When I joined MITRE in 1965, my officemate was a knowledgeable, urbane guy. A Harvard graduate, he had worked in the aerospace industry in California before returning east. He had a big house, furniture, a lovely wife, kids, a dog, a cat, and fish. But then, he was an old guy – he was 35!
One day he told me there were too many distractions around the house and since he didn't think anyone would take the kids, asked if we would adopt the cat.
We had a nice two-bedroom garden apartment with balcony on Lee Highway – the old part that doesn't have much traffic – about a mile from Washington-Lee High School where Betty Lou taught, and about twenty minutes from MITRE's location, at that time on the corner of Carlyn Springs Road and Columbia Pike.
One August Betty Lou was having a shower for a friend who was getting married, and they noticed that it was getting uncomfortably warm. We have the fan on all the time to keep the air circulating, so it wasn't obvious that the air conditioning had stopped working.
We called the property manager, who lived in a high rise down the hill behind us on Old Dominion Drive. He asked if there was a lamp on under the thermostat! I assured him that, as an electrical engineer, I knew that either refrigerant had to be added or the compressor would have to be replaced.
He said it was impossible to get anyone for such a small unit (in a closet at the end of the balcony) during a heat wave, so he sent a plumber. He washed the coils and changed the air filter, but that didn't solve the problem.
When we next complained, he again sent the plumber, who bypassed the circuit breaker that was causing it to shut down when the load got to be too much with some REALLY BIG fuses.
I didn't think that was a reasonable solution, an opinion with which the Arlington County electrical inspector agreed, so the plumber restored things. By this time, the worst of the heat wave had passed, and the air conditioner was able to cope. I complained and tried to withhold some rent for the time we were without air conditioning, but the property manager said he had tried his best.
The next spring, I sent him a letter saying that the air-conditioning had not been fixed the previous year, and we were giving him adequate notice so, if it wasn't repaired we would have grounds for withholding rent.
He came in one day when we weren't there, found that we had a cat, which wasn't permitted by the lease and, instead of repairing the air conditioner, evicted us! I've often wondered how the next tenant fared.
So we started looking around. A high rise down the street had a balcony with a nice view of DC, but when we started looking for the two bedrooms we had requested, realized they had shown us an efficiency! I have no idea why they wasted both their and our time.
Hearing of our plight, a colleague of Betty Lou's at school said she had a friend who was a realtor, and perhaps he could find us an apartment. He surprised us by saying he had a house that would cost less than we were paying for rent.
Our meeting at the house was like something out of a James Bond movie – it was 10:30 on a Sunday night, and he blinked his headlights so we'd know it was him. The two-bedroom house was several blocks from our apartment, on 16th street, even closer to our jobs. It was on a narrow lot but had a large screened porch overlooking a long back yard with a raised bed at the end, populated by a variety of flowers, thanks to the assistance of the next-door neighbor who was a gardener for the DC Parks Department.
We could assume the owner's VA mortgage for the really low rate at the time of 4-1/4%, and the payments actually would be less than our current rent. However, we were concerned about the big debt we were taking on – $22,000!
Air conditioning was provided by two window units, but fortunately, Betty Lou's colleague also had a handyman friend who installed central air. The neighbor on the other side was a house painter who lent me some tools to scrape the front door before applying a glossy Chinese Red finish.
In 1971, after teaching for six years, Betty Lou was awarded a sabbatical to earn a master's degree in Reading Education. One of the best schools in the country happened to be Syracuse University, and I took a leave of absence, and we returned to my alma mater.
She received a fellowship covering tuition and fees and a $400 a month tax-free research assistantship with a leader in the field. Since she was also receiving her regular salary and we had rented our house, my difficulty in finding work in a depressed job market wasn't that serious. (The second digression in the story of my 1960 summer employment refers to one of the jobs I was able to land.) In fact, our being able to afford to bring a half-gallon of wine to parties made us popular among the other graduate students.
When we returned, we found that the modern kitchen of our Syracuse apartment had spoiled us, so we started looking for an upgraded house. Betty Lou scoured the real estate ads, and she soon knew the market cold. Some houses we visited we thought were quite nice until we realized that we couldn't afford them. However, that turned out to be fortunate.
