EDITORIALS / OPINION

What happened to the mailboxes?

By David Roffman

June 2009

When an elderly person asked me if I could drop off a couple of letters in the mailbox for her, I said no problem and went out to post them.

Where have all the mailboxes gone? I went to the corner of Volta and Wisconsin — no box. There used to be one there. I went down to Wisconsin and O streets where Doc’s drugstore used to be, not to mention a mailbox.

Sadly, both were gone, the drugstore because Doc retired, the mailbox because … why? There is no mailbox on P or N streets either, and we mean the entire street in Georgetown, from 36th to 26th. In fact, as far as we can tell, in the entire 10 square blocks of Georgetown, we could hardly find any mailboxes.

I guess with e-mail and twittering, people are writing less and less on stationary than they were five or even 10 years ago. I still love the thrill of opening my mail box to find a card or letter in it. Even a few pieces of junk mail are okay too. It’s a childhood thing.

E-mail’s great for instantly keeping in touch and connecting the world in seconds but for me, it’s about time. Knowing, realizing or acknowledging that someone took the time to actually sit down and write out a thought or experience and then to go in search of a red mail box and deposit it. It’s kind of like film photography — there’s that delay, it’s not instant. And then, if you haven’t thrown it out, you’ve got something to look back on and re-read. Letters. Cards. Memories. Connections with friends, new friends, relatives. Do you remember the milk commercial tag line? “The faster life gets, the more sense milk makes.” So where are all the red mailboxes going to? Why are we not doing the present moment thing of communication any more?

Where is our creativeness going? How come we’re not making the time to stop and smell the roses along the way?

I stopped off at our post office on 31st Street. There were four mailboxes out front. Great! I walked all the way to the post office to find a mail box. I asked the person inside where all the boxes went. She said, “Nobody was mailing any letters. The boxes were empty. It was a manpower decision to eliminate the boxes.” How very sad. Oh, we did find another box up by Georgetown Visitation by the way. If any of our readers have knowledge of any other boxes, let us know.

Last rites for a legend

By Butler Derrick

June 2009

Shortly after my father died, my mother and I went to buy her a new car. There was no question that it would be a Buick. The first car I remember my parents owning was a 1938 Buick Special. This was the less expensive model. The point being that it was a Buick. The Buick brought us back to South Carolina and continued to be our family car until a year or two after World War II.

When Pop died, the family car was an older, rather large Buick. Although I had not discussed it with her, I assumed that Mother would want one of the scaled-down, less expensive models. Was I in for a surprise! As I guided her over to the less expensive models, she quickly let me know that she wanted nothing to do with a lesser model. Instead, she bought a top of the line Buick accessorized with every gadget General Motors (GM) could think to attach.

I have often wondered at her reasoning. It could not have been that she would drive it that much. When she died some 20 years later, the car had very few miles on it, considering its age. The Buick was parked in the driveway most of the time. This was a curiosity to me, but I think I have solved the puzzle. When her husband died, she wanted our small town to know that he had been successful and it wasn’t necessary for her to buy a more modest model.

I believe that the only way GM can survive is going through bankruptcy. This keeps the politicians and labor unions out of the mix. It also gives the company the chance to change an industrial culture that has not served well for some time. I shed a tear or two for the once greatest, most prosperous, and largest company in the world.

The baby boomers, and those who came later, find it difficult to understand the tremendous impact the American auto industry had on the life of this country. Before it became so easy to attain home ownership, the automobile, to a large degree, defined one’s level in society.

There were Ford men and Chevrolet men. People who lived in modest housing would buy a new Chevy or Ford every two or three years. This was serious business. There would be arguments about which car was best, which had the most powerful engine, which was the fastest. The family car was lovingly washed and vacuumed on the weekends. It went to the grocery store on Saturday, to church on Sunday followed by an afternoon drive. Sometimes the men would stand around after church, admiring and discussing a friend’s new car. The wives and children were equally proud and envied for being able to ride around in their new car.

