"Evermay" has a passing
Evermay was the name given to a large house which 15 Georgetown friends rented for their 1970-1971 senior year of college. At times it was more than 15. It was a former American University fraternity house that had folded and was curiously closer to the Georgetown campus than to A.U., walkable to Georgetown but not exactly a short walk. It was a block away from the National Cathedral. One of the 15, McD, died unexpectedly just over a week ago, and this is to a remembrance of Evermay and him.
(In this post there will only be initials used to indicate people as, while this is meant to be true, it is selective memory that I would not want to offend anyone, so think of it as historical fiction. I fully expect those involved who happen to read this will have no trouble identifying anyone, but I think caution is the right choice in this case. Search sites generally don't pick up on initials.)
According to what I have been told, McD had some seemingly controllable medical issues but was leading what was a regular life for him, then suddenly had a stroke that escalated into a series of strokes, and then the doctors discovered that he already had metastasized pancreatic cancer. He lasted only a few more days, with his girlfriend of 30 years by his side, a sad and unexpected event.
While I had not seen or spoken to McD in 25 years, we parted ways in New York in the 1980's, McD's best Evermay friend AH asked me to help track down those to notify about his death. We had all split up in different directions and maintained different contacts. I did what I could do, and SL was also a huge help once I contacted him because he had kept in touch with more than me. It was sort of a chain notification, the extent of which is not known.
On the same dorm floor in freshman and sophomore years, McD and I could not have been more different in some ways, but we were at times good friends on adventures of various sorts, often with AH or SW involved. (As a no sibling loner I had my own adventures too, another story, and with the low key brilliant JM tracking down blues bands whenever they came to town or seeing Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and other West Coast groups in their first visit to D.C). AH and McD had an apartment in a small house in Arlington, VA during our junior year, off Lee highway, and I lived with others in a larger apartment building a mile or two away by road, but a short walk through a wooded area to their place. I spent many evenings there with with them and others they attracted, talking, listening to music, and doing whatever else people our age and inclinations did in those days. There were many good evenings.
McD was a predictably unpredictable character. He certainly was smart and had an intellectual aspect to him. Mischief could have been his middle name, and occasionally mayhem or a few times malice. We had not stayed in touch by design, but I always had an interest in what he might be up to at any given time and at times, if I asked, AH would give me an update. One almost always thinks that there will be some reuniting with former friends, but that does not necessarily happen. I will miss knowing that he is not out there somewhere, and would rather have talked to him at some time than write about him.
This leads to two anecdotes that to me at this moment characterize my best memories of McD, Evermay, and those times, at least in my way of thinking. The first was in February of 1971 on a Thursday night before Mardi Gras weekend and the big day itself in New Orleans. I had been to New Orleans a couple of times on short trips related to a summer job, teaching tennis, that I had for several summers, and in the summer of 1970 had spent about two weeks in New Orleans on a questionably advisable tour of the South with a south Virginia hometown friend, questionable I only say because we were sort of long haired and uncoventional looking for driving through Alabama, Mississippi, and other states in between. It was a great trip and New Orleans was far and away the highlight. So in the living room of Evermay Thursday night I was rattling on about how great it would be to go to Mardi Gras.
Someone said "let's go"(despite being in the middle of mid-terms), so at midnight five us took off in SL's Volkswagen Beetle, crammed in. SL, PD, and RP were broad shouldered guys and KS and I were the skinny ones that somehow were squeezed in. Others in the broader group were interested as well as we left so I suggested that if others came to meet us at Burgundy and Toulouse in the French Quarter in the mid afternoon of the next day, an ambitious goal. We drove non-stop and when we arrived, McD in his blue Dodge of some sort with a big motor and MB in his even more high powered Dodge Charger, were already there, cars packed and waiting for us. A couple of the group were our close friends but not Evermay inhabitants and in all there were maybe 13 of us ready to experience Mardi Gras, and we definitely did so. There was a bar at the corner and we went in and it was filled with nuns, but they were not nuns, an appropriate introduction to New Orleans. We had no hotel reservations so we slept in the cars, bummed floor space at Tulane University, found accomodating folks our age to let us in their cheap hotel rooms, or just never went to bed at night and caught some shuteye in a sunny New Orleans park during the daytime.