One realtor had called Betty Lou several times until she finally told him that she knew everything that was advertised, and not to call unless he had something she wouldn't know about. One cold, rainy Tuesday in mid-January he did call her, after an agents' walk-through, and told her he had found the house. She wasn't feeling well and asked him to tell her where it was so she could drive by. When she did, she called me about it. I wasn't feeling that great either, but she said we really should both see it.
We went that evening with the realtor, took a quick look around, and said, "Let's buy it!" particularly since the price, $59,500, was at least $10,000 under market value at the time. The owner had contracted with a friend who had recently retired from the military and become a realtor. He was still learning and obviously hadn't been keeping up with price increases.
It was a rambler with three bedrooms on the entry-level – one of which had been converted to a den – and two baths. It had a separate kitchen, living, and dining room, a carport, and a screened porch that overlooked the back yard. The appliances were all new, and in fact, most of them are still in place and working more than 40 years later. (The furnace, air conditioner, and roof have been replaced several times.)
The lower level was a walkout basement, which, except for the utility room and shop, was finished, and included a large rec room, two bedrooms, and bath. In fact, the daughter of the owner had been living there with her baby while her husband was stationed away on business. There were corner fireplaces on both levels.
The lot was the best on the block. Arlington has many rolling hills, something I quickly realized when we returned from Germany and I started bicycling around the area, as I was accustomed to doing while we were there. Houses across the street are at the bottom of a hill, and some suffer from water problems. This house was on a bit of a rise, and just behind the back of the lot, which is nearly at the McLean boundary (in fact, by leaning over the back fence, one can view in an adjacent yard one of the original DC boundary markers placed by George Washington), the land drops off again to the street below. So the view to the rear, including from the screened porch, is of the tops of houses when the foliage is not otherwise obscuring them.
The house on one side is down the hill and configured as a split level. The one on the other side is on a corner lot with no private backyard. So it looked like we had really lucked out again!
Several offers had already been made. However, the owner was a careful man who was turning 65 in May and didn't want to settle until then – in those days there was a tax advantage when you turned 65. The other bidders wanted a quicker closing, but it was fine with us. In the meantime, we might be able to save enough of a down payment to be able to keep our other house. Unfortunately, we needed 20% down, and we were still well short of the $12,000 at settlement.
So now we had to get our house ready to sell. We finished some long-delayed projects, installing vinyl tiles in the kitchen, a bath/shower surround, and new vanity and wallpaper in the bathroom. Our realtor was very clever, advertising Breakfast With Tulips. This was in the spring, the tulips were blooming in the raised bed in the back yard, and the weather was pleasant enough to have breakfast on the screened porch.
A few made offers that weren't serious, but finally one arrived who was very interested. He was an Army captain, but needed income from his photography practice to qualify for the $42,000 loan. (We were aware of the increase in real estate prices!) Our unfinished basement was perfect for a darkroom but he was concerned about whether it was dry. He said he couldn't believe how many houses he'd seen that had water damage from recent heavy rains. Some even had paneling with water stains up the wall.
Evidently, our house had previously had similar problems because we had noticed new concrete around the periphery of the basement floor. At some time in the past, a French drain had been installed – the concrete had been jackhammered up and gravel and drain tiles installed before being covered with new concrete. Water pressing against the foundation as well as from the downspouts went through the drain tiles and exited into the street storm sewer. That would not be permitted today, but during a heavy rain it sounded like a river raging all around the basement. So that sealed the deal.
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Now, builders are buying homes in our neighborhood for $1,000,000, demolishing them, and erecting $2,500,000+ McMansions. The process of one such conversion across the street is shown here. As the realtors say, it's all Location, Location, Location – they advertise One traffic light to D.C. That's by the nearest bridge, which is still over five miles from downtown. However, another route provides access to four much closer bridges with only three traffic lights on the way.
That's not to say it's an easy commute even from here, but it can be an hour shorter during rush hour than from farther-out locations. Fortunately, our commutes were always in the opposite direction – and didn't require crossing the Potomac.
We were perfectly happy in our two-bedroom apartment with balcony on Lee Highway, but our eviction put us in the market before the really rapid run-up of prices. Who knows where we would be today if we hadn't done a friend a favor and adopted his cat?
Maybe there is something to karma!