
Introduction.
In late 2021, I had the privilege of interviewing David Edward Hummer about his experiences growing up in the Vienna area (see Figures 1 & 1b). When Mr. Hummer was born–in Washington, DC at the Columbia Hospital for Women (see Figure 2)– Herbert Hoover was president. Until 1940, Mr. Hummer lived on the west side of Beulah Road just north of the Town of Vienna. For a few years after that, he maintained a direct family connection to the area. Mr. Hummer’s blood relations include families that feature prominently in the history of the Vienna area: the Clarke, Follin, Millard, and Pearson families, in addition to the Hummers. His memories give us a firsthand perspective into what it was like to grow up as a boy in the Vienna area some 80-85 years ago. With that context, let’s look at the activities and events, people and places of a Vienna-area boyhood circa the ‘30’s and early ‘40’s, courtesy of Mr. Hummer’s reminiscences, collaboration with his family, and some research in response.

As a boy, Mr. Hummer was known to family and friends as “Eddie.” Thus when referring to Mr. Hummer as a child, this article uses his boyhood nickname.

The House.
Through the fifth grade, Eddie and his parents lived at his grandparents’ house on the west side of Beulah Road. His grandparents were Ira David “Dave” Hummer and Ada Frances Pearson Hummer (see Figure 2a). After the fifth grade, he maintained a connection to the area for a few years by virtue of his grandmother’s continued residence at the property. The grandparents’ house was the farmhouse that until a decade ago sat on what is now the Embassy Court III subdivision (see Figures 3 and 4).



Grandparents Ada and Dave Hummer owned 30 acres on the west side of Beulah Road (see Figure 5) that today constitute the Beulah Terrace and Embassy Court subdivisions (Delancey Drive, Grand Court, the 1900 block of Abbotsford Drive, Windsor Hunt Court, and an individual property) (see Figure 6).


About the house itself, Mr. Hummer explains: “Off to the right was a parlor and a piano. And that’s where they laid out….my grandfather [Ira David Hummer] when he passed on.” (Ira David Hummer died in 1940). Upstairs and to the right, Eddie and his parents had the biggest bedroom. To the left of the stairs were two other bedrooms, which his grandparents rented out to boarders, and a bathroom, presumably the only one on the floor for the five inhabitants.
Sports!

Grandmother Ada Hummer could be particular—“she had a reputation about being very fastidious.” Mr. Hummer doesn’t begrudge her for it, given that it was her house. Nonetheless, “if the weather was bad, I was in,” to avoid tracking a muddy mess inside. But if the weather wasn’t bad and Eddie was outside, there was a good chance he’d be playing sports. “I played a lot of baseball and fall sports….I liked sports. I played them all,…football, basketball, baseball…But I didn’t play soccer” (see Figure 6b).
The importance that sports had for the then-youngster comes through when as a senior citizen he makes reference to various properties in the area. “We played baseball up near the Willis’s; they had in the back a vacant lot up there” (see Figure 7). On the Louk property, he and the two Louk boys would “toss a ball and play catch” (see Figures 8 & 9). The northeast corner of Center Street and Maple Avenue was owned by Doc Bradfield. “He had a nice, level lot. Very pretty, right next to the store [Bradfield’s pharmacy], where my mother, Marie Clarke Hummer, worked at the soda fountain. We played a little football, tossed a football around there” (see Figures 10, 10b, and 10c).






With sports can come the disappointment of losing, but an even greater disappointment is being unable to play when you’d like to. When recounting his teachers at Vienna Elementary School through the 5th Grade, Mr. Hummer discusses such an episode, involving his attempt to play on the school’s baseball team. “Miss [Helen] Quigg (see Figure 11). She was good…She was the woman I wanted to play for. She was also …a trained athlete. But I had to give a note and I wrote the note and forged Mama’s name to it. She called Mother and Mother said she didn’t sign anything. So when I get back to school, I thought ‘Well, I’ve [made] Vienna’s baseball team.’ And she says, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t play.’ Broke my heart. I like baseball.”

His baseball experience at the Vienna School on Center Street during summer vacation must have been less frustrating. “In the summertime, we used to go down to the school. They had a teen club they opened in the basement. It was hot. We’d go down there and we’d play baseball. In the summer, for kids, to keep them out of the street” (see Figures 12 & 13).

Eddie also enjoyed sports as a spectator. For baseball, his team was the Washington Senators, of course. In the pre-war years, a favorite player was Washington’s Cecil Travis. (Travis was among those baseball players who lost several years of their prime playing period so they could serve the country during WWII).

