Old Vienna
Hal Howland
©
Copyright 2020 by Hal Howland
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I know what you’re
thinking: Here comes another ode to the city of
Mozart and
the Waltz King. I missed that tour, unfortunately,
though my
parents and older sister lived there for two years shortly before I
was born in 1951. Dad, a high-school principal and teacher of science
and history in his native Pittsburgh, had been sent to Austria by the
federal government to supervise an innovative student-exchange
program. From there he went to Washington to continue in this
capacity at the State Department. Apparently my parents’ happy
Viennese tenure inspired them to choose as their D.C.-area home the
neighboring town of Vienna, Virginia. This, then, is a random
collection of memories of a once charming village that today survives
as a baby boomers’ Facebook page.
Vienna was little more than
a dirt crossroads when Mom and Dad bought an aging two-story house on
Old Courthouse Road. Nearby Tysons Corner, that is, the intersection
of State Route 7, called Leesburg Pike, and State Route 123, known as
Chain Bridge Road or Dolley Madison Highway in McLean to the east,
Maple Avenue in Vienna itself, and Ox Road to the west, was marked by
an ugly brick building called Tyson’s Locker Plant. Behind a
façade advertising Meats! Meats! Meats! the Gadell
family served what then was the middle of nowhere; dressed venison
was a specialty. Today Tysons is part of a sprawling commercial
eyesore that continues consuming farmland out past Dulles Airport and
nearly all the way to the old town of Leesburg itself. The indoor
shopping mall called Tysons Corner Center, built in 1967, was among
the first of its kind in the United States. Throughout the sixties
and seventies Dad had lamented selling the Old Courthouse Road house,
since keeping it would have made us millionaires. As recently as
1999, the spot where the house stood was a Merrill Lynch office, the
good news being that someone had been kind enough to retain the old
oak trees that had shaded our front yard.
Our house on Old Courthouse
Road was a lovely unpainted stucco building with gables, heavy
forest-green doors, indoor archways, art-deco fixtures, a flagstone
patio, and other features reminiscent of the Truman administration.
Eisenhower was the first
president of whom I had any personal awareness. One sunny afternoon
Dad said hello to Vice President Nixon and his family as they toured
the quiet area in their convertible. Years later Dad would remember
Nixon as “a good president who simply got caught.” That’s
when I gave up arguing with Republicans.
The house was surrounded by
woods—Dad liked to repeat the story of the time he was burying
an old pet dog and was spared a copperhead bite when the snake went
for Dad’s shovel instead of his leg—and our nearest
neighbor was about a block away.
I saw my first example of
poverty just across the street: a large, dirty family squatted in the
basement that was all that remained of an unfinished house. My
brother and I played with their kids and learned quickly not to
repeat their vulgar vocabulary.
When I was about six I
witnessed a fistfight one afternoon, between, oddly enough, two
women: the matriarch of the squatter family and another woman I
didn’t know were going at each other in the middle of the
street. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen and seemed to
happen in slow motion. I remember noticing that the weak sounds of
their wild, ungainly blows didn’t match the choreographed Foley
punches I’d heard on early television shows such as Broken
Arrow and The Lone Ranger. The
fight lasted
a few minutes, until the two participants just stopped and walked
away from each other.
Around the corner was a
small general store that delivered our groceries. The owner and my
mom became friends. Since we had plenty of space for people and other
creatures, Mom impulsively agreed to adopt one of the grocer’s
white baby goats. Mom eschewed the obvious name Billy in
favor of the far more imaginative name Willie. Willie
was great fun for a few weeks, until he contracted some disease and
refused to eat. Sitting on the floor in my bedroom one night with
tears in my eyes, I watched Willie die in Mom’s arms as she
held a milk bottle to his quivering pink mouth.
Next door to the “hole”
across the street lived my first “girlfriend,” D., a
blonde my age. Next door to her lived a toothless old woman named
Effie who sold Mom eggs and cucumbers, the latter
pronounced kyoomers. I don’t
remember a single
other resident in that neighborhood. A mile or so down the road in
the opposite direction from the general store was another, slightly
larger general store. The day my family inadvertently drove off and
left me there for several minutes provided many a chuckle around the
old Thanksgiving table.
