent back in the service. I became pretty good friends with the purser who showed me various places on the tanker that you could see where the repairs were made. 

When you were 16 and working on the tanker, you didn’t know you were going to go into the military yet, did you? 

Oh, actually, to be honest with you, I realized that I did not like sailing around on a ship. I was at Landon [and] I took my books, my summer reading, with me and I remember a lot of them – Madame Bovary, The Red and the Black, Buddenbrooks. Buddenbrooks was extraordinary – have you read it yet? No? You’ll like it, or if you don’t like it, there’s something wrong!

You must have been the only ordinary seaman who was reading books like that.

Well, I was just, like, I was a mess boy. But I mingled with the seamen. They didn’t treat me like I was… well, I will say this … I think I showed up there the morning I was supposed to report in a seersucker suit [laughs].

At the end of the final [trip], we arrived at Marcus Hook, which is where the refinery Sun Oil Company was. In those days, they brought crude oil to the east. They didn’t have pipelines, and they would bring these tankers full of oil, and then they would be discharged, and then the refinery would, I guess, turn the oil into gasoline or whatever. As we arrived, there were other tankers ahead of us, so we had to wait in the Delaware River.  And while we waited, a freighter came down and crashed into the side of our tanker. And I remember, I was in my bunk, and I don’t think I was thrown out, but I mean, I felt the jar, and everybody felt the jar [laughs]. And of course, I suppose some of those people might have thought, Good God, we’ve been torpedoed. I have a photograph from the Philadelphia Inquirer showing this huge freighter. See, we were low in the water because of all the oil, and this thing was huge, and anyway, I jumped out [of my bunk], and everybody headed for the poop deck, which is where you would get out if you had to abandon ship. That was where we were congregating, and here’s this huge ship, it was like a monster over us. I would guess it took three or four hours before they were able to separate them. But the tanker dumped a lot of oil into the river from the puncture. 

It would be interesting to see that newspaper article.

I have it actually. My daughter had a friend at National Cathedral School who had some connection with The Philadelphia Inquirer, and sure enough, she was able to dig up some articles, including a photograph.

Nobody on board was hurt?

No, no one was hurt. It struck fairly close to the stern. Had it been another 25 feet closer, it would have been a serious problem. There would have been fatalities, and the engine room would have been flooded. And you know, it would have been a real mess. The tanker was not all one big thing of oil. It had various compartments so that if you had this problem, you didn’t lose everything. 

Let’s switch to a topic about some historical research I’ve done that you actually have some connection to. I go to Sidwell Friends School and there’s this house on the property called Zartman House now, but it used to be called The Highlands [built 1817-1827]. It was built by a man named Charles Nourse who raised his family there but also had enslaved people. I’ve been doing historical research on the plantation and the people who owned the land after the Nourse family.

Well, you know who lived there later was [Rear] Admiral [Cary T.] Grayson [1878-1938] Did you see that in your research? He was [President Woodrow] Wilson’s doctor, and part of the cover-up [obscuring the severity of Wilson’s October 1919 stroke], but he was also FDR’s doctor [as well as doctor to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft]. His son, Gordon Grayson, was my brother-in-law, and he told me that when they lived in that house – they were all horse people – they rode horses up and down Wisconsin Avenue. Really!

He married your sister, Laura?

That’s right. Oh, did I tell you this, or did you, is it part of your research? You looked it up! Yeah, Laura, that’s exactly right [laughs]. Gordon, he was a fabulous person, really. His father was an MD but he would always be referred to as “Admiral” Grayson. There were three boys in that family, Gordon – Gordon was Navy – as was William, and the third boy, Cary,  was in the Marine Corps. When you look at that house from the street, it doesn’t look that big, but it is a pretty big house. It spreads out and goes back. I don’t know where the stable was, but I think they had a stable down in the back. 

Did Gordon Grayson go to Landon or St. Albans? 

He went to St Albans, close enough to walk, or I guess ride. When I first went to Landon in 1945, the headmaster had a horse, and they had a barn and there was a horse paddock. He was still riding and jumping and all that sort of stuff. Well, if you research the Graysons, I’d be very interested. I mean, there’s George Grayson, William’s son, who I know. The family has a horse breeding farm in Upperville, VA,  and George is running it now.

Going back to the Nourse’s family: Joseph Nourse [1754-1841] was the first registrar of the Department of Treasury and had worked for George Washington then got a job setting up the Treasury Department. The Highlands was likely built by his son, Charles Nourse. I found so many interesting things. At the  Pennsylvania Historical Society I found correspondence concerning the whole question of whether or not Black people could serve in the military – this was during the War of 1812. A letter Charles Nourse wrote to Daniel Parker, adjutant and inspector general of the War Department from 1814 to 1821, was writen on July 9, 1820. Charles was recounting a general who was saying if it doesn’t work out, probably, if they lost, then they could just, like, sell the soldiers who were enslaved. The Army was extremely racist in that period.

I had an uncle [Joseph Dent Hungerford, 1894-1918], my mother’s older brother, who was in the Army. He was a captain in 1918, and there was a border incident at Nogales [Arizona, on the Mexican border], and he was killed. And I remember my mother telling me that she was 18 at the time. She was born in 1900 and they were in a carriage going to church on a Sunday, and coming down this road was an Army officer, and he said, “Can you point out the Hungerford farm?” He was bringing the news. That is how they alerted people, if they could. My mother said, “I remember that so distinctly because we were on our way to church on a Sunday morning.”

In that battle, the troops were Black and the officers were white. When he was killed, he was the commanding officer for Troop C, 10th Calvary. I believe he was leading the attack up the hill across the Mexican border. The man who took control was a second lieutenant who was also very badly wounded and couldn’t continue the attack. So the person that took charge of the company was a Black sergeant, and they did drive out the Mexicans. They were the Buffalo Soldiers. 

What a difference 100 years makes. Tell us more about the wars during yours and your family’s lifetimes.

Before we moved to R Street, my parents had a big corner house at 18th and Park Road in Mount Pleasant. A neighbor, Jack Corbett, was a Marine officer. He was killed at Guadalcanal. I hadn’t thought of that. Also, one of my sisters was unofficially engaged to a guy named Hank Gibbons. Hank was in the Army and served in the India-Burma theater. He was on a plane and the plane didn’t make it. I remember when he was declared missing in action. And I remember my sister being quite devastated by this. I’m pretty sure they would have gotten married. My oldest brother was an aviator in the South Pacific on a carrier. Another brother was in medical school when the war ended. So he never saw combat. 

Do you recall stories you heard from your eldest brother about the Pacific campaign?

Let me give you some advice. Jot this down: Have the conversations on the things you would like to talk to your family about [because you will wish you had when they are gone]. For example, I mentioned that my father delivered babies. Well, one of the neighbors, when we were at 18th and Park, was the McNamara family. And around [the year] 2000, I was reading the paper one morning, and I saw this obituary. I thought, My God, well, she was about 102 years old. And there was going to be a Mass at Little Flower Church with a reception after it. So I said Joyce, I’ve got to go to this. I vaguely knew some of the children. Ann Tierney was the daughter of Mrs. McNamara, and I walked up to her and said, Hi, I’m Bob Norris. And she said, Oh, Bobby Norris. I remember your father died on March 29, 1955.

I mean, you know, obviously my father was not president of the United States! And then said, See that young woman over there  – a woman probably in her 40s – Your father delivered her on the morning of March 29, 1955. That’s my daughter. Your father died that afternoon. 

And when word got out that I’m there, it turned out that something like 37 people in that house had been delivered by my father! My father was their favorite, and he wasn’t a gynecologist. In internal medicine he did everything [laughs].

Had you been aware that your father was working on the very last day of his life?

I knew that he was still practicing medicine. I was actually [on active duty] at Quantico [Marine Corps Base] when he died. I got a message to come home like, “Something’s come up. You should come home.” I had a car and I went home, and that’s when I learned. He had a massive coronary heart attack. 

Is he buried in Arlington Cemetery?

He is, with my mother and two of my brothers and their wives, and I have a slot, but there’s an issue as to whether or not I will get the slot, even though it’s still in my name. The burial site is located about 150 yards on the left from the McClellan Gate. And the reason for that is I didn’t put 20 years in [active duty military] or receive a reasonably high combat metal, like a Silver Star.

So there’s that issue. By the way, once a slot has been assigned to someone, there’s nothing that can change that until the person dies and they make a decision on whether or not the deceased remains eligible to be buried there. I know because I once offered [my slot] to the husband of my former wife, a highly decorated Marine officer in Korea. We went over there to inquire and they told me, It’s in your name, and it’ll be in your name till you die. Nothing will happen until after you die. I mean, it’s just – at 93, I mean – I’m getting there [laughs]!  Bizarre, right? It didn’t work out anyway because he died – and I’m still alive.

Now I’m told, by a couple of people, that my daughter can make a very compelling case for me, since my family is there. I also have two additional family members on my mother’s side buried at Arlington. Well, I’m not going to take up much room anyway because I’m going to be cremated [laughs].

How would you like to be remembered?

I belong to a church, Christ Church in Georgetown. And I’ve told my daughter I don’t want a bunch of people getting up and saying, “What a great guy.” I’ve been to too many funerals where people get up, and I’m wondering if they’re talking about the same person. And people go on and on and on. In some cases, I’m sure it’s justified, but there are other times…

I think I would just like for the priest to say that he had talked to me, and that if I’ve hurt anybody, I’m sincerely sorry. And that’s all. I don’t want to be remembered as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright – assuming you know if I get a Pulitzer Prize. Well, yeah, I guess I would like that, a Pulitzer, yeah [laughs].

END

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The post Robert “Bob” Brewer Norris, age 93 appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

Narrator: Gordon Stewart Brown, age 88

Date of interview: Jan. 12, 2025

Location: Mr. Brown’s apartment at Ingleside at Rock Creek

Interviewers: Natalia Weinstein, age 15, with Carl Lankowski

Transcribed from audio recording by: Natalia Weinstein

Abstract

Ambassador Gordon Brown, a 35-year career U.S. Foreign Service diplomat with postings largely in the Middle East, has done more in retirement than most people do in a lifetime –  from writing books to serving as chairman of the board at Habitat for Humanity.

Born in 1936 into a family whose social and professional circles revolved around international journalists and political dialogue, Brown was raised bicoastally, in Washington, DC, and San Francisco. His early memories on N Street in Georgetown included hanging out at the corner pharmacy with friends getting root beers and collecting papers for the war effort. At 9, immediately after World War II ended, his family relocated to Rome, then in a post-war devastated state, where he recalls freely roaming the city’s empty streets on a bicycle and collecting postage stamps.

High school passed happily in San Francisco and then he went off to Stanford University, a place he said was hardly the academic bastion it is today. Youthful disinterest in mideaval history led him to drop his dual major, leaving him with a political science degree – a fact he ruefully recalls since the first book he wrote upon retirement was about the medieval period. He took the Foreign Service exam as a junior in college not expecting victory, but it won him an interview with a promise to join the State Department after allowing him a few years to mature in the Army.

Over the years he married, had three children, raised them overseas  – Baghdad, Cairo, Tunisia, Saudia Arabia were some of his assignments – and always returned stateside to his home on 32nd Street in Chevy Chase DC that he bought in 1964. His retirement years were enriched by that long-standing neighborhood community, and he busied himself writing five books, volunteering at the Smithsonian American History Museum, attending the theater, teaching elder adults, and passionately advancing homeownership opportunities with Habitat for Humanity, where he served as chairman of the board for three years. He and his wife, Olivia, moved to Ingleside at Rock Creek in 2020.

His advice for a well-lived life: Keep your eyes and ears open to every kind of experience.

I’m Natalia Weinstein and I’m sitting here with Ambassador Gordon Brown. Let’s start at the beginning. You were born in Rome, Italy?

That’s correct. 

What date?

Feb. 24, 1936. 

Who were your parents?

My father, George Stewart Brown [1906-1957], was from Buckeye, AZ, and my mother, Helen Meyer Brown Lombardi [1908-2000], was from Cincinnati, Ohio. My older sister, Ronny Brown Baxter, was born in ’34 in Vienna, I think, when my father was the Vienna bureau chief for United Press International. She died seven or eight years ago.

Do you remember anything from living in Rome?

You know, once you are older than 20, you have childhood memories that you probably don’t really remember, but there are pictures, family photos and things like that, and then you think you remember them. I do have recollections. I was three when I left, so I probably don’t have any real memories. We lived in an apartment, in a tall building, and that’s about all I remember as a kid. 

When did you move to the United States?

We left Rome in the summer of ’39, which would have been just before [World War II] started. We [sailed] back on the SS Rex I remember, which is a great Italian liner, their prime liner. Not that I remember that, but I remember that’s what we came on, which subsequently was bombed during the war, so I never saw the ship as an adult. And we moved to Washington because my father had been recruited – very fortuitously, the timing worked out – to join the American Red Cross. 

What do you remember from your early years in DC?

I remember when we lived on Dumbarton Street in Georgetown for a while, and then we moved to our house in Georgetown – our permanent house – on N Street.

What was it like growing up in Georgetown?

I was a school kid. I remember my school, I remember all the things that happened there. We lived there until I suppose I was almost in junior high. I graduated from Jackson Elementary up on R Street, which is now an art collective, I guess. And, you know, I remember my friends. I can instantly remember their names and our escapades around the neighborhood. It was a very middle class neighborhood at that point. 

Did you have a favorite school subject? 

I think I liked everything. It was an interesting school. There were only four classrooms in six years of studying. So, each class was divided for a year and a half. First [grade] through halfway through second. Second [grade] through halfway through fourth, and so on. We all knew each other. We walked home after school and played in each other’s gardens, threw rocks at cars, and stuff like that. Snowballs at cars, not rocks [laughs]. 

What about after-school activities?

No, not that I remember. It was a grade school, and they weren’t big on after-school activities. We just played around. What’s the name of the pharmacy on P and 30th streets [Morgan’s Pharmacy], which is still there? We used to stop there for root beers on the way home from school. Anyway, little things like that I remember, but not very much. It was the war years, and I remember collecting paper, and smashing tin cans and taking them to, I guess it was the Little Tavern that sold dime hamburgers at the time, but they were also the collecting point for fat. We were collecting fat for the war effort. And papers for the war effort. We’d take our little red wagons and go around and collect peoples’ papers. We’d take it down to – well it used to be a junkyard, then became Dean & DeLuca on M street in Georgetown. And it’s now just become another upscale restaurant. So it’s still the old building of the junkyard in my mind. 

What political issues do you recall about that era?

I mean, we sang silly ditties making fun of the Germans and Japanese. And we bought saving stamps – and I can’t remember what they were called –  Liberty bonds, that’s what. We bought the stamps to fill our book, and if I remember correctly, the school had been trying to buy a Jeep. I think it took us a whole year to buy a Jeep. Maybe we bought a Jeep a year, I can’t remember. But I remember there was a big chart in the front hall of the school where they would show how much of the Jeep we owned that week. 

What was your dad doing for the Red Cross?

Like any other dad he went to work. And I didn’t know what his work really was, and I didn’t much care. I do remember one of the problems of living in Georgetown at the time, or in any place, was gasoline rationing. My father and mother loved to take picnics on weekends, and they would save the few gallons of gas they had in the car tank to go on weekend picnics. I remember my dad mainly on weekends because he wasn’t around much. He worked long hours, and my mother worked too during the war. She worked for what eventually became the CIA. She was translating, she wasn’t doing anything fancy. She was just translating because she spoke very good German. 

So you felt the effects of the war. 