It’s as a football fan, however, that Mr. Hummer remembers a key event in World War II. This was in the period after he had moved out of his grandmother’s house outside Vienna but she remained there. He was at Griffith Stadium (where Howard University Hospital now stands) for what the NFL records as the Washington Redskins’ final regular-season game in an early-1940s season. Washington scored twice against the Philadelphia Eagles in the fourth quarter for a come-from-behind victory, according to NFL records. As exciting as those developments must have been at the time, they aren’t what Mr. Hummer recalls when we talk, 80 years and one day after the event. Instead, he remembers what seemed to be the oddly frequent paging of Army and Navy officers over the stadium’s loudspeaker during the game, asking these men to report to the box office. Because, as he only learned afterwards, while it was the afternoon in DC on December 7th, 1941, in Hawaii it was the morning, and at the game’s 2PM kickoff in Washington the Japanese were more than an hour into their attack on Pearl Harbor. (The famous Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich featured this game and the mysterious paging in his column in 1941 and in a retrospective 50 years later).
During wintertime, a favorite activity for Eddie wasn’t quite a sport but was outdoors nonetheless. “We liked the snow because we could sleigh-ride,” Mr. Hummer responds when asked about snowstorms from his youth. On the south side of the Hummer property, in the direction of the Town, the Heath family were the nextdoor neighbors. (The Heath’s 12 acres were what is now the Talisman Court subdivision, comprising a portion of Talisman Drive west of Beulah Road, most of Quartet Circle, and several properties on Beulah Road itself) (see Figure 14). The Heath’s “had a nice slopin’ lot,” Hummer says in his Virginia drawl. “Behind the barn, in the Christmastime, that’s where we’d spend a lot of sleigh-riding. Had to duck though, because a barbed wire fence [was] down at the bottom of it!…”

Fun & Adventures With Warren Heath and His Family.
Eddie Hummer’s sleigh-riding partner was Warren Heath (see Figure 15).

“He was my best friend. He lived in the house next to me. [Through] the apple orchard and then over the fence was Warren” (see Figure 16). “Warren Heath’s father brought home cheese boxes” for the boys, who would use the boxes to play cars (see Figure 17). (Paul Heath Sr. worked in the meatpacking industry, according to census records). “Outside their house was a big tree, a big oak tree; provided a lot of shade. We’d make roads out of what Mr. Heath had brought home, cheese boxes. We’d scrape a road [with the ends of the cheese boxes] and that way we could run our cars down it.” The two boys would also do this at the post office in town. “There’s a path that goes from Beulah Road, through the woods, and comes out in Vienna…[We’d] come out here on the edge of Vienna, and then walk a little bit and go down the hill,” referring to the drop in elevation from the vicinity of today’s Park Street NE towards Mill Street (see Figure 18). “That’s where the post office was,” Mr. Hummer notes, referring to Bouton’s Hall, which still stands—albeit not as a post office—at the corner of Church and Mill, NW. “We played underneath the post office porch,….there were lots of stairs to get up to the porch” referring to the stairs that today are enclosed and in a different position but back then had an open, accessible space underneath (see Figures 19 & 20). “And underneath of it we’d sit and we played, and we played with cars,” with the help of Paul Heath’s cheeseboxes.



In Figure 19, an 1894 image of Bouton Hall, the space under the righthand portion of the porch is open (see the dark spaces separated by the corner support pillar).

The boys also played at Wolftrap Creek on the stretch that Foxstone Park now straddles. Mr. Hummer remembers that the Shockey’s lived between the Hummer’s and the creek, and as a boy he made many trips by foot and by bike from his house, across Beulah Road, and down the long lane to the Shockey residence to run things back and forth for his grandmother and a woman that he remembers as Florry Shockey. To play at the creek, he and Warren would pass through the Shockey’s back field, and then navigate a barbed wire fence, putting them about 20 yards from the creek and its minnows for catching (see Figure 21).