When in high school, I bagged groceries. I remember there were three men in the meat department. They called each other 70, 68 & 80. One day I finally asked what this meant. I was told, “That’s the amount of our monthly car payments.”

Very few people owned a Cadillac. Those who drove Chryslers, Lincolns, or Caddies, were a level above the average family. Most people never reached that plateau.

Now, the Pontiac and Oldsmobile brands will glide into history.
Everyone remembers his or her first car. Mine was an old Ford convertible. I thought it was cool. The truth is it ran hot all the time.
Everyone who was part of the 1950s remembers Dinah Shore singing, “See the USA in your Chevrolet.”
As GM slipped into bankruptcy, what had been a very large part of our heritage slipped with it. “See the USA in your Volvo” doesn’t move me.

It is said, “people are keeping their cars longer today.” Maybe this is a step forward, but it certainly isn’t the “American way” our country cherished for so many generations.

General Motors will never be the company it was a couple of decades ago, nor will it play such large part in our lives. Goodbye old friend; what a wonderful time we had all those years.

Butler Derrick is a partner with Nelson Mullins LLP and a retired U.S. Congressman from South Carolina. While he lives and practices law in Washington, he is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of South Carolina.

Jazz, done family style

By Gary Tischler

June 2009

The fifth annual Duke Ellington Jazz Festival is over now, but the notes linger mightily.

The festival, founded by Charles Fishman, left behind not only signs of continued growth but a shrimp-bucket full of delicious memories.

With its backbone of educational themes, its Jazz in the Hoods offerings all over the city, its rich and diverse two-day free concerts celebrating New Orleans on the Mall, its successful two-day family time at the Phillips Collection, the festival left behind the residual idea of an extended jazz family.

You saw the idea most clearly in the festival’s windup and signature event, the presentation of a lifetime achievement honor to Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch of the gifted Marsalis clan. This was a well deserved excuse to throw one of the more exciting jazz concerts ever seen in these parts, a gathering of rich talent, a night of outrageously fine playing, of story-telling, and a musical illustration of family and jazz.

Ellis, a gifted bebop pianist and composer, as well as jazz historian, mentor and teacher, is also the father of six sons, four of whom — Wynton on trumpet, Branford on sax, Delfeayo on trombone and the prodigy Jason on vibraphone and drums — make a not-too-shabby quartet by themselves. All of them were here to play for and with their father, making for an instant all-star jazz concert. There won’t be a play called “I Never Played for My Father” in the Marsalis family.

But that’s not all. Harry Connick, Jr., a former student of the elder Marsalis and regular visitor to the Marsalis home in New Orleans, also showed up, to play the piano to sing and to get razzed by the Marsalis boys. Billy Taylor, the elder statesman of jazz at the Kennedy Center, joined Ellis in a dual-piano number that showed inspiration and deftness.

You got a real sense of the Marsalis clan, of home and city by way of New Orleans and the inclusiveness of the music, which finally, like a flood of warmth, washed over the 2000 or so members of the audience at the Concert Hall when Wynton led a New Orleans-style musical march up and back down the aisle that rocked the house with brassy, affectionate, tough-love energy.

Jason Marsalis whistled, note for note with Wynton, who said “We call him the prodigy.” And another son, Ellis Jr., a photographer and poet, delivered a moving poem for his father, which choked up his brothers. Connick sang “Stardust.” Ellis Marsalis played as smooth as high-grade cognac.

While the sons saluted their mother Dolores and told stories about her — I never knew I was a momma’s boy until I left New Orleans, Wynton explained — Ellis was pitch-perfect in his salute to his wife. “They say behind every great man stands a woman. Well, I gotta tell you, my wife never stood behind me. She was right beside me always, and often in front of me.”

And they played, the father and the sons and the extended family on stage, and pretty soon, we all floated six miles high for a while, and it will be a long time coming down.

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