Unboxed

Voter Organization Focused on Local Issues for 93 Years

The Organized Women Voters of Arlington was founded in 1923, just three years after the 19^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution extended the right to vote to women.

A decidedly non-partisan organization, the OWV was unique in its distinct attention to matters facing the County. In an interview with the Northern Virginia Sun in 1958, then-president Ms. Woolley stated she believed “that the Organized Women Voters of Arlington is the only women voters’ group in the United States that is concerned solely with matters of local interest.”

While the OWV’s objective was to “collect and disseminate political and civic information,” it also served an important role as a space for the improvement of women’s social position within the county. Many prominent female leaders from Arlington, including county board members and former state senator Mary Margaret Whipple, have been a part of this significant organization.

In an oral history recorded in 1983, former OWV President Mrs. Sue Renfro remembered a time early on in the organization’s history when the two functions of education and political support intersected:

“At the first meeting there was a Sheriff Fields that came to speak to the ladies since they were having the vote. And he promised them that he would do something for them, so they asked him would he be willing to make an appointment [appoint a woman, and he replied] “Well, yes, under the circumstances.”

So then they had the election. Sheriff Fields won, and he just seemed to forget about appointing a lady. And the ladies decided that they should go and inspect the jail.

So they made several trips to inspect the jail, and finally it was reported that the sheriff looked up one day and saw the committee coming again to inspect the jail and decided that he might just appoint one of them, and he appointed Mrs. Pauline Duncan.

… She was the first deputy woman sheriff in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

In the photo above, attendees gather at the OWV’s 31st birthday luncheon in 1954.

These were high-profile events for the organization, and every year the group named a “Woman of the Year” from Arlington County. In 1938, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was an honored guest. Today, the Organized Women Voters still meets on the 4th Tuesday of every month from September through May at Essy’s Carriage House, to hear from candidates and county representatives.

Thank you to current president Nancy Renfro for the information regarding the organization’s current activities.

Learn More from the Center for Local History at the Central Library.

You can request to view materials in person from Record Group 17 – Records of The Organized Women Voters of Arlington County – or read the full interview excerpted above with Sue Renfro and Lillian Simms, cataloged as VA 975.5295 A7243oh ser.3 no.215.

What Were These Men Doing?

Mystery Photo Answered

Thank you to everyone who participated in the interactive portion of the Local History Center’s “Treasures from the Vault” exhibit at the Central Library last month.

In the exhibit we asked visitors to guess what these two Arlington County employees were getting ready to do.

Here are some of our favorite responses:

Studying amphibians at Ballston Pond
Feeding the local Loch Ness Monster
Fixing bridge supports
Search and Rescue
Space travel
Diving to the bottom of the Key Bridge to look for lost car keys
Searching for Atlantis
Repairing leaky pipes
River cleanup
Working on Metro’s Orange line tunnel under the Potomac
Exploring underwater for new life or fossils
Modelling jumpsuits
Selling makeup (If you look closely you’ll notice an Avon label on their gear)

The correct answer:

These are two Arlington County Public Works employees gearing up to repair a water main break under the ~~Key~~ Chain Bridge.

Help Our Collection Grow

If you have any interesting photos that help tell Arlington’s story please consider donating them to the Local History Center or allowing us to scan them.

For more information, stop by our Research Room on the first floor of the Central Library. You can also call us at 703-228-5966 or email us.

Treasures from the Vault

Arlington History Through Objects and Ephemera

On exhibit at Central Library, October 2014

In observance of National Archives Month, the Center for Local History has created “Treasures from the Vault,” an exhibit of artifacts showcasing Arlington’s history and culture through the years.

Learn more about important Arlington residents, politics, businesses, neighborhoods, the arts, and much more.

The exhibit includes historical photographs, posters, puzzles, political ephemera, and even an old gas mask from the fire department!

The Center for Local History collections are always growing, and many of them are made possible by generous donations from local organizations and members of our community.