In one summertime incident as the boys were at the creek, Eddie was in the water backing up when Warren admonished, “Don’t back up any more.”
“What’s the matter?” Eddie asked.
Warren responded, “Look over your shoulder. Eeaaasy….”
Mr. Hummer recounts: “I looked over my shoulder, and there’s this water moccasin smiling at me.” The snake dropped from the tree and into the water, but it didn’t survive the encounter and ended up as a trophy of sorts posted on the Shockey’s barbed wire fence, which was considered good luck.
In the opposite direction of the creek, that is to the west, the boys played at “Black Pond.” To illustrate “the kind of mischief we got into,” Mr. Hummer tells a story about one adventure at Black Pond. He confesses, “I was stupid enough to make a raft,” and he and Warren sailed it across Black Pond, despite not knowing how deep the water was. “We made it.” Mr. Hummer recalls that Black Pond was somewhere to the west of the W&OD railroad, but he doesn’t know exactly where and has been disappointed about its absence from several books he’s consulted about Vienna.
Some post-interview digging reveals that Black Pond was adjacent to the west side of the W&OD, just south of where the current Abbottsford Drive ends at the bike trail. It would be at the low ground of today’s Barrister’s Place subdivision, between Center Street NW and the subdivision’s northeastern boundary (see Figure 22). Deeds from 1892 and 1931 make reference to a “Black Pond” at this location (see Figure 23). Topographical maps and Fairfax County aerial images from the 1930s to the 1960s show a pond at the site (see Figures 24 & 25). The 1968 plat for Barristers Place shows a flood plain easement at the site. Our pond of interest also shows up as “Black’s Pond” in a 2011 Vienna Connection article, “Vienna the Way It Was,” featuring the recollections of longtime residents, although the story doesn’t give a sense of the location of the pond.




Not all the fun with Warren was outdoors, and the Heath household was a good place for indoor play. Eddie was very fond of the family. “The Heaths were very nice folks. I spent a lot of time with them, even in the Christmas time. They had a tree and I would go down there and play on the floor….And Warren and I would play with a farm set, all the animals.” (One of the Heaths’ sons, John, was killed in action in the Pacific theater during WWII).
Kids being kids, Eddie and Warren on occasion would be at odds with each other. “Typical boys…we argued sometimes. One time I got mouthy, and I called Warren a name. He told his mother. And his mother called my mother. I soon learned what the meaning of ‘soma’bitch’ was. I should never have called Warren a son of a bitch.”
“My mother says, ‘Okay, you’re not supposed to say that. That’s not nice.’
So I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’
‘I want you to go down and apologize to Miz Heath.’
I said, ‘Okay.’
‘Now you make sure you stand up and talk loud so she can hear you.’”
“So I went down and got up to her front door”—Mr. Hummer raps the table to make a knocking sound—“scared as hell. And she came to the door, and [I] says, ‘Miz Heath?’
‘Yes, Eddie?’
‘I’m sorry I called Warren a soma’bitch.’
She says, ‘That’s okay, Eddie. Don’t say it again.’
I said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ So I trooped it on down the street, got my bike, and took off,” Mr. Hummer concludes airily, as if as a boy he’d had a great weight lifted from his shoulders.
Young Hummer also interacted with Warren’s brother, Roland (see Figure 26). As Mr. Hummer notes, Roland was an older boy. According to census records, he was the fifth of the Heath’s six children and about five years older than Warren and Eddie. Mr. Hummer introduces the story from when he was about eight years old: “Roland was gonna teach me to swim. And we went to a little farm, had a pond in it.”

Eddie told Roland, “I don’t swim.”
“You don’t swim?,” Roland asked.
“No.”
“Well,” Roland announced, “I’ll teach you how to learn.”
Eddie responded willingly in word but warily in tone with an “Ooo—kay.”
“So he threw me in,” Mr. Hummer explains matter-of-factly, more than eight decades later.
At this point, Roland revealed his teaching method: “Now you gotta swim to get out.”
Eddie wasn’t buying it. “C’mon man, this water—” at which point Eddie went under before he could finish with “—is over my head!” When he came back up, Eddie urgently reminded Roland, “I can’t swiiimmm!” and called out for the older boy to remedy the situation.
With this, Roland abandoned the lesson with his own disappointed “O-kay,” entering the water and picking up Eddie to return him to the side of the pond.
Danger & Nearby Tragedy.
One can imagine how episodes of perceived or real danger from a childhood—an encounter with a snake, a dubiously conceived swimming lesson— remain as vivid memories for a lifetime. Whereas these two instances have a comic aspect to them, others that Mr. Hummer relates are more serious and in some cases, tragic. As an example of the former, on one occasion, Eddie and Warren entered the Heath’s barn to play. Warren climbed into the loft and as he walked across it, the flooring gave way and he fell through. Warren’s head hit a stall on the way down, laying him out flat on his back and generating a good deal of blood. Warren suffered a fractured skull but fortunately recovered.
Eddie himself had a close call. He was riding his bike to the north on Beulah Road in the direction of Antioch Church. To this day, there’s a hump in the road at the church that blocks the view of those traveling from the north and south. Unlike other intervisibility lines on Beulah Road, which are approached with more gradual slopes and thus tend to reveal what’s coming from the opposite direction before one crests, the slope on the Antioch hump obscures what’s approaching from the other side until one is at the very top (see Figures 27 & 28). If the timing is right, this can be startling. In Eddie’s case, just as he was cresting the hump from the south, a vehicle did the same from the north in the same lane, coming extremely close to hitting the boy. “Somebody came ‘whoosh’ and ran my laundry bill up,” as Mr. Hummer puts it. The driver was so shaken that after he halted the vehicle he went door-to-door on Beulah, from the Lindsays near the church down to the Dyers and then to the Hummers, looking for the little boy to make sure the child was okay. After the driver spoke with Eddie’s mother, the bike was “confined to the attic of the garage, restricted….” The potential seriousness of the incident is underscored when Mr. Hummer separately tells how an uncle, driving a truck from the chicken farm that sat where the Westwood Country Club now is, was in a terrible accident involving a boy who rode his toy vehicle into traffic, resulting in the child’s death.