Now that's the set up for this M story. The second night there McD, SW, MK, and I had driven to the Faubourg Marigny section to take a look. At that time only the part of Frenchman Street closest to Esplanade could have been called safe(now much of that area is the absolute center of all great music in New Orleans and the French Quarter is passe' for music, just the eating and drinking tourist mecca at night). Anyway we got out of the car and were adventuring around when a big white van of partiers, all young black New Orleans folks, asked us to jump in and they would show us around. Of course we did and they did take us around in this partying van with us and at least 8 or 9 other people mixing together for four or five hours, stopping at a few really run down places to hear great music and have a few libations, and spring for a few for our hosts. I remember passing one particularly lively looking place and suggesting that we stop there. The response, "if you go in there you will get shot". We all agreed to pass on that idea.
At about 3am we were finally dropped off at McD's car, said our goodbyes with pats on the back and hugs. In the interim MK had somehow disappeared. McD started the car, pulled up to an intersection with Esplanade( which has a road divider with very high curbs). He took a left turn onto Esplanade at the highest speed possible, ran into and up onto the road divider, blowing two tires and leaving the car askew. Then he immediately passed out. Calling the police for help was out of the question because New Orleans police just beat people up and maybe bothered to take them to jail. They were and apparently still remain dangerous, criminals with badges. SW and I barely had the combined mechanical ability to change a lightbulb but somehow we managed to remove the damaged wheels since the car was already in a position where they were off the ground. For some reason we were laughing like crazy people as we rolled the tires down Ramparts Street towards Canal looking for some service station that was open. Luckily there is always something open in New Orleans. After four or five blocks of rolling the tires we found a place.
They repaired the tires and must have driven us back up to the car and put them on for us. I have no memory of that and SW has been in hiding or disguise and using assumed names for 15 years so there is no one to fact check with on this. Anyway, the minute the tires were on and the car had been righted and put back on Esplanade Street, McD immediately woke up, and as if nothing had happened, he started the car and we sped off looking for a place to take a rest.
This anecdote may have been too long, but the point on McD is that he just always seemed to just move on, regardless of what happened. Talk about not looking back to any of his or other's actions or surrounding events, even to an immediate event, that was just the way he was, puzzling at times and not appreciated by some, but it was sort of fascinating to this small town Southerner. His approach to life led to both very amusing and uncomfortable moments.
The second anecdote will be shorter. That same year, in 1971, there was a complete "total" eclipse of the sun that would be visible on Assateague Island off the coast of Maryland and Virginia and maybe an hour and a half away from D.C. I have seen other supposed total eclipses of the sun described since that time and seen one in London in 1999, but unless one is in an exact spot where it is actually TOTAL, they just lead to a darkening dusk like sky, a little wind, and a cooling off. That is no, absolutely no, comparision to "TOTAL". M, SW, PD, and I drove to the island promptly, crossed a crowded narrow bridge and began the wait during which time McD set up what to me was an elaborately timed camera on a tripod.
Then the event happened. The skies began to darken, and when the darkness was complete this amazing band of bright, extremely bright, colors appeared on the horizon over the ocean. It was the most amazing natural event that I have ever seen. McD's photos didn't capture them because he had focused on the sun which you are definitely not supposed to look toward during a total eclipse. None of us had the slightest idea what would happen on the horizon. We drove back in uncharacteristic silence, listening to a classical music station, Mozart I remember mostly because we had not heard the introduction of the music so SW and I challenged each other to identify the composer. In classic New Yorker fashion he laughingly ridiculed my choice, and when I was right he almost lost his breath.
I am not a religious person in any formal or even informal sense, and I have no idea what is on each of our horizons, but I do have some spiritual sense of both the known for sure and the unknown for some reason, maybe Pascal's wager or maybe something deeper. I hope that the eclipse described is part of what McD is experiencing now.
Postscript 1---McD was the person who found the building that became Evermay in the summer of 1970 and basically told us that we were all living there. The name came from a tombstone in Dumbarton Oaks cemetery found by either McD or A or both. After finding, filling it up with occupants, and naming the building, McD essentially appointed me as treasurer, so my job was to collect everyone's rent each month and send it in, a responsibility that I actually liked despite a few nuisances. Occasionally that also led to being the point person to deal with the landlord who at times had a few complaints, all justified I think.