We knew about the war, and as I said we had these silly songs that we sang about, you know, “Mussolini is a meany” and “the Japs are worse” and some worse stuff. And we did the collections and stuff. We were very aware of the war because a lot of people had relatives fighting in it, but not my family. My dad went overseas again in early ‘45, because he had been recruited by the Army to go back to Italy. Because having been a press guy before the war, he knew all of the people they wanted to reach in the press and in the media, and so on, and in the arts and what not. He was a public relations advisor to the U.S. Army through Italy. And we joined him in ‘45, just after the war was over in Europe. It was the peace in ‘45, and we were there by July. My sister, my mother and I went out, and set up house in Italy for a year. 

How old were you then?

About 9 or 10. 

What was post-war life like in Italy? I assume you remember more since you were older then. 

Oh yeah, I definitely remember that. We first lived in a house in the outskirts of Rome in an apartment building that they put up, where there was a little farm actually below us.It sort of was an empty lot. And we were up on the third, fourth, or fifth floor, I can’t remember. But there was a family below, and they had kids our age. So we got to know these little Italian kids, but soon after that we moved. We were put in, actually, the ambassador’s residence, which had been used as a rehabilitation or rest hospital for military people during the war. It was in pretty ramshackle condition, but we lived there for the next year. Yeah, I remember Rome. There was no traffic in Rome then, other than military traffic. I had a bicycle. I could bicycle anywhere I wanted to, because the ambassador’s home was not far from the top of the Corso, which is where the embassy was. So we were close to town, close to the Spanish Steps and everything like that. I was collecting stamps in those days, and I knew where all the stamp dealers were, and I would bicycle around them to see if there was any news. I knew my way around downtown Rome pretty well, because a 12-year-old kid with a bicycle in Rome with no traffic? Terrific. 

Did you speak Italian?

I learned some. I couldn’t speak Italian. But I could get along. 

How many years did you live in Italy?

Well, I think it was close to a year and a half.

And then you moved to California?

No, we came back to Washington for a year, or a year and a half. I can’t remember whether I went back to Jackson [Elementary School] or not. But anyway, it was time to go to high school or junior high, and my parents didn’t like the junior high. It’s the one over on Wisconsin Avenue, it’s still there. So I went to St. Albans. I didn’t like St. Albans. I was very glad when my father got a job in California. So we moved to California, I think we were back in DC maybe only a year or so.

What was it like moving to California? I assume if you didn’t like St. Albans, then you were okay leaving DC?

Yeah, I sort of lost contact with my friends from school days. Particularly when I went to St. Albans. It was a whole different crowd of people, and it was a tough transition, so I was happy enough to leave, yeah. 

You settled in San Francisco. How did you like living there?

It was great, it’s a great town. We had a nice house. I went to a good school, good high school, good college. All in the Bay Area. 

Were political issues different in San Francisco than in DC?

There were a lot of local political issues. Not too many national ones that I was aware of at the time. I wasn’t very political, I don’t think, at the time. Well, by the time you’re in high school, you’re generally into some sort of sport. Since I wasn’t good at team sports, I was generally in track and cross country. 

Your move to California was for your dad’s work?

Yeah, my dad was working for the government when we came back to Washington, DC. He was with USIA [United States Information Agency], which at that point was part of the State Department. And the government had a [salary] cap or ceiling, and it was the beginning of the McCarthy days. He just wasn’t very comfortable in that situation. He then got a good job offer, once again in public relations, from Chevron Oil Company out in California. And frankly, my parents, I think they needed to do it for money purposes, because all their savings had been in British banks. And so, when the British pound was devalued — you probably don’t know this — the British pound used to be in the place where the dollar is now. Anyone who wanted to save money put it in a British bank before the Second World War. After the war, the British pound was worth about 20 percent of what it was worth before because they had spent all of their money fighting the war. And my parents didn’t have any savings left. So they were thinking of sending us to college obviously, so he needed to go to work for a company that paid more than the State Department did. It was quite simple. 

You and your sister went to Stanford University?

Yes, both of us. Stanford at that time was just a local college. It wasn’t the great college it became later. Wallace Sterling [1906-1985] was the president of the college at the time, and he was spending money to improve the professional schools – law, medicine, engineering. There’s probably one I missed there. That’s where the money was going. And I was in general studies. I was in history, political science, and that kind of stuff. The money wasn’t being spent on my faculty, let me put it that way. I didn’t think I had good professors. It was just another college, it wasn’t that great. 

Was Stanford the only school you applied to?

I don’t remember. To be perfectly honest, 60 years ago, the application process wasn’t quite the gut wrenching issue it is now. I probably applied to someplace else, but I remember not having any real thought about it. They accepted me; I went. 

Had your parents gone to college?

My father was from Arizona. He went to Arizona State I think – the one in Tucson. My mother went to Cal [University of California, Berkeley].

Your major was political science?

Yes, political science and history were the two things that interested me at the time. I studied them; I wound up getting a major only in political science because surprisingly enough, the history department had a requirement that you take a course in medieval history, and another course in historical method. At age 20, I was uninterested in either one of those, so I said, Eh, it’s not worth it, so I didn’t take those two courses, I didn’t get a double major. Then when I retired from the State Department, I started writing history, and the first book was about medieval history. So I should have!

Tell me about your life at Stanford.

Well I didn’t join a fraternity, and I lived off campus for three years after freshman year. I guess I was kind of a loner. I hung around with my friends, and we played tennis, or just hung around. I was involved a little bit in student activities, but I can’t really remember which one of those were important, and which ones were just make-work. I had friends; we used to go out to Rosotti’s Alpine Inn in Portola Valley, which is still around. It’s on a road up to the hills. An outdoor beer garden. But not as frequented as it is now. My daughter lives in the area now. We go to Rosotti’s as kind of an occasion. It used to be, I don’t know, jerky sticks, beer, and pretzels, that was about all.

But, those were the kinds of things I did. I tried out for the track team. It was pretty obvious that high school skills weren’t good enough for really competitive college track, so I decided I was wasting time. I was in ROTC for a while, and they flushed me out [for] medical reasons, which I’m told by medical people now, was probably just the result of a bad test. I never thought about challenging it, which is interesting because if I had been an ROTC officer coming out of college, my career might have gone in a whole different direction. But it didn’t. I liked political science. I thought the teachers were mediocre. My faculty advisor was kind of out of date, I thought. So, put it this way, I never joined the alumni association. I didn’t feel strongly about it. 

College was stressful. I was growing up. I was probably about a year, or at least a year younger than the other people in my class. I don’t know how that happened. I started school early –  I can’t really remember. So I was socially and sexually probably pretty immature. Kids are uncertain at that age, about everything, and I was. I wasn’t very happy in college. I liked the school, I liked the learning, but socially I think I was kind of a misfit. 

What was next after you graduated in 1957?

I guess I have to go back [to before graduation]. End of my junior year, I was going off on an exchange program – it was called the Experiment in International Living. We were going to Berlin for the summer. As kind of a trial run, I took the [Foreign Service Officer Test] entry exam in New York, on my way to get the ship to Europe. I had this summer in Europe, I actually stayed until Christmas time almost. Stanford is on a trimester system, so I could do that. While I was in Europe, I was told that I had passed the written test, and I was to come back and take the oral test. So I took the oral test before going back to Stanford. And somewhere during the oral test, they asked me, What would you do if we flunked you? And I said, Well, you know, I’ve got the Army – in those days everyone had to register for the draft, and you had to be ready for duty, or else have a better excuse. Since I didn’t have any good excuses at hand, I figured I might as well go ahead and do my military duty. So I said that. I said, I’d probably go into the Army, and volunteer and come back and sit for the exam again. At the end of the exam, they came to me and said, You know, we think you’re good material, but you’re just a kid, but we’ll take you, no questions asked, when you come out [of the Army]. So by the time I graduated, I already knew that was the promise I made to the State Department, so I went and signed up for the Army. You had to volunteer for a three-year commitment. Then you had to convince them that you were the right guy to go to the Army language school, which is what I wanted to do. I went to the language school and learned Russian. And that was what I did when I left college. I left college in June 1957, and by July or early August I was down at Fort Ord in California doing basic training. Then from there, went to the language school, then to duty elsewhere, and three years later I was out. 

Was Russian difficult?

No, it was very fun. I really enjoyed learning Russian. They teach you for a year, and they teach you with specific military ideas in mind. You’re going to be either listening to the radio, or you’re going to be a prisoner interrogator or something like that. So you learn vocabulary that you don’t need normally, and you don’t learn a lot of vocabulary that you would need in normal life. So, my Russian wasn’t very useful to me. Basically not at all in the State Department. 

Was working in the State Department the career you always wanted?

The State Department? [Yes.] It was a possibility. I had always thought of journalism, or something involved with living overseas or working overseas, or the State Department. My father after all – and most of the family friends who were journalists – were interested in foreign affairs. When my parents had friends over, they treated my sister and me kind of as adults, and we were invited to take part in the parties, and everybody was always talking politics. It just went the direction I was interested in anyway. 

Do you think your parents expected that career for you?

I never felt forced into it. It was just the way I was raised. I guess we were always involved in politics, or international politics anyway. And the people who came through our house were always people who were in the same line of business, so it was natural to me to go that way. 

How long did you work in the State Department?

When I came out of the Army it was July, and I think by September I was in the State Department. That was ’61, and I retired in ’96. That’s 35 years. 

What were the career paths in the State Department when you entered?

In the State Department, you usually have an assignment. Your first tour, there’s training. Then your first assignment is usually some get-acquainted-with-how-an-embassy-works assignment. They put you in kind of an administrative position rather than a managerial position, because you’re managing local employees, but not managing yourself. Or a consular, you can do consular work as a junior officer. I did a year, or two years, in Washington I guess.

Then we went overseas, and in the last part of Washington and overseas, I was studying Arabic at that point. They needed junior officers to specialize in Arabic, and I thought my Russian wasn’t going to take me very far, so I better learn a language that they wanted. I mean I had French already, and a bit of Italian and things like that, but they didn’t need those. What they needed was the hard languages. So we went to Beirut, and I was a student. Then my first post I was administrative, or a junior member of the administrative section in the embassy. I did the personnel office. I did the security function. I did a couple other things, I can’t remember, but I was head of a section where I was the junior officer and a bunch of local employees who were actually doing the work. So it was experience in low-level management at the beginning. And then, my next appointment was in Cairo, and there I was doing economic work reporting on economic activities. So you get a little more responsible work each time, until you eventually go either into the administrative or consular work, where you become a reporting management officer, where you’re essentially reporting on what’s going on. 

Which were your favorite assignments?

I had a lot of different ones. We loved Cairo because of the work and country, it’s a fascinating place. The easiest place we lived was probably Tunisia – that was years later. It’s like southern Italy. It’s a lovely country on the Mediterranean, with lots of Roman ruins and interesting scenery. I think the most challenging jobs were the ones in Washington, because you go back and forth between Washington and your posts overseas. Because they always involve many more layers of management issues, and responsibilities which are a little harder to penetrate than what you’re doing overseas, which is, generally speaking, representing the United States and reporting on the local activities, which is kind of fun. In that sense I still think of myself as a reporting officer. Somebody who goes out and finds things that we want to know, or don’t want to know. And report to Washington so they get an understanding of what’s going on in that country. 

In the midst of all that, you married Olivia Collins and started a family?

Yes, our first child, Marian Elsa Brown [Sprague], was born in Beirut in ‘62 or ‘63. The second child – Louise Margaret Brown [Ingold] was born in England because the hospitals in Baghdad were not up to par. But she came to Baghdad at the age of one month or two months. Then the third child, Stewart Laurence Brown, was conceived in Cairo I guess, and born in Washington. 

Tell me how you met your wife.

We actually met in 1958 when I was between the Army language school and Alaska, while I was still in the service. [Later in the conversation, Gordon Brown explained his military experience in Alaska where he was stationed at the end of the Aleutian Island chain monitoring Soviet missile tests. He said, “We listened to the police, air base, and other voice radio networks”]. Olivia was living in San Francisco, a guest of people whom we knew. She was from England, and so she didn’t know anybody. My mother knew her hostess, I guess. She was staying with friends of her family. And so they hooked us up a blind date, and it worked! 

What was it like raising kids overseas?

Well in many ways it was easier, because it’s easier to get help. The difficulty was always finding the right stuff. I remember in Baghdad we tried for a while to keep chickens because there wasn’t a good supply of eggs, and milk was often canned milk and stuff like that. So getting supplies in some of the countries, getting good baby supplies was difficult. But you always had the help around. You didn’t have to worry about washing diapers because there was somebody to do it for $20 a week, or something like that. 

How much time was overseas vs. the home country?

Well in the State Department, of course, you spend two thirds of your career overseas, and one third in the States. So between every second assignment or so, I worked at the [Washington, DC] State Department. My final overseas assignment was over in 1994, and I retired from the service in 1996. So our last move was 1994 – our last move from overseas. 

Your kids were how old at that point?

By that point our kids were gone. When we went overseas in ’87 or something like that, to Tunisia, we didn’t have any children with us anymore. They were in college or out of college. They all went to college in the states. The two elder girls went to Duke, and the son went to George Mason. 

What was life back in the U.S. like?

Well I was still with the State Department, and I spent my final two years with the State Department as an inspector of the embassies. That was the only time I ever got to use my Russian, because basically all the new republics, which used to be part of the Soviet Union, had been independent for maybe two or three years by then. They were due for an inspection. They were start-up embassies run by people who probably didn’t know much about what they were doing, and they needed somebody to come out and tell them how to manage their business a little bit better. Nobody in the inspection corps wanted to do it. I joined the inspection corps right when this came about. So in the end, I wound up going to all the republics that had broken off from the Soviet Union — the ‘Stan’ countries in south Asia, all the Caucasus, Moldova, which is back in the news, and so on. Leading a team of inspectors, which was great for me because I got to use my Russian and see the country, or at least the outskirts of the country, if you will. At least the semi-independent republics. I learned a lot. One of the things I learned was that I was damn glad I had kept my Russian skills up because these are miserable places to live, some of them. Really awful. During the Cold War, we [in the United States] were scared of the Russians militarily, and their science was so terrific, we built them up to sort of be this super power. But really, I spent a lot of time in Russia too, as well as the republics, and the public facilities outside of Moscow. The public facilities, schools, hospitals, I don’t know what else, were out of the 1930s. I mean it was a pretty backward country. 

What did that experience lead to?

Well I inspected those embassies in my last two years in the State Department. Then I traveled some more because one thing I wanted to do was keep a connection with those countries. An organization called “The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,” the OSCE, has a program where they send inspectors out to the elections in these countries, trying to encourage the countries to remain democratic. So I signed up for a lot of election observation missions for the next five or eight years I guess, after I retired. That wasn’t a full-time job. I’d do one a year or so, but it still kept me connected through that kind of travel.

We did a lot of [personal] travel after I retired too. We had bought [our] house on 32nd Place in Chevy Chase DC in 1964. That was after our first post overseas. We came back from Baghdad where they had what they call a hardship allowance. If you’re living in a country where you wonder about the quality when you can’t get eggs, they pay you a little bit more. So we had some money in the bank, and we came back to Washington. And since I had grown up in Washington, I remembered that my parents had always said, you know, this is a great town to own a house in. Because there’s always a demand, there are always new people coming to town, and there’s never enough supply. So we started looking for a house. We had returned from Baghdad, we had a little money in the bank. We wanted to live downtown but by that time Georgetown was too pricey. This was ‘65 and it was already getting pricey in Georgetown. We looked in various places, let’s say, North Capitol and whatnot. But we came out to Chevy Chase, and I didn’t know where Chevy Chase was, really. I thought it was somewhere just south of Baltimore, or something like that. We liked the house though. We were told the school was good. At that point we didn’t really have children in the school, so we didn’t really care about that. We thought the house was right, so we bought the house. When we came back from post, we always managed to time it so someone was [moving out of] the house. 

You rented it out while you were away?