Of the several instances of danger recounted by Mr. Hummer for which he had a firsthand perspective, the most tragic involved the Dyers, the neighbors to the immediate north. Mr. Hummer liked the Dyers. “Miss Dyer, Annie Dyer—a great lady. Best cookie-maker ever,” according to Mr. Hummer (see Figure 29). He tells a happy story about traveling down the path between the two houses to acquire some of Annie Dyer’s cookies. He was four or five, an age that suggests this must be one of his earliest memories. (Listen to Audio 1 below):


Mr. Hummer remembers Annie’s husband, Herbert Maxwell Dyer, as “a good old guy,” but his story about the man is a sad one (see Figure 30). For the Easter season, Dyer would grow daffodils on his property—“a whole field filled with them,” according to Mr. Hummer (see Figure 31). Dyer would sell the flowers in Washington. On a day that official records suggest was March 20th, 1939, Eddie was in his bedroom, drawing while sitting at the table that was at the window facing the Dyer property. Herbert Dyer had collected debris from his daffodil harvest, to burn it as he did every year. Young Hummer was watching as Dyer made the fatal mistake of turning his back on the fire, which took awful advantage of the oversight. According to his death certificate, Herbert Dyer died ten days later, with the cause of death as burns from an accidental fire. Dyer was 72.

Another fire in the neighborhood from Mr. Hummer’s youth was at the Lindsay residence, which he recalls as to the north of Annie Dyer’s. Property records show that the property associated with the Lindsays was to the southwest of Antioch Christian Church. In fact, a small subdivision in that area bears the Lindsay name. According to Mr. Hummer, at one point the Lindsay house burned down. Henry Leith Lindsay, the father, was a carpenter, Mr. Hummer says, but until Lindsay could put up a new house, the family moved temporarily into the children’s playhouse that he had previously built. Judging from property records, the new house built by Henry Lindsay would’ve been the one at 1864 Beulah Road, built in 1940 and just demolished in early 2022.
Economic Uncertainty and The Great Depression.
Herbert Dyer’s daffodil business highlights that as of the late 1930s, the immediate neighborhood still had a role in agriculture, even if some property owners, such as Paul Heath, had other occupations. Mr. Hummer believes that his grandfather, Ira David Hummer, at an earlier point had driven a laundry truck. Mr. Hummer’s understanding is confirmed by census records that list his grandfather as a teamster in the laundry business. “But then in the Depression he farmed,” Mr. Hummer adds, raising the other event of his Vienna youth that is similar to WWII in terms of its historical significance.
Well before the Depression, early 20th century economic turmoil had affected Mr. Hummer’s extended family. He tells how his maternal grandfather, Edward F. Clarke, had partnered to buy the mill in Vienna’s industrial area near the W&OD train station (see Figures 32-34). Property records indicate that this purchase was before World War I. Grandfather Edward had pledged his house as collateral to finance the acquisition, according to Mr. Hummer. However, business dried up with the end of WWI. “[T]hen he lost it. At the time he lost the mill, on the Old Dominion [Rail]road, they had a sidetrack rail, and they had umpteen cars on it with raw flour that they were going to mill for the war. But the bottom fell out, because…the armistice was declared. And that killed them. They couldn’t sell anything. And that’s why they went bankrupt. The Armistice killed the Vienna mill.” And when Edward Clarke “lost that mill he lost that house, too.” The house belonging to Edward and his wife, Goldie Millard Clarke, was on east side of Beulah Road between today’s Ayr Hill Avenue and Creek Crossing Roads. [Editor’s note: corrected from the original, which incorrectly placed Ed Clarke’s property at today’s Sherwood Manor subdivision on the west side of Beulah Road. Figure 35, which reflected the error, has been deleted].




