…She might be heading to Webster Girls’ School, at 10th and H Streets downtown. Yes, long before Zaytinya was serving up Mediterranean tapas to lobbyists and lawyers a block away, or “Verizon” even existed as a company let alone a sports center, Penn Quarter was home to a little public school for pregnant teenagers and young mothers. Last time I wandered by the intersection, the nondescript brick building was still there, though it was partially obscured by construction barriers.

I first heard about the school working on a story with DCPS historian and former D.C. public schools student Nancye Suggs. Recalling her own middle school years, Suggs said: “Girls would disappear all of a sudden, and then the whispering would start: WEBSTER.”

I was incredulous. That dumpy downtown building was a black hole of suppressed scandals, tucked-away teenagers, and unmentioned infants?

Then, lo and behold, I found a pamphlet in the sizable “Webster School” file at the Sumner School Museum and Archives. It laid out all my basic questions, then responded to them with stunning clarity.

Why should you attend Webster?

• You will be safer during and after your pregnancy.
• Special health services are planned for you.
• Home study materials and assistance will be provided while you are convalescing after the birth of your baby.
• You will receive the same credits that you would receive in regular school.

(This is a selection of responses.)

Do you have to pay to attend Webster?

• “NO”
• Webster is a public school operated by the D.C. Board of Education.

Who may enroll?

• Girls who attend any junior or senior high school in the District of Columbia may apply.
• All pregnant students should try to get into Webster Girls’ School.

Read the rest of this entry »

Virginia Tech unloads a small document dump spurred by a FOIA and the terms of the June 17 settlement that sheds light on what school officials were thinking in the wake of the school massacre. The Post discovers: school brass were concerned about their image!

The Post writes:

“Within a week of the incident, one memo shows, university officials had developed a media strategy that centered on three main messages: ‘We will not be defined by this event,’ ‘Invent the future’ and ‘Embrace the Virginia Tech Family.’”

School administrators handpicked sources for the media and coached them, and graded published stories from a rating ranging from positive to negative. None of this is much of a surprise. I was there covering the tragedy. If you wanted to get beyond the press conferences and well-staged interviews, it was easy. V-Tech is a huge campus with thousands of students and faculty. There were plenty of people willing to go off message. And the Post did amazing work according to our media critic. But I don’t blame the school for trying to manage the tragedy.

Still. This guy really is naive. The silliest suggestion came from an administrator who tried to get the school to coin its own tragedy phrase:

“A two-page memo from Chris Clough, who works in the University Relations office, is dedicated to the language choices the school had to make.

‘We likely will live with the label ‘Virginia Tech massacre,’ or ‘Virginia Tech tragedy’ for years to come in the media, however, we can use our own language in our own media to help prevent the event from defining us and may gain success in influencing history,’ he wrote.

Clough offered three suggestions on how to refer to the killings. The first is the ‘West AJ/Norris tragedy’ because it ‘confines the incident to specific locations within the university and doesn’t allow it to completely define the university,’ he wrote. Then there is the ‘Holocaust Day tragedy’ because the shooting fell on the same day as the Holocaust remembrance day Yom Hashoah. Finally, he suggests, the ‘Best and Brightest tragedy.’

The most famous homer ever hit in Washington has gotten a lot of press lately. It was hit by a New York Yankee more than 50 years ago.

Mickey Mantle crushed a pitch from Senators hurler Chuck Stobbs over the left centerfield bleachers at Griffith Stadium in April 1953.

The ball completely left the stadium, and was later found in the yard of a house on Oakdale Place NW. Legend holds that Mantle’s shot had traveled 565 feet.

Despite time and the Dead Balls Era™, it remains the longest HR in baseball history.

Stobb’s death earlier this month brought the homer back in the news. And of all the pieces written, none was more fascinating than the one posted on the washingtonpost.com’s PostMortem blog by obituary writer Matt Schudel.

After the Post’s Stobb’s obit appeared, Schudel got a call at the paper from Donald Dunaway. Back in 1953, Dunaway was the 10-year-old kid who found Mantle’s homer on Oakdale Place.

The official story had long been that Yankees PR man Arthur “Red” Patterson had left the stadium after Mantle’s at-bat and brought it back after paying a local kid $1 for finding it.

Dunaway was that local kid, and his version, which I had never read before, is that he was the only person even looking for the ball, and that he brought it back to the stadium by himself, and for doing that he was paid $100 by the Yankees. Dunaway says he also was given another baseball.

