00:00:02.220 - 00:00:13.260

What jail food tastes like. Well no, but I have done it. Anyway, they got out the next afternoon. The next afternoon they got out and they were whining and moaning

00:00:13.260 - 00:00:23.740

about hot dogs. All they could do was whine and moan about greasy hot dogs and applesauce. So whenever I see either one of them, I think of these two kids

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who suddenly discovered that martyrdom hurts. But there were a whole bunch of things, you know. We wound up winning, of course. Yeah.

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Let's get back to the community. You mentioned something about painting Dot's room four times in the nursery school? The fathers were required to put in a certain number of hours in

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the nursery school. And all I can remember about that nursery school is painting the same room over and over again. We figured out what somebody else and I were doing it together one

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night. There must have been 500 coats of paint on that wall. We wondered whether there was a

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wall under it. You know, we visualized the room getting smaller and smaller as the paint got thicker and thicker. It was a boring way to spend your hours, but it was required.

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Your right to participate was, but there was a feeling of belonging. Oh, no. Brought out the worst in everybody. What other neighborhood activities were you active in? You say the babysitter club? Oh yeah.

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Every so often we had the books. We had to keep track of them. I loved the rules of the babysitting club. I wanted a publishing house and a newspaper.

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If you had to put out a beverage, it could be instant coffee and a spoon and a napkin. And cookies or something, it was required to have something it was usually Grl Scout cookies And

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every house you went to was the same thing it was It was a jar of instant coffee and a cup. And a Girl Scout cookie. And Girl Scout cookies piled up.

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No matter where you went, it was the same thing. And people used to read each other's, Everybody had a League of Urban Voters calendar.

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I mean, it was like an [board?]. And I discovered, I don't know, one time in some meeting we were giving a book sale. One of the things that people did when they babysat each other's

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houses, they looked at the calendars, the social life of each other. Sandy and I used to put absurd things on our calendar, like go to the White House, dinner with the

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Queen, you know, just absurd. What else can we do here? We acted politically. Sandy was precinct chairman at one

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time. I was precinct chairman another time. We did not participate in the

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great adventure in Danville, which must have been the summer of '61, because I was really very resentful of the community luring these poor people in Danville into an exposed position where we couldn't protect them, where we couldn't help them.

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And a lot of them, some of them lost their houses down there. In Danville? Oh yeah. They had posted them as collateral and that kind of thing. I felt it was an irresponsible thing to do and didn't

00:03:54.060 - 00:04:05.240

participate. And I really didn't think that I had to give back my civil rights credentials for not doing it. This was in connection with the textile workers.

00:04:05.740 - 00:04:20.460

No, no, no, this was racial also. Well, it got started because of the--Remember we were boycotting the girls' cat uniforms? Dan River, yeah.

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Tell me about Carlton? Well, I was really... Sandy, tell us something about your coverage of the trolley car.

00:04:38.520 - 00:04:52.240

Well, I was writing a column for the Montgomery County Sentinel once a week. It was called Cabin John Brookmont. It covered, in about ten inches a week, everything from the district

00:04:52.240 - 00:05:09.300

line to us, to Cabin John actually. But one of the things I did do was cover the last trip of our wonderful trolley that we wrote about in the nursery school song and the Bannockburn show.

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And Mark and I went and rode the last, the last mile. Really? And then I wrote about it for the Sentinel.

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And in fact, in the– What year was this? Oh, he was, he must have been about five, so I must have– Must have been 1959, the winter of '59. Something like that.

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Everybody judges time by the age of their children. That's right. That's right. Well, how has the community evolved since you've been living

00:05:43.580 - 00:05:59.200

here? What do you think about it as a community as a whole now as compared to the early days? Do you think it's as cohesive, as cooperative? It doesn't seem to be, but again, our perspective...

00:06:00.040 - 00:06:09.260

First of all, women are working, as they simply weren't, to the extent. In those early days, we were all volunteers.

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I collected for everything there was to collect for, and got so people would see me coming and they'd slide in their closets rather than open the door. [laughter] Right? And I volunteered in politics.

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And then eventually I went to work. And... So you don't have as much contact now with the neighbors.