If you have old photographs, postcards, or any other materials you think we should add to our collections, please contact us. Help us collect, preserve, and share our community’s history.

The exhibit is open to the public and free of charge during regular library hours.

A New Way to Explore a Rich Legacy

The New Nauck/Green Valley Heritage Project

The Center for Local History is proud to launch The Nauck/Green Valley Heritage Project, a pilot program to preserve and present the history of south Arlington’s Nauck neighborhood.

The historically black Nauck neighborhood, with many residents who are descended from the original residents of Freedmen’s Village, is one of the most frequently inquired about by researchers at the CLH.

Until now, it has also been one of the least well represented communities in our collections.

In 2013 members of the Nauck Civic Association, Arlington County Neighborhood Services and Drew Model Elementary School approached the Center for Local History with a vision for creating an archive for the neighborhood’s history.

An initial plan to create a physical archive at Drew School was discarded because of space and other limitations. Instead, an online archive was created, which allows for the easy addition of electronic donations. In addition, having an online archive means we can include family photos without donors having to give up their originals.

The Nauck/Green Valley Heritage Project currently includes over two hundred items in three collections, which can now be shared with the community, students, and researchers – both in Arlington and around the world.

There are also two online exhibits – one about Dr. Charles Drew and another about the Negro Recreation Section (the division of the Department of Recreation under segregation).

We have more than three hundred additional images scanned and awaiting upload, and even more waiting to be scanned. So if you’re interested in the visual history of Nauck, check the site regularly to see the latest additions.

Do you have historic documents related to Nauck or Green Valley?

Please consider donating them via our online donation form. You can also contact the Center for Local History and arrange to have us scan your photos for you by email or phone: 703-228-5966.

Our Back Pages: Arlington’s Own Declaration of Civil Rights

In observance of the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, we look back at a document from a few years earlier, for a glimpse of a still-segregated Arlington…

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law as various Civil Rights leaders look on, including the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Photo courtesy of the LBJ Library, photo by Cecil Stoughton .

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the signing into law of the Civil Rights Act of 1964– one of the most important pieces of Civil Rights legislation of the twentieth century. The Civil Rights Act outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. Likewise, the Act outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, and ended unequal application of voter registration requirements.

In observance of this landmark piece of legislation, we would like to share a transcription of “The Negro Citizen in Arlington,” a leaflet that was published by the Arlington Council on Human Relations, a multi-racial, multi-faith organization that advocated for Civil Rights for all Arlingtonians.

Published just a little over a year after Arlington became the first school district in Virginia to desegregate, this document is a powerful reminder that despite those four students integrating Stratford Junior High in 1959, segregation in Arlington was still far from over. Many institutions in Arlington remained segregated, and this document specifically enumerates some of them: from sit-down restaurants and movie theaters, to maternity wards, to playgrounds and pony rides for children.

Item six contains one of the leaflet’s most powerful observations: “It is the uncertainty about so many aspects of his life that is trying for a Negro in Arlington. Some years ago he knew exactly what his limitations were. He didn’t like being limited but he knew what to expect. Now he is tired of being unknowing about his status.” In the years leading up to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, this was indeed the reality for many Blacks in the South.

This document powerfully evokes a time of both hope and deep uncertainty in the history of the Civil Rights Movement, when they had begun to affect positive outcomes on a local level, but those advances were tempered by lingering segregation, inconsistent statutes and enforcement, and the long historical shadow of Jim Crow.

THE NEGRO CITIZEN IN ARLINGTON

A Negro in Arlington, Virginia can, like any of the white residents of our community, call an efficient Fire Department if his house is burning. He can send his child to school and know that an alert officer will stop traffic if need be so that his son or daughter may make a safe street crossing. His wife can buy meat at the nearest super-market with the assurance that it has been inspected and is fairly weighed and priced. In most matters the Arlington Negro lives out his days with the same elements of risk and with the same measure of civic protection threatening him on the one hand and supporting him on the other as is the common lot of the rest of us in modern situations. But there are areas of his life where being a Negro makes a difference in his days. Believing that many people may be unaware of this difference, the Arlington County Council on Human Relations would bring the following facts to the attention of concerned people.

