Letter to the EditorOctober 9, 2013
• October 10, 2013

I received a letter from Jack Evans earlier this week asking for contributions to his quixotic campaign for mayor. In his letter, Mr. Evans states that it is his ?intention to redevelop the Whitehurst Freeway so that the Waterfront and K Street can be as vibrant as M Street.? His choice of the words ?redevelop? and ?vibrant? caught my attention. It is obvious that his real interest is in tearing down the Whitehurst Freeway. Like Captain Ahab, Evans has made the demolition of the Whitehurst Freeway his own Moby Dick.
Much like the feigned shock expressed by Captain Renaud in Casablanca when he discovered that gambling was occurring in Rick?s Caf?, I was as equally shocked when a $500,000 study commissioned by Evans recommended the demolition of the Whitehurst Freeway despite strong opposition from local community groups. Evans himself admitted that ?no one knows what will happen to the traffic? were the Whitehurst to be removed.

It took more than 30 years to build the Georgetown Waterfront Park, which is one of this city?s jewels. Now Mr. Evans would like to ?redevelop? K Street so that the approximately 45,000 cars a day that use the Whitehurst Freeway will make K Street as congested, noisy, polluted, and ?vibrant? as M Street.

Great idea.

-Charles Pinck

A Terror-filled Week, Saved by Life’s Little Things
• September 25, 2013

Were it not for last Monday, the week that just passed from Sunday to yesterday, would have been newsy enough, and even in its cultural and we-are-New-York and world-class way, a pleasant and rich harbinger of a fall to be enjoyed.

On Monday last week, the thorn of Syria was still in the news, and there was turmoil in that region as always. During that week, the House of Representatives passed its own version of a budget bill which, among other things, would cause huge cuts in the Food Stamp program and was hitched to a measure that would either defund Obamacare or lay the ground work defunding it, a prospect that could cause a government shutdown. Locally, the D.C. Council could not muster enough votes to override Mayor Vincent Gray’s veto of its Living Wage bill, a bill some thought was aimed squarely at the powers that be at Walmart, which had initiated plans for several of its low-wage, low-prices super stores in the District of Columbia. On the same day of that vote, Ward 8 Councilman Marion Barry—once the Mayor of Washington, D.C., who was once called mayor-for-life routinely—was censured (for the second time in three years) by the council for taking money from contractors, which he had already admitted. They also stripped him of his only committee chairmanship.

These things alone were big news—an ongoing foreign policy crisis in the Middle East, actions by Congress that threatened a government shutdown amid the usual partisan blame game and paralysis, major political and policy issues in Council actions. But this was Monday’s week and none of it, not even in the midst of gala season, the floundering Redskins and triumphant-sad plight of our baseball team or the thriving panda much mattered.

On Monday, a lone gunman made his way into the Washington Navy Yard and Building 197, which housed the Naval Sea Systems Command, and shot and killed 12 employees and workers there in a spree that ended with his own death at the hands of police. His name was Aaron Alexis, an apparently mentally disturbed man who only recently called police in Rhode Island to tell them that he was hearing voices, a former member of the Navy Reserve, with a checkered, but apparently not alarming enough, past of gun incidents and reported incidents with the law that stopped just short of being criminal.

Alexis and his killing spree blotted out the media sun Monday and for a good part of the rest of the week here. He brought “This Town,” back to the status of “Our Town”, in the sense that everybody was consumed, shocked, floored, and eaten up by the news, as the District of Columbia joined other cities and places like Aurora, Newtown, Virginia Tech and the list-goes-on-places in being overwhelmed by the senseless and the random, humanity’s version of nature’s disasters.

“Rampage at the Navy Yard” was the big Washington Post headline across the top beneath the familiar mast-head with a bone sharp photograph of a police officer with short-cropped to the skin hair with a fierce expression on his face, holding a gun that looked like it could kill dozens in seconds. The rest of the page was filled with categories: the victims, the suspect, the scene , a picture of the suspect staring into a camera, a map of the Navy Yard, a time line, and various columns and stories on the inside, including one that asked “How Much is Enough?” It suggested that maybe these shootings were the ones that would lead to better gun laws.