Postscript 2--- in making calls to the handful of people that I knew to inform about McD's death, a couple said "he's the first one of us to fall" or something like that. That unfortunately is not correct. A good and loyal friend RP died maybe nine years ago of leukemia. Few people knew because he kept up with no one after college. My completely uninformed guess is that when he got married and had children he went through one of those "people, places, and things" conversions to stay on the straight and narrow. When I moved to New York in 1980 I tracked him down by phone somehow at a lower Manhattan bond house that he worked at, but he never followed up and I just respected that. Still miss him and the remembrances of the adventures that KS and I had with him during an extended trip to Europe in the fall of 1971. There are some real stories from that trip.
In memory of both the recently departed McD and the relatively long departed RP, I close this narrative.
(In this post there will only be initials used to indicate people as, while this is meant to be true, it is selective memory that I would not want to offend anyone, so think of it as historical fiction. I fully expect those involved who happen to read this will have no trouble identifying anyone, but I think caution is the right choice in this case. Search sites generally don't pick up on initials.)
According to what I have been told, McD had some seemingly controllable medical issues but was leading what was a regular life for him, then suddenly had a stroke that escalated into a series of strokes, and then the doctors discovered that he already had metastasized pancreatic cancer. He lasted only a few more days, with his girlfriend of 30 years by his side, a sad and unexpected event.
While I had not seen or spoken to McD in 25 years, we parted ways in New York in the 1980's, McD's best Evermay friend AH asked me to help track down those to notify about his death. We had all split up in different directions and maintained different contacts. I did what I could do, and SL was also a huge help once I contacted him because he had kept in touch with more than me. It was sort of a chain notification, the extent of which is not known.
On the same dorm floor in freshman and sophomore years, McD and I could not have been more different in some ways, but we were at times good friends on adventures of various sorts, often with AH or SW involved. (As a no sibling loner I had my own adventures too, another story, and with the low key brilliant JM tracking down blues bands whenever they came to town or seeing Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and other West Coast groups in their first visit to D.C). AH and McD had an apartment in a small house in Arlington, VA during our junior year, off Lee highway, and I lived with others in a larger apartment building a mile or two away by road, but a short walk through a wooded area to their place. I spent many evenings there with with them and others they attracted, talking, listening to music, and doing whatever else people our age and inclinations did in those days. There were many good evenings.
McD was a predictably unpredictable character. He certainly was smart and had an intellectual aspect to him. Mischief could have been his middle name, and occasionally mayhem or a few times malice. We had not stayed in touch by design, but I always had an interest in what he might be up to at any given time and at times, if I asked, AH would give me an update. One almost always thinks that there will be some reuniting with former friends, but that does not necessarily happen. I will miss knowing that he is not out there somewhere, and would rather have talked to him at some time than write about him.
This leads to two anecdotes that to me at this moment characterize my best memories of McD, Evermay, and those times, at least in my way of thinking. The first was in February of 1971 on a Thursday night before Mardi Gras weekend and the big day itself in New Orleans. I had been to New Orleans a couple of times on short trips related to a summer job, teaching tennis, that I had for several summers, and in the summer of 1970 had spent about two weeks in New Orleans on a questionably advisable tour of the South with a south Virginia hometown friend, questionable I only say because we were sort of long haired and uncoventional looking for driving through Alabama, Mississippi, and other states in between. It was a great trip and New Orleans was far and away the highlight. So in the living room of Evermay Thursday night I was rattling on about how great it would be to go to Mardi Gras.
Someone said "let's go"(despite being in the middle of mid-terms), so at midnight five us took off in SL's Volkswagen Beetle, crammed in. SL, PD, and RP were broad shouldered guys and KS and I were the skinny ones that somehow were squeezed in. Others in the broader group were interested as well as we left so I suggested that if others came to meet us at Burgundy and Toulouse in the French Quarter in the mid afternoon of the next day, an ambitious goal. We drove non-stop and when we arrived, McD in his blue Dodge of some sort with a big motor and MB in his even more high powered Dodge Charger, were already there, cars packed and waiting for us. A couple of the group were our close friends but not Evermay inhabitants and in all there were maybe 13 of us ready to experience Mardi Gras, and we definitely did so. There was a bar at the corner and we went in and it was filled with nuns, but they were not nuns, an appropriate introduction to New Orleans. We had no hotel reservations so we slept in the cars, bummed floor space at Tulane University, found accomodating folks our age to let us in their cheap hotel rooms, or just never went to bed at night and caught some shuteye in a sunny New Orleans park during the daytime.