1. If an Arlington Negro man wants to take his family out to dinner, he will have to go to the District of Columbia to find a restaurant of high quality where they may be seated. They would be turned away from all the better eating places in Arlington. If his family is in the mood for an informal meal, he may buy food to carry home at an Arlington Drive-in Restaurant but he cannot expect the kind of curb service which many white families enjoy at the end of a busy day. It is not clear to what extent restaurant restrictions are related to the legal ban on mixed seating in public and to what extent they are related to the prejudices of white patrons.

2. If an Arlington Negro wants to see a movie, he must also go to Washington. He cannot walk to a neighborhood movie or go to any Drive-in Theatre in the Arlington area because they are all closed to Negroes. Nor can he go to a public bowling alley or skating rink. He cannot stop for his children to have pony rides at a pony lot.

3. Highly qualified personnel direct the Arlington recreation program for Negroes but whereas the playgrounds and summer recreation programs for white children are located in the neighborhoods where white children live, only two small playgrounds are available for Negroes. Both of them are inadequate and the largest one, where full-scale ball games might be played, is in the southern tip of Arlington, inaccessible to the large number of Negro youth in North Arlington. Negro children live very near some of the large playing fields designated for white children. They can only watch from the sidelines. If friendly youngsters call out to them to join the games, they must ignore the invitation or accept it with the risk that they might be sent away, or, failing to leave, might be taken to the police station.

4. A Negro man may rush his child to Arlington Hospital for emergency treatment or for hospitalization in the non-segregated pediatrics ward and he may go himself as an out-patient or as a bed patient in the Negro ward. But when his wife is ready to give birth to their baby, he cannot take her to the community hospital where white babies are born. He must take her miles away to a hospital in the District or in Alexandria. Perchance her baby can’t wait for the Washington hospital, the Negro mother will be attended as an emergency case in the Arlington Hospital but she cannot then be placed in the maternity ward. She will be put in the general ward for Negroes where she might be exposed to any one of a variety of infectious diseases. The general ward for Negroes actually becomes a receiving ward for all overflow patients because though a Negro may not be placed in sections of the hospital designated for whites, if the white sections are full, the white patients needing space are placed in the Negro ward. This ward is not as carefully controlled for visitors as the maternity ward is, making it the more unsuitable for post-delivery cases.

5. Many Negroes in Arlington own their homes and home ownership is a thing of special pride to them. Many of Arlington’s Negro citizens are native residents of the county and live on property which was owned by their parents or grandparents. But when young Negroes marry, even though they are well educated and have good jobs, they cannot find, in Arlington, homes which they may buy or land where Negroes may build. There is little rental property available to them. So they must leave neighborhoods where they have friends, must leave churches where they have roots and responsibilities, and whether they like it or not, must live in Washington. Older Negroes sit precariously on their front porches in Arlington because they feel that expansion of public building in the past has been at the expense of Negro land and they ponder when some new expansion will take their property and leave them homeless.

6. It is the uncertainty about so many aspects of his life that is trying for a Negro in Arlington. Some years ago he knew exactly what his limitations were. He didn’t like being limited but he knew what to expect. Now he is tired of being unknowing about his status.

The Negro knows that merit hiring permits him to apply for and, if he is qualified, to receive a Civil Service job in the Arlington community. He does not know to what extent racial prejudice may influence the decisions of the department head who is responsible for his promotions.

The Negro knows that by Federal Law his children are now guaranteed public school education on a non-segregated basis. He does not know how long it will be before Negroes in Arlington can expect that without individual court appeals, their children will all be accepted in neighborhood schools just as other children are.