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That's right. And I think that's true. I think that's true of, well, nursery school is really the cutoff for kind...But then, of

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course, there's PTA. And the shows. And shows. Do you go to the newcomers party?

00:06:46.880 - 00:06:52.000

And the swimming pool. And the swimming pool. Yeah. Almost all my contact with the

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community is in the summer at the swimming pool. Except for the people who swim at the Y in the winter, like Betty Wagman, I see once in a while. Well, what's symptomatic, I came

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home one day, I had to do something in Glen Echo. And I stopped off in the house. I don't know, pick something up, drop something off.

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It was about 1 o'clock on a summer afternoon day. And I came in the house. And I decided to call Sandy and tell her I was going to be late

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that evening. And the phone was dead. So I went out to use a neighbor's phone to call the phone company and tell them there was trouble with my phone.

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And I went up and down the whole block and there was not a single person home. When was this? It was about two years ago.

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Two years ago. And I began to realize it was like the Twilight Zone. Here was this street with about four cars left on it at that point.

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All the people had two cars, they had gone to work and one of them, for some reason, had a car left. All these houses, some of the doors open, you know, the heavy door open, And dogs or cats running around the neighborhood,

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flowers blooming, all the signs of life and vibrancy, and not a single human being, not one. But it's interesting that some doors were still open.

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Yeah, and this was, I thought to myself, this is Bannockburn after the bomb. You know? But I had a feeling that if you drove through Bannockburn in the broad daylight, you'd find

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remarkably few people. You don't see children playing in the street anymore. I remember when we used to drive

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into this block, there were a million children. I mean, you used to pick out yours from among them. That was all by the color of their sun suit or parka, whatever they were wearing.

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But now, it's just nothing. I mean, you don't see kids on bikes, you don't see anything. To that extent, it is lost. I think it's lost in cradle to

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grave. I don't think it's lost, I think it's in a state of transition, because there are a lot of second generation Bannockburn kids here.

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Yeah, but the nursery school is out trying to steal children. If your kids were married and had kids, do you think they'd like to come back here and bring up their

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kids? Yeah, Julie would. Mark probably wouldn't. What was their childhood experience? Julie would like to get married

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[and clone us]. Julie wants to get married. If she finds somebody to marry. If and when she finds somebody to

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marry. Well that's great. Their childhood experiences? Well, Mark is still very close to the children he grew up with.

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Frank Dunow, Tony Owens. No, it was extraordinary that this, you know, that this is something else that somebody ought to talk to Hilda Weissman about, her study that she did in the Bannockburn Nursery School when

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Barb was in nursery school. Barb, well, zhe's a psychologist and she did her PhD thesis interviewing the children. I have no idea what they told her or what she asked them.

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Well, I merely gave permission for Mark to participate. They were four years old. Really? When it came time to graduate from Whitman, she realized that at

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least two thirds or more of that original group that she'd interviewed were still in the neighborhood. And she re-interviewed them. Really?

00:10:27.720 - 00:10:30.400

Yeah. So that would be an interesting. That's very interesting. I'll get that.

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That would be an interesting--she has all that. I think she did get her PhD on the basis of the original interviews. So that would show. Julie's close friends are really,

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well, there's some from nursery school, well, like Rick Burke, who she went to college with, too. And they were always on the newspaper together in high school and the Michigan Daily.

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He's still part of the Michigan group. But her really close friends are-- Rick Burke, was he in Bannockburn? Yeah, well... Ricky Burke.

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Yeah, he was Ricky Burke. And they were... I think they were... They might have been one of the...

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Elgin Lane? Wilson Knowles. Yeah, Wilson Knowles. Oh, okay. Yeah.

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Not Elgin, but Callender, one of those up there, around the Bannockburns. Merriman. Not really...

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Not quite Merrimack Lane. Not quite. Yeah. The twins?

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Yes, that's true. She still sees Allison and Joanne Cook. And she has some...

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But her really close friends are her college friends, whereas Mark's...Mark still has really close friends from high school. From nursery school. From nursery school, yeah.