The greatest effects of the Depression on young Hummer’s life seem to have been 1) a period of unemployment for his father and 2) his paternal grandfather’s reversion to the farming of his pre-teamster years, discussed above. Regarding his father, Mr. Hummer notes that he was a printer by trade and during WWII worked as such, for the Federal Lithograph Company. A digression: Federal Lithograph had a government contract to print ration books during the War, Mr. Hummer says (see Figure 36). With this, the family would get insight into pending developments with the government’s rationing, for instance with sugar or gas coupons, which could then inform their judgments on what to buy before the ration books were issued.

Whereas by World War II Mr. Hummer’s father was able to ply his trade, “During the Depression, he couldn’t work.” Mr. Hummer relates that his father was unemployed for three or four years during the Depression. “He finally found a job across from the Capitol Theater in Washington at an ice cream stand. He was a soda jerk.” (The Capitol Theater was where the National Press Club Building now sits—see Figure 37). The period of unemployment seems to have been in the early 30s, when Mr. Hummer would’ve been too young to remember the experience firsthand. Nonetheless, he indicates that as an adult he has come to understand how hard the Depression must have been for his father, expressing empathy for its profound impact on the man.

Farm Life.
As for grandfather Ira David Hummer’s farming, Mr. Hummer credits it for why with “the Depression, I didn’t notice any difference.” “[I] never was uncomfortable during the Depression. Because I always had enough to eat….I told many people: I didn’t experience any difficulty on a farm. We ate because we raised our own food. I didn’t go hungry, that’s for sure. We had our milk and animals that we butchered every year, [for instance] a pig.” The farmer would slaughter the pig by slitting the animal’s throat or with a .22 bullet to the head, and then hang it on a scaffold for gutting, as Mr. Hummer recalls. He adds that the farm had chicken and guinea keets, and explains to his suburban-born interviewer what the latter are. (“Smaller than a chicken, a gray fowl…crazy suckers, they make a lot of noise”). His grandparents also grew corn on the farm and maintained a large garden with potatoes, sweet potatoes, cauliflower, cabbage, and lettuce.
Eddie helped in planting this garden and had other chores on the farm. His grandfather would be up before daylight. “When I’d go out in the fields with him, I had to get the eggs and then I had to slop the hogs.” As a source for the slop, Mr. Hummer’s grandparents “kept a bucket on the back of the stove and that’s where we threw all the leftover food. They didn’t waste anything. And I’d just drop it in the trough.”
Thrashing the crop was a big community event. “When they thrashed, they got together with other farmers and they hired a thrashing machine. And everybody chipped in. Then they would thrash. But then [grandfather] would look up at the sky and he says, ‘oh, it’s noon’—and he was like a clock, he could look at that scene and tell you what time it was. So he says, ‘Time to eat!’ So we’d go back to the house and my grandmother with some of the wives that were thrashing also, she had prepared a big lunch. [Grandfather] had put up some sawhorses and he put some boards across it, and they ate their lunch. And then after lunch they went back to the fields and thrashed out again.”
In addition to slopping the pigs, Eddie’s other chores included feeding the chickens and collecting their eggs. He’d do the latter after school: “Eggs won’t go anywhere; they waited for me to come home.” At night, he’d round up the horses “and the couple of cows we had” to run them back to the house. His grandfather would milk the cows, which had to be done twice daily. Young Hummer would also mow the yard and clean the stalls. For the latter, a long cable in the barn suspended a cart, in which Eddie would shovel the waste and material. He’d then give the cart a shove, it would run to the end of the line and hit a bumper, at which point it would flip and empty its contents.

