Bureau, Hotel, Daycare, Chicken

Three Stories and a Timely Old Video Clip

Washington, DC. Pen-and-ink and watercolor by Jeremy S. Graboyes at JSGraboyes.com.

Here are three favorite family recollections: “Your Tax Dollars at Work,” “When a House Is More than a Home,” and “Before the Era of José Andrés,” plus a timely video clip (“Truer than You Might Think”) for an era of big financial failures. May your Sunday be quiet and comfortable.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

In the 1930s, my father worked for the federal government, ultimately winding up in Washington, DC. For a time, he ran a small office for the Department of Treasury in New Haven, Connecticut.

At some point, the office had become impossibly jammed with filing cabinets, and there was little room for incoming files. So, he undertook a detailed survey of the contents of those cabinets. He determined that a sizable percentage of the documents were obsolete and could be safely discarded.

Dad filled out the detailed forms required by the National Archives before destroying any official documents. He sent his requests off to Washington for approval. After some time, he received a letter approving his plan to destroy the obsolete documents.

But the letter of approval came with one tiny stipulation. For any document destroyed, he would have to make three copies and send those copies to three different bureaus in Washington. Keep in mind that this was 20 to 30 years before photocopiers became readily available. Copying the documents by hand would have been a lengthy, all-consuming task for his staff. So, Dad, creative fellow that he was, simply rented a nearby office (at Treasury expense, of course) and stuffed it full of filing cabinets and their unwanted, unloved contents. He then bought new cabinets for the extant office.

I have half-jokingly speculated (but only half) that, nearly 90 years later, the Treasury Department is probably still paying rent on the cabinet-stuffed office. The documents will next be read when archeologists uncover the building’s ruins in a few millennia.

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Cafritz Mansion / Field School. In public domain from Wikimedia Commons.

When a House Is More than a Home

Here’s another of my father’s stories from that period. Dad’s father came from Eastern Europe around 1890. Within 15-20 years, my grandfather apparently went from penniless to a man of considerable means—owning a hotel, taverns, Turkish baths, and other concerns. Unfortunately, his lifetime of striving crumbled as hard times hit Philadelphia shortly before the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Dad went from being a well-to-do teenager to nearly destitute.

Brilliant though he was, Dad was unable to afford more than one semester of night school at the University of Pennsylvania. Fortunately, he lived in an era when college credentials were not required for success. In Washington, he worked in responsible positions at the Departments of Treasury and Agriculture.

While in Washington, living a spartan life on a government salary and no assets, he somehow fell into the sphere of one Morris Cafritz. Cafritz was one of Washington’s uppermost real estate developers—an immigrant who, like my grandfather, came up from modest circumstances—and climbed far higher than my family ever hoped to. His wife, Gwendolyn was a legendary hostess for the great and powerful in Washington. In that realm, she competed only with Perle Mesta, who was immortalized as “the hostess with the mostest” in the Broadway musical, Call Me Madam. Dad was always grateful that a couple at the very pinnacle of Washington society befriended an impoverished young civil servant from Philadelphia.

In 1938, Dad was invited to a housewarming party for the Cafritz’s new mansion on Foxhall Road in Upper Georgetown—now the campus for the Field School. In 2002, the Washington Post did a feature piece on the house, describing it as follows:

Combining the aesthetics of a French Renaissance chateau with those of an art moderne ocean liner, it's more a period curiosity than a weighty aesthetic treasure.

Dad had a sharp eye for architectural detail. When I was growing up, our house featured stacks of Architectural Forum and Architecture magazines. When he wanted to modernize the little pre-Civil War building where he and Mom had a clothing store, he copied designs from Minoru Yamasaki, who would would later design the World Trade Center towers. But in 1938, looking over Cafritz’s new house, he noticed that the bedrooms were arrayed in some unusual fashion. (If I remember correctly, their doors led directly to the outside rather than onto hallways.) Dad asked Cafritz about it. Paraphrasing:

Morris. Your place is magnificent. But I’ve never seen a house with this sort of layout. Why did you have it built this way?”

Cafritz gave him a surprising answer:

Harold, I’m a Jewish boy from Lithuania. No matter how nicely we’re prospering today, I’m always aware of how quickly things can go awry. If we wake up tomorrow and discover that all our money is gone, I already have permits in place so the house will immediately become be a hotel. With Gwen’s reputation as a hostess, I expect it will be full the moment it opens.

(Caveat: This is a story I heard 40 years or so ago about events that took place 85 years ago. The dialogue and facts are, of course, second-hand memories. So, I can’t verify the facts of the story. But Dad was a reliable fellow, and my recollections are pretty solid.)

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San Sebastián/Donostia, Spain. [Robert F. Graboyes © 1993]

Before the Era of José Andrés

Alanna and I were fortunate in that our son, now in his mid-30s, was an easy child to raise—well-behaved, respectful, interesting. (The snowy scene of Washington atop this column is one of his artworks.) That’s why it was so surprising when a daycare administrator who knew us well called one day to request an immediate face-to-face conference regarding our six-year-old. “Is there a problem?” I asked.

“I would prefer to discuss this in person,” she responded. And so, Alanna and I quickly found time to make our way to the daycare. We seated ourselves before her desk and watched as she interlocked her fingers, took a long, deep breath, and then began to speak.

“Mr. and Mrs. Graboyes,” she said, and then paused for a considerable time … “Is it true that when you took Jeremy to Spain this summer, you took him to topless bars?” Crickets began chirping all around us, and I felt my eyes widening severely. I turned slowly to the right and found that Alanna was turning to the left at precisely the same speed. Our eyes met. Our brows furrowed synchronously. We inhaled in unison.

And then, slowly, my head returned leftward to face the administrator—an ever-so-slight smile appearing on my face. “Ta … pas,” I said, “T … A … P … A … S. Tapas. It’s a Spanish word that means ‘little snacks.’ Tapas. You get them at a tapas bar.”

Her face turned bright crimson—suddenly, as if turned on by a switch. Her cadence switched from dirge to tarantella, from lento to allegretto. “Imsosorry!!!” she said. “Imsoverysorry!!! I apologize. I’m so … so … sorry. Please forgive me.”

Smiling broadly by now, I responded: “Don’t feel bad for even a moment. It’s fine. This meeting will be a story I shall savor forevermore. Thirty years from now, I’ll still be telling this story.”

That was 1993. This is 2023. Prophecy fulfilled.

Lagniappe

Truer than You Might Think

Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank recently collapsed in spectacular fashion. As regulators scurried to clean up the mess, I couldn’t avoid thinking of this South Park clip which came up during the 2008-2009 financial crisis. Warning: this is a little gross in the usual South Park way. However, it is suitable for viewing in the workplace—unless you work at the U. S. Treasury. Well, … if you do work for the Treasury, it’s probably OK to watch it in the cobweb-filled office my father rented in New Haven in the 1930s.

Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.