SUNDAY, MAY 30, 2010
KLMNO
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C3
Personal transit quest in the blogging era
metro from C1
JOHN KELLY’S WASHINGTON
Next stop on D.C. history tour: A 1950s official song contest
can make it in New York, New York, you can make it anywhere. And Washington? What songs spring to mind when you think of our city? Last week, Answer Man wrote
Y
about two Washington songs from the 1920s that were once popular here. Today, he looks at a pair of more recent songs. The fact that you probably haven’t heard either one underscores the difficulties composers have when celebrating our fair city. Both tunes stem from 1951, a banner year for Washington songwriting. Why? It was the year that local businessman James H. Simon had a letter published in The Washington Post. Simon, a native Washingtonian, said he went to conventions around the country where the practice was for attendees to stand and sing as a band played the song commemorating their state. The bands never played a Washington song, and he didn’t like having to choose between “Maryland, My Maryland” and “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny.” Wrote Simon: “I have become quite used to taxation without representation, but I am getting quite tired of posing as an adopted son and using Maryland or Virginia as my excuse for being born in Washington.” He proposed a song contest. And since Simon just happened to be the local distributor for Motorola products, he offered to supply the prizes as well. The Post endorsed the idea and kicked things off by commissioning a series of articles from musicologist Sigmund Spaeth on the state songs of America. Contestants were welcome to write original music, but The Post also provided a list of 91 public domain songs whose melodies could be borrowed, from “Auld Lang Syne” to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” Entrants were encouraged to play up one or more of the things Washington is known for: avenues, parks, stately trees, historic shrines, monuments and museums, and the “happy balance of gayety and seriousness among diplomats from every country on the globe and residents representing every corner of our own United States.” By the deadline, 3,628 entries had been received. The winner, as chosen by a team of judges that included the conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and the leader of the U.S. Marine
ou can leave your heart in San Francisco. Chicago can be your kind of town. If you
Band, was “Washington,” by Jimmie Dodd, a 41-year-old singer-actor who lived in Hollywood. “Washington,” the song began, “the fairest city in the greatest land of all,/ Named for one, our country’s father who first answered freedom’s call.” Dodd came to the District to claim his $1,000. The backlash began almost immediately. The rival Washington Daily
News noted that a later verse in Dodd’s song included the lines “Ole Stonewall Jackson and Franklin and Clay / All march side by side through our mem’ries today.” The paper pointed out that Benjamin Franklin never visited Washington (he died 10 years before it was founded) and Stonewall Jackson fought against the Union. Sheet music omitting those verses was printed in The Post and distributed to D.C. schools. Local real estate man James L.
Dixon (husband of astrologer Jeanne Dixon) wasn’t satisfied with the judges’ decision. His entry, “The District of Columbia Is My Home Town,” didn’t even make the top five, but in 1956, he managed to get the Federation of Citizens Associations to recommend it be adopted formally. Dixon’s chorus went “Proud to say, the District of Columbia is my hometown. / Yes sir! I’m proud to say the District of Columbia should wear a crown.”
Hometown. Crown. Greatest land of all. Answered freedom’s
call. You see the problem with writing a song about Washington: Most composers open a civics book for inspiration. Patriots, marble halls, freedom. Sure, those things have a place in Washington, but are they really what we Washingtonians think about, want to sing about? Dixon’s song gained no official
status. As far as Answer Man can tell, Dodd’s “Washington” remains the city’s official song. In 1955,Dodd became the host of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” The theme song to that show is one of the 525 songs that he composed. He died in 1964. To see and hear Blake High
School’s Revelations chorus singing the Dodd and Dixon songs, go to
washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
Finally, Answer Man wonders:
Is it time for a new Washington song contest?
For a copy of the lyrics and sheet music to the Dixon song, write
kellyj@washpost.com, with “Dixon Score” in the subject line.
REGIONAL BRIEFING
MARYLAND
Sexual assault near Metro station
A teenager was sexually as- saulted on a footpath near the Greenbelt Metro station Friday evening, transit police said Satur- day. The girl was leaving the station when a man tried to talk to her, followed her on the path leading to a neighborhood and attacked her, Metro police said. The police described her attack- er as a heavy-set man in his 30s with dark curly hair, and dark, reddish complexion. He wore a blue shirt, bluejeans and had a tattoo of a snake on his left arm.
—Fredrick Kunkle
Fatal stabbing in Anne Arundel
WALT DISNEY PHOTO LIBRARY
Out of 3,628 entries in a contest to create an official song for the District, the winner was Jimmie Dodd’s “Washington.”
LOTTERIES
May 29
DISTRICT
Mid-Day Lucky Numbers:
Mid-Day D.C. 4: Mid-Day DC-5:
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Day/Pick-3:
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1-8-19-20-34 5-4-9 N/A
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3-11-20-29-39 **26 N/A
*Bonus Ball **Mega Ball ***Powerball †Hot Ball ‡Free Ball All winning lottery numbers are official only when validated at a lottery ticket location or a lottery claims office. Because of late drawings, some results do not appear in early editions. For late lottery results, check
www.washingtonpost.com/lottery.
A52-year-old woman died from stab wounds suffered early Satur- day, and Anne Arundel County Po- lice are looking for a suspect who may have targeted her, officials said. A 25-year-old acquaintance of
the victim was also stabbed, but he was treated and released from
ANIMAL WATCH
‘Ugly duckling’ finds a home
K ST. NE, 1100 block, May 6. A woman took a 4-month-old York- shire terrier to the Washington Animal Rescue League to be made available for adoption. She said she had bred a litter and sold all the puppies except for the one, which she couldn’t sell because it was the “ugly duckling.” The pup- py was adopted 12 days later.
Among cases handled by the
Washington Animal Rescue League
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a local hospital.