Also in that direction was
Freedom Hill School, where I began elementary school. Dad chose the
school parking lot in which to give my sister her first driving
lesson in our powder-blue 1953 Chevrolet four-door sedan. For reasons
unknown, they agreed to let me ride along in the backseat. Carol did
so well that Dad let her drive home. Turning back onto Old Courthouse
Road, Carol misjudged the curve and went off the road, bumping into a
neighbor’s mailbox. To me this fender bender seemed positively
apocalyptic. I ran the block or so home, meeting Mom at the end of
our driveway and sounding the alarm: “We crashed, we crashed!”
Completing the cycle years later, I would take my own driver’s
test in Carol’s powder-blue 1967 Mustang convertible and would
barely pass because the cop in the passenger seat took stop signs
more literally than anyone with whom I’d ever ridden.
There apparently was a
Battle of Vienna on June 17, 1861, centered on the railroad that
would run through the center of town until my teens. We attended a
reenactment in the early sixties; I can still smell the gunpowder
that local historians fired in the general direction of an old
locomotive and passenger car they had parked on the tracks between
the Community Center and the Safeway store. Today the track bed,
named the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, is a paved bicyclist’s
paradise that runs forty-five miles from Alexandria to the east all
the way out to the piedmont town of Purcellville.
Throughout my childhood we
employed a middle-aged black housekeeper named Estelle who was as
much a part of the family as any of us. With quiet dignity she
deflected the embarrassing racist comments some of my less
enlightened acquaintances uttered in her hearing; most offensive was
one of my first bandmates’ calling me a “n***** lover”
as we rehearsed pop songs that owed their existence to Africa. We
visited Estelle’s home once when she was too sick to get out of
bed; I was amazed to discover a whole section of town devoid of white
people and of whitewashed houses. Estelle attended a local
Pentecostal church and often hummed gospel tunes to accompany endless
beige wicker baskets of ironing. When those baskets were empty we’d
sit in them in the laundry room and pretend to row them down the
Potomac.
In the days before Maple
Avenue emerged as Vienna’s main commercial artery, the center
of town was where Church Street intersected the railroad tracks.
Facing the tracks were the stately Vienna Trust Company, then the
only bank in town, a feed store, a smelly chemical lab, an automotive
repair shop, and a small quarry whose dusty red silo rose high in the
air. Two blocks of Church Street comprised a few other
establishments: the Full Cry Shop, a women’s clothing store
that catered to the equestrian community of nearby Oakton; Curly’s,
the working-class men’s outfitter where we bought our jeans,
flannels, and winter boots; the post office; and of course the Family
Music Centre, where I took my first drum lessons and became a regular
and not altogether welcome researcher. At the corner of Church Street
and Lawyers Road sat the old wooden Knights of Columbus Hall, where
my band would discover the thrill of natural echo. Just across
Lawyers Road was the private home from which we would be ejected one
night for drowning out the insects with electric guitars. On the hill
behind Church Street rose a cozy neighborhood of neat brick houses
and majestic old trees.
We had an attic that I
never saw and a basement that, with its many dark, mysterious
features, was one of my special places. We called this room the
cellar and for some reason didn’t begin using the
word basement until we moved
across town in 1959. My
favorite memories of the cellar are of private moments with Dad,
building and operating electric-train layouts and watching him tinker
with tools. My green-and-yellow diesel
locomotive clickety-clacked around corners,
disappeared
into snowcapped tunnels, and flew past miniature
shops and
lampposts, accompanied by the unforgettable smells of a warm
transformer and damp concrete.
We had no air-conditioning
in those days, and I remember many a sweaty night upstairs in my bed,
shifting constantly to find a cool spot, soothing myself with the
drone of the impotent window fan. The Beatles would already have
conquered the world by the time Dad splurged on a single window AC
unit, mounted in the dining room of our next house.
Our move in the blazing
summer of 1959 to the new planned community of Vienna Woods, another
pathetic nod to the real Vienna, was well timed in one respect and
not so fortuitous in another: (1) our beloved cellar was prone to
flooding, and I suppose my parents got tired of hoisting one valuable
thing up on blocks after discarding some other thing for which it was
too late; and (2) that also was the year Dad was appointed cultural
attaché to Israel. We rented our brand-new house, for which
Dad paid $13,000, to a family that showed the place considerably less
respect than we had, and would, on our return three years later.