Eddie also helped his grandfather with the harvest. He describes paternal grandfather Ira David Hummer as a “prince of a guy,” “a nice man,” and a “class act.” Mr. Hummer’s aunt—who passed away in 2021 at 108—similarly held Ira David Hummer in high regard, according to Mr. Hummer’s children. Mr. Hummer tells a story of his grandfather having some fun with him during the harvest. “I’d help him when they would thrash. They’d wanna put the grain up on the wagon. He would say ‘Get that little pitch fork there I gave ya.’ I’d say, ‘oh, okay.’ ‘Get up on that wagon.’ I’d say, ‘whaddya want me to do, grandpa?’ ‘When I throw those things up, you stack it in the corner of the wagon.’ Well, invariably, I caught [the bale on the head]. And the itching! Oh, the grain and dust got all over me, and he laughed. He thought that was funny” (see Figure 37b).
Mr. Hummer relates how he got back at his grandfather but is careful to caveat that it wasn’t intentional. The farm had an apple orchard (see Figure 38). Eddie and Warren Heath often climbed the trees. The farm’s pigs also frequented the orchard. One day, Eddie got an idea. As he tells it, “I said [to myself], well, I’m gonna ride a pig. I’m gonna catch that sucker. So I went up to the barn,” after remembering there was a plow line inside. Mr. Hummer explains that the ploughman used the plow line to turn the horse via the bit. He continues, “So I got [Grandfather’s] plow line. I did not know that it was his best plow line….I put the thing down in front of a tree, and this pig was eating apples…; you know, pigs love apples.” Hummer anticipated that the pig would walk into his trap, and recalls thinking that “when he does, I’m gonna yank that rope and I’m gonna ride him.” “Well, we had nice pigs. Pig had other ideas…So I was up in the tree and …I says [whispering], ‘oh, c’mon, c’mon, a little bit more, get in there!’ [The pig] put his two legs in it and [speaking as if he were straining] I yanked on that pig, ‘I gotcha!”—and that’s the last thing I remember because he pulled me right out of that tree.”

Mr. Hummer concludes the story by noting that the pig ran off with the rope, and his grandfather eventually wanted to know what happened to his plow line. Eddie confessed to Ira David what he had done and that he didn’t know where the plow line was, prompting his grandfather to direct, “You gotta go find it.” Eddie walked the orchard past the Heath’s and ranged over the property, without success. Ira David asked his grandson, “Did you find it?” Eddie replied, “No, Grandfather,” and his grandfather exclaimed “That was my best plow line!” “I’m sorry, Grandfather. Maybe the pig ate it.” They never found what had been Ira David Hummer’s best plow line.
All in all, it seems like grandfather Ira David Hummer was able to take in stride the kinds of not-quite-mischief a boy can get into. For instance, Eddie had a red fire-engine pedal-car and one day decided “I’m tired of red fire engines.” Mr. Hummer tells how he retrieved paint from the garage “and I painted that bad boy green.” His grandfather’s reaction was a measured “It’s yours and you gotta drive it.”
At this stage of her life, Grandmother Ada seems to have been less able to accommodate the unpredictability and disruption that young children bring, especially when it comes to their escapades. (Ada herself had raised three children, all boys, one of whom died of diptheria in 1914 at age 17). Some of Ada’s rules sound reasonable under the different standards of many decades later and considering that she was managing the inside of the house, where the implications of, say, a paint mess are starker than if it’s outside where Grandfather Ira David appears to have been in charge. For example, when asked about Beulah Road, Mr. Hummer answers that it was indeed a paved road at the time and adds, “When the sun got hot or when they had to repave it you didn’t walk on that bad boy. That tar was stuck to your feet and then you could NOT come in the house. Grandma said, ‘You been walkin’ on the road?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘Stay out there.’ ‘Aw, Grandma, I gotta get in, I gotta wash my feet.’ ‘Go out to the well, get a pan, and wash your feet as best you can. And put some socks on.’ And she’d give me the socks.”
In response to another example of Ada’s strictness, however, one really feels for the young boy. The family had nice Christmases in the living room of his grandparents’ house, Mr. Hummer remembers, and on one Christmas Day, he received a Lionel electric train, which was set up around the Christmas tree. After Christmas, he expected to come downstairs and play further with the train, but the day before was the last he saw of the toy. Ada hadn’t gotten rid of it, but she didn’t want the child in the living room.
Activities and Fun Outside the Farm.
Regardless of the severity of some of grandmother Ada’s rules, Mr. Hummer’s account of his childhood indicates that he enjoyed it, as his adventures with Warren Heath would indicate. He did have responsibilities beyond the chores at home, though. In something still familiar today, at the Vienna school he became a patrol boy. His duty station was nearby, across from Feezers ice cream parlor. (Feezers, with alterations, eventually became today’s Vienna Inn). But he also had opportunities to enjoy himself beyond sports and the play with Warren. For instance, for entertainment at home after slopping the hogs, Hummer listened on the radio to “The Shadow” and “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy.”
Young Hummer also became a big movie fan. He saw his first movie at the Vienna school, and loved it. “After that, I wanted to go to a movie. It was [at] State Theater.” (In Falls Church and still standing) (see Figure 39). “But I couldn’t get there. I wanted to take my bike but my mother wouldn’t let me ride it on the highway. So I walked,” with a friend. He walked via Tysons Corner and then down the Leesburg Pike past the peach orchards, into Falls Church and to the theater, on Lee Highway near the intersection with Broad Street. According to Google Maps, that’s a walk of more than seven miles. Presumably reflecting the circumstances of the Depression, “to get into the movie, it was free, but you had to bring food. So I’d take….whatever [Grandma] canned in the jar. Took two of those, I remember, and I sat in the balcony and I watched ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’ and I was stuck on movies from that point on” (see Figure 40).
Figure 39: The State Theater in Falls Church, VA, Circa 1945.

