Chapter 10
Work, Play, Drink
Austin
has always worked, from his first job as a paper boy to his last, taxi driver,
and all the others in between. Jobs, he
noted, “are plentiful for a capitalist willing to work.” During sophomore year, Jim Campbell and
Austin began working at Johnny's Gulf, which was located next door to the old
Donut Dinette at Adams Street and Columbia Pike. In 1969, the Donut Dinette became the classic
late-night Arlington eatery, Bob & Edith's Diner. When Bob and Edith Bolton came to town in
1961, they formed a friendship with Johnny.
Bob, a fervent Dallas Cowboy fan, bet Johnny on the upcoming
Redskins-Cowboys game. If Dallas won,
Johnny would have to push a peanut across the parking lot with his nose.
Conversely, if Johnny’s Redskins won, Bob would have to clean out the service
bays at the Gulf station. Their wager
found its way to the newspapers, complete with a photograph of Johnny pushing
that peanut across the parking lot.
On one New Year’s Day, Austin and
Jim Campbell pumped over $2,000 of gas for Johnny’s customers, which kept them
very busy since gasoline only cost 30 cents per gallon at that time. “Both of us had a wad of bills that would
choke me,” Austin recalled. He even found time to get an out-of-towner on
his way by installing a fuel pump on his car.
Oddly perhaps, an auto parts supply store was open on New Year’s Day
(on King Street, near the Shirley Highway).
With a new fuel pump in hand, the repair job was completed and “… he was
on his way after paying a nominal fee, well under book.” The repair job earned Austin a $10 tip, which
he noted, “... was big money to a teen then.”
During senior year, Austin, Jim
Campbell and Barry Wuerker began working for Bob Smith, owner of Blue Ribbon
Laundry & Dry Cleaning. Each worked
at one of Blue Ribbon’s three valet shops in the Executive Apartments
complex. In their prime, the Executive
Apartments were “the cream of the crop” in Arlington. As soon as the first building at 1850
Columbia Pike was completed, construction for Executive 2 and 3 (both on South
Scott Street) quickly followed. “The building explosion was
taking place before our eyes,” recalled Austin, “and the entire [Columbia] Pike
was transformed.”
One day, as he and Jim Campbell
worked together at one of the Blue Ribbon shops, they had the pleasure of
meeting "a fiendish kind of guy.” Jim Decker possessed a quick and incisive wit. He was, Austin said approvingly, “… a general
smart ass. Jim and I liked him
immediately.” Jim Decker’s father was
“some high level muckety muck in the government, but I remember him mainly for
his red Ford Convertible and its high-powered 406 horsepower motor. It even had overdrive. What a screamer!” Mr. Decker, despite being some sort of
government official, was very liberal in Austin’s words and loved his
trouble-making son. However, after Jim Decker’s senior year at Wakefield, Mr. Decker “ushered his ass off to some small school in Helena, Montana. Let me tell you, it not a fit ending for such
a hell raiser as Jim Decker.”
Before his job at Blue Ribbon,
Austin worked for a short time at the Mario’s Pizza on Wilson Boulevard. Besides having the best pizza in town,
Mario’s attracted many “good looking north side women” which included Lynn
Ramey. She was “… one pretty lady from
McLean that I had this thing for … it was a short tryst. But not short enough to be forgotten.” Mario’s also boasted a miniature golf course
and petting zoo. Some of Austin’s duties
involved caring for the animals, including a full-sized eagle, a monkey (“that
filthy bastard”), and a Macaw.
Cars
“bring you to new horizons,” Austin once said, “Thanks to an auto, I moved my
operation into Alexandria and instantly expanded
my social circle.” Being mobile brought
a new world to explore and girls to meet.
It was era when drive-in theaters and food joints were king. His preferred drive-in was situated by Route
1 (to be eventually replaced by the bridge that crosses over to Reagan National
Airport).
