Prince Street
1012 Prince Street
In 1942, near the start of the war, my father rejoined the State Department. Our family had moved from our farm in NJ and then to “Luxmanor” in Rockville, MD for a brief period before moving to Alexandria, VA. As Mom and Dad loved old, fix-em-up houses, they decided to purchase a small, two-story, pre-Revolutionary townhouse with an attic and basement located at 1012 Prince Street in the “Old Town” section of Alexandria. I was then six years old.
Jock, Gran-C, Tom, Heather and Tony in front of our home on Prince Street. c.1942
Wartime
Located just south of our nation’s capital, Alexandria was under greater wartime vigilance than we had experienced in New Jersey or Maryland. Designated neighbors served as air raid wardens to monitor and police their respective residential areas. Blackouts occurred nightly throughout the town.
I recall a number of the wardens sporting World War I vintage steel helmets. Most wore yellow raincoats and armbands. Whistles hung around their necks. At night window curtains were drawn and interior lights extinguished when local sirens sounded.
Across America, government-imposed price controls were firmly in place. Food and gasoline were rationed while the availability of hundreds of everyday needs -- shoes, meat, sugar, eggs and margarine-- were strictly limited. Most consumer goods were controlled by government-issued War Ration Stamp Books. In sum, American families had to get by with a lot less of everything.
Throughout the war, rationing of food, empty store shelves, blackouts, sirens wailing in the night, and military-like men walking the sidewalks, had become the norm. Such disruptions and shortages were explained to us in a way we children would feel at ease. That special sense of calmness can be attributed to the attentive, hands-on, caring approach mostly of Mom.
Segregation
Our family’s move to Alexandria came just in time for the start of a new school year. Jock, now eight years old, and I attended Robert E. Lee, a public elementary school located directly across from our house. My young sister, Heather and baby brother, Tom, were not yet of school age.
Though living in the South, I was completely unaware of racial segregation. No African-American students had attended my previous school in Maryland. Likewise, in Virginia there were no students of color in my first grade. In fact, in the early stages of my life, whether living in America, Europe or Asia, segregation was prevalent everywhere.
During the war, segregation was not a topic of general discussion whether in public or at home. As a young boy, I was never aware of, much less even inquired about the subject of segregation. The discussion on this subject, whether in church, school or at our dinner table, simply never became about.
Even in my second grade at Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school in Washington, D.C., none of my classmates were African-Americans. In all my years at Sidwell, to my knowledge no such students were enrolled. There were a number of children of color at the school; however, they were non-American students, e.g. citizens of Nigeria, India, Egypt, China. It was generally accepted, certainly in Virginia, Maryland and Washington that non-white and white people had their own separate schools, trolleys, lavatories, movie theatres, taxi services, restaurants, and, yes, even drank from separate water fountains.
Even well after the war, all trolleys and busses in Washington, as throughout the South, had white lines painted on their floors designating rear seats from the front. Non-whites were not permitted to sit or even stand in front of the white line. Many other facilities displayed signs that read “Whites Only.” To me, as a youngster, segregation was simply the way life was. Until the mid-1950s, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution’s “separate but equal” interpretation actually permitted, and justified, racial segregation as the law of the land.
It would not be until 1951, when our family moved from Virginia to Rhode Island, when I first became aware of inequality between whites and non-whites. I had just turned fourteen as I entered my freshman year at Newport’s Rogers High School. Rogers was the first integrated school I ever attended.
Segregation Watershed
Having located my classroom that first day of school at Roger’s High, I was taken aback to see a single African-American student seated at a desk. She sat alone, the only non-white among more than 40 classmates. Given my experience at Southern schools, my knee-jerk reaction was that she was in the wrong school. Confused, I grappled with the situation. It wasn’t until later that day I realized I had misjudged the girl’s situation. More importantly, I had never even considered her personal feelings. As the first week of school progressed, I decided to do something about my first-day’s mishap. Embarrassment enveloped me. My self-esteem hit rock bottom. Only innocence was on my side. On that day, the issue of segregation suddenly came alive for me.
That evening my parents observed a change in me. My encounter at school that first week served to alter the tenor of our conversation at the dinner table. New, sometimes sensitive as well as difficult subjects began to creep into our discussions. For the first time social and political issues became an integral part of conversations. As a six year old, I found myself on the cusp of beginning to reason and even to understand a bit more. It was then I began to grapple with, opine on and question my new-found world, including a number of America’s heady issues. Mom and Dad were most receptive to my fresh perspective.
It would be several years before President Eisenhower signed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a voting rights bill introducing the first Federal civil rights legislation since America’s Reconstruction Era (1875). That same year the President had to call upon Federal troops to enforce integration of a public school in Little Rock, Arkansas.
The “Separate but Equal” doctrine permitting state-sponsored segregation throughout America was eventually overturned by a series of Supreme Court decisions. Until that time, many schools throughout the country, North, East, South and West, had been practising widespread, legal, “separate but equal” segregation.