Now that's the set up for this M story. The second night there McD, SW, MK, and I had driven to the Faubourg Marigny section to take a look. At that time only the part of Frenchman Street closest to Esplanade could have been called safe(now much of that area is the absolute center of all great music in New Orleans and the French Quarter is passe' for music, just the eating and drinking tourist mecca at night). Anyway we got out of the car and were adventuring around when a big white van of partiers, all young black New Orleans folks, asked us to jump in and they would show us around. Of course we did and they did take us around in this partying van with us and at least 8 or 9 other people mixing together for four or five hours, stopping at a few really run down places to hear great music and have a few libations, and spring for a few for our hosts. I remember passing one particularly lively looking place and suggesting that we stop there. The response, "if you go in there you will get shot". We all agreed to pass on that idea.
At about 3am we were finally dropped off at McD's car, said our goodbyes with pats on the back and hugs. In the interim MK had somehow disappeared. McD started the car, pulled up to an intersection with Esplanade( which has a road divider with very high curbs). He took a left turn onto Esplanade at the highest speed possible, ran into and up onto the road divider, blowing two tires and leaving the car askew. Then he immediately passed out. Calling the police for help was out of the question because New Orleans police just beat people up and maybe bothered to take them to jail. They were and apparently still remain dangerous, criminals with badges. SW and I barely had the combined mechanical ability to change a lightbulb but somehow we managed to remove the damaged wheels since the car was already in a position where they were off the ground. For some reason we were laughing like crazy people as we rolled the tires down Ramparts Street towards Canal looking for some service station that was open. Luckily there is always something open in New Orleans. After four or five blocks of rolling the tires we found a place.
They repaired the tires and must have driven us back up to the car and put them on for us. I have no memory of that and SW has been in hiding or disguise and using assumed names for 15 years so there is no one to fact check with on this. Anyway, the minute the tires were on and the car had been righted and put back on Esplanade Street, McD immediately woke up, and as if nothing had happened, he started the car and we sped off looking for a place to take a rest.
This anecdote may have been too long, but the point on McD is that he just always seemed to just move on, regardless of what happened. Talk about not looking back to any of his or other's actions or surrounding events, even to an immediate event, that was just the way he was, puzzling at times and not appreciated by some, but it was sort of fascinating to this small town Southerner. His approach to life led to both very amusing and uncomfortable moments.
The second anecdote will be shorter. That same year, in 1971, there was a complete "total" eclipse of the sun that would be visible on Assateague Island off the coast of Maryland and Virginia and maybe an hour and a half away from D.C. I have seen other supposed total eclipses of the sun described since that time and seen one in London in 1999, but unless one is in an exact spot where it is actually TOTAL, they just lead to a darkening dusk like sky, a little wind, and a cooling off. That is no, absolutely no, comparision to "TOTAL". M, SW, PD, and I drove to the island promptly, crossed a crowded narrow bridge and began the wait during which time McD set up what to me was an elaborately timed camera on a tripod.
Then the event happened. The skies began to darken, and when the darkness was complete this amazing band of bright, extremely bright, colors appeared on the horizon over the ocean. It was the most amazing natural event that I have ever seen. McD's photos didn't capture them because he had focused on the sun which you are definitely not supposed to look toward during a total eclipse. None of us had the slightest idea what would happen on the horizon. We drove back in uncharacteristic silence, listening to a classical music station, Mozart I remember mostly because we had not heard the introduction of the music so SW and I challenged each other to identify the composer. In classic New Yorker fashion he laughingly ridiculed my choice, and when I was right he almost lost his breath.
I am not a religious person in any formal or even informal sense, and I have no idea what is on each of our horizons, but I do have some spiritual sense of both the known for sure and the unknown for some reason, maybe Pascal's wager or maybe something deeper. I hope that the eclipse described is part of what McD is experiencing now.