These certain limitations and uncertain opportunities which daily confront Negro citizens in Arlington are felt by those who participated in the survey, to be a blight upon the county and a burden upon all of its residents. How change and improvement may best be brought about will be a matter of continuing concern to those persons of several races and of various faiths who compose the membership of the Arlington Council on Human Relations.

Local History: A Pentagon-less Arlington?

Calling All Local History Fans…

While answering a reference question, we came across this interesting passage describing President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s original plans for a War Department building in Arlington:

…The new building in Arlington would not be the War Department’s permanent headquarters. Ultimately, the department would return to Foggy Bottom in Washington. “Now, my thought is that this new War Department building [in Arlington] would be built on extremely simple lines, and that when this emergency is over, and the War Department… reverts to a peacetime status, they will be able to come back here to their regular place,” he said…

As for the building in Arlington, Roosevelt said, it was perfectly suited for another pet project of his: He wanted a central home for the old files that now used up space in government offices around Washington. He had millions of records in mind, ranging from the individual files of three million Civil War soldiers to the public-land records charting the development of the great West to obscure State Department consular reports on the history of Mongolian ponies. “So I hope that this new building, when this emergency is over, will be used as a records building for the government,” Roosevelt said. – from “The Pentagon: A History” by Steve Vogel, p. 97

In other words, Roosevelt imagined a future where instead of the Pentagon, the area of Southwest Arlington would be home to the much smaller National Archives and Records Administration!

What do you think?

What would have happened to Arlington’s development – and history – if FDR’s vision had been carried out?

Would the smaller building have allowed the Queen City neighborhood, which was demolished to make room for Pentagon parking and car traffic, to have survived?
How would a smaller National Archives building have impacted neighborhood traffic patterns, or the planning of 395 and the metro lines?
Would Arlington and Arlington’s post WWII growth rate have changed?
What would have been the impact on military contractors, if the military headquarters had moved back to Foggy Bottom?

Share your thoughts in the comments!

Images of the Pentagon in the 1940s, from the Center for Local History collection:

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Virginia In Postcards: Eastman-Fenwick Collection

Newly-Digitized Postcards Share a Glimpse of Bygone Virginia…

The Center for Local History has recently added two groups of early and mid-twentieth century postcards to our online collection.

Virginia in Postcards contains 80 postcards from the Eastman-Fenwick Family Papers and the personal postcard collection of Diane Salman. These have been digitized, both front and back (or recto and verso, as archivists sometimes call them) for a total of 160 images.

The first collection (Record Group 306) contains the personal postcards of Diane Salman, and consists of many postcards collected by her grandmother, Irene Andris Finlayson. Finlayson lived most of her life in Morgantown, West Virginia and died in 1954.

This collection is particularly interesting as it includes many paintings and lithographs of historical Virginia sites including the Royal Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg and the George Washington Masonic National Memorial in Alexandria.

Many also include handwritten messages (mostly from the 1910s) such as:

“Suppose you have heard from [?] that Frank and I are married. Write to me…”

The second collection of postcards (Record Group 60) from the Eastman-Fenwick Family collection are primarily from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

These postcards are part of a much larger collection of personal papers and ephemera from four generations of two prominent Arlington families. Unlike the Salman collection, the Eastman-Fenwick postcards were not mailed but simply collected. They include striking photographs such as a locomotive charging through Ford, Virginia, and a large turkey farm in Highland County.

This project was completed with generous help from volunteers Peter Perry, Levertes Ragland, Sharad Shah, Cattleya Concepcion, and Justin Paulhamus.

Our Back Pages: A Taste of Home

Vietnam in Clarendon

For a brief period in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a small area of Clarendon became a hub of activity for America’s newest immigrant group, the Vietnamese – and even gained international fame.

The Vietnam Center was one of many Vietnamese shops in Clarendon.

For the first half of the twentieth century, Clarendon had been Arlington’s shopping and social center, with stores, movie theaters, offices and restaurants populated by people who used buses and trolley lines.