Yes, we just lived there while we were in Washington. We rented it out while we were overseas. So we had this very nice house to come back to each time. It worked out well, and we could travel from there with ease. We almost paid off the mortgage. Oh we did pay off the mortgage. We paid off the mortgage twice actually. When we refinanced it I supposed, then when we sold it again. So anyway, the house was kind of our little bank account, if you will, in Chevy Chase. It allowed us to come and go frequently. After I retired, for a while I was the new executive director of a new business council called US Qatar Business Council. I don’t think they ever really knew what they wanted to do with the business council. They had kind of been convinced by the Qataris that they [American companies that founded the council] put up the money for it as sort of a good will idea with the Qatari Embassy here. I was their executive director – the first one – and we spent three years kind of spinning their wheels, and I eventually left. They were just about ready to ask me to leave, so it worked out fine. The place is still operating and it still doesn’t really have so much to do, as I can see. It’s one of those typical Washington things. But what I really did when I retired was I decided I was going to write some books. So I spent 20 years writing books. 

What did you write about?

Almost all of them history. The first one was really about the eastern Mediterranean. About the connection between the East and the West. A bunch of young, I don’t know, “freebooters” I guess you could call them. From Normandy, they came down to southern Italy in the 11th Century and eventually built a kingdom for themselves. They fought both the local people and the Byzantine Empire, or the Roman Empire in Constantinople. And the Arabs in Sicily. So it was kind of an East meets West in the Middle East discussion. It was kind of an interesting book, because it hasn’t been written up well in the United States. I enjoyed writing that, but I had a hard time selling it to a publisher. But I enjoyed writing it, so I thought, this is what I want to do.

So I thought, okay, I’ll concentrate on early U.S. History, not American history. So I concentrated on the area between our Constitution and the Jacksonian Revolution sort of, in the 1830s. Sort of a 30-year period where we were really just getting set up as a country and learning how to deal with the big powers. Learning how to screw the Indians, and establish ourselves as a future continental country. So it was a really interesting period, and I wrote a number of books about it. Both about Washington and our foreign figures at that point. 

Were you using prior knowledge about history, or did you research?

I had always been interested in history. Almost nothing I had done in work really applied to this. So I had to do it all from scratch. And I won’t say that there were – what should I say? I didn’t plow any new ground, and the academic reviews were mixed about the books, so I wasn’t really adding much to world history. I was adding a lot to my own sense of enjoyment. I really enjoyed that. 

You became a real Washingtonian. Was that always your plan?

I had not thought of myself that way when I was younger. When I would return here from overseas assignments, I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, as a home. I still thought of myself as a Californian. I still in a way think of myself as a Californian. But when I go out there to visit our daughter, I realize I’m not anymore. 

In addition to writing books, you got involved in other projects. Did politics interest you?

No, not politics. Somewhere along the line I had come to the conclusion that what Washington really needed was a solid lower-middle class. A home-owning middle class. And [I realized] that home ownership was the way to get that. So, I was looking for housing groups and I worked for a while with housing charities, and I thought that wasn’t the way. We were keeping families in homes which were substandard, and basically we were just keeping them in places that we shouldn’t really have been renting. Fire and sanitation problems. We were keeping the families together, that was one thing. But really, we were giving them shit to live in. So I decided that home ownership was really the answer, and that fits the pattern of the organization Habitat for Humanity. So I worked with Habitat for Humanity for 10 or 15 years. I was chairman for three, I think, and I liked that. That was worthwhile work. I left there in 2016 or 2017.

Wasn’t President Jimmy Carter involved in that?

He was involved with it ever since he left the government as far as I know. It was started by a guy down in Georgia, which is how Carter got involved with it. Carter became their biggest public relations kind of asset because he came to one of our builds when I was chairman. You know, it brings the press, it brings the people who are interested in seeing what you’re doing, and all that stuff leads to donations, which is nice. Because if you’re a charity, or public relations outlet like that, you need support. You don’t do it on your own money, you do it on other peoples’ money. 

Did you have any direct interactions with President Carter?

I shook his hand when he was here, but that’s about it. Actually, at one point or another, I would have had a lot more connection with him. While we were in our last post, out in Western Africa, I knew I wasn’t going to get another embassy [assignment], so at that point I asked myself, I’m probably going to have to retire in the next few years, so what am I going to do? And I got a phone call from one of my ex-colleagues in the State Department. He worked with the Carter Center, saying, Gordon, we want you to come. We’ve got a project for you, and you’ll be the director of x, y, z or something like that. I thought about it for a while, and I thought, Well, it would mean moving from Washington to Atlanta, and I’m not a southerner by nature. And to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t entirely convinced that I liked the Carter Center’s kind of ‘holier than thou’ way of doing business. I’m a little more cynical. So I said no. I was tempted though, because the work sounded interesting. The salary was good. And I’m sure that living in Atlanta is probably pretty comfortable, but I just didn’t want to do it. 

I didn’t ask about what your wife was doing during your postings.

For the first couple postings, she was raising children. We came back to Washington and the kids by that time were all in school, so she didn’t have that much to tie her down anymore. I shouldn’t say that, because god knows a housewife has to do the cleaning, the plumbing, the washing, the shopping, and all those other things. She got a job with a real estate company, and she was their office director. She sort of ran the office for a company that is no longer in existence. That would have been in the ‘80s, when we were here for almost eight years. Then overseas, at one point when we were in Saudi Arabia, she worked for an American contractor, which had an office in Jeddah where we were living. But their headquarters were in another city, so she was there since the airplanes all came to Jeddah. But people came there first, and a lot of the government offices were in Jeddah. So she sort of ran an office for these people who were coming and going for the contracts that they had. She did essentially administrative stuff for them. But it was good for them, since in Saudi Arabia, if you’re a woman you can’t drive. Or you couldn’t in those days. And this got her a chance and gave her a financial reason to pay for transportation to go out everyday. She’d go out for four hours, and she had a driver, who would take her to the shops on the way home, and so on. So she got out, she liked that. When we were in Tunisia, she took a job at the embassy, being kind of the morale officer in the personnel department. She had some jobs overseas, but most of the time she was raising our children. 

How did it work for the kids, switching up schools?

When we were here in Washington, obviously they went to Lafayette, Deal, etc. The two girls went through the whole thing. The son, who was five years younger than the second girl, went to Lafayette. He went to Deal for a year. He’s – should I say – the least aggressive of our children in terms of wanting to advance himself. He was happy with having Cs, and we tried to convince him that having Cs at Deal wasn’t good enough. He was hard to convince, so we put him into private school. First, St. Andrew’s School, then up in Mercersburg, just across the line in Pennsylvania. A small, private academy. He went there and we went overseas again, and he was there on his own. He said it was a prison, but I still note that most of his friends are still from that school, so he had a good time. I think he went over the wall more than he should have. 

Eight years ago you stopped working for Habitat for Humanity?

Yeah, I had been chairman of the board for three years. The management was changing, the whole system had changed. I think the financial – you’re probably not aware of this, but the financial collapse in 2008 was all based on the fact that the real estate market was all wrong. The financing was all wrong. And everybody came out of that collapse of the financial world –  it took four or five years to get out of it really. The lesson everyone learned was that the financial models that everyone had been following weren’t any good anymore.

Habitat had been raising its money through private donations, and support from institutions – how should I say – larger charitables. We raised about 30 to 40 percent of our money through larger donations. It just dried up completely. We couldn’t raise money anymore, and the Habitat guidance, which had always been, Habitat runs its own banks, Habitat sells the houses, manages the mortgages. Habitat wants to know its customers. So it wants to be the financier for these people because you’re selling them a lifetime house. And we did a lot of looking over their shoulders, you know, trying to keep them out of the hands of people who offer them a $50,000 advance if you just sign a second mortgage kind of thing.

But the whole model changed and Habitat headquarters said okay, we’re going to have to use more commercial finance. Basically now, Habitat here in Washington is simply a contractor for the government. The government offers us land, gives us the possibility of building houses – when I say ‘us’ I mean Habitat. You can build houses on land offered to you by the government, and they have a lot of programs for financing and building the houses. And you’re just contracting the government basically, for low-income housing. It’s not as charitable, it’s almost all bureaucratic at this point. That was changing as I was about to finish my chairmanship, and I decided I really didn’t understand the new world of finance, and I wasn’t set up for it, so I left. I hung around on the board for a couple of years, but I didn’t have a serious management job anymore. I think sometime before the [COVID-19] pandemic I had already stopped even contributing. I just sort of felt they weren’t doing what I thought they were doing anymore. The end is still the same. The end is still to provide their own housing to lower income families, so they can raise their families in a way they couldn’t when they were renting. But the way of doing it is so different now. I just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore. 

What have you spent your time doing instead?

Well, writing those books took a lot of time for a while, and I’ve written my last book, I guess. When I ran out of book projects, I translated a book from French. Then I spent a year or so asking, What am I going to do next, and trying different things. I went up to New York once I remember, and spent a day in the New York Public Library looking at the records of a guy who I thought was a fascinating guy who might be a good subject for a biography. I discovered his handwriting was so impossible to read, and I thought, I’m gonna spend thousands of dollars in this library trying to translate 200 letters, you know, because of what hotels in New York cost and so on. I decided it’s financially not worth it. To write a book about a second- or third-echelon guy back in the early 19th century. I’d be lucky if I got a publisher, and I certainly can’t spend $10,000 to $13,000 to do the research. So I ran out of subjects to write up really. 

How long have you lived at Ingleside?

Since the pandemic, yeah I’ve been here. Pretty much my outside life is now in low gear, put it that way. I had been volunteering at the Smithsonian and doing other things, but that all petered out I guess. 

You teach at the OLLI [Osher Lifelong Learning Institute] program at American University, correct?

Yes. It’s basically old farts talking to other old farts, but we all have fun doing it because those of us who have something we enjoy talking about can go do it, and some people can come and actually learn something from us. I think it’s delightful that anybody past 80 wants to learn.

What have you taught there?

Basically I’m doing the easy thing – I’m taking my old books and turning them into courses. I’m doing it one more year I think. I’ve taught the same course for two years; I think three years is probably the maximum I can teach it. The first time I had 25 students. Last time I had only 15. I’ll have only five next year, so I’ve run my course. 

You mentioned you travel to California – to visit your children, grandchildren?

The grandkid is actually here. That’s our first daughter who’s out in California. The grandkid is actually here in Washington. She’s a lawyer living in town now, on 16th Street, getting a good salary with a New York law firm. So, she’s here, but we don’t see her. She’s got her own life, she’s busy. Her mother comes to town periodically, she’ll be here, maybe next week [but] she’s not here to visit us, she’s here to visit her daughter. 

We went to Richmond to visit our other daughter for Thanksgiving and New Year’s this year. We were in California in the fall. We went back to Yosemite. We probably take a trip to California once a year. We see the Richmond family. Our son, who’s the youngest, just lives across Western Avenue from here, so he’s pretty close. He’s divorced, and his two kids are in college so he doesn’t see much of them. 

What else keeps you busy?

When I’m here, I’ll tell you what I do. I’m editor of the newsletter for this organization here [at Ingleside], which is kind of fun since I still like being a journalist in a way. There are always these committees, which I told you about. So I’m on a committee or two, which spends a lot of time spinning its wheels, but sometimes gives good advice to management, which the management sometimes pays attention to. I still like reading things. I build a model ship every couple of years – I’m not artistic so I create things that I can build. 

How do you do that?

I’ll show you my little workshop when we leave here. When I was a kid, I built model ships that size [pointing to a model in his sitting room]. In a scale of 1:300, which is really small.That is a famous historic ship – the [HMS] Victory – the one that (Lord) Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar in 1814. Now I can’t see and I can’t control the shaking of my hands well enough. I’m building it 1:60, where one inch becomes 60 inches. But that [one] was one inch and becomes 300 inches, which is a lot more. It’s fun just to do something like that. It gives you something to think about in addition to other things you have to think about – put it that way.

This is a sociable place. This retirement home is full of a lot of people, almost all professional people. We have doctors, we have politicians, we have artists, we have a lot of writers, people who have written professionally, we have medical people. So there are lectures and talks, and community activities. And we go down to the dining room and dine with different people each week. So it’s a pretty interesting place just to live in. You know, the activities are limited to what old folks do.

Do you spend much time out in the community?

Not that much. Most of our cohort on 32nd Place are gone. They’ve all moved out too. All the people we played tennis with for years, and played golf with and so on, have either moved out or died. So your social life sort of changes. We see some of them occasionally, but it’s gotten down to, you have to call them and ask if they can go out to dinner since we can’t invite them to the house. Most of them are out of their houses too. Or we go to the theater with old friends. Over the four years we’ve been here, we’ve noticed that we’ve kind of lost our connection with the community. 

How has Georgetown changed since you grew up there?

By the ’50s, by the time Kennedy lived there, it became the fashionable place to live. I was once invited into our old house. I happened to be in the area so I drove by N Street and I noticed they were doing work on the house. This was maybe 15 years ago. I walked up to the house, and a little girl came out, maybe 12 years old or something like that. I said, Do you live here? She said she did, so we started talking. She invited me in, and I looked around and you know the house, the body of the house is a marvelous place. Big, tall ceilings. Tall windows. Architecturally not unusual, but just good. When we lived there it was kind of not well maintained. Still as bad as 1860 or 1840 character pretty much. But it had been all gussied up. The basement, which used to be a place for the furnace and the work room downstairs, is now all fixed up like a den, and stuff like that.

So you know, how did I get on this? It’s a totally different world, anyways. I don’t really feel nostalgic about it, but I do know that I’ve cut off connection. I was volunteering downtown to teach English to foreigners up until the year before last. I gave up. The buses weren’t regular enough to really count on. It took me an hour to get down there every morning, an hour to get back. I was wasting more time on public transport than I was teaching. So I let that spin by. The pandemic ruined my job at the Smithsonian because my boss moved on. They closed that branch, and I had nobody to recommend me. So I couldn’t volunteer at the Smithsonian anymore. One thing after another, it just cut off connection. And I’m getting old now, so it isn’t much fun anyway to spend a five or seven hour day. I was working, let’s say, five hours a day as a volunteer at the Smithsonian. Transit added an hour each day. When you’re older, you get tired faster. If you don’t have interesting work, it isn’t worth it. The Smithsonian would be a great place to work if they just had a better way of, what should I say, recruiting and incentivizing volunteers. 

At which museum did you work?

The American History Museum. When I tried to go back, I was hoping that I had some contacts in the archeology department, in the natural history department. That didn’t work out. I chased that for years. The first year we were here, I chased that as hard as I could. Their staffing dropped after the pandemic. They weren’t taking any volunteers since they were still worried about the health conditions. I was trying to row upstream, it just wasn’t pulling it. 

You mentioned theater.

We still have a subscription at Arena Stage, downtown. But even that’s getting to be a pain in the ass. Ever since they built the Wharf project downtown, and The Anthem is there. The traffic jams down there! You used to be able to go down there in a half an hour. Now it takes 45 minutes to get there, and so on. Another organization. You know, things change. While I was writing these history books, I was pretty active inside the Association of Oldest Inhabitants of DC. It doesn’t mean old in terms of age. They were put together after the Civil War for some other reason when they were trying to prove that the government had a strong support in the community, because there was still talk of moving the capital to Kansas City or something like that. Anyway, this organization used to have monthly lunches downtown in one of the hotels down at the Wharf. Well those hotels have been demolished. You could park at the hotel, it was a country hotel where there were parking lots. Now there are 8-story buildings. It’s $8 for parking, and $50 for lunch. It takes you four hours to have a two-hour lunch with people we don’t know anymore anyway. So you drop out of things. When you’re older than 70, you begin making calculations as to whether it’s worth the trouble. 

