Clare Tighe Oral History

Clare Tighe is a lifelong Ordway Street resident, gardener to the neighborhood, and owner of the famous orange pickup truck. In this fascinating oral history, she contemplates the changes she’s seen both socially and physically in the neighborhood, reflected even in the residents’ gardens.

Excerpts:

MACLEAN: So, Clare, here we go. Tell me about you and your family coming to Cleveland Park.

TIGHE: We moved to Cleveland Park in 1960, the summer of 1960, in August. My parents had six children, but at that time only four were still living at home. My oldest sister Mary Catherine was married and gone. And my oldest brother Michael was in the Air Force at that point. So, it was my sister Cecily, my twin sister Connie, my brother Jimmy, and me.

TIGHE: And my mother and father who were—actually my mother was a native Washingtonian. My father was born in Scranton but he actually grew up on Porter Street. I’m not—I can’t tell you the exact address. I know the house so I don’t have the address in my head right now, but it’s just a block down the street from here. He remembers as a child. He was born in 1910. He remembers as a child the house that we moved to here on Ordway being built in 1924.

TIGHE: Well let’s see. So, we moved to Cleveland Park and I was seven. And going on eight that fall. And we were enrolled in the Catholic school, Annunciation, which was pretty brand new then on Massachusetts Avenue. My oldest sister was at Notre Dame Academy over by Gonzaga over by Union Station and Capitol Hill. And my father worked for the CIA and my mother was a homemaker but she had been in the first graduating class of dental hygienists from Georgetown University. But she didn’t pursue the career unfortunately. She decided to marry and have children, which women did in those days. Well, let’s see, we moved here and that summer we spent—the children, my sister and Jimmy and—not Cecily who was in high school—we spent it carousing around the neighborhood trying to meet new friends. We had a dog, a Saint Bernard, who was humongous. And we had to walk him. A lot of people in those days didn’t walk their dogs, they let them out of the house off leash. Majority of people did. They ran up and down the streets. The pick-up-the poop law was no longer—wasn’t in effect yet, so you didn’t have to do that.

TIGHE: And Rosedale was a huge part of my childhood because Rosedale then was so much larger. All these houses weren’t built on Rosedale yet, there was the big mansion house, the old one, and the little cottage. And that was it. The Faulkner houses on 36 Street NW weren’t there, those three solars; the other two, the big two; the whole line on Ordway wasn’t there. It was just all grass and fields and boxwood and huge box elder trees, which you hardly ever see anymore. Concord grape arbor. And we played in there all the time. We would play hide and seek and just run around. That’s the way kids were in those days. It wasn’t a scary time and we didn’t have to be hovered over and chauffeured everywhere. We just amused ourselves.

TIGHE: And the neighborhood was different, too. When you went to Connecticut Avenue, the shops were much more, you know, small and personal. There was a dress shop that our neighbors owned, the Smiths, this elderly woman and her daughter, had run for a long time on Connecticut Avenue. There was an appliance store. Not as many restaurants which back then, you know, you had a little...You did have a small grocery store. I think it was the Safeway then. Yeah. We used to call it the “Soviet Safeway” because it had long lines and little selection. And the Giant, of course, had already been built, which was a good thing because that was a popular spot. And People’s Drugstore where the SunTrust Bank is now was a mainstay. It had a lunch counter like the old-fashioned lunch counter, with the black ladies behind with the little caps. You could sit there and get a milkshake, a hot dog, a Cherry Coke. And G. C. Murphy Company was there. That was always fun on Wisconsin Avenue. We would go in there for little sundries and things that you needed all the time, sewing materials or underwear. It just was like a five and dime but it was very handy. Let me think of what else...Oh, and the Cathedral, too. We as children used to go up there and play.

MACLEAN: Was it built already by the time...?

TIGHE:It was still being built. But it was mostly the top level still being worked on and they didn’t object to us running around there, either, like little hoodlums. I mean inside and out. It was fun.

MACLEAN:So, did it still have a country air to it, the neighborhood?

TIGHE:Oh, yes, I think especially with Rosedale there, that always struck me as so bucolic. The split rail fences and the white board fence, the big field, there was that big flat field that was bordering 36th Street NW where the Faulkner, the three white Faulkner solar houses are now that looked just like a pasture and should have had cows on. But it never did.

MACLEAN:Did it have ponies?

