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| 4826 Davenport Street, NW |
I love it when a homeowner in
Washington, DC contacts us to investigate if a rumor they heard from an old
neighbor is really true. Especially if
that involves a famous person, as did the owners of 4826 Davenport Street, who conveyed
with much trepidation that they had heard their house was the childhood home of
the beloved columnist Miss Manners – aka Judith Martin - could it be true? “Anything is possible,” I replied, and we
went to work.
The first thing I investigated was to
find out what her real name was, and approximately how old she was. Then we went to work on the house itself,
when it was built, and creating a successive line of owners or renters. The thought of composing a letter to Miss
Manners left me many sleepless nights: how on Earth does one get it just right?
Typed or hand written?
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| Miss Manners |
The house at 4826 Davenport Street
was by William B. Pichler and William Richmond of the Pichler-Richmond
Construction Company, who received a building permit on October 2, 1936. They listed themselves as the builders, and
William Crusemire as responsible for its design. It was to be constructed for an estimated
cost of $6,000.
An advertisement for the house
appeared in the Washington Post on
January 10, 1937, when it was listed for $11,650.00 by real estate agent
Clifton D. Kelley. Pichler &
Richmond sold the newly completed house on February 10, 1937 to Jacob and Helen
A. Perlman. They obtained a mortgage in
the amount of $9,000, and a second mortgage in the amount of $7,000 that was
due in three years. The Perlman’s would own
the house for the next eighteen years, until 1955.
There was the answer: Miss Manners was born Judith Sylvia
Perlman! But, we had to make sure we had
the correct Perlman family, as there were dozens in Washington at the time. Either way, the Perlman family that purchased
4836 Davenport Street was turning out to be quite interesting.
Jacob Perlman was born on May 10, 1898 in Byalostock, Poland. He immigrated to the United States in 1912
with his father, Mordecai (aka Max) and mother Pauline to Madison, Wisconsin and
became a naturalized citizen in 1918.[1]
They had been invited by their brother Selig, who had already begun a lifelong
academic career at the University of Wisconsin.
Jacob’s WWI Draft card (below), filled out on September 12, 1918
indicated that he was of medium height, slender build, with brown hair and
light colored eyes.[2] He graduated from the University of Wisconsin
in 1919, and spent the next two years as statistician of the New York State Department
of Labor. He was listed as a lodger at
1156 Brookline Avenue in Albany, NY in the 1920 census, and indicated that his
native language was Yiddish.
In 1921, Perlman returned to the University of Wisconsin for
graduate studies and to teach in the Economics Department. He obtained his M.A. in 1922 and his Ph.D. in
1925. Perlman moved to Washington, DC in
1933 as a staff member of the Committee on Government Statistics, and married
Helen Aronson in 1935.
The Perlmans had a son named Matthew Saul and a daughter
Judith Sylvia Perlman who was born on September 13, 1938. Matthew attended Brown University and Harvard
Law School, and eventually became a partner at Arent, Fox.
Judith would marry Robert Gene Martin and indeed would
become famous for her columns and countless books written under the pen name ‘Miss
Manners.’ Growing up, Jacob once asked
his sassy child Judith “How come you’re so upper class and we’re so lower
class, and you're our daughter?”[3]
With that in mind, I penned a letter to Miss Manners once I
found her mailing address – handwritten on heavy cardstock stationery – and asked
about her youth at 4836 Davenport Street.
She responded via a phone call – and was it fun to talk to her about the
house!
In 1943, the Perlman’s took out a classified advertisement
in the Washington Post to seek the
return of a lost sugar ration booklet that had been issued to their daughter
Judith, not unusual despite the fact that she was only age 4 at the time. A 1948 Washington
Post article included Judith among local youth that had collected unused
streetcar tokens for donation to Children’s Hospital.[4]
Judith’s mother Helen had been born in New York City in 1902,
and attended the Maxwell Teacher’s College.
She began her teaching career in the public schools of New York City,
and in the 1940s after moving into 4826 Davenport Street, she became a member
of the Visiting Instruction Corps and taught disabled children in their
homes.
Between 1951 and 1956, Jacob Perlman served as a United
Nations advisor on economics to the governments of Colombia, Greece, Bolivia,
and the Philippines, before joining the National Science Foundation, where he
eventually became the head of the office of Economic and Manpower Studies. It
was living in various foreign countries that daughter Judith credits with
establishing her knowledge and passion of both manners and etiquette.
In an interview in 1984, Judith Martin fondly recalled that
during their time in the Philippines, “My father sat us down, my brother and
me, and said, ‘Children, we have to tell you something. We have reached the
crucial point when the servants outnumber us 2 to 1. It takes a while to get
used to this kind of life. It takes about two minutes. And it takes the rest of
your life to get unused to it.’ ”[5]
Judith began attending Wellesley College before the family
returned from abroad, graduating in 1959.
She married Robert Gene Martin, a graduate of Harvard College as well as
Harvard Medical School.
An article in the November 5, 1984 edition of Time magazine entitled “I Have Ten Forks,” neatly summed up her
early education, career, and social life.
It reads:
…While still a student at Wellesley, where she claimed to have majored
in gracious living, Martin got her first job on the Washington Post. “It was an
accident,” she says. “My parents wanted me to find a summer job, and I thought
the Post would be a safe place to apply, thinking they would never hire me
since I had no experience. They hired me as a copy girl—monotonous work with
terrible hours and featuring a take-home pay of $27.50 a week and the
opportunity to get screamed at a lot.”
Since, “you can’t be young and miserable forever,” as she puts it,
Martin eventually won an assignment to report on the Washington social circuit.