Postscript 1---McD was the person who found the building that became Evermay in the summer of 1970 and basically told us that we were all living there. The name came from a tombstone in Dumbarton Oaks cemetery found by either McD or A or both. After finding, filling it up with occupants, and naming the building, McD essentially appointed me as treasurer, so my job was to collect everyone's rent each month and send it in, a responsibility that I actually liked despite a few nuisances. Occasionally that also led to being the point person to deal with the landlord who at times had a few complaints, all justified I think.
Postscript 2--- in making calls to the handful of people that I knew to inform about McD's death, a couple said "he's the first one of us to fall" or something like that. That unfortunately is not correct. A good and loyal friend RP died maybe nine years ago of leukemia. Few people knew because he kept up with no one after college. My completely uninformed guess is that when he got married and had children he went through one of those "people, places, and things" conversions to stay on the straight and narrow. When I moved to New York in 1980 I tracked him down by phone somehow at a lower Manhattan bond house that he worked at, but he never followed up and I just respected that. Still miss him and the remembrances of the adventures that KS and I had with him during an extended trip to Europe in the fall of 1971. There are some real stories from that trip.
In memory of both the recently departed McD and the relatively long departed RP, I close this narrative.
posted by John Borden at 5:46 PM
6 Comments:
You did not mention two crucial aspects of Evermay - the ping pong table and the regularly service Coke machine.
Although I wasn't the one christened our "Evermay," I should clarify that the original is an actual house near Dumbarton Oaks in Georgetown (with a tombstone-like stone marker in front), which was recently sold to a Japanese couple for $22 million. For more information regarding the original Evermay, please see the references below.
Evermay (also known as the Samuel Davidson House) is the name of an estate located at 1623 28th Street, NW in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The Federal-style home was built in 1801 for Samuel Davidson, a prominent 18th century businessman and landowner. It was designed by architect Nicholas King, the first surveyor of Washington, D.C., and founder of the city's first library ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evermay
In the heart of Georgetown, one of Washington D.C.'s oldest communities, the historic Evermay estate provides a rare glimpse of the elegance and beauty that once graced the Nation’s Capital...
http://evermayestate.org/
We finally know who bought Evermay, the historic estate in Georgetown: Bio-tech entrepenuers Ryuji Ueno and Sachiko Kuno paid $22 million for the property, making it one of the most expensive private home sales in DC ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/reliable-source/post/georgetown-mansion-evermay-purchased-by-biotech-entrepreneurs/2011/07/25/gIQAvCrWZI_blog.html
Library of Congress archive: The formality and elegance of Evermay's architecture and landscaping create an ensemble of unparalleled beauty. The estate reflects twentieth-century aesthetics, rooted in and continuing Evermay's early nineteenth century architecture and landscape design ...
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/dc0343/
Our "Evermay," on the other hand, has fallen victim to an obnoxious recent trend whereby moderately-priced homes are gutted (except for the street-facing facade), rebuilt right to the property lines and converted to high-priced condos. The resulting monstrosity is now advertised as a six-unit "Botique Building" with four 2-bedroom and two 3-bedroom apartments starting at $399 K ...
http://www.3925fultonst.com
As I said, "historical fiction". "Evermay" is now official McD'ism for that period. I had done the research for some time and know that there was another much more prominent Evermay, but not to us.
Have learned over time that the buildings close to us had tunnels into the Russian embassy staff building. CIA. No wonder at a community meeting everyone complained about us, according to Charlie Weismiller(sp?) the deli owner in Georgetown who lived nearby. He told me once that, "even the Russkies are complaining about you".
Thanks for your positive comment about my post of McD on eyesnotsold. I think that it was honest, maybe something that lit up some memories of others, surely a passing goodbye.
Anon is of course me.
As I said "historal fiction". You were by far the most dedicated to Dumbarton Oaks, and with you on visits most of the time I thought and just made an assumption.
I have researched over time the records of Evermay and realize that is was also the name of an amazing estate. For a year it was the name of an amazing student destination.
When Kathy, Alex, and I last walked to your house from the National Cathedral our Fulton House Evermay in 2006 it was still intact. Apparently not now. Who cares, destiny made that place for our one year.
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