Since you grew up her, are you a Commanders [formerly Redskins] fan?

They’re kind of boring in a way. Put it this way — I’m more of a fan when they’re winning. This year’s great. It’s fun to see them winning again. Yeah, everybody remembers the years when you had winners. I was watching the Steelers game last night against the Baltimore team. The Steelers are the kind of team the Redskins used to be. A lot of really hard running football, they go in the dirt and stuff. Football’s gotten a lot flashier. All the trick plays they have where you can’t even follow what the guards are doing now. The guards aren’t just sitting there and blocking. They’re running downfield and so on. Blocking 10 yards away from the line of scrimmage. It’s a way more complicated game. Now I don’t really understand it that well anymore. I’m not that big a fan, but it’s still fun to watch. To be perfectly honest, if you can find a way to eliminate the timeouts, they’re endless. It takes three hours to watch an hour and a half of football. 

To be perfectly honest, my wife thinks I’m crazy , but I follow English football [soccer]. I follow the English teams, and the French teams, and the Spanish teams. I like soccer because it’s continuous action. And a lot of TV channels, well they have a variety of channels too. You can find a lot more European football on TV than you were able to 10 years ago. So I watch that very regularly, as a matter of fact I’m taping something right now. Right now Madrid is playing Barcelona this afternoon for the championship of Spain. 

Who are you rooting for?

I don’t really care. They’re good players, I just like to watch them play. 

Before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to talk about?

Well I’m surprised you haven’t asked more about Chevy Chase [DC]. Chevy Chase was a really good neighborhood. What we enjoyed about it – well for one thing, it was really convenient for me. There were always State Department people living in our part of Chevy Chase. So all those years I worked in the State Department, I was able to carpool. They gave you a parking place in the building if you had a carpool. So we were able to carpool down to the State Department, down to Foggy Bottom. The carpools were some of my best memories of working in the State Department because the State Department is like any large organization, divided up into little fiefdoms, where you work for the Latin American division, or on the Middle East division, or on the Asian division. Somehow or another we always managed to get a carpool that had representation from all the divisions. So you got most of your office gossip about what was really going on in the other divisions during your carpool rides. So that was one of the advantages of living here, and it’s a nice commute down to Georgetown, or to Foggy Bottom, from here.

So I think we were very lucky that we bought a house in Chevy Chase. We had one of those old – I guess you’d call it Edwardian – front-porch houses. Big front porch. 1908, 1904, 1908. I think it was actually the sales model for – what’s the name of the stream that runs from Western Avenue? Pinehurst, Yeah. Pinehurst. The Pinehurst Development Company developed those streets down there, and I think our house was their show house, because it was the first one there. It was two houses up from Tennyson [Street] on 32nd Place. It was a good old solid house. Built with timbers you couldn’t saw through with water. It was oak timbers. It was really amazing and well built. Because any time we did a renovation there, you would get inside the walls and the people would say, oh my god. The lumber was so much different. But anyway, we enjoyed living there, and I’m a fix-it guy, so it was all fine for a while. Once you get past 75, you’re a little tired of being Mr. Fix-It, so it wasn’t so much fun later. But you know, we enjoyed it. The schools were good, our neighbors were good. We live here on the 5th floor with two of our neighbors from 32nd and Tennyson. They happened to move at the same time we did, to the same floor of the same building, which is kind of amazing. 

How has Chevy Chase changed in your time?

There’s a lot of pressure on Connecticut Avenue. We all know that fight about what happens to the library and community center there. Yeah, I mean Chevy Chase has changed. The development of Friendship Heights has changed a lot. I mean it’s brought some nice stores here, but it eventually pushes back the neighborhood. It pushes back. But that’s okay, it’s alright, it’s inevitable. The urban planner in me, which isn’t a very large part of me, says, yeah it makes sense to have denser housing communities in town rather than going out to far-off Loudoun County to build a community, a city. But I know it’s painful to each neighborhood that gets changed. I’m not sure if it’s the beginning of the end for the neighborhood, in a way. I can see if maybe 20 years from now, all the way up to Nevada Avenue will be more apartments buildings and so on. And eventually from Nevada to Utah, who knows. I’m glad that we’re not part of the change anymore because it’s a little traumatic to see change happen in your neighborhood. I can see that it’s going to happen – it’s just inevitable. Every time you turn around, some house has gone down and a bigger one has gone in its place. But what I suspect will happen is some of those people who build the bigger houses will, 20 years from now, sell a piece of land to a four-story apartment building. Rezoning, I suspect, is going to happen. 

What advice would you give to the generations to come? You’ve lived a very full life with plenty of experiences. 

Well, yes. I can look at my own extended family and see how a narrow world vision impacts people. For instance, I have two relatives about the same age. One is purely professional. Focuses on his profession and his politics. The other one is much more interested in a broad field of things. He loves to travel, loves sports, is open to all kinds of cuisine and so on. One of them is happy and the other one isn’t. I’ve seen a lesson there about being open to a lot more in life. Which I think is strong.

And among the younger generation, I have watched one person grow up who is the least interesting [of that generation] and the least happy too. He doesn’t have the imagination that the others have, and he’s a “Joe six pack.” Is that a term you understand? It was a term from about 15-20 years ago. “Joe six pack” is a factory worker who goes home, opens a six pack, drinks beer, then goes to bed, etc. Has no life outside of watching football and talking to his wife and children, and his work. I find his life is just not very rich, and I don’t think he’s very happy either.

If I have any lessons it’s to keep your eyes and ears open to anything new. The richer life is the more fun life. You may not be a scientist, but there are some scientists who are totally focused on what they’re doing. Actually we have a couple of those in my cousins and so on, so I’m thinking what they do. I don’t think they’re very happy. They really like their work, but they don’t have any peripheral vision. It’s kind of a limited life in my opinion. 

Living overseas makes you understand the way other people work. Being in the Army makes you understand other people’s reality. I mean, this building is full of professional people. They don’t understand why [other people] vote for [President Donald] Trump. Being in the Army made me understand the vote for Trump in a much different way. I understand the problems that lower-middle class people have. About just eking out a living, and you know, raising their kids in an easy way, and so on. They’re much more susceptible to agitation when things are going bad. I think that comes from a lack of imagination. It comes at all levels and classes in society. The idea is to keep your ears open not just socially, but intellectually about the world. I think I’m happier for that. It doesn’t make me a better person in any way, but I enjoy life more.

END

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The post Gordon Stewart Brown, age 88 appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

Narrator: Burton Lee Gerber, age 91

Date of interview: August 6, 2024

Location: Ingleside at Rock Creek Retirement Community

Interviewers: Maddy Fine, age 17, with Carl Lankowski

Transcribed from audio recording by: Maddy Fine

Burton Gerber died from congestive heart failure on Jan. 2, 2025, five months after this interview was recorded. Read his Washington Post obituary here.

Abstract

A proud Midwesterner, patriotic American, and the son of a Chicago man who worked for a encyclopedia publishing company, Burton Gerber joined the CIA in the 1950s and worked his way up to CIA Station Chief in Moscow by 1980. But you wouldn’t hear about it from him. A consummate professional and careful man, Gerber unspooled his life story in the following oral history by mostly talking about his intellectual path through life and the observations he made of the world around him.

Topics include the 91-year-old Gerber’s nearly 40-year career as a CIA operations officer, focused primarily on the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries; his upbringing in Illinois and Ohio; his journey from a paperboy interested in global happenings to CIA station chief in Moscow. He spoke of feelings of being an “outsider” to the world of Washington due to his Midwestern roots. He chose to spend his retirement in volunteer activities, serving as a Knight of Malta, working in local food banks, riding his bike for AIDS charities, and supporting AIDS healthcare centers.

Gerber also spent many years as an adjunct professor in Security Studies at Georgetown University, passing on lessons learned from his spywork but also enjoying the opportunity to continue learning from the young people he taught. Much of his oral history discussion was personal reflections on the human side of geopolitical issues that he encountered through his work in espionage, education, and volunteer service.

Unfortunately, five months after this oral history was conducted, Mr. Gerber died on Jan. 2, 2025, of congestive heart failure in hospice care at his apartment in Ingleside at Rock Creek in Chevy Chase DC. He had been a widower since 1999 when his wife, Rosalie Prokarym, whom he met at the CIA and married in 1958, died. They had no children.

Here’s a snippet from Mr. Gerber’s Washington Post obituary: “Mr. Gerber, a lanky Midwesterner who spoke bluntly and was a demanding taskmaster, mentored dozens of CIA case officers over the years. He schooled them in the mental skills and critical methods of espionage, from recruiting agents to surveillance detection runs, from dead drops to handling defectors.

“Mr. Gerber often and openly espoused an uncomplicated patriotism. He often asked students about the ethics of espionage: Is it moral to urge someone to betray their country? Yes, he said, when in defense of a political system such as the United States. He signed every email, ‘God Bless America.’” 

Maddy Fine:

Alright, this is an interview with Burton Gerber, who I’m sitting down with today. Are you doing well today? 

Burton Gerber:

Yes, thank you very much. 

I’m glad to hear it. So, if you don’t mind, I just want to start chronologically at first. So, where were you born and raised?

I was born in Chicago, IL, on July 1933. Lived there until the age of seven when the family of four, including me [his parents, George Gerber (1900-1957) and Pearl E. Smith Gerber (1899-1975), and his older brother Donald A. Gerber (1929-2019)], moved to Columbus, OH. And I lived there, and then I later went to college at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI. After that, I started work at CIA, interrupted by Army service, back to CIA from ‘55 to ‘95, at which time I retired. I was married in 1958 to my wife, Rosalie [Prokarym Gerber, 1931-1999)], whom I met at CIA [and married two months later]. She died in 1999. In retirement, I’ve been engaged in volunteer activities of various sorts.

Growing up, did you have some inkling that you might go on to serve for the government? 

When I was a boy in Ohio, in Columbus, I was a paper boy for the Ohio State Journal, a daily morning newspaper. About 80 to 100 customers, four or five years. And so, during that time, because I was delivering a newspaper, I was very conscious of what was in the newspaper. I was following the war and world events closely. My parents were, of course, also, so that wasn’t unique to me. But it was unique in the sense that I figured out as a boy that the war would eventually be over. And that after that, there would be a world to work in. And I wanted to be part of that.

I thought that I’d like to get out of a small town. I lived near Columbus, not in the city. And I’d like to get out of a small town and work in something abroad. So, my goal, when I was in high school, was to join the Foreign Service. And I won a scholarship to Michigan State, and it was my choice, to study international relations with that State Department as my goal. And I took the State Department written exam in December of ’54, my senior year in Chicago, where my family had moved back to while I was in college. And I got a good grade in that, and so I knew the next step would be an oral, whenever that would be. In the meantime, I would graduate with an ROTC commission, in any case. 

It turned out in my senior year, in March of ’55, I received a note in my box at the university that someone from CIA wanted to see me. So I did an interview with a gentleman who couldn’t tell me very much about CIA or about what I might do, but was interested in me in terms of a career. I mean, that maybe I’d be interested in a career. At that time, there was very little known [by] the American people about CIA. There were no books or magazines or movies or plays and so forth the way it is now. But I had read two articles in the Saturday Evening Post, a then-weekly magazine, about CIA activity and what was later called covert action in Iran in ’53 and in Guatemala in ’54. And so that’s what I knew of it. And the gentleman said, if I was at all interested to fill out a form, send it in. Don’t call us. We’ll call you.

And so I did fill it in and sent in this basic thing where you put down everything about your life. But when I was 21 years old, I didn’t have much of a life, so there wasn’t much to put down. The day or two before I graduated, they called me and asked me to come the very next week down to Washington for interviews, which I did, and told my parents I was just hanging around East Lansing for a while, which was not true. And so I did the interviews, which included the psychological, psychiatric, and academic kind. I’d say sort of like an advanced SAT. And then I went home, went out to visit my brother, who was a Marine on the West Coast, came back and was getting ready.  I could go in the Army, go to Yale, where I had a fellowship, or go to CIA if they called. And they did call and asked me to come down, and so on August 22nd of ’55, I joined the agency. And that was my career, along with a brief time in the U.S. Army, because I was commissioned as an ROTC graduate. And that’s what I did from 1955 to 1995.

How did you find it, coming to Washington, DC, after growing up in the Midwest?

That was a difference, because I had been raised in the Middle West, [attended] college in the Middle West, and when I came to the agency, excited to be in Washington and having a job that promised me to be very interesting, I was surrounded by most of my young colleagues, who were also young trainees, who were Ivy League, or what I called Little Ivy League, like Williams or Bowdoin, and so forth, graduates. I didn’t know anyone from, there was no one from Michigan State or Ohio State. And so that was a difference, because I realized these people often knew each other through all sorts of activities that they shared through sports or other things on the East Coast, and I was an outsider. I didn’t view that as a disadvantage, but I quickly realized I needed to fit in somehow.

And I didn’t own a suit in those days, and I saw that they all had suits, so I went downtown to a store that sold men’s suits and bought a suit, because I wanted to be friendly with them, because I knew that these are the people I’d be working with, and I think that worked pretty well. I had friends, often from this kind of group, who went to the East, lived in the East, went to Eastern Colleges. I’m not sure that they knew much about Michigan State, because in those days its reputation primarily was as an Aggie school.

When did you grow out of feeling like an outsider? 

I’m not sure that I completely stopped being an outsider. I’ve always been, and still am, proud of the fact that I’m a Midwesterner, and I think Midwesterners are pretty good people. You just saw that the vice president has chosen a Midwestern governor to be her vice presidential candidate [Minnesota Governor Tim Waltz]. I think there’s a certain spirit in the Midwest, and I try never to lose that. But obviously, in terms of the agency, in terms of my activities here, I fitted in enough to have a very successful career representing the United States abroad.

What was that spirit, that Midwestern spirit? 

I think that Midwesterners, as opposed, or in contrast, maybe, with Easterners, the Midwesterners have a work ethic, have a friendship ethic, have a patriotism ethic that is central to their lives. There’s a lot more friendship and close friendship, I think, in the Middle West. You often hear about Minnesota nice, and that’s the equivalent of how Minnesotans treat each other and treat visitors, and I think that that’s so pretty much where I grew up. There was a feeling there, maybe going back to the spirit that came in the immediate years post-Revolution, when it was the Western Reserve, that these were people who went out there and built their lives in a hostile area, hostile in the sense I’m talking about nature, not Indians. Hostile nature, and they were able to cooperate and get along. I just think that that’s something of what I call a Midwestern spirit.

So I want to ask, did representing the U.S. abroad change how you see the country when coming back later?

Yes, the question is whether in representing the United States abroad, I came to see my own country even in different ways, and I think that’s so. And you’d be surprised to know that often was to the advantage of the United States. Having lived in three communist countries, one Middle Eastern country, and Germany immediately, or not so immediately, but ’58, ’59 to ’65, and still the post-war era, you saw what the superiority of our country was. Superiority in terms of opportunity, in terms of freedom, in terms of the way it’s organized, and the way it is less bureaucratic than any European nation that I visited. I also saw that there were aspects of America coming back after nine years abroad, after that first period of my overseas life, coming back to America and seeing some aspects that you say, why do we do it that way? Everything from traffic to civil liberties for certain minorities, not for the great majority of Americans.

But if you don’t take care of all, you don’t take care of everyone, you’re missing something, and that’s the problem that we’ve had continuously through my life. I was acquainted with that much earlier in my life, in terms of growing up in Ohio in an all-white, all-Christian town, and realizing that that can’t be what all America is. And certainly I learned more about America when I went to college in Michigan and went in the Army. In the Army I was posted, and this was during the period of segregation, I was posted in Virginia, in Southern Virginia. This was a time of segregated bathrooms, segregated drinking fountains, segregated bars and restaurants and so forth. My best friend in the Army was another lieutenant, a Black man, and we could do things together on post, such as athletic stuff or go to a dinner or a movie or something. But if we went off post, we could not go anyplace [together]. We couldn’t go to a restaurant, we couldn’t go to a bar, we couldn’t go to a movie. We could go, and we sometimes did, to places like Jamestown, which was a National Park, and so it was not segregated.