As to that, fat chance. Only Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and a few other officials raised the question, and even President Barack Obama, in his eulogy for the victims on Sunday, worried that these shootings, like others had become “the new normal.”
“Checks failed to flag gunman’s past,” was the second day across the front page, underneath a list of the names of the victims, which we can repeat here, lest we forget so soon or sooner:

Michael Arnold, 59; Martin Bodrog, 54; Arthur Daniels, 51; Sylvia Frasier, 53; Kathleen Gaarde, 62; John Roger Johnson, 73; Mary Frances DeLorenzo Knight, 51; Frank Kohler, 50; Vishnu Pandit, 61; Kenneth Bernard Proctor, 46; Gerald Read, 58; Richard Michael Ridgell, 52.

The week was dotted with videos from funerals, people in line at churches, memorials, memories told like stories. And yet, as noted elsewhere, including by the president in his eulogy, more, and, arguably worse horrors awaited during the week: shootings at a basketball court in Chicago— the kind of gang violence that is a major plague in Chicago and which continued through the weekend —a murderous assault on the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya, by members of al-Shabab, a terrorist group associated with al Qaida, in which nearly 70 shoppers were killed and in Peshawar, Pakistan, the All Saints Church was hit by suicide bombers, killing more than 80, the single worst-ever attack on Christians in Pakistan.

In his eulogy at the navy yard, President Obama said he felt a “creeping resignation” in the country about gun violence, that it had become the new normal. “There is nothing normal about innocent men and women being gunned down where they work.”
But by Monday, while the world absorbed the news of the Navy Yard, Kenya or Chicago, other talk floated through the year, including the dread of going over the cliff, urged on by congressional Tea Party members, and the prospect of a government shutdown, a prospect that sent a rush of anxiety through this city as well as our town.

In times like these, you take a deeper interest in the visit of the President of Iran to the United Nations where he is scheduled to speak as is President Obama. You take hope from the ongoing ability of Pope Francis to surprise with his gentle, expansive vision, which includes chiding the church for its obsessive attention to gay marriage and abortion.

In these times, you take solace where you may—the way the sun lit up and made almost holy the colors of apples and peaches in brown boxes at the Dupont Sunday market, the sight of six or fawns and does on a visit to Olney, the modulated, almost musical voice of National Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as she read from her poetry in a crowded tent, men, women and children, old and young, black and white, and all the rainbows, listened raptly at the National Book Festival. Even with a heavy rain storm, it was attended, according to reports, by some 200,000 people over two days — more than those who attended the Redskins’ or Nationals’ games this weekend.

Now, it is a new week, and the headlines are thankfully small, making room even for the status of that sorry race for Governor of Virginia.

BID Releases ‘State of Georgetown’ 2013
• September 12, 2013

Last week, Georgetown Business Improvement District released its first “State of Georgetown Report 2013.”

According to the BID, it is “a compilation of statistics and analysis about key features of the Georgetown economy: people and employment; office and retail activity; hospitality and tourism, and; transportation. The report will help inform decisions by the BID’s members, as well as brokers, potential investors and tenants and the District government. This inaugural edition shows that Georgetown remains D.C.’s premier retail and accommodation destination and continued to attract new and dynamic businesses that serve residents, tourists and visitors in 2012 and the first half of 2013.”

The following are key highlights about Georgetown from the BID’s 2013 report:
= Businesses in the 0.25 square mile Georgetown BID area support over 11,000 jobs; immediately adjacent to the BID, Georgetown University supports around 10,000 additional jobs on 0.16 square miles. This density of jobs is similar to areas near Dupont Circle, Shaw, and the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor.

= Within a three-mile radius of Wisconsin and M, a rapidly growing cohort of 25- to 34-year-olds now comprises 54,000 households with $3.6 billion of disposable income. Determining how to remain relevant to this powerful group of consumers will require thinking about a variety of topics: transportation preferences, retail trends, employment patterns and marketing strategies.

= Georgetown has 440 retailers, comprising more than two miles of store frontage; in 2012, 26 new retail businesses opened in the BID area, a net gain of nine from the previous year.