But in the 1950s, Arlingtonians starting spreading out and relying on cars to get around — Parkington (a large parking garage in Ballston) for example, was built in the late 1950s. These more auto-dependent shoppers bypassed Clarendon, which had little to no parking, instead shopping at malls farther west and south. Businesses started folding or leaving the area, and by 1970, Clarendon was a shell of its former self.

In the early and mid-1970s, the first wave of refugees from Vietnam came to the United States.

Many of these “first-wave” immigrants were middle-class and managed to leave Vietnam with their savings and valuables to help them start a new life. Arlington’s immigrant-friendly attitude made the county appealing to these Vietnamese, and the empty storefronts in Clarendon represented an opportunity. Rent was cheap at only about two dollars per square foot, and as immigrant numbers increased with the fall of Saigon in 1975 there was a ready-made clientele, homesick and unsure in a new county.

By 1979, the 3100 block of Wilson Boulevard (near Clarendon Circle) was the business epicenter of what was usually called “Little Saigon” but was also known as the “Ho Chi Minh Trail,” “Mekong Delta” and “Saigon Strip.” These businesses, along with others on N. Hudson, N. Herndon and N. Highland Streets, sold products familiar to Vietnamese immigrants and provided services by Vietnamese businessmen who knew the language and culture. Vietnamese people came from as far away as Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Tennessee to Clarendon to get a taste of home.

Little Saigon’s importance was so vast that “Arlington” was spoken of as a specific destination by those in refugee camps in Southeast Asia.

It was not to last, however; metro was coming and it would change the face of Clarendon. The Clarendon station opened in December of 1979, and over the next five years, rents started to rise in this now prime real estate. Housing was also getting more expensive, driving recent immigrants farther west. Business owners realized they had to relocate or close; with the fall of Little Saigon in Clarendon came the rise of the Eden Center in Falls Church, further south on Wilson Boulevard near Seven Corners.

Today, the 3100 block of Wilson has many restaurants and shops, but the only sign this area was a little taste of home for thousands of Vietnamese refugees is Nam Viet Restaurant on N. Hudson Street.

The following Vietnamese businesses on the 3100 block of Wilson Boulevard were listed in the 1979 Haines Directory:

3105: Pacific Oriental Department Store
3107: Mekong Center
3133: Far Eastern Food and Gift/Viet Nam Center
3143: Kim Long [a general store]
3147: Saigon Market
3153: Vietnamese Custom Tailor
3171: Kim Ngoc Food and Gift
The 1980 Haynes Directory added two more Vietnamese businesses:
3103: Huong Que Restaurant
3169: Saigon Souvenir and Jewelry

In the 2012 Haines Directory, no businesses with obvious Vietnamese links/names were listed for the 3100 block of Wilson.

Mystery Photo: Football Edition

Can You Help Us Identify This Photograph?

The Center for Local History is looking for your help in learning more about this photo, found in the attic of a house on 21st Street South – the Arlington Ridge/Aurora Highlands neighborhood.

In the photo, a football team stands in front of a public school:

Finds like this are fascinating to us, because they pose so many questions… Who are these young men? What school are they from? And when was the photo taken?

The thirteen young men appear to be high-school aged, and they are wearing turn-of-the-century or early-twentieth-century football gear. The two men in suits are presumably coaches. They stand before an arched doorway labeled “Public School.” The back row of young men seem to be standing on miniature chairs. One man holds a football, upon which is painted “04.” The “04” suggests that they were either playing in 1904, or were from the class of 1904. But what other details back up that assumption? How do we know that “04” wasn’t painted onto the ball for some other reason?

Figuring out the date of a photo can be tricky, but fun.

Different historians, archivists, and history buffs have preferred methods. Some like to date pictures by finding the latest-model car in a street scene. Hairstyles and clothing can be good indications, though they can be misleading. In professional sports, uniforms change slightly but noticeably over the years, but these boys aren’t wearing uniforms.