But my experiences in segregation there in Southern Virginia made me, when I came back to Washington, state that I will never live in Virginia, and in all those years I never have. I’ve always lived in D.C., but I will not live in Virginia because of its racial history. And now some people say that’s silly because this is 2024, but I still have that view about Virginia.

But I think it’s important that we address the minority issue, and being in the military and then being overseas, I saw that we had an integrated system. But when I came back to the States, even though by this time in the late ’60s, there had already been the Civil Rights Act, which is being celebrated right now, the 60th anniversary of that. Even with that, there were still things that kept Blacks, particularly, from achieving full opportunity. So that’s one of the things I observed being abroad.

I also understood, though, that foreigners who criticize America on race relations are often not really so sincere themselves. Russia, for instance, had the Patrice Lumumba University for Black Africans [named for the former Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. They treated black Africans terribly and spoke of them terribly. And that was true in the three communist countries I lived in – Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union. And in Germany, there was a strong prejudice. France was probably the least prejudicial country that I was in. But you see that there is prejudice, while [there’s] very little prejudice against Blacks, [France] certainly has a problem with Islam or with Muslim believers.

So I saw enough to see that there were some problems living in America, but overall I saw that the freedom was so much greater. And I don’t just mean freedom that you can say what you want or vote for whom you want, but you can go to the grocery store when you want. In Germany, you can’t. At very strict times, grocery stores can be open. And in America, we sort of let people have the opportunity to move ahead with their own initiatives.

Are you happy with the progress America has made in the years since the segregation you described? And do you feel that we’re more aligned with our values now than we were back then? 

Are we more aligned with our values now? Certainly in 2024, compared to when I lived in the South, which was in the mid-50s, there are still things to do because there are still prejudices that exist. And I guess maybe prejudices are a feature of human beings. I saw in Bulgaria, for instance, complete disdain for the 10% of the population, which is Turkish, and they talked about Turks in vile terms. And I’ve seen that in Iran, where they talk about Arabs in manners that if I use those words about anyone, you would be starkly offended. So prejudice seems to be universal of some sort against the other. The question is, first of all, to provide legal means to give everyone equal opportunity, but also to have systems that encourage togetherness. 

In this regard, I think that we’re making mistakes now because unlike the time of Dr. [Martin Luther] King [Jr.], when he talked about whites and Blacks being together, there now seems to be strong sentiment in many Black instances to be themselves. For instance, Black dorms at universities and Black courses at universities. I’m not talking about a course about Black achievement, but courses restricted to Blacks. There seems to be now a re-segregation, but it’s more voluntary than it was in the past, and I don’t think that’s good. I think you see it in the identity politics that we’ve got to have in this job. We’ve got to have a certain number of people of whatever thing.

I just saw, as you guys were coming up, I was reading an article about women and achievements of women, and those have been greatly enlarged since the days when I was in college, for instance, and that’s a good thing because I always used to say, why do we not have 50 percent of our intelligence force working? But I saw in there this question of whether we’ve got to have a greater percentage of women, blacks, browns, et cetera, in certain jobs, and I don’t think that’s the goal. The goal is to have the best people in certain jobs, so the question is to provide opportunities, but not then to have… number things. So I’m unimpressed with programs that force that. Obviously, I would be uncomfortable with what is commonly called DEI now.

So having lived in many places, what made you decide to settle in D.C.?

Well, as I said, when I came back, when I first was here, before I went in the Army, I lived in the city, and when I came back, having lived in segregated Virginia, I determined that I would live in D.C., and so I was living here. I met my wife at CIA, and she was living here, and we got married and lived here, and then whenever we were back and forth to various countries, we always stayed in D.C., and we lived in Dupont [Circle], Adams Morgan, Kalorama, Palisades for several months when we were between overseas assignments. 

The times when we bought, we bought in Kalorama and then [lived in] a condo, and then after my wife died, I moved to Adams Morgan, and then a condo, and then I moved here. When I decided to come to a senior community, I looked only in D.C. I did not want to go to a suburban one. I think of myself as more of a city person, and this is where I do most of my activities.

What do you think makes D.C. special to you? 

Well, it’s a city. It’s urban. It has stuff going on. I had colleagues when I was first working in CIA, it was in the city down where the Korean War Memorial is now, and all the area across Independence Avenue toward Ohio Drive. So it was a city organization. They later moved to the suburbs, and nowadays most CIA people live in the suburbs. This was a statistic that they shared with us: There’s more CIA employees living in West Virginia than live in D.C., and I think that’s a shame. So I wanted the excitement of the city. I want to hear the stuff going on on the highway. I want to find stuff. When I lived in Kalorama and Adams Morgan and Dupont, I could go to things without a car. I could just walk around. Here I have to have my car because I’m old and I don’t walk very well, so I can’t walk to places. But for a long time in the city, I could – except for driving to work – I could get by walking.

Do you feel that other cities you’ve lived in had things to offer as well, even though they were sometimes… 

Well, obviously in the United States, the only cities I’ve lived in have been Chicago and Columbus and East Lansing and Southside Virginia and Washington. But Rosalie, my late wife, and I always felt that if for some reason the FBI came to us and said, you have to leave Washington, you can no longer live here, we would pick Chicago. And I still feel that way. I really like Chicago. I lived there as a boy until I was seven, and then I was visiting, so to speak, when I was in college and my parents had moved back there. I like the city. I like the atmosphere. I like the setup, all of those things. It has a high crime rate. And, I mean, in the old days, they used to talk about that during the days of Capone and so forth, and now it’s a different kind of crime. And that has to be fought, and I’m not sure that they’re doing it the best way they should. But if I had to move to another place, it would be Chicago, and not the suburbs. I’m talking about the city.

When you lived abroad, did you enjoy your life there as well, or did your work complicate your enjoyment of those areas? 

Well, I wouldn’t say work complicates enjoyment. Work contributes to enjoyment, and sometimes it contributes positively and sometimes negatively. But Rosalie and I both greatly enjoyed being abroad, and we felt comfortable there. We felt comfortable in dealing with foreigners, in leading a life that was not your basic American life, the kind of life where you have to get by in their society. In three or four of those countries – the three countries are Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union, and the fourth is Iran – we knew that we were in areas that, the first three in the communist countries, they were hostile to the United States, and we were subject to surveillance and controls and so forth that they do. Despite that, we could still find so many great things about the society. Bulgaria was a very difficult place to live in, but the Bulgarian people, if you could get beyond the bureaucrats, were warm and friendly, and we liked it very much. Also, in all those countries— plus Germany, which was not hostile to us— in all those countries, we learned so much more about the world and about history and about how people think and how we can work with them, because it’s true that the United States cannot stand alone. In foreign affairs, it does need alliances. It did have an isolationist policy for a while, but that’s long gone, or I mean the circumstances that allowed it are long gone.

Did living abroad make you more sympathetic to those living in hostile countries?

Well, certainly living abroad made me sympathetic to foreigners living in bad circumstances, and I used to think, for instance, what could these people be like if they had freedom? And I saw that, for instance, in the Soviet Union, when I would travel to Armenia and Georgia and think, these people are strongly entrepreneur-like, and if only they were free of communism what they could do and be. And I saw in these places that there was a deadness about being a Russian, unless you were part of the elite. And I wished that they had opportunities. This is what happened with the breakdown of communism and the Warsaw Pact, and you see the dynamism that’s going on in the former Warsaw Pact countries, except the Soviet Union. 

And you see the desire for freedom in the Ukrainian people, who have always been put down by the Russians to the point that they couldn’t use their own language. And I think I was sympathetic to all that before I went overseas, because I was following world events closely, and everything about the Soviet Union disgusted me. But then seeing it directly, you understand the great value of what America is, and you also understand that people do have a universal ability to strengthen themselves if they’re not held down by a police state— which Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union were, and Iran to a lesser extent. I’m talking about Iran under the Shah. Iran now under the Ayatollahs is terrible.

While living abroad, did you ever feel that you were in danger due to these repressive regimes? 

[Chuckles] Let’s see. The only time that I felt threatened and Rosalie felt threatened was living in Iran, and that was because during the time of the Shah, and there was an outfit called the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which was anti-Shah and periodically would be assassinating Iranian leaders like generals and admirals and judges and government officials. Then at one time, they tried to kill a CIA officer, and at that point, I began carrying a weapon for the first time since the Army, and the only time since the Army that I did it, because they were a very effective assassin squad. They did kill American businessmen and some American military – six during our time. So that was a time of threat; except for that, that’s the only time. I did not feel that the Russians or the Bulgarians or the Yugoslavs were going to do anything to me. I mean, they would harass me and harass Rosalie, but they wouldn’t do anything physical. 

What would you say to a young person considering getting involved with the intelligence community? 

I teach, by the way, at Georgetown in graduate school. Now, because of my age, I only feel capable of doing one course one semester. So I do meet with young people on this very issue you’re asking about. I tell people, first of all, how important intelligence is, because keep in mind if there’s an issue, whatever the issue is, the first thing that a president, a general, an ambassador, an admiral, a secretary of state, et cetera, has to ask for is, what’s going on? What are they doing? Why are they doing it? Et cetera. So intelligence is part of that answer.

And so I emphasize to people how important intelligence is, and by that I mean obviously correct intelligence and not false intelligence or misapplied intelligence. I discuss with them what particularly among young people today seems to be a big issue, and that’s the work-life balance. And frankly, I tell people in the intelligence field and in the military field and in most of the foreign service field, work has to come first. And you’ve got to be prepared to sacrifice a lot of those things that some people consider absolutely important. Oh, I’ve got to be home for Thanksgiving, or I’ve got to do this or that. No, because I may need to send you to Ethiopia at Thanksgiving time to do a job. And you have to go if you’re going to be a successful intelligence officer or military officer or State Department officer. So I want people to understand what’s involved in terms of work. It’s also that, okay, if you’re in intelligence or military or State Department, you’re going to spend some of your time overseas. So you’ve got to be ready to do that. Your family has to be ready to do that. Your husband or wife has to be ready to do that. 

And this sometimes creates issues about where can my husband or my wife work, or what can they do and so forth. So you have to be able to work those things out, because I believe, frankly, that work will come before life for success. I saw some people who handled it very well. I saw some others who didn’t. But I think young people often want things too easy for them. And as my wife used to say, you can always do more than you think you can. So push yourself. 

Do young people today seem less likely to make sacrifices for their country, as opposed to your generation? 

I hope not. But that’s certainly an issue that ought to be thought about by young people and by, if you will, middle aged or old people. I think young people have to look at it in terms of what do they want? And what do they expect their country to be? Often, among people who do not go to Eastern colleges, there’s more patriotism shown— I’m not talking about real, but shown— in the South and the Midwest than there is in the East or the Pacific Coast. I would be more comfortable with a graduate of Michigan State than of Harvard, for that reason. 

Not to exclude the fact that I have many friends here, both here in this installation, but in my life in Washington from Harvard. But I don’t know about the present day. I worry about some of the demonstrations that I’ve read about that were going on. Hamas attacked Israel. And Israel has retaliated. In my view, they’ve retaliated disproportionately. But they are fighting for survival. And I have to acknowledge that. But there’s a good bit of Americans who are prepared, without really knowing what Hamas is, to back Hamas. And I think that there is still in this country, more anti-Semitism than we want to acknowledge.

Do Americans have a duty to be educated on foreign policy issues?

I think Americans have a great duty to be educated on foreign policy. And I fear that most are not. It’s almost laughable what people can do in terms of interviewing ‘man in the street’ and asking questions about history or foreign policy. And there’s woeful ignorance. There’s a lot of people who couldn’t define NATO. There’s a lot of people who can’t be sure about why we fought in this or that war, let alone when that war was. I think that some of this is caused by mistakes that U.S. government officials have made. For instance, the invasion of Iraq, which the administration at that time gave about six different reasons for why they invaded Iraq, and probably none of them was valid. And I think that that has caused a lot of cynicism about foreign policy decision-making among the educated people. And among the people who don’t follow much about foreign affairs, it just turns them off. But I think we need to know more about it, because you have to understand that helping the Ukrainians fight against Russia is also defending us. Because if Russia can win there, they’re going to put pressure on the rest of Europe, and that causes us problems.

How do you think the government can work to get Americans interested in world events again? 

How can the government make Americans more interested? I don’t know. I mean, part of it would be if you had a—we try to sell democracy abroad through our foreign programs. I think we need to try to sell it to the American people as well, but that would be forbidden by a whole lot of customs and laws. I think that our leaders need to be much more comfortable with talking to the American people about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and why an investment in Ukraine is an investment for America. I don’t think that President [Joe] Biden, for instance, has come close to explaining why that is. And I think former President [Donald] Trump is dangerous in that regard, because he doesn’t understand the world. He understands himself. He understands power and how to achieve power. But he doesn’t understand what these issues are. And this was true in his first term, or in what may be his only term, and it’s true now in the campaign he’s waging. I don’t know if Vice President [Kamala] Harris is equipped to do this. There’s nothing in her background that convinces me she cares much about international affairs. I think there have been men and women in our life who have been aggressive in that regard. But when it comes to elections, we tend to vote on economics or domestic issues. Very seldom do we get into the issue of foreign affairs.

American education needs to be better. I went to a superb school system. In my day, in this town we lived in in Ohio, we—people obviously paid for a very good education. And people went to private schools only when they had problems. In places like Washington, in places like the East Coast, people go to private schools because it’s considered proper and historic and so forth. Families do that. And it’s also, in some circumstances, to get out of what I think is a really disastrous public education system in some cities. And so I’m not saying I’m against private schools, but I’m saying that we’ve got to get schools which are teaching hard subjects. And there’s a bunch of stuff that goes on now in education that is soft. And if I had children—my wife and I did not have children—if we had had children, I would have put them in Catholic schools because I think there’s a tougher education system. And I think that you’ve got to get tough systems and you’ve got to get international relations taught well. And I don’t think that’s going on in most of public education in America.

I was just reading an article today about the NEA. This is the National Education Association, a teacher’s union. And the NEA’s employees have been on strike against the NEA for something like three months now, asking for better wages and work conditions, not unusual. I used to be a member of the United Auto Workers, so I’m biased toward unions. And so they’re fighting the NEA, which is actually doing all sorts of efforts to break the union, things that if General Motors did against UAW, you’d all be outraged about. But very few of us know what’s going on because the media aren’t telling us.

How did your education shape your personal worldview? 

I guess my education was important in making me think about the ‘other’ a lot, about the people who are different, about the nations that are different, about the religions that are different, and what they can contribute to our lives. I grew up in a family that was not religious, although both my brother and I were, but our parents were not. And so we had to learn on our own, basically, the tenets of our religion and then how to apply that. In doing that, I realized that, hey, everybody has, there’s a God, but that God is for all of us. The education helped me understand that better or expound that better.

Did your religious values that you described just now come into play during your career? 

Yes, religious values have to be part of your life as an adult. First of all, in your life as a child, teenager, and adult, there’s a question about how you conduct yourself and why. There are things that you can do and things that you ought not to do. As the Pope said, that just because you can do it doesn’t mean you ought to do it. It came up very much in my operational life because what I did in CIA is that I was a case officer. What case officers do is recruit foreigners to be spies for America. You could immediately tell me, Gerber, that’s immoral or unethical. I would get into that. I’ve written about this kind of thing. I’ve done essays and parts of a book about that very subject. Just this morning, I’ve been preparing for a talk I’m going to give in September in which I talk about intelligence ethics. 

