Oral History Interviews
Beginning in 2007
The founding committee — Louise Brodnitz, Denise Cunningham, Betsy Cooley, Hazel Denton, Nola Klamberg, and Leslie Kamrad, Annie Lou Berman, Patty Murphy and Leslie Wheelock – worked out details and procedures for the project. They met with Bernadette McMahon, coordinator of Capitol Hill’s Overbeck History project, to learn about that established project. (Check out Capitol Hill’s excellent website at www.capitolhillhistory.org to get a sense of their fascinating program.)
CAG’s Oral History project is recruiting and training volunteers to conduct interviews with people who have played significant roles in Georgetown over many years. Dozens of long-time residents are being tapped (many in their eighties and nineties) to record their rich experiences and invaluable memories of growing up, living, or raising families in Georgetown and/or participating in the organizations and businesses that have developed and preserved Georgetown buildings and structures over the past century. Our oldest residents are being interviewed at the earliest stage of the project to share their unique and irreplaceable knowledge.
Don Shannon
Don Shannon was an army artillery officer during World War II who served in the Pacific and in the occupation of Japan just after the war. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1951 and spent nearly forty years as a foreign correspondent in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In this interview with Kevin Delany, Shannon talks about exciting times as his paper’s first White House correspondent during John F. Kennedy’s administration. For more than fifty years, Don and his late wife, Sally, have lived in a...
Lucy Moorhead
Lucy Moorhead moved from Pittsburgh to Georgetown in 1959 with her Congressman husband and four small children. The Moorhead family first lived on Foxhall Road while trying to decide where to permanently settle; they soon fell in love with the streets of Georgetown: “We'd walk down to wherever it was that we were going, somebody’s house. We just loved the feeling of it. And we’d look into peoples’ houses it was at night so of course you could see into peoples’ rooms because nobody seemed to...
Frida Burling
Frida Burling has seen Georgetown transform from a “sleepy old southern town…full of racial prejudice” into a vibrant community with lots of young families. Frida moved to Georgetown in 1945 with her first husband and after a brief stint in Cleveland Park, moved back with her second husband, Eddie Burling, in 1959. She has been a constant figure in the Georgetown community ever since. In her interviews with Annie Lou Berman, Frida describes what it was like to live here during desegregation in...
John Prince
John Prince moved to Georgetown in 1954 with a Cordon Bleu education in French cooking after fighting in WWII and travelling the globe. After many years in the catering business and a short stint as manager of The City Tavern Club, he decided his next business adventure would involve more person-to-person interaction. In an interview with Louise Brodnitz, John tells about his career in the Georgetown real estate business and shares many stories about catering parties for the political elite...
Page Wilson
Page Wilson has lived in the same house on Q Street for over fifty years. Raising four children and three step-children with her second husband, she explains that they rented the house next door and cut a hole in the wall to connect the two to accommodate their newly combined family. In this interview with Joyce Lowenstein, she gives a tour of the neighborhood -- from the sandwich shop on Dent Place owned by Mrs. Rosen, a Lithuanian immigrant, -- to the drug store near Potomac Street where her...
Ray Kukulski
Ray Kukulski moved to Georgetown as a young naval officer in 1967 with a few of his naval buddies and the group rented a house between M Street and the Potomac. After more than forty years of living in “lower Georgetown,” Ray has witnessed the massive changes that have occurred on the waterfront. When he arrived, the waterfront was mostly industrial: Geller’s lumber yard, the Flour Mill, Washington Gas and Light Company, and other offices littered the Potomac shores. Ray has since become a...