Other activities included the Vienna Volunteer Fire Department’s carnival in the summer and a church Christmas pageant in the winter. Mr. Hummer recalls the carnival fondly as a good deal of fun—despite the hot time of year—and as an event that he’d attend each year. One attraction that he remembers was a big, water-filled pickle jar, with a slot in the lid and a cup in the water at the bottom of the jar. The object was to win a prize by dropping a penny in the slot so that it sunk in the water and into the cup. “But most of the time they got my penny,” he deadpans. The family worshipped at Antioch Christian Church, which they would walk to from their home every Sunday. At Christmas they went to the pageant and party in the basement of the church. Mr. Hummer remembers the cake donuts from the event. For a Christmas tree for the house, the family would visit the Clarke property, near the railroad’s Clarks Crossing. The step-mother of Mr. Hummer’s maternal grandfather lived on the Clarke property. Her nickname was “Mammie,” according to Mr. Hummer. Judging from Ancestry.com information, this would be Anna Frances Cronin Clarke, second wife and widow of B.F. Clarke. Mr. Hummer describes her as a “great lady.” Mr. Hummer also recalls the train station at Clarks Crossing, really a shelter like those the railroad emplaced between larger stations such as the Vienna and Herndon depots (see Figure 41).

As a boy, Mr. Hummer also enjoyed visiting a country store that sat on the west side of Beulah Road to the north of Antioch Church but before Clarks Crossing Road. He says fondly: “I’d been in it a million times. I’d go in and get a big orange [drink] and…peanuts. I’d get the peanuts and I took the peanuts and …my big orange [drink] and took the lid off of it, of course, and dropped my peanuts in. And then I sat on the porch and watched the cars go by and sipped my orange with the peanuts in it.” I suspect this store was on Olive Dyer Millard’s property just short of Clarks Crossing Road. A Fairfax Herald article from 1942 indicates that S.M. Millard–presumably Olive’s husband Samuel M. Millard–had applied for a permit to build an addition to a store on Beulah Road that was two miles from Vienna, probably in reference to downtown Vienna. If the store was indeed on Olive’s land, then it would have been one of the structures that in 1937 sat at what is now Liberty Tree Lane on or near the intersection with Beulah Road (see Figure 42).


Ranging away from the immediate Vienna area, Mr. Hummer remembers taking the train with his mother to Falls Church. He was so young at the time that the purpose of the trip is uncertain, perhaps to shop. They boarded the train in Vienna and rode what the family referred to as a “puddle jumper.” By Mr. Hummer’s description this appears to have been the hybrid rail and road vehicle, or auto-railer, that resembled a bus and was operated by the Arlington & Fairfax Auto Railroad. The Arlington & Fairfax Auto Railroad was the last gasp of the trolley line that had gone from Fairfax City to Rosslyn via Vienna (see Figure 43). In its final years, 1937-1939, the Arlington & Fairfax converted to auto-railers built by its new owner, a Detroit firm, and apparently terminated in Vienna. (The W&OD Railroad acquired four A&F auto-railers after the trolley line shut down for good. However, the W&OD only used these for maintenance purposes and not for passengers, according to Herbert Harwood Jr.’s history of the W&OD).

For excursions to Washington, Eddie traveled by car. His mother worked at Bradfield’s Pharmacy, and Doc Bradfield became a friend of the family (see Figure 44.) Bradfield would sometimes drive family members in his coupe to dine at O’Donnell’s, a seafood restaurant in Washington. What comes across to his interviewer as a vivid memory for Mr. Hummer: the first time he ate frog legs was at O’Donnell’s.