Intelligence espionage, which is vital for the defense of America, has to be done on an ethical basis. My approach to that comes heavily from my education and from my religion and from St. Thomas and St. Augustine. 

Are there some aspects of espionage you see as unethical, then? 

Well, that’s a very good question. Do I think of some aspects of intelligence as unethical? Yes. If it doesn’t meet the standards of what I have adopted as my outline for ethical behavior, which is just war theory, which begins with St. Augustine, goes through St. Thomas, and gets amended and so forth by others. I think you have to look at just war theory as a basis for what is ethical to do in intelligence, not just in war. One of the first issues that comes up is, can it be ethical? I always had a public school education, but I did go to—not successfully, in other words, I didn’t get a degree— but I did go to graduate school with the Jesuits. In discussing this very thing, it comes to the issue of, is espionage ethical? A priest at Georgetown [University] wrote and opined that the defense of a just political community is ethical, and that espionage is necessary to defend a just political community.

You have to have those qualifiers in my book. This is why, for instance, when I talk about espionage ethics to audiences, I ask them, do they see any difference, say, between [Aldrich] Ames, who was a CIA officer who became a KGB spy, and [Adolf] Tolkachev, a Soviet avionics engineer who became an American spy? If people say, no, it’s the same thing, and I say no, because the one was for the defense of a just political community, that’s what Tolkachev was contributing to, the defense of the United States. Ames was working to promote an unjust political community, the Soviet Union.  There’s where I kind of make a distinction, and I elaborate on this in much greater detail in writings and talks. How do you define a just political community? That’s the important part, isn’t it? When the Jesuits first said that to me, I said to myself, okay, how do I define a just political community? I defined it, and you can add or subtract. I just tried it as a community with free and fair elections, the right to dissent, and the rule of law. None of those things exist in the Soviet Union or in today’s Russia, and they don’t exist in Iran, they don’t exist in China, and they don’t exist in North Korea, to name four enemies. And they don’t exist to some extent in Turkey, for instance, or to some extent in India, and so forth. And we’ve got to fight any limitation on it in the United States, because we must remain with free and fair elections, right to dissent, which includes free speech, and rule of law. Curiously – and very few people know this – Thomas Jefferson wrote after he was president that the rule of law is important, but it’s not the most important thing. He said the most important thing is to preserve our nation. And that’s what some people might grab on to, but I think you have to have the rule of law.

Could ordinary civilians learn from your ethical rules outside of an intelligence context? 

Yeah, well, I think, not my rules necessarily, but the whole concept of good ethical behavior and what I just said relates to that. And I said, yes, that’s how I would hope people raise their children, and that’s how I hope our schools teach our children, and that’s how I would like to think our leaders behave, although some don’t.

This is sort of a big one, but are you hopeful about the future of America? 

Yes, I have to be, and I am. I think America does have the ability to provide opportunity for the most people. Not for all, I understand that, but for the most. And I think that, you know, we’re faced with terrible issues right now, one of them being that some people, particularly young people, think that the climate is the big issue. And I realize that, being old, it’s not going to affect me. It’s going to affect you very much. But I think that Americans, the world – but particularly led by America because of the scientific and technology advancements that we have made – is going to find solutions that you and I right now can’t even think about. Because as I look at my lifetime and look at the things that have happened, no one could have imagined when I was a boy and young man, college student, starting out in my career, the kinds of things we would have in this world now. And so I think that’s going to be happening with technology and science in terms of addressing the climate issue. And so I have, I am optimistic about America. I bemoan things often about the culture and tastes of American people, but who’s to say I’m right. But I’m an optimist. You will have a good world. 

Do you have anything else to add? 

I’m not sure about, you know, everything you’re trying to illustrate through your [oral history] program. One of the things that I felt strongly about when I was in the agency, and that was an intense life, was that we do have issues in this country and I am now contributing to solutions. And so as I was contemplating retirement, I felt that now I could turn away from foreign affairs and deal only with American affairs. And so I retired on a Friday and on Monday I got up and shaved and dressed and went to my first volunteer activity. And that was rather minor. I was a docent at the National Archives. But then I had to move beyond that. And the others that I went into, two of them through my church, were being a volunteer in an AIDS hospice. Because this is a time when men, some women, but it was mostly gay men, were dying of AIDS. And I signed up in a hospice run by the Missionaries of Charity, which is the Mother Theresa order. And so once a week I spent time with them, taking care of all their bodily needs, feeding them, giving them medicine, leading them in a rosary if they were volunteered to do it. There was no requirement to take the rosary. Actually, most of our guests were not Catholic. We had Muslims and Protestants more than we had Catholics. And most, by the way, were druggies, some gay. And I did that for 10 years. And that’s probably the best thing I ever did in my life, was taking care of men as they’re dying. Because it brought me closer to God, and it gave me an example of the most marvelous women I’ve ever met, the sisters of Missionaries of Charity, the sisters.

Then the next thing I did, these were all simultaneous, the archives, the Gift of Peace [Hospice]. And then the third thing was a food co-op that had been founded by Catholic Charities and the Order of Malta. And we provided food at reduced cost to low-income people. Most of our clients were Protestants. Because we usually did it through churches, and we did it primarily through Black churches in Prince George’s County and in D.C. And that was important work, to be able to provide these families with better nutrition. And along with it came some nutritional guidance. So those were the things that I spent the first 10 years of volunteer work doing, because I wanted to contribute in a way to America, because I felt I had contributed to American foreign success.

The other thing I did was — and I did it for five years in my 60s and 70s — I rode my bike between Raleigh and D.C. five times to raise money for AIDS service organizations. Not to raise money for AIDS research. I figured that’s a big job that foundations and government should do. But here in D.C., for instance, we have Gift of Peace. Gift of Peace is the hospice I worked at. We also have Food & Friends and Whitman Walker that served the needs of persons living with AIDS. And now they’ve gone beyond AIDS. But that was important, because this was dealing directly with those who, this was raising money directly for the people who needed it. And both Food & Friends and Whitman Walker, which still exists, continue their good work. And so what I did – and you have to train if you’re going to ride from Raleigh to D.C., which is 335 miles in three and a half days – you’ve got to train through the year. So I became a very successful long-distance bike rider. And I did that, and I raised money by asking you, you, and you to contribute. And that’s how the money then was given to the AIDS organizations. So that was part of my 10-year plan. And it was after that 10 years was up that Georgetown asked me to come and teach. And so I then began teaching. I am not an academic. I teach, I’m hired because of my background.

I’m just going to wrap it up with one more question. Has teaching imparted any lessons for you? 

Yeah, one of the things I’ve learned from teaching is that I’m learning. I learn from the students. I teach in graduate school, and a class can have, the rule at Georgetown is you can have up to 18 [students]. And I usually have the 18 in my class, sometimes 16 or 17, but always a pretty full class. And these are people who are there by choice. And some of them are military, active duty, some are former military, some are persons already in national security, some are persons who want to be in national security. The program is a master’s degree in security studies, and there’s several different concentrations. And my courses are in, well now it’s just one, I reduced other courses. It’s on intelligence, and it’s in that concentration, because I don’t know anything. I’m not an academic. I don’t even have a master’s degree, although I started. So I learn from them. And I don’t mean learning about what’s their musical choices or what’s their book choices. I learn from them in how they think, and what are the problems that America has, and how are we doing, and what are their concerns for their future. And they are all very much interested in careers. They are interested, some are already married, even with children, some are not. But they are interested in their personal life, and they’re trying to understand how to put that into balance. And they’re trying to understand what they should do if they’re interested in national security, because the good opportunities are State Department, CIA, and the military, as far as I see it. And I encourage all three of those as opportunities for people to undertake. And I learn, because as I express thoughts, I run the class with a good bit of discussion, not me reading text for an hour and a half. But I learn, hey, maybe I ought to rethink such and such issue. So in that sense, I’m learning as well as, I hope, I’m teaching. I do get favorable remarks in the student evaluations, which, by the way, never existed in my day. 

So to finish up, what do you think someone reading this can learn from your life? 

Well, I guess if I wanted someone to learn something from my life, it is to always look to do what you think you need, and to not be held back by what others may think. Neither of my parents went to high school. But my parents were determined that my brother and I would finish high school. I don’t think they knew anything about college. So we each, you know, proceeded on our own about college. My brother via an NROTC scholarship, which is like going to Annapolis, they pay everything. I went on a tuition scholarship to Michigan State with savings. I worked in a car factory on the assembly line. I was a member of the UAW. I did all sorts of jobs like that, you know, to pay for my college. And I did stuff in college. I mean, I was editor of the yearbook and I was a member of a fraternity. It wasn’t that I was sitting around, you know, working and studying. I had a social life and I had an extracurricular life.

And then I had this goal for national security and I went into it. And then when I was there, I realized that all these other people in those days, there were very few of us who came from land grant colleges, [chuckles] Aggie schools. And I realized that these people probably had better education because they went to Harvard and Yale and Williams and Stanford and so on. but I never let that discourage me. I figured that I would just stick with it and I could do better than they can. And I did. I did better than most of those Harvard and Yale and Princeton guys.

Thank you so much for just speaking with us. This has been a great conversation.

Oh, well thank you.

END

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The post Burton Lee Gerber, age 91 appeared first on Historic Chevy Chase DC.

Narrator: Ana Steele Clark

Date of interview: July 10, 2024

Location: Chevy Chase House, 5420 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, DC

Interviewers: Charlie Martin, age 17, with Cate Atkinson

Transcribed from audio recording by: Charlie Martin

Abstract

Ana Steele Clark was born in Niagara Falls, NY, in 1939. Her family soon moved to New Castle and then Wilmington, DE, where she resided until college. Clark recounts growing up in a household with both Puerto Rican and British influences, her remarkable educational performances in an all-girls Catholic school environment, and the emergence of her passion for theater.

After graduating from Marywood University in 1954, Clark moved to New York City to pursue an acting career. Clark worked numerous part-time jobs to sustain herself, as the entertainment industry was increasingly competitive. Eventually, Clark realized that a career in acting wasn’t for her, and she looked elsewhere for work. Her father recommended she join a newly emerging government agency called the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Clark started working in the NEA in 1965 at 26 years old, and she would spend a riveting 33 years with the Endowment. During her time, she progressed from being a clerk-typist to the Acting Chair in 1993, met her late husband John Steele, advocated for arts of all varieties at a national level, and found a warm and strong community.

Clark retired in 2001 and she and her husband went on a road trip around the country, employing the connections she made during those years in the NEA, seeing the fruits of her labor. For most of their married life they lived in an apartment condominium in Foggy Bottom, DC, which Clark still owns. Clark suffered a hip injury in 2023 and moved into the Chevy Chase House, an assisted living facility in Chevy Chase, DC, where she currently resides and receives physical therapy. Clark ponders on her decision to stay in the assisted living facility or move back to her apartment in Foggy Bottom.

Charlie Martin:

Let’s start from the beginning – before you were a young actress in New York, before your career at the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts, and before your long marriage to your late husband, John Clark. You are 85 now and are living in the Chevy Chase House, healing from a broken hip. Take us back to where and when you were born, and who your parents were.

Ana Clark:

I was born on Jan. 18, 1939, in Niagara Falls, NY. My mother was Puerto Rican, and my father was British. Her name was Mercedes Hernandez and he was Sydney Steele. She was Catholic, and he was Protestant. They met at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and fell in love and decided to get married. This is way back when that was unheard of. Neither family was happy with their religious difference and the Puerto Rican and British relationship was out of line in those days. But, they were crazy about each other, and they overcame the negative opinions.

My father had to promise, as an Episcopalian, that when he married his Catholic wife, if they had children, he would raise them Catholic. It almost killed him [laughs]. But he did make that promise because he so loved my mom, and he kept the promise and raised my older sister, Carmen, and my younger brother, Arthur, and myself as Catholics. As he went through that process, he fell in love with the education we were getting and the nuns. He had never even met nuns as far as I know in England, but they were wonderful women, and they were giving us a terrific education. So he became a happy Protestant husband to these Catholic kids and his Catholic wife. It was interesting to grow up in that environment.

What do you remember about Niagara Falls?

We moved before I was old enough to remember it. I only remember my mother telling me a story about Niagara Falls. She was Puerto Rican, unaccustomed to Niagara Falls’ temperatures, snow, ice, etc. But, I remember her story later that she had turned my older sister and myself loose into the front yard, it was winter, and there was quite a lot of snow out there. She was standing at the door, and saw her two little girls go down a few steps and take a few steps and then she realized they had vanished into the snow! She literally couldn’t find them. She told us how she ran down the stairs, climbed through the snow and grabbed her two little girls [laughing]. Of course, I don’t remember that, but it was vivid enough for me to remember that story. And that’s all I know about Niagara Falls, then sometime thereafter my family moved to Wilmington.

What prompted the move to Delaware?

My dad was working for the DuPont Company, and they transferred him from Niagara Falls to Wilmington. Actually, we lived in New Castle, DE, a small town outside of Wilmington. Later, we moved from New Castle into the city of Wilmington, and we lived there for quite a while.

Were you and your siblings very close growing up?

Not really. I mean, she was my sister and he was my brother, of course we were close, but I hear a lot of people talking about their baby brother or big sister—I don’t remember it like that. I just remember having them and that we were family; I don’t remember a favorite or particular sibling, or if I do it was probably my “kid brother.”

How would you say your religious upbringing and Puerto Rican heritage influenced you?

It’s an interesting question. I was raised Catholic and I went to Catholic schools. I think that not only the quality of the education, but the values that the Catholic Church was giving us stayed with me and are still with me. Unfortunately, I didn’t often meet the Puerto Rican side of the family. Our family went to Puerto Rico several times by ship. I was pretty small and didn’t speak or understand Spanish, and learned that there were lots of relatives in Puerto Rico, and they all couldn’t wait to meet us. So it was overwhelming for me because I didn’t get the language but I understood the love, care, and the fun of my Puerto Rican side of the family—I will always remember that. On separate occasions, the Puerto Rican grandparents and the British grandparents visited us in Wilmington. I remember those visits as well. So it’s not as though we were, you know, cut off completely. We were pretty cut off but not totally—there was still that influence. My mother volunteered for a charity group, which she called the Spanish nuns, in downtown Wilmington, doing whatever needed to be done for people who were hungry or didn’t have enough clothing or whatever. That was part of what my mother was doing with the Spanish community in Wilmington. All of that was part of my growing up, part of my learning to be who I am. 

Did your mother infuse Puerto Rican culture into the household through cuisine or language or stories?

I don’t know how to put this except that basically only the King’s English was spoken in the household, probably because of my dad. I learned some Spanish by listening to my mom talk on the phone to either relatives or the Spanish nuns. I began to pick up some Spanish words, so I know a little when I hear it, and can translate some of what I’m hearing. The cooking, yes, there were rice and beans and those special chicken dishes and the yummy plantains. My mother loved to dance with my dad. I don’t know what it was because I was a kid, but it was a kind of music and movement that was delightful to me. I think it was tango—I really don’t know what I was watching. But I know I loved it. I think that was part of my mother’s influence as well.

Was there a large Puerto Rican or Catholic community in Delaware or New Castle?

Not that I’m aware of no, not Puerto Rican, not Spanish, even. Certainly not in New Castle. But in Wilmington, there was enough of a Spanish community for my mother to be volunteering in downtown Wilmington with the Spanish nuns. So that does suggest that there was Spanish influence in Wilmington, but I was never really exposed to that. That was one of my mom’s activities. I was pretty removed from Puerto Rican culture and even British influences. My dad—God bless him—had decided, I learned this when I was a kid, that he was going to become an American citizen. When he became an American citizen, he decided he was going to lose his British accent, and he did. So if you met him, if you’re a linguist, you might pick up something but not otherwise. Trust me, when I learned that, I was so disappointed! It was like “Daddy, why did you do that? I love the British accent—you don’t have it!” It was because he made up his mind: He became an American citizen. He wanted to sound like an American and so he did.