= Average office rents remain among the lowest of the regional submarkets at $40.93 per square foot; at the end of 2012, the average rent in Georgetown was 22.1 percent less than Downtown-East End.

= Georgetown hotels generate a disproportionate amount of revenues relative to other hotels in D.C., as they represent only 2.8 percent of D.C.’s total hotel rooms but generate 3.9 percent of D.C.’s total hotel revenues. In 2012, hotel revenues generated $8.8 million in hotel sales taxes.

“We are very excited to launch the very first ‘State of Georgetown.’ “ said Joe Sternlieb, CEO of the Georgetown BID. “With each subsequent, annual edition our knowledge of the commercial district will deepen, and our decisions can be increasingly well informed. This sort of data is extremely important for efforts like Georgetown 2028, our 15-year visioning process.”

Is It Forever . . . September 11th?
•

The photograph that the Georgetowner caught that afternoon from Halcyon House, looking south, doesn’t seem like much if you don’t know the context.

Something way off on fire, plumes of smoke, a distant shot. It was our cover in our Sept. 14, 2001, issue after it happened. (Sept. 14, by the way, is the birthday of our national anthem, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by Georgetowner Francis Scott Key in 1814. That flag seen waving in the foreground is a Star-Spangled Banner flag, a version of which still flaps today from Francis Scott Key Park on M Street.)

Knowing, of course, what it was and what happened, makes and made that photograph a powerful reminder of that day, you can hear it happening in your head looking at it, the noise, the utter confusion, and we know exactly where each and every one of us where that day and we can roll it back on command as if we lived in a story.

We still have a stack of publications from that day and right thereafter: the Georgetowner cover(s), the Time cover with President Bush waving a flag on top of the pile of rubble at the tip of Manhattan where the Twin Towers used to stand, a Vanity Fair special edition cover, “One Week in September,” “Faces of Tragedy, Faces of Heroism,” “Fanfare for the American Spirit,” a Newsweek cover with the faces of three sturdy firemen on the cover, “America a Year Later,” a Dec. 31 Newsweek cover with the Twin Towers on fire as the number 11, a commemorative issue based in Shanksville, Pa., where the last hijacked plane crashed in another ball of fire.

We remember all of those things vividly and only glancingly remember that Newsweek is gone. Yet 12 years after September 11, 2001, we are changed.

We live in the world in large part created and formed by that day and its aftermath. The terrorist attack on the United States led to two costly wars that had major impacts on our economy—wars that President Barak Obama is retreating from even as he and we and the rest of the world muddle through a response to chemical warfare in Syria, a muddle that has a lot to do with the wars of the 9/11 aftermath.

We live in a changed world because of 9/11—there is such a thing as the Homeland Security Department, there is the discomfiture of traveling anywhere, including the United States. There is a ratcheting of spying hiding under the flag of national security, the extent of which is now secret no longer, with a odd result: while people are afraid, aware and even angry, there is precious little passion or outrage that raises to the surface. We have gotten used to the world we live in, which is full of high-tech toys of the kind that bright 12-year olds can penetrate. So, why not the nation’s super-intelligence agencies?

In this world, everybody spies on everybody, for economic gain, for political advantage, for guessing the next terrorist attack, the latest scheming in some basement in America, Yemen or France. Our names are out there, and so are our bank accounts, any friend named Ali, or a contribution to a mosque, or knowing that a Sufi and a Sunni and a Shiite are different branches of the same Islamic tree.

In the Middle East, the Arab spring is misunderstood by most Westerners, except that perhaps free elections are overrated as a springboard to democracy. We know that what is going on has its dangers and that the grandchildren and children of Osama bin Laden are among the participants and soldiers of the civil wars and revolutions and demonstrations all over the region.

What happened on Sept. 11, 2001, raised a wall many of us would like to lower again. We are either at war or awaiting the next war, wondering who is friend or foe. The president may have been—in his agonizingly slow approach—acting on principle and seemed surprised that when he said, “Follow me,” there was no one behind him on Syria. The GOP stalwarts seem to have trouble imagining any sort of future except one that is absent Obama and his health care plan. They to would like to go back to before 9/11, somewhere when morals and movies were black and white.