Apparently, as much as has been written about the homer through the years, nobody had ever bothered locating the guy who really found it.

Kudos to Schudel for getting Dunaway’s tale out there. I want more!

The D.C. Times wrote a nice story this week about the refurbishing of Cardozo’s football stadium, which should be the grandest in the city by fall.

But the article turns tragicomic when reporter Amanda McClure gives a brief and off-the-mark history of the venue and the school.

The stadium was built along with the school in 1916, and hosted Central High School football games and track meets until it was renamed Cardozo in 1928. The name honors Francis Lewis Cardozo, the first black to hold administrative office in South Carolina.

Cardozo became segregated as an all-black school in 1950 but was reintegrated in 1954.

Cardozo’s current plant was in fact named Central High School—with alumni that included J. Edgar Hoover—until 1950 and was the flagship of the white portion of the city’s totally segregated school system till its dying day.

The transfer of the building, located on a hill off 13th Street NW, from all-white Central to all-black Cardozo made for one of the ugliest chapters in the ugly racial history of D.C. Contrary to what the story infers, no public high schools in this city were ever “reintegrated”—they were all-black or all-white from Day 1 until the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

But, again, no matter its history, as the story points out: Cardozo is gonna have a helluva football stadium.

Right when you thought the Lincoln Theatre was all cashed out, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced earlier today that the District plans to develop two city-owned properties behind the theater and use a portion of the funds generated by the properties to support the theater’s future operations.

Fenty says its his hope that the two properties on the 90,000-square-foot parking lot will bring in enough revenue to help keep the cash-strapped 88-year-old theater afloat.

Early last year, Lincoln officials threatened to shut down the once-popular theater due to lack of finances until the D.C. gov put up a $200,000 grant to keep the doors open. The District also spent another $1.5 million last year for capital improvements that are nearly complete.

Ward 1 Councilmember Jim Graham and At-Large Councilmember Kwame R. Brown also attended the announcement today outside the theaterss U Street entrance.

“We want to bring the Lincoln Theatre where it should be,” said Graham, who has been on the theater’s board for 10 years.

It was a shame the announcement did not take place in the back parking lot so everyone could see where all the action was taking place. The District is requiring that any development will provide ongoing financial support for the theater and include at least 7,500 square feet of flexible event space. Bids for the site are due by July 18 and construction is scheduled to begin by October of this year.

Opened in 1922, the Lincoln Theatre is known for hosting big-name performers, including Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. Early next month, Maya Angelou is scheduled to celebrate her 80th birthday there. Maybe she can give over her birthday cash to help out?

—Whitney Boyd

Turns out history’s most disappointing Washington Bullet/Wizard not named Kwame Brown is something of a historian himself: Chris Webber collects African-American artifacts.

And apparently Webber doesn’t carry the selfishness he ALWAYS displayed on the court here when he’s off it. Webber has loaned two pieces from his collection to Decatur House for an exhibition titled “The Half Had Not Been Told Me: African Americans on Lafayette Square(1795-1965).”

The items are: a letter Frederick Douglass signed on “United States Marshal’s Office” stationary and something called a carte-de-visite from Douglass from 1870.

Starting today, CWebb’s FDoug wares, and the rest of the exhibit, will be available for viewing Mondays through Saturdays, 10am to 5pm and Sundays, noon to 4pm,  through March 1, 2009.

Don’t wait long. If Webber’s artifacts are anything like their owner, they’ll become very hard to find as the end of the exhibit nears.

Tomorrow, D.C. commemorates two anniversaries: The 40th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, and the 75th anniversary of the repeal of prohibition. Please do not commemorate these events concurrently.

If you’d like to commemorate Martin Luther King–assassinated 40 years ago on this day–head to Ballou Senior High School at 3401 4th St. SE at noon for the 29th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade. The parade is chaired by Marion Barry.

If you’d like to commemorate the occasion of prohibition not existing anymore, convene outside the Dubliner at 520 North Capitol St NW at 6 p.m. for Budweiser’s block party–complete with Bud Clydesdale photo-op. From the Post’s “now we can drink again” round-up:

[O]n April 7, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an amendment to the Volstead Act that allowed brewers to sell beer that was 4 percent alcohol by volume instead of the previous 0.5 percent. According the national Brewers Association, more than 1.5 million barrels of beer were consumed in the first 24 hours.

Commence commemorating!