Tell us about your Catholic education.

As I said, I went to Catholic schools: a parochial school in New Castle, but then quickly into Ursuline Academy which was an all-girls Catholic grammar school and high school in Wilmington. From there, I went to Marywood University (in Scranton, PA) —also Catholic women—where I got my college degree. So my education was all-girls, all-Catholic schools, and my dad was perfectly happy with that.

Did you enjoy the continuous all-girls Catholic environment? Or did you ever want a co-ed environment?

I don’t remember being discontented. But you know it was peculiar. Especially in this day and age like: What! All girls, all your life? Well, it wasn’t totally that because Marywood had the all-boys University of Scranton in the area, and we did programs with them, mostly plays is what I remember doing because I was a drama major and I was going to be an actress. We did some fully staged plays with the boys from the University of Scranton. So it’s not like we didn’t interact with guys – we did but it was, you know, they had their campus, we had our campus, they had their classes, we had our classes. So it was pretty separate.

We understand you graduated from high school at age 15—tell us about that.

My older sister Carmen started school before I did. She would come home from school and tell me what she learned or teach me to start reading or something, so I started a little ahead of the game. I do remember going straight into the first grade in New Castle before we moved into Wilmington. I was given some preliminary tests for first grade. Next thing I knew, Mom and Dad were telling me that they were going to put me in the first grade because the tests showed I would be bored if I went to kindergarten. A little later I skipped first grade and went to the second grade. By then I was at the Ursuline Academy in downtown Wilmington. We had a wonderful tough cookie of a nun, and she had a small class of little people like us. In second grade, I was already a little younger and smaller than most of them. But we really learned, big time, so instead of going to the third grade, I went to the fourth grade. So I had gone from nothing to second grade to fourth grade, at which point I caught up with my older sister. That was pretty hard on her, and it was actually not too good for me. But that’s the way it was from then on and we graduated together. I was 15 and she was probably 17 or 18.

During those early years of school was there ever a time or experience that made you realize that the arts and theater were what you wanted to pursue for a living?

This is a little weird for me, but I seem to remember that when I was little, seven or eight or something, we were in plays at Ursuline. This sounds like ego, but I remember that sometimes in those plays, one of them that I remember, when I had lines and talking parts, I became aware that the audience got really quiet. It was peculiar for a kid my age because I didn’t really know what that meant, but it was like Wow! And I love people—this is a little sidebar, but my mother caught me staring at people several times when I was a kid on the public bus going to downtown Wilmington, and she would tell me, “Ana! Stop staring at people!” I later realized I wasn’t staring – I was a people-oriented kid (and) I watched people. I still do it, even here (in the lobby of the Chevy Chase House). I really enjoy getting to know people or simply getting to know what they look like, what they walk like, what their languages sound like. I didn’t remember that I had been that way since childhood until I remembered now my mother telling me to stop staring.

My interest in the arts starts with that experience as a child – to be able to affect an audience and also to be somebody else—I thought that was fascinating. If they would give me a script and ask me to play a role, I loved that because I loved to sort of crawl inside of somebody else and be somebody else. I don’t really know why, actually. By the time I was in high school, I decided I really was going to be an actress, and then I went to college where I was  a drama major and French minor—wasn’t too good at the French (laughing).

When I graduated from Marywood, I went to New York City. As I mentioned, I graduated early because I went through school young – finished high school at 15 and got out of Marywood when I was 19. I went to New York City to be—what did I know! —in the theater. I look back, and I think my mom and dad must have turned gray—you know, having a daughter exposed only to all-girl, all-Catholic schools going to New York City to be in the theater! But they let me do it.

They were amazing parents, my mom and dad. I lived in New York City for probably five, maybe six years. I was not highly successful and very poor, so I went to work looking for jobs just to live. I went to an office temporaries organization where you would sign up and tell them what kind of skills you had or what kind of job you were interested in doing. As a result of that, I ended up working in and for some of the most interesting places in New York City. My favorite one was the Audubon Society, which I absolutely loved. But I also worked at Scholastic Magazine, which was very interesting, and for a French importing company, which was fascinating because I didn’t know anything about importing from abroad to the United States.

I also volunteered at campaigns for Ken Keating and John Lindsay, both Republicans, Keating for senator and Lindsay for mayor. And I also volunteered as a reader at Recording for the Blind.

So I was always active and learning. But that was during the day, and in the evening, I did a couple of off-Broadway shows and also one television program. I was not a member of the union, so I made almost no money. You know, being in the theater and being on television didn’t mean I was making a living, trust me—it was like $10 a week because getting into the union was very hard back then. 

Tell us more about those off-Broadway productions and the television show.

The television show was called The Nurses, and I was an extra and had to be there really early in the morning. I was also a stand-in for the two lead members that were an older nurse and a younger nurse; they found me close enough physically that if something happened, I could step into the role of the younger nurse. The extra role meant that I was in crowd scenes, and the only scene I remember was standing behind a cash register—which I had no idea how to work—checking out the nurses. I remember once they told me I had to do a stand-in because the gal I was the under-study for was sick, and I was terrified. I only had a few lines, and they didn’t shoot me full on, so nobody could tell that it wasn’t the gal. That was my limited experience with television; it was very interesting. 

For my theater experiences, one of them was a revival off-Broadway of the Arthur Miller play called The Crucible, which is fabulous. The show was a translation of the McCarthy hearings which were going on in Washington, where individuals suspected of being communists were being prosecuted all over the place, and peoples’ lives were ruined because of manic beliefs. Arthur Miller put that situation into the town of Salem, MA, where prosecution of people suspected of being witches had run rampant. There were good, normal people, and there were manic people—I guess they’d be called extreme right wingers now—that were looking for witches. I was playing a servant girl, and one of the couples I worked for was accused of being witches. I was asked to accuse the couple to join in their prosecution. The couple ended up being hanged. Arthur Miller did an extraordinary job. For me, the play was so powerful, and I was working with really professional actors, actresses, and director for the first time; it was a big step for me. I think that I got paid $10 a week, and we did seven performances a week.

There were performances most weeknights with matinees and evening performances on Saturdays and matinees on Sundays. It was a lot. During the day, I would go back to the Audubon Society or other part time jobs trying to earn a little bit more money. And the other thing I did off Broadway was a play by Ionesco called The Lesson. It was really weird; I don’t recommend (it). It had a two- person cast – a professor and the student – I was the student. It was sort of a spooky play—I think the professor ended up killing the girl. Anyway, it was weird. I remember things that I was supposed to do as the student, including develop a toothache while learning from him. The toothache kept getting worse and worse, so I had to learn how to speak with increasing pain and difficulty. I’ll give you a PS on that one, which is that my dad came to see me in the play, and when we got together the next day he said, “You know dear, I went to my hotel room and I developed a toothache and I couldn’t stop it!” I felt sorry for him, but I was happy—I thought I’m not a bad actress; I’m doing a good job! Those are the two experiences that I remember from working in New York theater. I also remember living in very modest circumstances.

What was the process for auditioning for all these different shows?

There was a newspaper called Backstage and another one called Variety, and sometimes they would put casting calls for different shows. I would try to follow up with them with really limited success. I had also done some professional summer stock theater when I was in Wilmington in high school. A (fellow summer stock) actor remembered me and when they were casting to replace somebody in The Crucible, he remembered me and gave me a call—I thought: Why? I almost couldn’t remember his name! That’s how I got to audition and secure a role in that play. I don’t remember the audition for the student role in the Ionesco play. Basically you could look in the newspapers, you could do work somewhere and somebody would remember you and call, or you could just hang around theaters and see if anybody needed anything—that wasn’t very useful.

Given how competitive acting was in the ’60s late and ’50s, and the fact that you had to manage multiple part time jobs, did you ever feel stressed or a bit discouraged in New York?

I did, but, you know, I really loved it, and I thought I could do it. I guess I’m sort of an optimist or at least upbeat because if I had to do those part-time jobs, I would find them interesting. I never got like poor me poor me! I just didn’t want to live that way. Ultimately, my older sister moved to New York and got a job with Time Inc., the Time Magazine company, and she moved into the local YWCA, and then I moved into the YWCA. So there we were in the middle of midtown Manhattan in the YWCA, which cost relatively little. It was good to have family and friends, so I got through it fine.

There was a point where I said to myself, you know what Ana, the theater in New York does not need you, so move on! I decided I was going to leave, and my mom was a little ill, so I went home to help take care of her. In the meantime, my father, who was my press agent – that’s what my mother called him – had read in the New York Times about the creation of a new government agency called the National Endowment for the Arts.

He told me I should go get a job there in Washington, and I said okay, so I started sending resumes, resumes, and resumes. There were only like four people in that office, so they were drowning in paper down there. I got on the phone and couldn’t get through. Once I got the phone number, it just rang because they didn’t have the answering machines like they do now—it was a big struggle. Then, somebody answered the phone one day, which shocked me and I – boom! – said “I’m going to be on the train tomorrow from Wilmington to Washington, and I’m going to come because I want to be interviewed for a job.” The person said, “All right, hon.” I got on the train the next morning, just crazy, got off the train at Union Station and realized I didn’t know where I was going. The lady had said to come to the Old Executive Office Building, which is where the agency was because it wasn’t a full agency yet. So I got into a taxi and said, “I want to go to the Old Executive Office Building,” thinking to myself this cabdriver better know where it is, otherwise, we’re dead! But he did. It was a beautiful building right next to the White House. I thought, THAT building is the National Endowment for the Arts? Anyway, I went in, and the guards cleared me and told me to go to the second floor, and I was like Wow! I went up to the second floor, and they told me room dadada, so I’m walking down the hall, and there’s a big circular sign up against one of the walls on the left side, and it read the Vice President of the United States. I thought, wait a minute—I’m in the wrong building – what is this? (laughing). But I went into the specified office, and there was a secretary and a little office behind that with piles and piles of paper and phones ringing. It was chaos. When I was being interviewed by the secretary she stood up, looked over my shoulder, and I turned around and there was this big, bald, grumpy looking guy who was Roger Stevens – the chairman of the Endowment and the founding father of the Kennedy Center! Standing next to him was Gregory Peck! Of course, somebody my age saw Gregory Peck in person this close, I almost fainted because he was gorgeous and a big movie star! The secretary interviewing me said to the two of them, “Oh this is—what did you say your name was hon, Ana Steele? This is Ana Steele; she’s been on Broadway,” and I’m saying “No, no, no, not ON Broadway, OFF-Broadway! She was trying to sell me to them, and I was embarrassed because she was overdoing it. They didn’t really pay a whole lot of attention, but I ended up with a job as a clerk/typist. I didn’t know how to do shorthand, but I could fake it because I pretended to do it when I was doing office temp work. You could pretend that you took shorthand, and it worked. When I got tested in Washington, I did the same thing, knowing that I was going to flunk, but I passed, and it was like ridiculous. I got the job at the Endowment in 1965 when I was 26.

Before we get further into life on the staff of the National Endowment for the Arts, can you tell us what the agency does?

The National Endowment for the Arts was signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Johnson. It is a federal agency that provides funding to foster the excellence, diversity, and vitality of the arts in the United States. He called it a part of the “Great Society” to encourage artistic expression. Grants are given to nonprofit arts organizations, individual artists, state arts agencies, and regional arts organizations. The chairman of the NEA makes final grant decisions based on recommendations of advisory panels made up of experts in individual artistic fields from all over the country. The National Council on the Arts, an advisory board to the Chairman of the NEA, whose members are appointed by the President of the United States, advises on policy issues and makes final recommendations on grants. At least that was the way it worked when I was there.

So you were a young woman trying, but not quite succeeding, to be an actress and the next thing you know you are working at the federal agency tasked with supporting young artists like yourself. What was the career jump like – nerve wracking or scary?

No, actually, since I was hired at the lowest grade as a clerk/typist doing the same kind of work that I had been doing in New York, thank God. I mean, there were very few of us in the NEA’s early life, maybe seven or eight people in the whole agency, which was just getting born. But I was just so happy to be in a place that was going to encourage the arts in this country. I just found that overwhelming and beautiful. So I didn’t mind being a clerk/typist – I thought, I’ll do whatever I have to do. It sounds goofy,  but I was a happy camper, I really was. I did progress over time in the agency a lot. I got bigger jobs, and the pay was better over time. 

Do tell.

At some point, for reasons I will never quite understand, I became director of budget—moi? But, you know, you just do it, and thank God I could. Then, I was director of planning, and then director of planning and budget, then program coordination. Eventually I was deputy chairman, for a while, and later the then-chairman left and the Clinton Administration hadn’t found a replacement yet, so they asked me to be acting chairman. I said no and told them why, but then they came back and said, “You’ve got to do this. Everybody says you’ve been there from the beginning—you’re the only one who knows everything.” They quickly found a new chairman, though – Jane Alexander, who’s a fabulous actress. She made me her deputy, and boy was that heaven. She was—and is—a unique human being.

I also met my husband at the Endowment. Nancy Hanks was chairman then and she hired him. She was a Nixon appointee, Republican, and she was splendid too. That was a message that guided us all, which was that we were a non-partisan, bi-partisan agency that had nothing to do with politics. Program deputies hired were experts in music, dance, theater, creative writing, visual and media arts and all that. I look back and think my goodness! It was a blessing that we lived that way! Sometimes it was hard—we had problems with the Congress when they would come after us for doing things they didn’t approve of. It was a magic agency also because I met (my husband) John.

Which NEA projects, in particular, stood out to you, like Westbeth Artists’ Housing in 1969 or the Dance Touring Program, from around 1968/69, for instance?

Those are two super projects that you mentioned because they were huge and had great impacts, especially on dance touring which put dance on the map all around the country. Professional dance had been primarily in New York and a few other cities, and we helped put companies on tour nationwide – rewarding for dancers, dance companies, and their growing audiences.

Tell us about your early years at the NEA under Roger Stevens.

We had space in the building that housed the National Science Foundation, and we had a few offices in that space. It was a very small staff, and Roger Stevens was hiring the directors for a lot of programs, so over time we built up until we were 15 or 20 people. We all worked very closely together, and he was the perfect chairman, although he was mumbly and not very outgoing, but we all loved him because he was just right for the job. He would go up to Congress when we got in trouble for doing something thought to be inappropriate, and he would bumble on up to the Congress and some probably thought, here comes this big bald, grumpy looking guy. He was also a real estate magnate and Broadway producer, and they didn’t know what to make of him. They were expecting a weirdo, but he would take care of everything with them in an hour meeting, and everything would settle right back down again. He was brilliant at his job, and he was also  putting together the Kennedy Center in his spare time. He took no salary as Arts Endowment Chairman.

I remember when he left to go full time to the Kennedy Center, the secretary was going through the materials in his desk, and in the top drawer they found a letter from Jacqueline Kennedy thanking him for his work—he didn’t even take it with him. He just did the work. He never looked for thanks, praise, or even acknowledgment for himself. But imagine! A letter from Jackie Kennedy, and he didn’t take it with him! He was brilliant and totally self-effacing.

When you say the NEA “got in trouble,” I assume you are referring to controversies in the 1980s and ’90s with the American Family Association trying to shut the Endowment down, and President Reagan’s failed attempt to abolish the agency in 1980. Later, there was (Andres) Serrano’s “Piss Christ” and (Robert) Mapplethorpe’s sadomasochistic portraits, just to name a couple, that drew press attention and embroiled the NEA in controversy. What was that like to live through? Were staff members discouraged, or did these controversies motivate them to work harder?