TIGHE:Oh, it did, because we discovered that Mrs. Peters and her husband at 36th and Macomb had an Icelandic pony hidden in their backyard in a corral. He was dun-colored, he was wild, his name was Candy Custard, and at the age of nine or ten my sister and my friends and I fell in love with horses. And we were up there every day pestering Mrs. Peters, who had three daughters who weren’t interested in the pony at all, if we could play with the pony. Yes, she said we could play with the pony. He had brushes. He had a bridle. He did have a saddle but we never bothered with it. And she would let us brush him and feed him carrots. And then we would jump on him and ride him around the corral. And in order to get him to canter there was a little dip in the corral headed downhill you had to kick him and head him downhill, and then he’d break into a canter for maybe five steps and then he’d stop. And we were thrilled. So, we kept bothering her and she kept letting us and then pretty soon we started pestering her to let us take him over to Rosedale. Which was a lot of convincing but she finally let us do that, on rare occasions in the summer. We got to ride him in green fields over there which was truly exciting. And there he was crazy because he was so excited to get out. He was galloping and he got to eat grass. He was happy.

TIGHE: [The University Pastry Shop] was my first job. We went and got our work permits when we were 14. Because you were supposed to be 15 I think to be hired, but you could get a work permit at 14 and the Andrascek family who owned that bakery and had for years, Julius Andrascek was the proprietor and his two sons Tom and George helped him. And I’m not exactly sure but I think that bakery opened in the 1940s. He called it “University” because of the American University and—a small bakery, and I was just entering high school and we got a job there and came after school to work behind the counter and make ice cream cones and wait on people, put on our aprons. And they were the nicest men that hired us. They always hired local kids, gave them their first jobs, and they were the sweetest people to work for. And it was a great job, because people came in there, you know people come into a bakery in a good mood, they’re not going to be [laughs]...So. And that was a fun job in high school. We worked Saturdays and after school.

TIGHE: When we moved to our house the I. M. Pei house was being built and we played in the construction site of it all the time. Very famous house. Supposedly the only residence, I believe, that he ever designed. All his other buildings were public and he designed it for William Slayton who was a buddy of his. They I think had worked together in capacity with some other kind of architect-oriented thing. But they were good friends. They used to go to dinner together all the time. But you’ve heard that story about how Mr. Slayton got I. M. Pei to supposedly design his house for him? He kept pestering him and pestering him that he wanted him to give him a design for the house, and supposedly they were at dinner and Pei grabbed a paper napkin and drew it on the paper napkin and handed it to him and said, “Here, Bill, here’s your design.” [laughs] And the story goes that Mr. Slayton took it to an engineer and had him, I mean a builder and had him build it. I don’t know if that’s true. [laughs] But they were a nice family I was good friends with the Slaytons and their children and spent many days helping Mrs. Slayton in her elderly years with her garden, and her dog. And he was quite a character, Mr. Slayton. He always dressed in plaid suits. And every day he had to wear a boutonniere to work. So, one of my jobs when I started gardening for them was to always plant some type of flower in the garden that he could harvest for his boutonniere. And in the winter, he had to have a potted plant like a carnation or something so he could pluck a flower to put in this boutonniere.

TIGHE: [Later,] Tom and George and Mr. Andrascek hired me back and then I started doing cake decorating at the bakery. And the bakery by then was a pretty big institution for birthday cakes for the neighborhood. Everybody used to go there and get their birthday—and the doughnuts were great, and the homemade ice cream, and the doughnut business in the morning was very popular. Doughnuts and coffee, everybody would stop from the neighborhood and get them. He made these delicious cake doughnuts which were so crispy with powdered sugar on them. Did you ever get one of those? Glazed. And he didn’t make a whole lot of different kinds. They were made every morning fried fresh back there. He made a jelly doughnut with cinnamon sugar. He made a whole line of sweet rolls and danish. But the homemade ice cream was their signature. And one year Colman McCarthy who wrote for The Washington Post had written an article in the magazine section of the Post, on a Sunday, with a big picture of an ice cream cone on the front of the magazine about the University Pastry Shop’s fresh peach ice cream that Mr. Andrascek made from fresh peaches. And that article caused the biggest run on our ice cream ever. People were lined up out the door the very next day waiting to get their ice cream. We couldn’t keep up with the ice cream. We couldn’t make enough to—we were just floored. Colman McCarthy then lived on Highland Place, I believe. He was a local. But he launched us into fame. After that our business took off on everything because people discovered us. They had never noticed us there behind the—we were next to the Friendship Flower Shop. We didn’t have a very large sign that caught your eye, and a lot of people came in and said, “I never even knew you were here.” And Mr. Andrascek had a signature mocha cake which was very popular. He made mocha buttercream. He had four layers of cake, toasted almonds on the side. But my job was to decorate the birthday cakes and to draw anything on them that people wanted. And I also, unfortunately, have an artistic bent and I could draw, so I started drawing on the birthday cakes what they wanted for their children you know Smurfs and Snoopy and...freehand. We didn’t do stencil or anything. And then that really took off because I was doing crazy stuff.