We took a circuitous route
home from Israel in 1961, stopping in Cairo, Athens, Rome, and Paris.
During several days in Egypt, we visited Luxor, museums, the Nile,
the Valley of the Kings, and other popular destinations. At the
Pyramids we met a Coptic guide who let tourists ride his camel,
which, thanks to American advertising, he had named Canada Dry. The
beast’s placid demeanor and undulating gait would help inspire
my jazz tune “Bedouin Song,” on the Howland Ensemble
CD 10 Years in 5 Days.
At the age of twelve, back
in Vienna, having absorbed my share of Wild West folklore, and having
missed no opportunity to ride both real and mechanical ponies, I was
pleased to learn that Blackwelders Farm, located about a mile from
our house, offered equestrian lessons.
At my first session, a cute
brunette of about fifteen walked us around the shady barnyard and
steered us away from low tree limbs under which my horse could knock
me out of the saddle. In the throes of puberty, I was as interested
in this mysterious “older woman” as in the tutelage
itself. After the lesson, she taught me not to walk a certain
distance behind a horse that might decide to kick me in the head.
At my second and final
lesson, the teacher thought I was ready for a longer ride and perhaps
a bit of trotting. She assigned me an old mare that she promised was
as gentle as a kitten. We climbed to the red-clay roadbed that in a
few years would be Interstate 66, running from D.C. to Interstate 81
near Front Royal, Virginia.
Things were fine for
several minutes, until my mount started looking back and nibbling my
left shoe. The teacher said, “Don’t let her do that;
she’s just testing you. Give her a gentle push with the
stirrup, and she’ll behave.”
As soon as I did so, the
animal suddenly reared up, spun eastward, and took off galloping
toward the District of Columbia. It happened so fast that I lost the
reins and held on only by grabbing two fistfuls of the horse’s
mane and clinging to her rocking neck. After about half a mile, the
old girl slowed down and pretended to let me regain control of her.
The teacher caught up with
us a minute later and arrived at my side laughing hysterically. She
told me how proud she was that I’d managed to stay on the
horse, but by then my cowboy fantasies had gone the way of those
electric trains.
In the early sixties a new
shopping center was built on the opposite side of town, across from
my junior high school, Henry Thoreau Intermediate, and near the old
town of Dunn Loring. The parking lot was shaped like an amphitheater,
rising on the hill above the building, and in the months leading to
the grand opening it was a great place to indulge my short-lived
enthusiasm for skateboarding. For many kids a skateboard still
consisted of a two-foot plank and four metal wheels cannibalized from
a pair of clip-on roller skates. I considered my new commercial
version, polished oak with cushioned red rubber wheels—still a
miniature by today’s standards—to be the Stradivarius of
skateboards. But the finger-conscious musician in me abandoned this
dangerous diversion well before the strip mall’s ribbon-cutting
ceremony.
This decision coincided
with a friend’s developing interest in photography. Kodak
Brownie in hand, he would pose several of us around a fire hydrant, a
telephone pole, or some other obstruction and stage elaborate
skateboard accidents, complete with “borrowed” lipstick
for blood. One of us would stand aside wobbling a skateboard several
feet off the ground so it appeared to be sailing through the frame.
Vienna boasted two swim
clubs, each with its devoted membership: the older, Olympic-size
Vienna Swim Club, located in the middle of Vienna Woods, and the
smaller Vienna Aquatic Club, on Marshall Road near the intersection
of Nutley Street. Our family belonged to the latter because it was
nearer to our house on Dove Circle, but we kids often visited VSC as
friends’ guests or to attend parties.
I first heard the best band
in Vienna, called Us, at VAC. Their drummer was my local hero, Jeff
Steele, with a lovely old Gretsch kit in Black Diamond Pearl; their
skinny, precocious lead guitarist, Teddy Speleos, played the heck out
of a Gretsch Country Gentleman just like George Harrison’s—it
looked even bigger on Teddy—and ruined the finish by jamming
his harmonicas between the bridge and the tailpiece; and their
virtuoso bassist, Steve Gilles, would eventually join one of my own
bands, the Cambridge Blue. The band Us was known for its authentic
arrangements, but my main memory of the guys was of the night they
were holding forth under the starlit suburban sky at VAC and Teddy
flew into a rage when the club manager said the neighbors had
demanded they turn down the volume. I still find
myself siding with the neighbors whenever this subject comes up.