Their gear, however, does present some clues. The minimal padding, sewn into their clothes and not worn separately, suggest that this was from the earliest days of football– “harnessed” leather pads that pulled on over the head began appearing around the turn of the century. Likewise, their boots suggest something from football’s earliest days.

The most interesting detail is the nose guards that several of the men are wearing.

While we have helmets with face masks to protect the mouth and nose today, there were no such protections in the early years of football. Instead, some players wore nose guards like the one seen to the right, which during play strapped around the players’ heads and protected the nose and teeth. At first we thought it resembled this nose guard, patented by Frank Wilcox in 1904, but the strap on Wilcox’s design is a bit lower. We eventually found our nose guard patented by the Morrill Company in 1891, which according to this page from the University of Michigan was for sale in the “Spaulding [sic] catalog” in 1902. Thus, we find support for the 1904 date.

But what team was this, and where were they photographed?

Our first thought was that the nearby Hume School (now the Arlington Historical Society) and other Arlington-area schools from that time period have somewhat similar arched entrances. But none that we are aware of have the stonework “Public School” over them.

More importantly, there was no public high school in the county at that time, so young men of this age would likely be going to school– and perhaps playing football for that school– at high schools in the District.

With all the above in mind, we turn it over to you, the public.

What clues can you glean from this picture? Do you recognize anyone? Can you identify the archway behind these men? Is there anything in the above post that seems off-base?

What can you tell us about this picture?

Local History: Growing Up with the Pike

Digitized Family Photos and Oral Histories Provide a Fascinating Look at Fifty Years of Development Along Columbia Pike

The really amazing thing about archives isn’t just the collecting, preserving, and sharing of collections– it’s the magic that happens when collections come together to give a richer, deeper picture of the past.

The Center for Local History has recently completed digitizing the Ruth Levin Photograph Collection.

Coupled with the center’s extensive oral history collection, this small collection of photographs, donated to the library in the 1990s, provide a fascinating window into the changing nature of family life and small business ownership along the Columbia Pike corridor between the 1910s and the 1960s.

Sher family in front of M. Sher & Sons General Merchandise, Columbia Pike and Walter Reed Drive, circa 1922. Charlie Sher can be seen in front of the family’s Model T Ford Utility Truck.

Ida Sher moved to Arlington in 1918, when she was 8 years old, along with her parents, Menasha and Esther Sher, and her four brothers. They bought a country store, the former C.F. Burner’s Emporium, at the current location of the Arlington Cinema & Drafthouse. In an oral history with her brother Charlie conducted in 1975, he recalled their early years at M. Sher’s General Merchandise in a manner that might seem quite foreign to us today.

The family lived in the back of the store, which had no electricity, no heat, and no running water. Columbia Pike was unpaved, with just a few other businesses.

Deliveries were initially made with a horse and wagon, and the same wagon would make the trip to Washington Terminal at 11th and E St. SE to get ice three times a week– ice being a necessity to keep meat and other perishables fresh at the store.

There were no restaurants in the area when they first moved there, and Sher states that “I don’t think [my parents] ever went to a restaurant to eat.” In 1924, however, Andrew Norton opened a restaurant, Norton’s Café, almost across the street from the Sher’s, at Columbia Pike and Edgewood. He had a son, Everett, who was the same age as the Sher’s youngest children, the twins Hyme and Joe.

Twin brothers Joe and Hyme Sher, circa 1925.

In an oral history with Everett Norton, we can see that even the nine-year age difference between Charlie and his youngest brothers meant experiencing a very different Arlington. He remembers a boyhood in an Arlington that was, by comparison, far more urban.