Mike Rhode’s excellent ComicsDC blog includes a tidbit that makes the town of Falls Church at least 25 percent more interesting: It’s the town where Columbus, Ohio, native and very funny writer James Thurber was nearly blinded in one eye as a child, thanks to a moment of unstructured play with his brother that went terribly wrong. (A bow and arrow was involved.) Cul de Sac cartoonist Richard Thompson, who fed Rhode the anecdote, fills out the story on his own blog.–Mark Athitakis

While writing for this week’s issue about the football misfortunes at J.E.B. Stuart High, I mentioned that the fellow who gave the Falls Church school its name had put his West Point training to work killing Indians and fighting on the losing side in the Civil War.

I neglected to point out a career highlight, that, having been bludgeoned with local Civil War history throughout my public schooling in Fairfax County, I shouldn’t have missed: Stuart was also the point man in the military action that ended the 1859 siege at Harper’s Ferry.

The scenic West Virginia riverside burg, long before it became a fine antiquing outpost and pit stop on the way to betting on the ponies at Charles Town, was where abolitionist John Brown holed up in a firehouse.

Far as I can tell, Stuart, then with the U.S. Army, was to Harper’s Ferry as Janet Reno was to Waco. At Stuart’s orders, U.S. troops burst into Brown’s compound and killed or captured everybody in his gang. Survivors, including Brown, were put on trial for their violent activism and executed.

John Brown’s Raid and its aftermath accelerated the move to get rid of slavery and thereby helped trigger the War Between the States. Stuart jumped over to the Confederacy when his native Virginia seceded, and in his last battle for the losers in May 1964 1864 took a bullet to the head ribs outside Richmond. Stuart died the sort of death that every Civil War officer died, as this 19th Century record indicates:

[President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis], taking his hand, said, “General, how do you feel?” He
replied, “Easy, but willing to die, if God and my country think I
have fulfilled my destiny and done my duty.”

That concludes today’s installment of U.S. History from Dummies.

Usually e-mail forwards are stupid. The one I received today was not. In fact, I must share it. It has shown me how to be a better employee, nay, a better female employee. Back in 1943, Transportation Magazine published 11 tips for (male) managers on how to handle the new, necessary influx of lady employees in the workplace. Here are some of the most vital tips:

1. Pick young married women. They usually have more of a sense of responsibility than their unmarried sisters, they’re less likely to be flirtatious, they need the work or they wouldn’t be doing it.

3. General experience indicates that ‘husky’ girls—those who are just a little on the heavy side—are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.

4. Retain a physician to give each woman you hire a special physical examination—one covering female conditions. This step…reveals whether the employee-to-be has any female weaknesses which would make her mentally or physically unfit for the job.

8. Give every girl an adequate number of rest periods during the day. You have to make some allowances for feminine psychology. A girl has more confidence and is more efficient if she can keep her hair tidied, apply fresh lipstick and wash her hands several times a day.

So now I just have to get married, get husky, ask my doctor if I have any female weaknesses, and start bringing a comb and lipstick to work. Problems solved.

Yeah, cheesy headline. But here’s a cheesy story to go with:

If you live in the city, you have to get used to your favorite places closing. Who isn’t still mourning A.V. shutting its doors? Behind the coats of fresh paint, shiny bright neon, and all those condos, lay the ghosts of once-favorite hotspots. Of course there are things people will never mourn. No one will ever shed a tear if a CVS closed. No one will devote ink to a shuttered Chinese carryout. So it’s not unreasonable that no one really noticed the closing of the MotoPhoto in Dupont Circle.

In the age of digital and Snapfish, who really cares about a MotoPhoto?

Well I had to care. Its licensed and trained photo technicians still had my prints.

Right before New Year’s, I paid $9 to get some prints made at that MotoPhoto franchise. The prints were nothing special just photos I took along my walk to work and some leftover things from a summer trip to South Africa. The photos would take a day.

But when I returned to pick up my pics, I found the shop a mere shell. There was nothing but bare drywall. There were no novelty frames, no advertisements for jumbo prints in vivid color, or bored looking licensed photo technicians in sight. The doors were locked. A sign had been made directing people to Embassy up the street.

I knew my photos were lost. But I still called around to other MotoPhotos. They all were ignorant of my brilliant black-and-whites (with borders). They all directed me to the MotoPhoto Mothership online. I wrote an e-mail to their help desk.