For as long as I can remember, politics was rarely discussed within our family. All Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) were required to swear an oath in service to their country whether America’s leadership was Republican or Democrat. In great part, career Foreign Service Officers simply did not vote knowing that all senior FSO appointments had to be approved by the President. Neither parent ever voted, certainly while Dad worked for the State Department. For these various reasons, within our household, discussions having to do with politics were handled with care.
Food Dump
On returning home from work each night, Dad always hugged each of us before heading upstairs to change for dinner. Once freshened, he came down to the living room wearing a jacket, slacks, and a clean shirt with cravat -- always dapper. Having prepared dinner in anticipation of his arrival, Mom had already changed. Then the two would spend an hour alone enjoying cocktails while chatting and having a smoke. We children understood it was also time for us to freshen up while still avoiding our parents’ private space.
Once dinner was finished, the family typically retired to the sitting room for coffee, a liqueur, conversation, reading, or board games. Of course, those who had not yet completed their dinners were expected to remain at the table to finish. During the war, clean plates were de rigueur in our family.
At that time, food was scarce in America. All over the world starvation was intense. China was cited as a prime example of starvation. We children were reminded regularly that “millions of Chinese children were dying from starvation while Americans were wasting food.” Nevertheless, Jock and I sat peering down at our unappetising, uneaten food. By then, of course, Mom and Dad had already finished dinner and were enjoying coffee in the sitting room.
During those years many houses were heated with cast iron steam radiators. Most rooms in our Prince Street house featured such heaters. Each had two pipes that carried hot water to and from the coal-fueled furnaces in the basement. The dining room radiator pipes traveled down through the floorboards into the cellar below.
Sitting at the table one evening, Jock and I railed against having to clean our plates. We plotted ways to avoid finishing the unappetising food. Suddenly, Jock came up with an idea.
Rising from the table, he tiptoed across the room to the radiator. Leaning over, he pushed the food off his plate, down through the radiator hole and into the cellar below. I followed suit. Then, having reported our plates clean, both of us were excused from the dining table.
Over the following months of discarding all sorts of leftovers, little did we realize it must have been accumulating somewhere. And, if so, where was the food piling up below?
Though on occasion, Dad spent time in his cellar workshop, he never mentioned garbage. Indeed, he never found out about Jock’s and my “clean plate caper”. Years later, Jock and I came up with a reason for the disappearance of the garbage. Rats. During a year of dumping food into the cellar, rats must have been feasting nightly on our food scraps. They must have been smiling at our perfect foil.
Dangerous Play
It was during the 1943-1944 period while living at our Prince Street house, Jock and I played at will with nearby neighborhood children. Most of our free time outside was spent either in our small backyard or on the sidewalks. We rode our bicycles freely on the streets, but never too far from home. Mom and Dad always encouraged us to play outside from breakfast till lunch, then after lunch until dinner. Promptness on returning home was always a given. For the most part, Jock and I were on our own, but always within well-prescribed bounds. As inquisitive youngsters, from time to time we would venture outside those parameters without telling our parents.
On snowy winter days, Jock and I would occasionally go sledding. Our target was a long hill on Route 1, America’s busiest east coast highway not far from our house. Following the Depression and during the war years, traffic on Route 1 was understandably sparse. After a good snowfall while tagging along with a group of neighborhood boys, we would venture towards Route 1 in search of fun and excitement. The group would wait patiently at the bottom of the highway’s long, snow-covered hill. As I was only six, Jock and I shared a sled. We all knew that fuel trucks had to gear down as they approached Route 1’s slippery incline. In those days, tankers had grounding chains that were dragged behind on the road surface. Their purpose was to rid the tankers of the potentially explosive, electrostatic build-up caused by the sloshing of fuel.
As a truck drove slowly past, one of the older boys would run out onto the highway and, with perfect timing, belly-flop onto his sled as he grabbed the trailer’s grounding chain. In turn, several others would follow suit, each grasping the foot of the sledder immediately in front. As Jock’s turn came, my job was to shadow him as he ran frantically out onto the highway carrying our sled. Once he had belly-flopped on the sled and had connected with the sledder in front, I then would jump on his back. By using this technique, as many as five or six youngsters with their end-to-end sleds got several free truck rides up the snowy hill each day.
At the top of the rise we would disengage from the truck by rolling off the highway with our sleds and into a snowbank. We had to be careful to avoid the traffic following behind us. Once clear of the truck, we all regaled one another in laughter over our accomplishment. Some of the sledders paid a price in the form of ugly cuts and bruises. But at our age, danger was never factored into either the decision-making processes or the potential consequences.
By the spring of 1944, I had completed first grade at the Robert E. Lee School. My one and only recollection that year was having to play the triangle in our class band. For me, life was blissful and uncomplicated in an otherwise chaotic world.