The latter. We were not discourageable, but we were very upset, especially with the American Family Association. They were up in Congress, up in the press, telling stories about us to make us sound so utterly appalling. They would muster their forces to attack things that they found inadequate or improper for the government to assist. They would go to the press and tell their stories and do their mega-mailings all over the country to their members, who would then bombard the Congress with mail. It was tough. 

After Roger Stevens, Nancy Hanks became chairman in 1968. Did the agency’s culture change?

Somewhat, yes, partly because we kept growing. Nancy was a whiz-bang and charming lady. I’d never met anybody as smart as Nancy. She persuaded the Congress to increase our budget and she hired more people. It was heaven: We just grew and worked hard and did good work. She was a terrific chairman; nobody had any feelings about Oh, Roger was a Democrat—L.B.J. had signed the legislation— and here comes Nancy Hanks hired by Nixon. Nancy was wonderful. We ended up being good friends as well.

How did the Endowment decide which artists and organizations got funding?

We had a system of advisory panels made up of experts in each of those artistic fields from all over the country, who would come to Washington for a day or a week, depending on how many applications were landing in our agency. We didn’t want government bureaucrats making those decisions. We wanted people from the arts fields to make recommendations; while they would not make final decisions, their recommendations would be honored. These advisory panelists, who worked in the various art genres and fields, would go through all the applications and make recommendations about funding. The next step was to take those recommendations to the National Council on the Arts, the advisory body appointed by the president of the United States. They also represented all the different fields and viewpoints. The panel recommendations would go to the National Council, whose recommendations would go to the Chairman for final action. 

You became the NEA acting chairwoman in 1993—what was that job like? It must have been enormously stressful.

We were under attack big time when I was acting chairman, and that was really hard. I had to testify before Congress; the staff was on edge. We were all on edge because our budget was cut almost in half. It was hard, but we so loved what we did. We didn’t have people quitting. We didn’t have people going to the press complaining. We just hung together and did everything that we could as best we could. My favorite moment – except for when I had staff meetings with everybody, which I loved because I loved all of them – was when we were under fire, and I was sitting in the chairman’s office, and I received a phone call. When I picked it up, it was Mary Bain, the lead administrative assistant to Congressman Sidney Yates, a Democrat from Chicago, who was a big fan of the Arts Endowment. He chaired the appropriations subcommittee, which gave us money. He loved the arets abnd he had fallen in love with our programs and the program directors. He was a great friend and supporter. I pick up the phone and hear, “Hi hon,” “Who’s this? “Mary” “Mary Bain?” “Yeah hon. I’m just calling to tell you that Sidney Yates said keep your little fanny right in that chair!” Maybe it wasn’t quite as graphic, but it was powerful. I laughed and almost cried because I was so grateful for that kind of support coming from such good people in the Congress. You know, it meant so much to me and still does. Boy, there’s some wonderful people in my life and in the history of the arts in America.

Tell us about some of the people you’ve met and connected with through the NEA. 

I can’t even begin. I mean, the members of the National Council on the Arts, the presidential appointees, way back in the very beginning like Leonard Bernstein, Isaac Stern, and Jerome Robbins, Harper Lee—the writer of To Kill a Mockingbird – and John Steinbeck. Later, people like Toni Morison, Helen Frankenrhaler, Jacob Lawrence, choreographer Martha Graham, actor Sidney Poitier, and jazz artist Billy Taylor. I’m sorry, I just go blank. If I could go back to my apartment in Foggy Bottom, I have a lot of wonderful lists of Council members over the years—you’d all fall over! The members would rotate every four years, so we had change all the time; we had old guys and new guys all the time. We tried to keep our heads because they were presidential appointees. We couldn’t  appoint them, all we could do was advise the White House who might be a good replacement for somebody, and they would do whatever they wanted to do. But, yeah, there were some extraordinary people, especially in the early days. 

Speaking of people, you met your husband, John Hunter Clark, while at the NEA when you two were colleagues. I understand you were married for 42 years until his death at age 93 in April 2021. According to his obituary he was a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and was devoted to the arts, including being an author, lyricist, and director of his own comedic adaptations of popular musicals of the day. You worked directly with him?

I met John when Nancy Hanks was chairman, and he was working for her. She was looking for more staff because we were growing. She was good with the Congress. She was Republican, which helped with Republican groups that didn’t love us. Anyway, John had worked for the Pentagon, then the Office of Management and Budget, then the Poverty Program, running the Office of Economic Opportunity Community Action program. He was very involved in that and saw the writing on the wall when Nixon was elected. He figured that the Poverty Program would be put out of business, since it was not much valued by most Republicans. John started looking for another job before they shut the whole place down, and he read about this new thing called the National Endowment for the Arts. He had heard about it and was interested because he loved the arts, especially music. He was looking for a job and called his big brother, Jim, and said, “Jim, do you know anything about this? Because I’m thinking of looking for a job there. I know it sounds a little far fetched.” His brother said, “Oh, yeah, the chairman is Nancy Hanks, and we used to date.” (laughing). Jim had been married to someone else for eons, so it had nothing to do with anything, but John told him, “I’m not gonna call up and say I’m Jim Clark’s brother!” He said, “Go ahead; it can’t do any harm.” So John met Nancy for an interview and mentioned that in passing—it was not much of a credential. She hired him to be special assistant to the chairman.

He later told me that he had gone to the government organizational manual, which used to print information about all the big-time jobs across the federal government, and he saw that the NEA director of planning was a woman named Ana Steele, and said to himself, “Oh my God, first of all, she’s planning, and I was planning at OEO [Office of Economic Opportunity], so that’s not going to work because they can’t have two of them. And the name Ana Steele conveyed to him a large Germanic woman with power! After he was hired, Nancy brought him in to meet me, and – in his words – he saw a little young thing sitting in a chair with her shoes kicked off, sitting on her feet with a cardigan sweater thrown across her shoulders—he was like, Whoa! this is not even close to what I imagined!

We worked together literally for six years as co-workers [before marriage]. Nancy was a workaholic, and he was her special assistant, and I was probably her next closest, so we all worked late every night. Nancy would finally go home, and then John and I would walk home. He lived in Georgetown, and I lived in Foggy Bottom, so we would walk home together a lot. At some point it would be, you know, John would say, Are you hungry? and I would say, I’m starving! Then we would go to eat dinner somewhere. John’s favorite way to describe our relationship was an “impetuous whirlwind six-year courtship.” We got married after that impetuous-whirlwind-six-year courtship—that’s the truth, except the whirlwind courtship is sort of a joke. Neither John nor I would be able to answer if asked if there was a moment that we said to ourselves, I’m in love! We just grew into love. I remember one day saying to myself, I can’t imagine my life without him. I guess that’s falling in love. It was beautiful – what a blessing.

Long before you and John moved into the Potomac Plaza Cooperative Apartments in Foggy Bottom where you spent most of your married life, you, Ana, lived in Dupont Circle. I understand there were a lot of social movements in that area at the time—were you involved in these movements?

I was not—I remember that when I first came to Washington in ’65, I was on P street, a few blocks off Dupont Circle, which was a hotbed of all kinds of demonstrations, especially against the Vietnam War. I remember walking out of my front door one day, and I saw police with clubs beating kids down to the ground. I had never seen anything like that—I was horrified. I didn’t ever do anything in any of those movements except support them. I had some interesting interaction later with members of the gay rights community in Washington, and did something supportive with them—I can’t remember exactly what. 

Also while at Dupont Circle, I volunteered tutoring a young African American in a program called, “Future for Jimmy.” My young student, William, was very special. I remember him still.

Because you and John had a love of the arts in common, and when married lived not far from the Kennedy Center and other entertainment venues, did your lives apart from work involve the arts?

Yes, absolutely. Music was John’s passion, but so was everything in the arts – like it is for me. Whenever we could afford it, John and I went to everything possible. We took a subscription to the dance, but we went to everything else when we could. We both loved all of the arts and having many of them right there too. That’s one of the things now when I’m trying to decide whether to go back home to our apartment or stay here [in the Chevy Chase House, where she gets regular physical therapy after breaking her hip more than a year ago]. I have a friend – she and I are subscribers to the dance series – so she’ll come and pick me up and take me down there, hobbling around. John was really fading in his last years, but we would keep going to the Kennedy Center, and they gave him seats in the aisle for the handicapped. I’ve kept that seat because as it turns out I’m handicapped now. I use a walker.

It must have been difficult to retire from a career that was so focused on the arts, something you loved. You retired in 1998 after 36 years with the NEA.

It was very hard. We had new leadership, and the agency was changing. It didn’t feel the way it did before. I don’t remember even what I was doing then, probably deputy for programs or something, but I just felt we weren’t the passionate arts people in the way we had been. Of course, I had worked there a very long time, and was of an age to retire, and my husband had retired. He was 12 years older than me. One day, we were driving home and John listened to me and said, You know, sweet love, you may get to the point where you don’t really love going to work anymore. Think about that. I decided that I was going to leave. I had a huge farewell party, which was amazing. Congressman Yates came, which was a big wow because everyone told me he doesn’t go to retirement parties. The fun part was that I had become notorious for editing, and we had these colored pens, and mine was purple; everybody started to call me the “purple pen lady.” For my farewell party, they had decorated everything in purple! I had not been let in on any of the plans for this farewell party, so, trust me when I walked in I was like Wow! There were like 100 people there—most of the staff—and then when I saw Sidney Yates, I almost fainted [laughing]. I loved them, I loved my staff, I loved the people, I loved the work, I loved my sweet angel, John. I’ve had too blessed a life, I don’t know how that happens but I’m so grateful. 

And what has life after retirement held?

My life was really full. I didn’t need to do anything new. We had joined the Foggy Bottom West End Village. The Villages are all over the world now. They are community-organized groups that get together and decide what they might do to be helpful for the neighborhoods or areas in which they reside. I did some projects with them and for them, which was really good. I enjoyed that a lot.

Church is still a part of my life. I go to the St. Stephen Martyr Catholic Church [in Foggy Bottom]. It’s a beautiful small church. I’ve been going there ever since I can remember. When I was living off of Dupont Circle, I was probably going to St. Matthew’s Cathedral, but then I came to St. Stephen’s. They have an exquisite choir and, at the moment, a wonderful pastor, Monsignor Paul [Dudziak]. The other priests are also wonderful like Father [Klaus] Sirianni.

The church is poverty-stricken, and there are concerns that it may be shut down.  Sometimes when you call the church, whoever answers the phone might be the priest because they don’t have enough regular volunteer people to come in and do secretarial work. Anyway, I had never been in the back of my church until I went back to go to Mass a month or two ago. I got there when the 10 o’clock Mass was finished, and the 11 o’clock wasn’t starting, so I got myself into the back of the church and just sat in the back of the church. I could see the whole church—it’s gorgeous, absolutely beautiful. I was so happy that I was early because I had a new vision of the whole church.

Tell us about your travels with your husband. We understand you cashed in on all those arts contacts you made while working at the NEA and got to see the fruits of your labor – arts in action all over the United States.

My sweet husband had said, You know, everybody retires, and they want to go to Europe. Why would people go to Europe? We have this big, beautiful country, and nobody’s seen it, including us. So we decided to chop the country in half, and we went one year to the southern part and the other year to the northern part. John was the man with the maps and the travel books, and I was the woman on the phone calling all those people we had met over the years – panel members and council members and artists. Before, they would all say to either John or me, When are you going to come see my museum? When are you going to come to see my folk arts program? When are you going to see my dance? John assigned me to pick up the phone and say, Hi, remember me? You were always asking when are we coming – we’re coming! Our rule number one is we’re staying in a motel because we aren’t moving in on anybody, and we will only be there probably a day or two but we’d love to see you! We had the best trip. Before we left, friends were saying, Are you kidding? You’re gonna get in the car, drive across the country, and then you’re gonna do it again? You’re gonna end up divorced. You can’t sit in the front seat of a car with anybody and drive 24 hours a day practically without somebody starting an argument. Never happened. We were cool. It was wonderful, and we loved it. The country and its sites are exquisite.

Give us just one magical moment of the trip.

The one that immediately comes to mind is when we were in Arizona going to the Grand Canyon. We were driving toward it and we saw a lot of cars were pulled over to one side, and John wanted to see what it was about. We parked the car, walked over there, and it was the sun setting on the canyon across the stone—I’ve never seen anything like those colors, and I can still see it – it was exquisite, and I’ll never forget it. I’m sure John took a lot of pictures. I told somebody to count them in my apartment and we have 83 photograph albums covering most of our lives. 

What went into the decision to move from your apartment, which is close to all the things you love, to across town into an assisted-living facility?

Two years after my husband died, I fell and broke my hip in our apartment. I went from the hospital to a place called Forest Hills and then from there to here at Chevy Chase House because I still can’t get around by myself. I was in so much pain, and I know they were giving me all kinds of pain medication. When I came here, the biggest blessing about being here was physical therapy. They have therapists here, occupational and physical, and they do magic.

I miss [my apartment]. What I mean is that it’s very different. One plus side here is – and it’s a big plus – meals that I don’t need to cook myself. The staff by and large is really wonderful, skilled, warm, and caring. And I have made a lot of friends because of sitting in the lobby and staring—you know, you get to know people! That’s a big blessing to being here; I feel as though everything surrounding me has been a blessing more than a downside. I’m not especially crazy about the room I’m in. I live in a studio, and I’ve been here for well over a year and it’s getting crowded in there. I have only one chair and the bed. I have a walker and a wheelchair. You can hardly move around in my room [laughing]. But I’m blessed to be here, and I’ve met some really interesting people. When I’m trying to make up my mind to stay here or go back home, I talk to a friend who lives in my old building [Potomac Plaza], and once she said, I’ve lived in this building for more than 24 years and I haven’t made many close friends. There are so few situations that lead to making friends (in a condo building)  – you don’t eat together, there are no programs together; we have only an annual Christmas party when everybody’s in the lobby and says hi and that’s about it. On the Fourth of July, they’re all hoping for enough space on the roof for the fireworks. She told me to think about it.

I have a niece who called me a couple of days ago. She’s very smart, and she was telling me that studies of seniors make certain issues and points about what makes people live longer and happier, and I said okay whaat, and high on the list was “friends and collegial activity.” It’s good for health, it’s good for the brain, it’s good for everything. It’s very hard for me to give up my Foggy Bottom apartment. I mean, my life was there. But this is really important to me now, so I’m still struggling with my decision. 

What would compel you to return to Foggy Bottom?

The neighborhood is beautiful, it really is wonderful. It’s near the Potomac River, and everything is walkable – walk to church, walk to the river, walk to Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods, walk to the Kennedy Center, walk to the Tazza Cafe. All of those things are important to me—being able to reach them and involve myself in them. I have to make up my mind. I’ve only twice been back to the apartment where John died [since my fall]. It was John’s niece who said, Come on, everybody’s overthinking taking you in there, including you Ana! We’re just gonna do it, and we did. I didn’t go into the room where he passed away, but  I spent some time there. It felt better than I thought it was going to feel—I thought I was going to fall apart, but I didn’t. I’m leaning towards staying here at Chevy Chase House, but I still don’t know. 

Your life is so inspiring, especially your work in the Endowment. Could you give a word of advice to young people who want to pursue a big job or interest but don’t know where to start?

I think probably the most important thing is to pick an organization or agency that has a mission or subject you personally identify with or care about and go check them out to see whether they would help enlarge your interest or even shift you from something that you feel strongly about. Stick with your core and don’t think about politics or money or anything for a while. Think, “what do I care about, what means something to me, what do I want to spend part of my life involved in?” This sounds selfish, but it’s actually selfless if you think about it. 

Was there anything that we haven’t covered that you’d like us to ask about?

No, I just wish I could show you some of the pictures from my apartment—I have some wonderful pictures of me and John.

END

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