(Young RFK and Family at Hickory Hill)   I wasn’t going to write the story of the two stones in Decarlia today, much less drag you off on some brand new wild goose chase.   Dammit, I was going to finish off the mystery of the Buckingham Swim Club, and I will. It is going […]

  (The Econowash Today) I have two recollections of the wide world from the 1950s. There is a jumble of personal stuff, of course, but the two things that filled my little brain with dread were the news of Ike’s heart attack in 1955.   Why that stayed with me all these years may have […]

(Author Alex Haley)   Great forces were in motion in the year of 1966. They manifested themselves on the world stage, and in local politics, and even in the real estate market.   The Civil rights protests under her office window must have given pause to the Queen of Buckingham. Frances Freed had already laid […]

Frances Freed was no Henry Ford, though her late husband Allie had made a decent go of manufacturing in the taxi business in New York.   When he passed away with the first Buckingham units just being completed, she picked herself up and executed the plan. She was a remarkable women, disciplined and industrious, and […]

(Basement Laundry Room)   It is a chicken-and-egg thing, and I wish I had time to slow down and have some eggs this morning. Unfortunately, I have to be someplace else and there is nothing to be done about it. To make an omelet you have to break eggs, right? No time.   So no […]

(Buckingham, November 1939)   I am a little peevish this morning. I am distracted by a breathtaking demonstration of how far we have fallen as an educated society. The fall has been so swift because the tumble is accelerated by astonishing technology.   If you want to get sidetracked and pissed-off, you can take the […]

(Original Klan Robe)   After the marching season was done emotion continued to run high outside the rental office at the target for integration in Arlington County, the Buckingham neighborhood.   1966. One hundred and one years since the War Between the States had concluded. The centennial was only a year past, and the demonstrators […]

  (The Hate Bus. Rockwell on right wears his Navy Flight Jacket)   I have to get to it at some point, so here it is. I have been looking for a missing pool, and the sound of the water filling up the one at Big Pink last night kept the idea fresh in my […]

(Starship Enterprise) I know the Buckingham Swim club was there in 1996, just northwest  of the corner of Henderson and 5th Road North. I saw it in overhead imagery of the neighborhood that is on file at the central library.   I don’t know how many old Spooks they have in there, probably more than let on, […]

(Marchers)   The summer of 1966 was completely normal in Arlington County, which is to say that it featured some temperate days and some that cooked the brain in the spirit in humid air wafting up from the lower south.   The District of Columbia is a cusp city, definitely not North, though close to […]