We cannot go back. The smoke is still in our nostrils, as it was for everyone who experienced World War II. One of us remembers, as a five-year-old living in Munich, watching American tanks come into the fallen city. One of us also remembers standing next to the White House on 9/11 and being told by a policeman that two planes had struck the World Trade Center, and one had hit the Pentagon and another was coming right here, perhaps.

It didn’t. But that smoke from that picture, that was the Pentagon.

It was 9/11.

‘Let Freedom Ring’: the Measure of the March on Washington
• August 22, 2013

Our whole city will be celebrating Aug. 28, when thousands are expected to converge on the National Mall to celebrate, remember and commemorate the 1963 March on Washington, the march that saw the leaders and participants in a rising civil rights movement come together nearly 300,000 strong to demand justice and jobs.

The march will also always be remembered for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, oratory that reached the mountaintop of measured, stirring rhetoric, a visionary epic dream of that our better angels would finally come to achieve equality for all in America.

The people who came to Washington were famed and courageous pioneers in the movement. They were labor leaders, they were workers and those without jobs. They were African-Americans–or Negroes as in “The Negro is still not free,” as declared by King. They were politicians, organizers, movie stars and singers. It might be remembered and even recreated in its spirit. As an event, it was one-of-a-kind, never to be seen or heard again.

If you weren’t there or if you won’t be here for the 50th anniversary celebrations, you could do worse than pick up “Let Freedom Ring: Stanley Tretick’s Iconic Images of the March on Washington,” written by Kitty Kelley, the Georgetown author known for her large-scale, controversial biographies of the likes of Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, the Bushes, the Royal Family, Jackie Kennedy and Oprah Winfrey.

“Let Freedom Ring” is the second book Kelley has produced after she discovered a treasure drove cache of photographs in a trunk left by her friend Stanley Tretick, a noted photographer and photojournalist who covered the White House, politics, wars and the civil rights movement. She had already provided the prose and background for a book on Tretick’s iconic photographs of John F. Kennedy, many of which were done for Look Magazine and amounted to a chronicle of the Camelot years.

“Let Freedom Ring” is an entirely different book, although the structure and process is the same. It’s a kinetic look at the march, but also a chronicle of the civil rights movement and its leaders, more journalistic in nature, a kind of documentary that appears to be without style or guile. If you have that wish of having been at the march, this is as close as you can get, perhaps accompanied by YouTube clips of the speech, the gathering or the singing of Joan Baez.

“The government, the Kennedys were very much afraid that there would be real violence and demonstrations,” Kelley told us. “They had set a curfew. They were going to make sure that nothing like that happened. And when it didn’t happen, I think they got some very different notions about the march, about King and about the fight for civil right.”

“Stanley was right in there, chronicling the whole thing,” she said. “He had a front row seat, and he had a lot of empathy for the march. From that day, and I think the pictures show this, the movement picked up visibility all across the nation, and these pictures and others helped do that. This was about the power of people coming together, about non-violence.”

Images of violence–not of the civil rights participants and leaders–but their opponents throughout the south, including the infamous Bull Connors in Alabama and the murder of Medgar Evers in Mississippi had already had their effects in forcing the whole country to look at what was happening. The march, with its images of thousands singing, marching, swaying and listening to King’s gospel-like speech, added to the impetus.

These are not great pictures. They’re something better than that. There are thousands of images that exist of the march. Tretick’s photos have the look of news, of in the moment. They are faces caught up close. They show the multitudes carrying a message or rather hundreds of messages. Then, as now, it wasn’t just about justice, but: “We march for Jobs for all now!” and “We march for first class citizenship now!”

This is what you see in the images of “Let Freedom Ring”: men in suits, holding hands locked in unanimity, Roy Wilkins, Walter Reuters, religious leaders, priests and rabbis, members of the so-called Big Ten, including Whitney Young of the Urban League, authors like James Baldwin (“Go Tell It On The Mountain” and “Another Country”). The headline from the local Afro American is here: “We Shall Overcome! 200,000 Voices Will Be Heard.”

