Chapter 9: The Foggy Bottom Foghorn
In the southeast corner of the intersection of 21st and G Streets in Northwest Washington stands a reddish brown brick townhouse that was built in the 1920's during one of the many periodic booms in the history of Foggy Bottom. The sign over the door says "Quigley's Pharmacy", but there is no pharmacy within. The sign stays to recall some pervious tenants and the fact that Foggy Bottom is, as it were, a fertile site for cultural archeology. Many layers of history exist simultaneously. And as one walks down the street, one might encounter artifacts from the most current layer of culture juxtaposed with exposures and outcroppings from any number of previous layers.
This particular townhouse is the home and offices for the Foggy Bottom Foghorn, an editorial establishment whose sole purpose is the construction and maintenance of the social and cultural identity of the area of Washington DC know as Foggy Bottom. The Foghorn publishes a local newspaper that bears its name, and also produces a number of pamphlets, booklets, editorials and other materials that serve to promote its mission. The following pages provide a number of those works.
But written works alone never tell the whole story. They are artifacts of a time. We cannot dig up a piece of antique pottery and say what motivated the people who made the pottery. We cannot say what conflicts were experienced by the people who used the pottery. We cannot say if the loss of the pottery, when it was broken, was significant to anybody. Lives were lived all around the use of that pottery, but all we have left is the broken shard. And from that we attempt to know, almost futilely, what those lives were like. It is like finding a scrap of paper with a few words from a mystery story and trying to infer, from that, what the mystery story was about. No, written works are never enough.
The Foggy Bottom Foghorn is both an editorial establishment and a mission - a mission that resulted from the convergence (or possibly the collision) of the live of three people. Maxwell Trent, Nathaniel Higgins and Sally Meyers. We will learn more about these people as their narrative proceeds. But for now, suffice it to say that an identity crisis led Maxwell Trent to Higgins and Meyers, and those meetings led to a coalescence of purpose for these three people.
We can see Maxwell Trent standing in front of the editorial offices. He is casually leaning up against the brick doorframe smoking a meerschaum pipe, which has become a rich honey brown from usage. He is wearing khaki tan gabardine slacks with brown tassel loafers buffed to a high shine. His jacket is a traditional brown herringbone with suede patches on the elbows. His pipe and patched elbows give him a somewhat academic look and this is not entirely misleading. He teaches a class now and then at The George Washington University which surrounds the Foghorn offices and largely devours its corner of Foggy Bottom. But Trent's real, or should we say remunerative, occupation is not as an academic. He is a consultant in technology transfer for the World Bank which is located just a few blocks away also in Foggy Bottom. Trent's office occupies the entire first floor of the townhouse but he still steps out to smoke his pipe, largely out of courtesy for the other inhabitants and occasional visitors.
The second floor of the townhouse is occupied by Sally Meyers, the founder of the Foggy Bottom Historical Preservation Society. Sally can only be described as always being there fully in the moment. While Maxwell could be described as 'youngish', no word that comes to mind seems fit Sally. She is far too dignified to be in her thirties or forties and far to vibrant to be in her fifties or sixties. Any attempt to guess an age is met immediately with contradictory evidence of some sort. She is, as they say, timeless. But age is not the only mystery about Sally Meyers. She is rumored to have more money than Bill Gates, but this cannot possibly be true. Her late husband was a real estate developer in Washington during the real estate boom of the 1960's and 1970's. He is said to have pulled out exactly at the peak leaving others to fund the subsequent decline in values and glut on the market. The story goes, and nobody has any idea if it is true, that the Myers fortune sat in bonds until the late 1980's when the stock market crashed. On dark day in 1986, the market lost thirty percent of its value. Skittish investors pulled out merely locking in their losses. But Myers saw an opportunity and began cashing in his bonds and using the proceeds to buy equities. The fortune that he had made in real estate then rode the longest bull market in the history of the US stock market to increase many, many times his original investment. At the beginning of the bull market, Myers was wealthy beyond the comprehension of most people. By mid to late 1990's even he couldn't count his money. But speculations take their toll and eventually Dagbert Myers succumbed to the stresses of high risk investing leaving a bubble, on the verge of popping, to his beloved wife Sally. Sally, although a very astute and savvy woman, had very little understanding of Dagbert's speculative portfolio. So after his death, and a respectable period of mourning Sally got down to business. She ordered her broker to sell everything and put the money back into bonds. The broker carried out his orders under great protest and three months later the market crashed again.
The third floor of the townhouse is occupied by Nathaniel "Nate" Higgins. Nate is a tenured full Professor of Victorian Literature at the George Washington University, which leaves him ample time for pursuing all manner of other more interesting activities.
Early in his career he published such page-turners as The Role of the Novel in Catalyzing Social Change, The Novel as Interpretive History, and The Death of the Novel. Higgins intellectual star reached its zenith in the night sky of literary criticism over two decades ago. Apparently, when the novel died, so did Higgins' academic career. Since then he has become a dilettante. He teaches his classes in Victorian Literature, which he had done so many times that he now strolls into the classroom without notes of any kind. He teaches an occasional special topics class or at least attempts to. Usually these classes are canceled due to lack of enrollment. However, the chair of the English Department will let them go if at all possible because the titles are so compelling and suggest a depth in the department that is belied by the dozens of sections of freshman composition.
Recently he co taught a seminar with his colleague Professor Leon Trout on Character Construction in Modern Society. The course attempted to show how each person is the author of their own character and that everybody needs to understand how to construct believable characters if they are to become believable people their selves. Only five people signed up - two with black boots and purple hair, two who apparently had forgotten to take their medication, and one senior who needed three more credits to graduate.
Higgins joined the Foggy Bottom Foghorn because of his belief that literature and journalism were becoming one and the same. The essence of his argument was that journalism focused on facts not meaning, whereas literature focused on meaning not facts. Writing of any kind, Higgins believed, should begin with facts and turn them into meaning. In his role as editor of the Foggy Bottom Foghorn Higgins frequently wrestled with Maxwell and Sally who would like to report the facts alone. For Higgins does not see the world the way it is. He sees interpretations and possibilities. He sees hidden meanings and the footprints of evolving ideas.
But together the staff of the Foggy Bottom Foghorn provides depth, perspective, interpretation, and speculations to the streets and building in the southeast corner of northwest Washington known as Foggy Bottom. The following pages provide some of the pieces they have written and the stories behind some of those pieces. It is a Foggy Bottom (to borrow the words of Michael Eisner) that never was and always will be.