Norton recalls many more shops in the area, and where Charlie talks about taking a horse and wagon into DC to get ice, Norton remembers hitch-hiking to DC along the bus route:

I remember one time when Hymie Sher and I and Roy Pearson were–we were thumbing our way to Washington–and Bob May, the man that owned the bus company, came by; and he stopped. We thumbed a ride, and he stopped. And we said, “Are you going into Washington, Mr. May?” And he says, “No, but a bus is coming by here in five minutes.” He wanted to make that 15 or 30 cents.

It was still a very different world, however – while Joe and Hyme were among the earliest graduates of Washington-Lee High School, they were also perhaps the school’s first bus drivers. Mr. May, whose bus yard was in the Sher’s neighborhood, lent the school a bus, and the twins would drive and pick up students.

Ida Sher went on to meet and marry Sol Cohen, a young man who ran Cohen Brother’s Jewelers in Alexandria. But then her father took sick and needed help running the store. Sol and Ida moved back into the store where she had grown up to help mind it when her father could no longer do so. A few years later, their daughter Ruth was born, and her brother Charlie, who had been working at the store since 1918, opened Dependable Cleaners down the street.

Renamed Sher & Cohen’s Market, the business continued to do business throughout the Depression, despite often having to trade and barter with members of the community, while their suppliers demanded cash. In the late 1930s, they even managed to move across the street to a more modern building. When the US entered World War II, however, Sol was worried about being drafted, and sold the market.

Columbia Hardware & Appliance Company, 3102 Columbia Pike, 1950’s.

His brother was still running several jewelry stores, and he opened a gift shop adjoining one in Arlington Village, which did a brisk business selling gifts to workers from the Navy Annex and the Pentagon.

At the end of the war, he decided to change businesses and locations again, building a new hardware store only 200 yards down the street from the old M Sher General Store. The new Columbia Hardware & Appliance Company did a brisker business in furniture and appliances, and would eventually change names around 1956 to Columbia furniture.

In addition to selling home goods, the store– much as Sher’s had in the 1920s and 1930s– served as a place for the community to gather. Sol would keep the store open late so people could come by and watch the Friday night fights on television.

Their daughter, Ruth, would later recall how this practice led to her meeting her future husband, Dan Levin:

In those days many people didn’t have TVs. My father had the appliances and hardware and stuff so on Friday nights they used to have fights until ten o’clock or something so he used to keep the store open on Friday nights so people could come and watch TV.

When Danny’s family moved down here from New Jersey, they had moved here that week and on Friday night his mother and father went out for a walk, and they were out there out there watching the TV…[M]y sister, my mother and I and we came to the store. My aunt and a cousin were there. My aunt said to my cousin… “Well, Mrs. Cohen, are you ready to go home?”

[H]is mother heard “Mrs. Cohen” so she went up and said, “Which one of you is Mrs. Cohen?”

My aunt said, “I’m Mrs. Cohen. This is my daughter-in-law, Naomi Cohen, and this is my sister-in-law, Ida Cohen.”

This lady said, “Are you Jewish?”

Of course my aunt said, “Yes.”

She said, “Well, we’re Jewish and we just moved here from New Jersey, and I have two sons and they’re tired of eating dairy, they want meat. Can you tell me where to find a Jewish butcher, a kosher butcher?”

…She said she had these two sons and of course here I am this bold little girl and I said, “How old are your sons?”

She said, “fifteen and seventeen.”

I said, “Do they like to bowl?”

In just a single generation these photos and oral histories show us so much about the rapid changes that happened to Arlington in the first half of the twentieth century. Columbia Pike goes from being a rural outpost with dirt roads, dairy farms, children working in shops and going swimming in creeks, to an urban area with a larger and more diverse population, paved roads, swimming pools, and teenagers going bowling in Clarendon.

We hope that by digitzing them and making them available online, we make these stories– and others like them– more accessible to people in Arlington and beyond, so that you can pore through them and make your own discoveries. These are very rich documents. Dig in!

Unboxed

Voter Organization Focused on Local Issues for 93 Years

Learn More from the Center for Local History at the Central Library.