Some of the best shots are those of the thousands sitting by the Reflecting Pool, barefoot in the water, or mingling thickly on the steps leading up to the Lincoln Memorial.

The photos–and the text by Kelley, and the many verbatim speeches, including the King speech–appear both direct and art-free and all the more powerful for their modest qualities. They seem true, like the perfect music that accompanies a wedding, a solemn moment.

Reading, leafing through the book cause a kind of flashback to where one might never have been. Still, something stirs, you hear the raspy voice of Dylan, the crystal clear voice of Baez, the thousands singing ‘We Shall Overcome.”

The major civil rights legislative actions were yet to come, and King would live to see that, even if Kennedy did not.
The struggle in a way had begun for real at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Kitty Kelley, for ensuring that Tretick’s photographs would be seen in this powerful way, is to be commended. And we are all the better for that and plan to be at the anniversary events here next week.

So should you.

Just Say No: to the Large Retailer Act and the Visitor Parking Pass
•

Two issues of varying governmental “help” deserve further discussion and action, because we find that they — while well-intended — do not translate well into the real world.

We have previously called for Mayor Vincent Gray to veto the Large Retailer Accountability Act–which forces large retailers like Walmart with more than a billion in annual sales and stores larger than 74,000 square feet to pay a minimum (or liveable) wage of $12.50 an hour — when he finally receives it from the District Council. After the council voted for the bill which is patently anti-business and, in effect, anti-job, it delayed sending it to the mayor because of the vacationing council members and fearing a lack of votes. We repeat: Mr. Mayor, when you get it, veto this bill.

We have reported that free visitor passes will now be available on request for D.C. residents from the D.C. Department of Transportation. No going to the police station each time a visitor will be staying with you. Also reported: While not all details regarding the new passes have been released, DDOT has said that they will be valid from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, 2014. They must be used inside the boundaries of the passholder’s advisory neighborhood commission.

This could set the stage for deceit, even as the pass require the parking to be in one’s ANC district — not that most residents know which one it is. These visitor passes look ripe for unfair trading of some kind — let’s take another take on this surprise gift. (We’ll leave it at a “maybe.”)

Ev Shorey: Georgetown?s ?Great Friend, Great Citizen?August 21, 2013
•

The obituary in the Washington Post for Clyde Everett ?Ev? Shorey, who died July 23 of congestive heart failure at his home in Georgetown, tells a story of a career and a passion for the March of Dimes, the charitable organization for which he had been a top lobbyist for a number of years.

The interview with him in the Citizens Association of Georgetown?s Oral History Project in April 2010 tells the story of Ev Shorey, resident of West Lane Keys in Georgetown, where he lived with his wife of 63 years, Joan Burgess Shorey. It?s the story of Shorey, the concerned citizen of Georgetown, who committed to active service and participation in CAG and became its president for a time.

Neither story gives you a sense of the kind of impression Shorey, who was 91, could make if you met him or watched him preside over CAG meetings.

His professional life of which a significant portion was his eight-year role as a lobbyist for the March of Dimes was surely sparked when his wife contracted Polio in 1953 at a time just before the breakthrough work of Jonas Salk bore practical results. A Yale graduate, Shorey had served in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II and was a graduate of Columbia Law School. He had been an attorney in his father?s Chicago law firm and came to Washington where he was deputy general counsel of the U.S. Agency for International Development.

He helped in his role as lobbyist to widen the role of the March of Dimes to include a focus on comprehensive maternal and child health care and was on the organization?s board from 1962 to 1974. He was the first head of the organization?s government affairs office. He had lobbied for such programs as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children.

In Georgetown, where he and his had moved after raising their children in Cleveland Park, Shorey soon became involved in the community life of the village, his neighbors and CAG. He helped with the creation of watch and guard programs and many other issues but his contributions were more subtly evidenced in his leadership style, which was to grow the organization, persuade other Georgetown residents to take part and lead on various issues.