TIGHE: Fitzy Carter, who lived at 34th Place and Ordway, asked me to come help her in her garden, because I had gardened at my house and had a little display out front and people knew I liked to garden, but I’d only done my own yard and she always liked what I did and she asked me if I would like—she knew I was out of a job, so she said, “Would you like to come up here and do some and earn some money?” and I said, “Yeah, sure, I’ll try it.” She did it, then Mrs. Slayton who lived at the I. M. Pei house immediately asked me if I would help her, and from there it just kind of steamrolled, because I don’t know if people took pity on me and said, “Oh, this girl needs a job.” But that’s the kind of neighborhood it is. So, everybody kept saying, “Clare, would you like to come work for me?” And I said, “Okay.” And so pretty soon I had a full plate, and it just kind of steamrolled into that.

MACLEAN: I’d love to hear your perspective on the plant life of Cleveland Park when you were young and then how it changed over the decades. For instance, were there more trees in the 1960s then than now? Definitely?

TIGHE: Yes. The big trees, a lot of them have gone now. In the 1960s, of course, as a child, I didn’t really pay attention to yards but the whole atmosphere was much more relaxed and loose and nobody had blowers and edgers and Hispanic teams coming to make everything perfect, and we didn’t have that fixation with mulch, piling it on and piling it on, season after season to choke everything to death. But yes, I think.... Well as you know we’ve lost many trees in storms and our hot droughty summers. The big trees that are even as far up as Warren Street are going, the ones that are the street trees, and the city is replacing them now with the smaller trees, which to me, I don’t see the point. I mean, I know they don’t want to interfere with power lines but those trees are never going to be shade trees. They’re gonna—the cherries, the stewartias, the red buds—they’re gonna be short stubby trees that poke branches into your eyes as you walk down the sidewalk. But I guess they’re trying to plant—and they’re also not that long lived. You don’t see them planting big oaks anymore or tulip trees or sycamores. It’s sad.

TIGHE:But our climate’s changing radically, too, because things that used to thrive in this neighborhood don’t thrive anymore: lilacs, the long hot humid summers, they’re not as lovely and vigorous as they used to be. We used to have cold winters that were evenly cold, all throughout, with a lot of snow, and you didn’t get the fluctuations like we’re having this year, you have zero one week sixty the next week, which is hard on plants. And even the bulbs, tulips in this area because of our hot humid summers aren’t happy. Daffodils aren’t happy as much as they used to be because we don’t have the long hard freezes. Sometimes they’ll come up and not bloom at all. After a cold winter, you’ll see them come up and rebloom. And things like crape myrtles used to be rare up this way. It used to be a rare thing to see a crape myrtle big like the one in front of the Freunds’, but now they’re ubiquitous, they’re everywhere. That used to be a Southern plant. And they used to die. In fact, I lost one or two in my yard in the cold winters that died back to the ground and butterfly bushes were something that were not—of course, that’s a new fixation, the butterfly bush, because it’s supposed to attract butterflies, but they weren’t available for here. And euonymus used to get, ligustrum used to get beaten up bad in the winter. Most people who had euonymus or ligustrum hedges were just resigned to having them be leafless in the spring, and have to wait for them to regenerate. But that doesn’t happen very often anymore either. So, you can really see climate change if you pay attention to gardens.

TIGHE: I have a very stand-out vehicle, an orange truck, my signature. I guess it’s my one claim to fame. But every day—last night I was getting out of it and some man or some young man pulled up in his car and said, “That is an awesome truck.” And then he says...Once a month I get a sign on my windshield underneath the windshield wiper offering to buy that truck but they never tell me how much they want to pay for it but they give me their name and number to call in case I want to sell it. But I don’t.

MACLEAN: Well, do you plan to live forever in your house?

TIGHE: I do. I hope. I do. I have plans to live to at least a hundred.

MACLEAN: Oh, at least.