After getting bounced around, this came into my inbox from a “Jim Murphy Franchise Service Manager“:

Good evening Mr. Cherkis,

I apologize that you were not properly notified of the DuPont location’s intention to close. The owner of that location does not have any other locations open, and to the best of our knowledge did not leave the remaining pictures at any of the other area MotoPhoto locations.

I will attempt to contact the owner, and share with you any information gained.

Again, on behalf of the other MotoPhoto Franchisees, I would like to apologize for this situation.

The apology was nice and all. But I wanted a discount at the very least. That discount finally came today. I told my sad story to the MotoPhoto in Cleveland Park. The clerk called his boss. The boss agreed to just make a new set prints for free. So thank you MotoPhoto Cleveland Park branch!

A Jimmy Carter expert says he doubts Carter ever made the anti-Semitic remarks that Marvin Mandel attributes to the former president in “All About Abe,” a new and occasionally brutal documentary about Abe Pollin.

Allegations against Carter provide the film’s biggest bombshells. Mandel, the now-87-year-old former governor of Maryland and longtime friend of Pollin, says Carter “tried to keep me from being chairman of the National Governors’ Conference. He actually said on the telephone…‘We can’t elect a Jew the head of the National Governors’ Conference.’”

Mandel and Pollin go on to spew a lot of anti-Carter gibberish in the movie. Pollin asserts, for example, that Carter rigged the Justice Department to make sure Mandel was indicted and convicted, and downplays the extent of Mandel’s corruptness, saying he only took “[s]hirts, couple of suits, very small stuff” from political pals.

Pollin’s charges are quite disprovable: Mandel was indicted on mail fraud and racketeering charges in November 1975; Carter took office in January 1977. And the trial record indicates that Mandel took hundreds of thousands of dollars in goods, services and cash from cronies before doing their bidding.

The slime from the quote attributed to Carter by Mandel in Pollin’s doc, however, isn’t as easy to wipe off.

But Albert Nason, an archivist at the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, a branch of the National Archives, says he’s suspicious of the accuracy of Mandel’s memories.

“I don’t know if Carter had anything at all to say about who would head up the Governors’ Conference,” says Nason, who has been with the library for 21 years. “But look back to that time: Here’s Carter coming in in 1976, he’s setting up the administration — the first thing he’s going to do is appoint a governor who is under indictment? This is after Watergate. He wanted to pursue a transparent image. If he were to push Mandel while Mandel was under indictment, that would be against everything he was running for.”

“I just can’t see Carter coming out with something so blatantly anti-Semitic as ['We can't elect a Jew...],” Nason adds. “Nothing else in his life would indicate that.”

Jimmy Carter Has Always Hated Jews!

Michael Jordan Called Abe Pollin a Lying Redneck Bastard!

Those are the money shots from All About Abe, the straight-to-party-favors-bags documentary about Abe Pollin that was recently produced.

The only release the film has had so far came when DVDs were given away at a party celebrating Pollin’s 84th birthday and the 10th anniversary of the Verizon Center.

I didn’t rate an invite to the party, but got a copy from a guy who knows a guy, and was stunned that the movie hasn’t gotten any attention whatsoever, even with its very limited distribution.

What’s more, wide release or no, I felt the scenes containing the aforementioned Jew/Redneck slurs made the film’s director, Ivy Meeropol, a lock for the 2007 Unsportsman of the Year award.

I didn’t speak with Meeropol until after deadline for my current column, which bestows the annual dishonor on her.

Turns out she’s a real good sport. Rather than get defensive or snippy, Meeropol said she was “happy to hear” any feedback, even if I thought parts of the doc make Abe seem like a creep.

“I’m probably not going to hear many perspectives on this, so, I welcome anything,” she said. “I have to say, I didn’t think anybody would feel that way.”

Meeropol said that the Pollin family, who funded and produced All About Abe, wanted a feature-film documentary made, and paid the going rate to have that done. But there were indications that the Pollins never intended to release the movie to theaters or television.

“They didn’t buy insurance, which you’d have to do if you’re going to put this out,” she said. “What if Jimmy Carter comes after me and says, ‘Hey, you’re calling me an anti-Semite!’ You’d have to protect yourself. I don’t see how this could ever be released. The family just wanted to make [several thousand copies] and give them to friends and family. They wanted a legacy thing.”

In other words, Abe Pollin wanted his friends and family to see him and his pals smear Jimmy Carter.