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Now, I was telling her about... Did they come to the homecoming? Your kids? Oh yeah. Well, no, Mark was in, where was he?

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Kathmandu. No, he was in Ireland. Oh, in Ireland. But Julie went to the homecoming.

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And had a ball. Yeah. It was a great day. Yeah.

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We came back from New York later, I remember. Yeah. You came back specially to... No, no, no. I went up there.

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He went up, but I had to write a story. I came, it was, I had been covering a conference, so we came over from New York and I had to

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write my story. Did you ever belong to a carpool, Ed? No. No. I did not myself belong to them, but I would on occasion get

00:12:33.700 - 00:12:45.420

a ride with one or another. But there were social units as to whose carpool you were in. There were two of them for the

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labor board. Yeah. Labor board and the AF of L-CIO carpool. There was one for the AFL-CIO.

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They went on for years and years. They went on. And they were self-renewing, too. If somebody would leave, you really applied for membership like

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a club. There was one of them that was the Rand people. That was Herb Dinerstein and Leon

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Garay and Hirsch, whatever his name was, who lived up the block there. Arthur, was it Arthur? Yeah.

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And the lady whose husband was, no, her brother was Harold Rome. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, Betty Morris.

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Betty Morris. Yeah, her husband was in that carpool. And that you needed a clearance to get into, I mean practically for a Q clearance to get into.

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But the subject matters were organized by the carpool. There was one group that was, I think Lou was in the one with Steve Jaworski.

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And they were the more senior ones at the labor board. It was him and Jaworski and Nordkomm. Mel Pollack? No, Mel Pollack was in a different one Goldman when he was alive was-- Max Reece, that's right.

00:14:11.930 - 00:14:26.320

And if you wanted a ride with them they had to not only have space, but they had a clear whether you were fit, you know, to I can't, but it was a real social clique. You know, if you went to the

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Halloween party or something, you would see people clustered by carpool. [laughter.] And it was just a subform of organization within the community that was very durable.

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Speaking of the Halloween party, I was very saddened by that letter in the newsletter this time, that--. No more Halloween parties? Well, no, it wasn't that no more Halloween parties, but the Halloween party was rained out and

00:14:57.620 - 00:15:10.620

the clubhouse was rented, so they had no place to go. But didn't it also say there weren't going to be any more because of the lack of interest? Really? Oh, that is too bad, because I didn't see that.

00:15:10.680 - 00:15:18.130

That party was really, that was the greatest thing that we had, the Halloween party. The Halloween party? For the kids.

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Yeah, yeah. And the adults. I mean, that's how we knew Herb Hauptman.

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Not that he was a chemist, specialist in crystallography or whatever he won his Nobel Prize for, but he collected the cookers for the grills for the Halloween party and brought them back.

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You know, you picture people in your mind's eye. Whenever I think of Herb Hauptman, I have to focus on seeing him through the smoke of the grill.

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[laughter] You know, "Ed, Eddie, come over here." Because it was from my grill. The other time my grill got cleaned once a year because he would clean...But it was great, I

00:15:59.670 - 00:16:15.720

mean it was great for adults too. It was also, yeah, it was also, you know, the kind of thing that would happen when the Ross kid fell out of the tree and broke his arm, and the Rosses were off

00:16:15.720 - 00:16:21.940

sailing someplace, And he had not wanted to go. I think it was Timmy. I don't even remember which one it was.

00:16:23.040 - 00:16:32.940

And Ed Goodpastor took him to the hospital, to Suburban Hospital. And Vita Goldberg, they could not reach them.

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And it was a compound fracture, and it needed to be operated. She took the responsibility for operating.

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She still lived across the street. I mean that was one of the quintessential Bannockburn experiences. And then of course you have

00:16:48.740 - 00:17:05.400

somewhere on this tape, don't you, the Wagman's story about their son who went to Brandeis. And, well, she really needs to tell it, but he was in some kind of a sociology class, and the

00:17:05.400 - 00:17:14.600

professor asked this big freshman group, how many knew their next door neighbors. Practically everybody raised their hand.

00:17:14.600 - 00:17:27.340

She kept upping the how many knew everybody on their block, how many knew 100 families in their community, and there was just one hand left up, and she said, "You must be from Bannockburn." Really?

