MY FATHER HAD A NIGHTCLUB in Greenville, North Carolina. It was called the Burnie Street Hall, and it was down by the high school. My father played piano and had a band — Hamp’s Jam Session, that’s what he called it. I started picking up the piano when I was seven or eight years old. My father showed me a few licks, but
After being told that there would be no “freebie” tickets to President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inaugural parade, Chief Justice Warren E. Burger was reported to have said: “If I have to pay $25, then I’ll charge Carter $50 to swear him in.”
If you didn’t know that Washington, D.C., has an official “key to the city” — the ceremonial icon that mayors typically bestow on visiting dignitaries and homegrown honorees — you’re by no means alone. And that, for the moment at least, suits City Hall just fine. Soon after he moved into One Judiciary Square two years ago, Mayor Anthony
MY FATHER STARTED THE BUSINESS IN 1936, when we moved back to Washington from Wilmington, Delaware. My mother was from Wilmington, and my dad was in the jewelry business there. He opened a little shop at Tenth and D Streets. It was probably twelve feet wide and maybe twenty-five feet long — a tiny little place. Then he met a gentleman who was interested in buying a gift shop
And Now, For Our Next Witness. When the Justice Department needed to show in U.S. District Court in 1976 that Metro subway tunnels would not threaten the foundation of the new Continental Trailways building at 12th Street and New York Avenue, N.W., it turned to Robert L. Redell. Redell, a construction engineering expert with degrees from Michigan State and
Throughout its checkered history, the nation’s capital has held special allure for the most sophisticated species of the American criminal class: the con artist. Nowhere else, save perhaps for Wall Street, has the confidence game been more comfortably practiced and its practitioners more handsomely rewarded. Disciples of Phineas Barnum, knights of the golden fleece, con artists have swindled their way through society soirées on Embassy Row and wheedled their way into
Though its last rites were pronounced by a final bang of the auctioneer’s hammer on August 27, 1994, Dominique’s restaurant died with a whimper. Out, in the satisfied hands of auction-goers, went the autographed photographs of presidents, celebrities, and other famous folk, from Teddy Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to Warren Beatty and Frank Sinatra. Out, from the 30-foot-high Garden
J. EDGAR HOOVER ALWAYS GOT HIS MAN, or so they said, but apparently he never got his hat. Sometime during World War II the fearsome director of the FBI went into Harvey’s, which was then next to the Mayflower Hotel on Connecticut Avenue, and laid his fedora on the counter of the restaurant’s checkroom. Hoover didn’t bother to get
IT WAS AT THE TOBACCO COUNTER of the Willard Hotel at 14th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, the story goes, that Thomas Marshall, who served for eight years as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, uttered the words that were to become one of America’s classic aphorisms: “What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.” As with so many other good
IN ITS EARLIEST DAYS the mile-long stretch of F Street from 15th to Fifth was called the Ridge. Until Pennsylvania Avenue was paved, it was about the only way to reach the Capitol from downtown Washington. But the name didn’t stick, and with the turn of the 20th century F Street finally came into its own. For decades it