Both his career on the national stage and his service on CAG were about substance and style, the cheerful and graceful embrace of principled duty. Talking about the people who participated in the block captain program, he called them ?great friends and great citizens.? Called a ?great motivator? during his interview, he said that ?you have to be convinced yourself that you can make a difference. And that it is important to get people to work together to make things happen. ?

It?s fair to say if you met Shorey, you were not likely to forget him. He had a certain cheerful dignity about him, a friendly curiosity. CAG meetings sometimes?not often?could get volatile or bogged down. Shorey was a great defuser, and persuader a champion of people joining and working together. He was one of those disappearing types of men?he was a gentleman. The description he made of others fits him: for Georgetown and Georgetowners, Everett ?Ev? Shorey, was ?a great friend, great citizen.”

Shorey is survived by his wife, Joan Burgess Shorey, four children, C. Everett Shorey III and Katherine Herold, David Shorey and Alden Lattu and seven grandchildren.

Barking Around Book Hill
• August 15, 2013

It’s no secret that Book Hill is an amazing spot for shopping, but what is the ingredient in the special sauce that sets it apart? The answer may be some of the stores’ best salespeople, the dogs who inhabit many of the stores in the neighborhood. We visited shops from Reservoir Road to P Street. Tom Vogt of Marston Luce may have put it best: “To be able to bring a dog to work every day brings a great deal of character to a store.”

And what better opportunity to meet all of these furry friends than the Georgetown French Market? The French Market is Book Hill’s signature European open air and sidewalk sale, which features up to 75 percent off at more than 35 shops and cafes. The event will take place April 19 and 20, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, visit GeorgetownDC.com. Remember to bring treats.

STELLA OF CATHERINE ROBERTS
Age: 9 years
?Breed: Yellow Labrador
?Stella has worked as a therapy dog at Georgetown University Hospital?for four years now. She previously worked in pediatric oncology and now works in the emergency room. Her favorite things include treats, going out in the garden behind the store and men. She is a huge flirt.

ASPEN OF PATISSERIE POUPON?
Age: 5 months?
Breed: Gold Retriever?
Aspen is perhaps the newest dog on Book Hill. At only 5 months old, he is still a puppy. Ruth, his owner, says his favorite things include food, toys, mud, playing and children. He is afraid of walking down stairs but is a great jumper. He is very cuddly.

KONA OF ELLA RUE?
Age: 4 years?
Breed: Mountain Mastiff (Burmese Mountain and English Mastiff mix)?
Kona is a lovely doggie. Her owner, Lauren Amons, says Kona’s favorite things are snuggles, belly rubs and babies. “She goes nuts
for the snow,” says Amons. Kona is very stylish, shown here wearing a necklace by Stella Dot.

HANNAH OF HEINER CONTEMPORARY?
Age: 10 years?
Breed: Mixed?
Hannah is very food-focused and loves balls, sticks and chicken soup. She is very much a window dog. People walking by often think she is a statue because she sits so still.

BRINCA OF THE PHOENIX
?Age: 11 years?
Breed: Boxer?
Brinca was born in Mexico City. She is a cancer survivor, who had a tumor removed from her shoulder. She loves shopping, dog biscuits, greeting and waiting on customers and jumping. Her name means “jump” in Spanish.

MOLLY AND PHOEBE OF COMER & CO.?
Ages: 6 years
?Molly and Phoebe belong to Fred Comer and Mark Manoff. They spend most of their time living in the countryside.

LATTE OF SUSAN CALLOWAY FINE ART?
Age: 12 years
?Breed: Maltese?
Latte is the very energetic Maltese who lives at the Susan Calloway Gallery. He was supposed to be named Cappuccino, but Susan Calloway thought Latte was more appropriate because of his white coat. His full name is Latte Bianca. Latte loves treats, and the mailman brings him one every day. Here he is seen with a portrait of himself.

PENNY OF MARSTON LUCE?
Age: 11 years
?Breed: Miniature Schnauzer
?Penny is the very cute Miniature Schnauzer at Marston Luce. Her owner, Tom Vogt, found her on the website for a Schnauzer Rescue League. Her favorite things include coming to work, riding in the car and cookies. Vogt says Penny has a “very sweet disposition” and that she “gets along with all other dogs and people.”