00:17:27.340 - 00:17:37.120

Yes. It was one of the Wagman kids. But how did the teacher know? Just simply because that's practically the only community of bright kids who would go to

00:17:37.120 - 00:17:43.440

Brandeis. Apparently, she'd had this happen in enough other classes. That's a good story.

00:17:45.400 - 00:17:54.940

You drove Sandy? Yeah, we were, she doesn't remember. She told me I drove her to have one of her kids, and I drove her when she had her measles.

00:17:54.960 - 00:18:08.280

I don't remember. That's all. But I remember when you took her because there was another Bannockburn..They took Mark to, Mark was at the- - The Muntzes.

00:18:08.480 - 00:18:15.350

No, not the Muntzes. No. No, no, no, the people, the Quaker, you know- Oh, the Delaplaines, that's right. Delaplaines.

00:18:15.560 - 00:18:23.100

They had Mark, they gave him dinner, they were perfectly willing to keep him overnight. I mean it was again the community, yeah. Which again the whole sense of community.

00:18:23.100 - 00:18:38.300

That's where I had to go to pick him up. He started with the Muntzes, then the Muntzes had to go someplace, so they dropped him off, you know, at the Delapines, And that's where he was when I, when I came to get him.

00:18:38.460 - 00:18:50.880

But it was, again, you know, the sense of community. You took it, you remember this was one of the few communities, too, where kids could go out trick or treating without parents. At a pretty young age.

00:18:50.880 - 00:19:01.430

You just sent them out by themselves, and there was no anxiety that they were gonna--that anything bad would happen to them any place. You kno you just sent them out, it was a, a safe community.

00:19:05.540 - 00:19:18.300

And as a result, they would wander around any place. I'm not, I would have no hesitancy now, for example. I don't think that character has changed at all in the community. I think it's still the same.

00:19:18.540 - 00:19:23.680

Yeah. Just fewer little children. I don't see any little children. Actually, I do lock my front door though.

00:19:23.680 - 00:19:36.360

Do you? For about half the time we lived here, I never did. I didn't know where the key was. I literally did not know where the key to the front door was.

00:19:36.860 - 00:19:53.980

There was some really disreputable kid lived across the valley, came and let the dog loose, let Brandy loose. Really, as an effort, it was an act of terrorism against us. I don't remember this kid's name.

00:19:55.760 - 00:20:01.640

I don't remember it either. He wanted to take the job away from Michael Richardson. That's right. And they finally moved away

00:20:01.640 - 00:20:17.540

because his kid had been arrested a number of times by the cops. And they finally felt it was better to get him out of town than to...I don't remember his name, but anyway, that was the point at which we told the policemen, somebody had broken in here to,

00:20:18.160 - 00:20:25.080

Somebody had come in and discharged a fire extinguisher. When was this? What year? Not too long ago. Oh, yeah.

00:20:25.080 - 00:20:30.040

Yeah, long enough, I guess. 10 years ago at least. Yeah. Time flies.

00:20:30.060 - 00:20:44.480

And the policeman said,"How did he get in?" And I said, "I guess through the front door." He said, "How could I say I'm not all the time?" Eddie, nobody can understand what you're saying. I said, "Not at the time." And the guy, I didn't have the

00:20:44.480 - 00:20:54.760

guts to say, "I don't know where the key is." That's when we got a key. That's when we got a lock. We had to get a lock to get a key, because we did not know where the

00:20:54.760 - 00:21:00.720

key was to the front door. Oh, you had to get a whole new lock. Just so we could have a key, like

00:21:00.720 - 00:21:06.700

other people do. It's crazy. But I don't lock the door. I still don't.

00:21:06.700 - 00:21:16.400

I lock the car doors periodically. Well, then there was, yeah, there were... Because kids were roaming-- A

00:21:16.400 - 00:21:22.860

certain group of kids went through a hard adolescence. Let's put it that way. So you've got to lock your car door.

00:21:25.920 - 00:21:34.620

OK, well, that's been great. And I'll give you a copy of the transcript to see, and thank you very much.