Both VSC and VAC were the
sites of numerous teenage romances and pranks. My favorite of the
latter was the time several of us broke into VAC late one night and I
got the brilliant idea of diving off the high board—something
I’d done a hundred times during daylight hours, not assessing
the accompanying noises of rattling board and splashing water—thus
announcing our presence and necessitating a hasty retreat in our
soaked underwear as the authorities pursued us through woods infested
with poison ivy.
The mid-Atlantic region
enjoys a temperate climate with four distinct seasons, each with its
charms and irritations. Like most children, I loved snow and all its
possibilities, especially the thrill of sledding at top speed down
our hill. I experienced a surprising moment of claustrophobia one day
inside a low igloo I had built a bit too solidly in the front yard.
But of course I lost my enthusiasm for the white stuff when I began
driving. Since we lived on an elevated circle—an arrangement
that a Native American documentary filmmaker would one day tell me
was considered the ideal community—the
municipal snowplows generally made a bad situation
worse
when they took their cursory stab at our street. You’d spend
half the day shoveling out your sidewalk and driveway and the other
half extricating your just-freed car from the glacier the plows had
left behind. Late one night years later, when a gig on which I was
hired to play bass was canceled at the last minute because of an ice
storm, I had to leave my car at the bottom of the hill and crawl home
on my hands and knees, instrument slung onto my back. I developed a
theory that the perfect year would be two weeks of light snow for the
holidays, followed immediately by eleven and a half months of summer.
Maple Avenue had firmly
established itself as the main drag by the time I reached my teens,
and our hangouts expanded accordingly. One of my favorites during the
early fashion-conscious years was Normford’s Style Shop, in the
shopping center that featured the Giant supermarket. I loved the
scent of the place as much as the clothes themselves. It was in that
parking lot one summer afternoon that two freshmen girls who’d
attended Thoreau Intermediate propositioned me, an offer I was too
naïve and too nonplussed to accept. Another
teen fave was
Pizza Fair, a tiny chrome-plated dive in another shopping center
closer to the old section of town. We’d go to Pizza Fair for
weekend lunches and to play the jukebox. To this day, the songs “Like
a Rolling Stone” and “Help!” evoke the aroma of
tomato sauce and the taste of root beer. The original shopping
center on Maple Avenue, at the corner of Lawyers Road across from the
Money & King Funeral Home, featured an old-time drugstore with
a
soda fountain, where I consumed many a sandwich and chocolate
milkshake after my weekly drum lesson on Church Street.
In future decades Vienna
would be home to several excellent ethnic restaurants: Afghan,
Chinese, French, Greek, Indian, Italian, Japanese, Mexican, Turkish,
and other cuisines were available many minutes closer to home than
the parking hassles of Georgetown.
In 1967 Dad was appointed
consul general to Amsterdam, and I embarked on the most memorable
chapter of my youth. I returned to Virginia in 1969 for college, and
my folks returned to the Dove Circle house, further degraded by
careless tenants, in 1972. By then Vienna resembled any other town
blighted by urban sprawl and had lost nearly all its charm for me. In
1989 I inherited the house, made it my own, and lived there more or
less happily, give or take several feet of snow, until I escaped to
Key West in 2000. The last lesson I learned there was never to sell a
house to neurotic fair-weather friends. I haven’t visited
Vienna in twenty years and have no desire to see what else has become
of the place.
Every generation treasures
its version of the good old days, which for most of us comprise our
carefree teens and early twenties. I feel immensely fortunate to have
finished elementary school in Israel and high school in
Holland—college, back in the culturally illiterate U.S.A., was
a bit of a letdown—but I remember “old” Vienna just
as fondly. More reminiscences appear in my book The
Human
Drummer.
Mostly I envy those
pioneers’ kids who knew the future nation’s capital as a
riverside oasis on the eastern edge of the New World.
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