She enjoyed “that nice, healthy vulgarity” of the Lyndon Johnson regime,
particularly when L.B.J. invited her and several other women reporters at a
White House party to come upstairs. “We stayed for two hours, eating popcorn
from a silver bowl, while he swore he had never wanted to be President.”
The Nixons were less amusing. When the White House decreed that
reporters covering Julie Nixon’s wedding reception had to stay outside and rely
on briefings, Martin sneaked in by masquerading as a friend of a bridesmaid.
She subsequently found herself banned from Tricia Nixon’s wedding, but perhaps
that was because she had written that Tricia dressed “like an ice-cream cone.”
The White House announcement explained that “the First Family does not feel
comfortable with Judith Martin.” Remarked Martin’s husband: “I'm scared to live
in a country that's run by a man who's scared by the likes of you.”
Robert Martin, 49, an affable, Harvard-educated physician who does
research in biochemical genetics at the National Institutes of Health, claims
that his own manners have required no polishing during their 25-year marriage
because he was “already perfect when we met, and so was she.” If anyone has the
temerity to address him as Mr. Manners, says Dr. Martin, “I correct them
immediately. I tell them it's Lord Manners, not Mr. Manners.” (The name Miss
Manners derives from a figure in Victorian English folklore who was originally
called Lady Manners. She was conjured up so that when children tried to gobble
all the food on the table, they could be ordered to leave a little bit on the
plate “for Lady Manners.”)
Just as Miss Manners urges, the Martins have reared, educated and
nagged at two children, who appear to have acquired flawless manners. “It's
amazing how much a parent can terrify a child without actually doing anything,”
says Nicholas, 18, a freshman at Harvard. Jacobina, 13, plays the harp and
studies at a private school in Washington. Once when Martin relayed a prying
reporter’s request to interview the whole family at home, Jacobina objected,
“But mother, I wasn't brought up in that manner.”
She was right. Throughout Martin’s gradual self-transformation from an
impudent reporter into a stately personage, she has always maintained a sharp
division between her private and public lives. There is no business entertaining
at her handsome Georgian brick home near the Washington zoo (a hired couple do
the housework), and when she does go out socially, it is usually a family
expedition to the theater or a small dinner with friends. “As a rule, I only go
to the kind of thing I give,” she says, “a dinner where everyone sits down and
has real conversation.” The seating is limited to ten people, since “I have ten
forks of all kinds.”
Having left the Post to live by syndication in 1982, Martin now works
alone in an antique-filled ground-floor office in a town house a ten-minute bus
ride from her home. The bookshelves contain a large collection of etiquette
books, from The Book of the Courtier to Victorian Vista. Martin devotes one day
a week to writing her column on an IBM word processor. Some of her mail, which
may be useful later (she has to work two months in advance), gets saved in
wooden trays with such labels as Weddings, Business or Diverse Civilities;
other letters receive a standard answer in engraved script on cream paper
(“Miss Manners regrets exceedingly . . .”)
The remaining four days Martin devotes to other writing: book reviews,
speeches, a new novel titled Style and Substance. Her first, Gilbert, a rather
arch attempt at a comedy of manners, received generally favorable reviews in
1982. She has also published a collection of newspaper essays, The Name on the
White House Floor (1972).
To those who regard Miss Manners as an eccentric anachronism, Judith
Martin has a contemporary answer. “It would be ridiculous to say that manners
should be static, and we should return to 1948 and behave like that,” she says.
“The world changes and develops. There are lots of new situations.” She has
always been richly prepared for them. Printers at the Post, she recalls, tried
to embarrass her years ago by telling off-color stories. “I'd look right at
them and say, ‘I don't understand it. Could you explain it to me?’ Have you
ever seen a printer blush?”
Judith Martin continues to reside in Washington, DC, and was
the recipient of a 2005 National Humanities Medal from President George W.
Bush. On March 23, 2006, she was a special guest correspondent on The
Colbert Report, giving her analysis of the manners with which the White
House Press Corps spoke to the President. Her advice column is distributed three times a
week by United Features Syndicate and carried in more than 200 newspapers
worldwide. She also produces a column
for the Microsoft Network.
4826 Davenport Street was advertised for sale in the May 1,
1955 edition of the Washington Post (left),
“Priced surprisingly in the twenties.”[6] Later in life, Perlman taught at American and
Catholic Universities, Johns Hopkins University and the University of
Connecticut. He joined the esteemed
Cosmos Club in 1963. Jacob Perlman died
in April of 1968 in Israel while on a celebratory vacation to Greece and Israel
with his wife Helen.[7] He is buried in King David Memorial Park in
Falls Church, Virginia. At the time, he
and his wife Helen resided in an apartment at 2900 Connecticut Avenue, NW.[8]
The Perlmans sold 4826 Davenport Street on September 19,
1955 to William John and Anne L. Middleton.
[1]
1920 census record for Albany, NY, Ward 3, Enumeration District 66.
[2]
Ancestory.com subscription
[3]
“I Have Ten Forks,” Time magazine, November 5, 1984.
[4]
Washington Post, October 20,
1948.
[5]
“I Have Ten Forks,” Time magazine, November 5, 1984. Judith Martin noted to the home owners that
there were minor inaccuracies in the Time
article that “hardly matters.”
[6]
Note that the front entrance in 1955 did not have a small porch constructed
over the doorway.
[7]
“Jacob Perlman Dead; Economist, Educator,” Washington
Post, April 10, 1968, pg. B3.
[8]
In 1968, daughter Judith and her husband resided at 1651 Harvard Street, NW,
while son Matthew lived at 5280 Wisconsin Avenue, NW.
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