About 2:40 a.m. Saturday, offi- cers were called to the 8000 block of Corkberry Lane in Pasadena for a disturbance. They arrived to find the two victims lying in a parking lot, police said.
Witnesses described seeing an
altercation in the parking lot be- tween both victims and a black male suspect, who was last seen leaving the area in a gray car occu- pied by a white female. No further description of the
suspects was provided. Officers ask that anyone with information contact Det. Jason DiPietro at 410-222-3415 or call a general number for Anne Arundel police at 410-222-8610.
—Dan Morse
Station “is quite boring, aside from a lame piece of artwork at the top of the escalators.” Washingtonians’ stormy rela- tionship with Metro provides fod- der for a dozen or so active blogs, including Unsuck DC Metro, Great- er Greater Washington, DCist, Why I Hate DC and The Washington Post’s Get There.
Personal odyssey
What makes Hall’s different is its personal odyssey. She is just as like- ly to mention a favorite shoe store along a bus route as she is an up- date on the transit agency’s budget woes. There have been other Metro quests. In 2001, a Silver Spring man became the first person to ride the entire Metrorail system, then 103 miles, in one day. One year later, a District man fulfilled a dream of jogging to his Columbia Heights home from every Metrorail station. But Hall is one of the first to bring personal transit ambitions, once covered solely by the main- stream media, into the age of daily blogging. She said she criticizes Metro when necessary — buses that don’t show up, maddening Farecard machines that don’t ac- cept the same Sacagawea dollar coins that they spit out in change — but also hopes to broaden readers’ transit horizons. “You can be mad at Metro all the time — that’s easy — or you can have fun with it, find alternate commutes and provide useful in- formation,” she said. Metro spokesman Steven Tau- benkibel said Metro-Venture is one of the 15 blogs that Metro officials follow. “We monitor blogs daily and
have staff dedicated to respond to their inquiries,” Taubenkibel said via e-mail. “To that end, we have in- vited many of them in to meet with our general manager, and we plan to continue that initiative as well.” Hall, who works full time man- aging the United Service Organiza-
TRACY A. WOODWARD/THE WASHINGTON POST
Blogger Em Hall aims to experience all of the Metro system — rail, buses, suburbs and city — in a year.
tions (USO) Web site, said she has “a few hundred” readers each week on her Metro blog, which she con- siders “awesome” months.
after four
She adds new bus and train rides while commuting between her Northwest Washington apart- ment and her Arlington office, tak- ing a lunch break (as she did Thursday for her bus trip to East Falls Church) or meeting up with friends. Reaching far-flung bus routes and those that run only dur- ing rush hours will likely require vacation time, she said. She doesn’t carry a map, part of
her “self-imposed adventure” of boarding a bus or train and seeing where it takes her. She also doesn’t take notes, preferring to rely on impressionistic memory. “It’d be like ‘tweeting’ about it as
I went along,” Hall said. “I might miss something.”
‘Transportation geek’
A self-described “transportation
geek,” Hall said she has never owned a car, both to help the envi- ronment and save money. Even more striking: The blogger doesn’t own a cellphone. She said she passed up an iPhone from her em- ployer 10 months ago after she’d lost one and broken another. She got a land line at home mostly to appease her parents in Indianapo- lis. As a Web professional who blogs in her free time, she said, she needs the techno-break.
“Once you put your phone down and start looking around on the bus, you realize everyone is buried in a phone,” she said. She said she detects snobbery among many Metrorail riders toward buses, which she thinks are underused in a region where rail has relatively limited reach. One of the biggest differences she sees are
bus riders who are often chatty, while train passengers tend to hide behind newspapers and zone out on iPods. Her biggest gripe with Metro:
“When something happens and they don’t tell you what it is,” she said.
But Hall said she also has come to appreciate how difficult it must be to maintain such a vast system. She praises Metro employees who clean up passengers’ garbage and endure abusive tirades. “Metro does, indeed, suck sometimes,” Hall has blogged, but overall she thinks it’s a pretty good deal. “The fact that I don’t have to own a car and someone else can get me someplace every day,” she said, as she rode the Orange Line back to her office after her mid- day bus ride, “that’s pretty awe- some.”
shaverk@washpost.com
Amber Alert in Stafford Co. after incident at shopping center
by Martin Weil
An Amber Alert was issued Sat-
urday in connection with what seemed to be an apparent ab- duction of a female teenager from a shopping center in Staf- ford County, an event that was captured on a startling surveil- lance tape. The video shows three people
struggling to force the apparent victim into a sport-utility vehicle just outside a store in the shop- ping center at 11:26 a.m.
At one point in the video, which was posted on the You- Tube site, a woman with a shop- ping bag walks toward the strug- gling group, then seems to shift her path slightly to avoid them. The Amber Alert said the ap- parent abduction victim, a 17- year-old African American girl, was taken by a man and two women, who may be in a green 1998 Dodge Caravan with a Rhode Island license tag of 984610.
According to the alert, the ap- parent victim, described as 5-
feet-7, about 140 pounds with brown eyes, “was seen being forced into the vehicle.” The apparent victim was not
identified. The shopping center is north- west of Fredericksburg. Persons with information about the in- cident are asked to contact the Stafford County Sheriff ’s office at 540-659-2020 or the Virginia State police at 800-822-4453. In the surveillance tape, a van is seen driving from the parking lot onto the roadway that runs in front of the store. The van turns
to the right and stops. Seconds later, the apparent victim walks along the same route. The male driver gets out and comes around the side of the van toward the teenager. She turns to the left, away from him. But a woman who has apparently been follow- ing the teen on foot joins the man in grabbing her.
A second woman emerges from
the van, and the three people pull the struggling apparent victim about 10 yards to the van and wrestle her inside.
weilm@washpost.com
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