“I had many great and somewhat
lurid experiences there,” he recounted, “The last row in the drive-in was just
in front of the railroad tracks. It was the prime spot to park and neck and
such.” When the trains passed, the
ground would shake violently. The
drive-in was not the only place for teen romance. Other options included an evening drive to Hains Point in D.C. to watch the ‘submarine races.’ Although some of the girls “were wise to the
ploy,” many readily accepted and “… after a healthy necking session, we would
head off to Mario’s or the Tops Drive-In for some munchies.”
Curb service was the major attraction
for the Tops Drive-In at Glebe Road and Route 50 (straddling north and south
Arlington). Teens from all over
Arlington would drive up in their cars or street rods, including Corvettes,
409s, 426s, 428s, and 1955 Chevys among others.
“It was cool to drive a ‘sleeper,’ a regular looking car with a
bodacious motor in it.” Austin explained.
Drag races were set up there, dates were
made, and, sometimes scores were settled.
Another favorite was drive-in at
the Hot Shoppes, located at the intersection of Braddock Road and Quaker
Lane. Although a few Wakefield students
dropped in, it was frequented primarily by students from Hammond High and
George Washington High School (both schools closed long ago). The hoodlum fringe in Alexandria
was always in attendance at this Hot Shoppes. “Leather jackets
and duck tail haircuts were the order of the day,” Austin said, “You were
either a collegian or a greaser. I fell
somewhere in between.” Austin waxed nostalgically about
this era, dreamily describing how they would listen to Johnny
Dark on the radio, and that nearly everyone had a “reverb unit that gave
that echo effect.” They would talk of
school, cars and girls. He adds, perhaps
anachronistically, that it was “… a more gentle time.”
Tired of driving Willie Wilburn’s
1956 Buick, and having earned enough from his side jobs at the service station
and dry cleaners, Austin saved enough to buy his own car, a 1953 Oldsmobile 98. When the Olds died after a few months, John
Moneymaker sold Austin a 1953 Ford Convertible, truly a beauty of an
automobile. The Ford lasted until the
10th grade when Austin’s good friend, Jim Campbell, blew out the transmission
in the middle of Columbia Pike, in front of the Dorchester apartments. In 1959, Austin purchased a 1954 Olds 88, and
with the help of Bill Pfahl who worked on altering the carburetor system, the
gas-guzzling auto was renamed ‘Big As Hell.’
Two years later, ‘Big As Hell’ was replaced by a red Pontiac Convertible,
which confirmed his lifelong penchant for convertibles (or “ragtop man” as
Austin likes to say).
No matter what he drove, Austin
loved cars despite the fact they did not always return his love. One day, Tom Bowden and Austin decided to
leave school grounds in Austin’s 1952 Plymouth, an auto inherited from his
family. En route to the Bradlee Shopping
Center off of King Street, the front left tire blew out. “Not having much money to put into our
jalopies, I used ‘recap’ tires. Well,
the tread flew off the tire and, as it went around, knocked my left front
headlight into King Street.” The boys had a good laugh, and after picking up
the pieces strewn across the road, they made it back to Wakefield in time for
class, riding an extremely bald tire all the way.
Across
the Potomac River lies Georgetown, a trendy and affluent neighborhood in the Northwest
quadrant of Washington, D.C. Founded in
1751, Georgetown functioned primarily as a trading post and dockyard for many
years. By the 1950s, a new influx of
post-war residents arrived. Wealthy and
well-educated, they began Georgetown’s metamorphosis from dockyard to the
fashionable and expensive Georgetown of today.
In the late 1950s and early 60s, though, Georgetown was still very raw
and counted many bars, clubs and late night eateries as its primary draw. Austin was 17 when he ‘discovered’
Georgetown. To get there, he would sometimes ride a streetcar from
Rosslyn Circle, located just across Key Bridge from Georgetown. Streetcars were once an important mode of
transportation in Washington. Between
1862 and 1962, their tracks were ubiquitous.
When O. Roy Chalk bought the system in 1963, he switched the newly
renamed system - DC Transit, a precursor to the Washington Metropolitan Area
Transportation Association - to buses and the age of streetcars
effectively ended. Austin, like many
local residents, wishes “we had the streetcars back and I bet the D.C. City Council
wishes they were back also.”