The ex-president is portrayed in the movie, albeit with total disregard to historical accuracy, as a guy who back in the 1970s used all his powers to ruin the political career and life of FOA (Friend of Abe) and former Maryland governor Marvin Mandel.

Why? Well, according to the documentary, because Mandel is Jewish. (The Mandel/Carter scenes feel like they should be in another movie, but are creepy enough to make the DVD worth seeking out all by themselves.)

Meeropol said if she wasn’t working on a vanity project for the Pollins, she would have made some attempt to counter-balance those portions of the film that brutalize Michael Jordan, also. The most sensational of these scenes has Pollin accusing Jordan of calling him a liar and “redneck bastard.”

“I think this told Abe’s side of the story. We did not give [Jordan's] side at all,” she said with a laugh, “I felt that was a little unfair. But….”

We know: We’ll have to wait till Jordan funds his own documentary to get the rest of the story.

In 2003, the federal government declared DC “does not have a serious problem” with meth amphetamine.

I’m no epidemiologist or addiction expert. But I’m gonna say: DC still doesn’t have a serious meth problem.

At least, not like Bakersfield’s meth problem. After years of hearing how evil the drug is, I’ve finally seen a place crushed by it.

I visited Bakersfield, a flat, dirty town about two hours north of Los Angeles, a couple weekends ago.

Not for its meth present, but for its musical past.

It’s the birthplace of the Bakersfield Sound, a brand of hardcore country music, pioneered by Buck Owens and fellow Bakersfielder Merle Haggard, that inspired the Beatles (here they cover Buck at Shea Stadium) and Stones and Dwight Yoakam and pretty much all good country rock.

I went there with friends to go to Owens’ old recording studio, located just outside city limits in Oildale, a sad dustbowlers’ destination. He was for years the bandleader on “Hee Haw,” and recorded the musical backing for that show in this West Coast studio, then he and other players in the cast would fake strum and lip-sync over during the videotaping sessions in Nashville.

Owens died two years ago, and his studio has gone pretty much to seed and is barely in operation. We were told that Owens’ old equipment, all sorts of Fender Tweed amps and red-white-and-blue Telecasters, still sits on pallets behind some locked doors next to the main room. Much as we asked, we weren’t allowed to see this goldmine. (We did, however, get a glimpse of a gold record for, ahem, Korn, which recorded its debut here, the last big album to come out of the studio.)

But, again, this town isn’t just about music anymore. It’s about meth amphetamine, too.

“Tweakers,” as the meth heads are known, are as much a part of the landscape as dirt. And this, remember, is where Steinbeck set much of “Grapes of Wrath.”

Young tweakers, old tweakers, tweener tweakers. They’d ride past the studio on teeny little bikes, which the sound engineer told us are part of the meth culture: The last possession a tweaker sells is his bike, because the car goes early, but he still needs some sort of wheels to get to where more meth is. It was a freak show. (Owens’ old nightclub, which is still open and quite popular, is called the Crystal Palace, but that’s gotta be a coincidence.)

On a trip to a 7/11 in early one evening, it occurred to me that every other customer in the crowded store was wasted on something other than booze. The zombies in the original “Night of the Living Dead” showed more life than this bunch. I can’t get that scene out of my head since coming back.

And it’s made me wonder: Why hasn’t meth hit DC like this?

I caught the end of the 6 O’Clock news on WJLA last night, the last few seconds of a piece on Tom Sarris’ Orleans House. I couldn’t hear what the anchors were saying, but I knew the place was only newsworthy if it was shutting down. I called up the Rosslyn landmark immediately.

Sure enough: “We’re closing on January 15,” said the woman answering the phone.

It’s being being torn down to make room for a another high-rise, she said. She sounded sad.

This hits me where I live. Or, well, lived.

I went to Orleans House before my prom in 1979. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I clearly remember being at that restaurant that night in a white tux, ordering prime rib (the “Mammoth Cut”) and eating jello from a huge salad bar shaped like a boat, and, though everybody in our foursome (all of whom I saw at a party in Centreville last Saturday, coincidentally) was either 16 or 17 years old, ordering a few bottles of wine. I also recall that the wine was Lancers, a mass-marketed brand in the ’70s, and that it came in a brownish clay decanter, just like in the ads, and that it cost $8 a bottle. I’d never ordered wine before.

I remember thinking this was the high life.

Before hanging up, I told the sad-sounding lady from Orleans House that I’ll miss the place. I think what I meant was: I miss 1979. Everything but the white tux…