MISTY OF JUST PAPER & TEA
Age: 8 years
?Breed: German Shepherd?
Misty is a German Shepherd with a German bloodline. She loves visiting Volta Park and being with her owner Nick. According to him, she is a “ball-head” and loves chasing balls and Frisbees.

VALENTINE, PET OF JOY BLAIR?
Age: 13 years?
Valentine loves to play with Stella and Latte, who live at Catherine Roberts and Susan Calloway, respectively. Her favorite things are Gerber chicken sticks and riding in the car. “People love him,” said Blair. “I do, too.”

SHERMAN OF SHERMAN PICKEY (DECEASED)
Age: Lived to 16 years?
Breed: Mixed?
Sherman was adopted by Sherman Pickey own- er Ethan Drath from the Washington Humane Society. “He had an amazing run,” says Drath. His favorite thing was to sit in the doorway of the store in the sun. Sherman died in 2010, but other dogs are welcomed to the store, which gives complimentary treats to visitors.
[gallery ids="101231,145393,145387,145381,145407,145373,145411,145415,145367,145421,145400" nav="thumbs"]

The 1960s Bring Us Years of 50th Anniversaries in This Century
• August 7, 2013

If you read the cover story of the Downtowner on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington—for which 250,000 showed up in our fair city to demonstrate for jobs, justice and freedom, among other things and to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., tell us, repeatedly and with passion, that “I have a dream”—you will see that 1963 is the year of anniversaries.

For those of us who were alive back then, we must have been also unaware and too young to notice we were living in history’s stream or as Bob Dylan sings “ Ah, but I was so much older then. I’m that much younger now”, or cryptic words to that effect.

Those of who can remember, commemorate—there will be lots to do, these being 50th anniversaries: images from history in beginning Vietnam, the death of four young girls in the bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala., the Beatles’ first number-one hit in the United States.

I was in my second year of service in the U.S. Army then, far from harm in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, but always aware of the tension of world affairs—officers being called out of movie theaters, units forming up. Some things there hardly touched us, but I remember this: one of my friends was a guy named Liam O’Keefe and he would be at my wedding a year or so later, but when I remember him most, he was crying, watching the news of the death of President John F. Kennedy, shot in Dallas.

The murder sent alarm bells through the army post, but unlike anything else—besides the chill of fears that went through all of us quasi-soldier—we were heart-broken in some sense or another because of all the images, the flickering stuff out of Dallas, Cronkite’s somber voice, Oswald shot in front of us on a Sunday morning when we should have been in church, the bloody coat, the widow, John John’s salute.

That’s an anniversary that’s coming up and here among the residents of our village in Georgetown, the residue of his presence remains like a cobblestone that has a place of honor, never to be removed. He was so older then in our young minds, and that much younger now.

All Things Media Addendum
•

For Washington to say this has been the week that changed everything would be an understatement. Arguably, the two more significant players in Washington media for decades have been the Allbrittons and the Grahams. Individually and simultaneously, they have both walked away from their legacy media – in the same week. It might be a bit extreme to say, but it is like the communist authorities in Czechoslovakia walking into the negotiations with reformers and saying, as they did, “Okay, you know what – it’s all yours. We’re done. Good luck!”

What will happen to the Washington Post is going to be fascinating. The Post faced a number of huge questions and challenges. And now it gets really interesting. New owner Jeff Bezos is playing the “nothing will change” game, but everything will change. Post publisher Katharine Weymouth may or may not step aside, as she is part of the former ownership. The Post is still struggling to unify its print, video and web personas, Now, with an internet pioneer owning it, does that help? Will the new building, wherever it is, force more than define the future? And those are only two of the most obvious questions. If you are media watcher – you just hit the jackpot. Buckle in: Washington media just got really interesting.

The Graham family did more than run and develop the Post and Washington journalism. They protected it. The Grahams along with the Sulzbergers of the New York Times were the grand families of American journalism. They have given some explanations of why they did it. Yet another question persists: what really happened? Why did they really decide to walk away?