The first shop in Georgetown - after
crossing Key Bridge - was, and remains, Dixie Liquors where, Austin noted, he “bought
my first bottle there, and my second, and my third. Well, you get the idea.” Jules’ Bar & Restaurant was located
nearby on the south side of M Street. To
Austin and his pals, Jules’ Bar was “… dear to our hearts because we would get schooners of beer there for a quarter. A
quarter!” He was often accompanied by Charlie
Weiss and a few Wakefield football players.
He added that only one of the crew had a legal ID (D.C.’s minimum
drinking age was 18 years old at that time), but guessed that the owners of
Jules’ knew that but didn’t push it since their waitress always asked for one
ID only, often remaking, “Well, I’m not going to look at all of them." The boys had one steadfast and rigidly
enforced rule when going to Jules’: “If you get trashed, we take you out so as
not to ruin a good thing.” Some nights,
Austin admits to having no idea how he got home and suspects Charlie Weiss took
care of him because “Charlie could drink some beer. It never seemed to bother
him.” Eventually, Austin opined, “Georgetown
turned to crap. Too much money and
stuck-up people changed it. For all
their money, they ended up making Georgetown look cheap. I miss the old Georgetown: the Rive Gauche Restaurant
and quaint shops, streetcar tracks, cobblestone streets … and low priced
schooners.”
On one occasion, they would drive
into D.C. to watch a Washington Senators baseball game at the old Griffith
Stadium, just off Florida Avenue near Georgia Avenue. This was just before D.C. Stadium was
completed (and eventually renamed Robert F. Kennedy Stadium). “We always dressed appropriately.” Austin noted, “We did not go to the
game out of love for the home team, but to drink cheap beer. We would sit down on the first base line
side, midway down the right field line, and the [beer] vendor would hit us
about every half hour. Needless to say
we would get sloshed. Most of the time, we sat through the usually horrible
game just trying to sober up. Most
everyone was drinking a lot at those games.
Didn’t matter much since most really did not care what you were
doing.” Some of the drinking resulted
from the perennially bad Washington Senators team. As attendance decreased throughout the late
50s, owner Clark Griffith decided to move the team to Minnesota in 1961. Concurrently, major league baseball expanded
by two teams and one of the expansion clubs became the new Washington
Senators. They, too, would reside
permanently in baseball’s second division until 1969 when new owner Bob Short
moved the team to Texas.
Glen Echo, an amusement park in Maryland (and just across the
Potomac River from Virginia), offered another venue of entertainment. “One
night, we started out for Glen Echo Park, not having had much to eat, began to
drink en route and were well on our way when we got there. Naturally we had to ride the roller
coaster. What a mistake,” he narrated. “Of course, we had to sit in the front
car. By the time we got to the second climb, we blew dinner and a lot of
beer all over ourselves, and the people behind us. Thank God there were only a
few of us on the ride. We were a mess. We went to the coffee early that
night. Before you know it, we were wide
awake drunk with the jitters so we all sat down until one of us was calm enough
to drive home.”
It was not always about
drinking. One night, Austin and Charlie
Weiss pooled their cash and purchased four large boxes of soap powder. They had decided to “soap the fountains in
D.C.” Driving into town, they spotted a
fountain at the corner of Constitution Avenue and 7th Street (this fountain was
the precursor to the current fountain/skating rink called the National
Sculpture Garden). The boys dumped two
of the soap powder boxes into the fountain and sat in their car half a block
away to watch. Nothing happened. They returned and poured in another box
before scurrying back to their car.
“We sat for a little longer and
still nothing happened. Well, we put our
last box of [soap] powder in the fountain and ran back to their car. About five minutes passed, and the fountain
just exploded with bubbles. The police
showed up just about the time the bubbles began to run over the fountain. As
you can imagine, we were roaring laughing, bent over laughing. Hell, it got even funnier when the bubbles
started rising up their pants legs.”
Although unnoticed by the police, they achieved some notoriety: “We made
the newspaper as unnamed hooligans.”
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