Memories of Family.
A car features in another happy memory that Mr. Hummer holds of his mother, Ocea Marie Clarke Hummer. He notes that he was close to his mother (see Figure 45). She had grown up nearby and had attended the Clarke School. The Clarke School was the public school that sat on a high point just to the west of where today’s Percussion Way intersects with Clarke’s Crossing Road (see Figure 46). After working at Bradfield’s Pharmacy, she worked at U.S. News and World Report. Mr. Hummer recalls that after being dropped off by the school bus at his house and doing his chores, he’d wait in the front yard for his mother to return home from work. He’d climb a tree out front and watch down Beulah Road in the direction of the Heath’s to the south. “She would come up this way in a car,” Hummer explains. “She’d always stop. Sometimes she’d let me get in and drive up the lane. And other times I’d ride on the running board; they had running boards in those days. I’d ride on the running board and then she’d pull all into the yard, she’d pull into the back of the house… She was a good gal.”


Regarding his father, a fond memory for Mr. Hummer was accompanying him to Tysons Corner. His father would meet up with friends there to have a beer while making sure his son had a hot dog or something similar to eat. For Eddie, the place had pinball machines and machines with toy rifles to plink at targets.

Happy family memories for Mr. Hummer’s include his extended family, as we have already seen. One not previously noted in this article: his aunt, Nellie Hummer (see Figure 47). She was the operator at the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone exchange at the northwest corner of Church and Center Streets, where the building with the Sushi Yoshi restaurant now stands. She would let Eddie sit at the switchboard and play with the device, for instance by pulling the plugs out. Nellie’s mother died when she was just three years old, so she was raised by a paternal aunt and her husband, according to the biography in her funeral program. She started at C&P at age 17. When she went on dates with her future husband, Leith Hummer, her de facto mother monitored the switchboard. Nellie and Leith “were talented ballroom dancers in the big band era, and the floor often cleared so folks could admire their dancing,” according to Nellie’s bio. She rose to be the chief operator in Vienna and worked for C&P for 49 years. She and Leith were eventually able to buy a house in southwest Vienna in the 1950s, and this house became a happy gathering place for the extended family, according to the Hummer family and Nellie’s bio.
People and Places:
In the course of the interview and subsequent follow-up, Mr. Hummer’s comments ranged over a variety of other places and people in the Vienna area. Among the tidbits:

Savia’s Barbershop. Eddie’s first haircut was at Sam Savia’s barbershop in Vienna (see Figures 48 and 49). The barbershop was on the north side of Church Street, east of Center Street. The building remains to this day and currently houses the Diamond Spa. Mr. Hummer also remembers one of the Savia boys as a superb baseball player. Judging from Ancestry.com information and the ages of the Savia sons, this presumably was either Simone (Sammie) Savia or Alfred (Al) Savia, the two Savia boys born in the 1920s.

William Fortune. Mr. Hummer remembers William Fortune as someone with whom he spoke on occasion to offer friendly greeting. From the late 1920s to the late 1940s, William Fortune owned the land that now features Brenner Court as well as portions of McKinley Street, Talisman Drive, and Northside Park. William Fortune and his wife, Louisa, stand out in in the history of “northwest of Northeast Vienna” as a rarity: black property owners during the Jim Crow era. An outline of their lives will be the subject of a future profile.
Mrs. Randolph and Klondike Morgan. Mr. Hummer recalls that his mother, Marie Hummer, worked for Mrs. Randolph, perhaps helping with the housekeeping, at Mrs. Randolph’s residence on Maple Avenue about a quarter-mile east of Beulah Road. This house stood at what is now the northeast corner of East Street and Maple Avenue, where the Wolftrappe Square townhouses now sit, according to Fairfax County property records. Mrs. Randolph went by her nickname, “Randy,” and later helped Marie get the job at US News and World Report, where Mr. Hummer says that Mrs. Randolph herself worked. Mrs. Randolph was Edythe Virginia Durrett Randolph, judging from records on Ancestry.com and Fairfax County’s property records. She had been widowed many years before the mid-1930s and after her husband’s death went on to be a longtime employee of the Treasury Department, according to her obituary. In 1938, Eddie served as the ring-bearer at the wedding of Mrs. Randolph’s daughter, Alice Marie Randolph Young. This honor and Edythe’s help with the U.S. News position, as well as the frequent backdrop of the Randolph house in Hummer family photos in the 1930s, are suggestive of a close relationship between the Hummer and Randolph families. Mrs. Randolph died in 1939, according to her death certificate. She was about 66 years old, judging from census records.

The wonderfully-nicknamed R. Douglas “Klondike” Morgan lived at the same house as Mrs. Randolph, according to Mr. Hummer. He notes that Klondike Morgan was an expert marksman and a Linotype operator for an area newspaper (see Figures 50 and 51). Press reports from the time corroborate Mr. Hummer’s recollections, with accounts of Klondike Morgan’s participation in shooting competitions and references to his work as a printer. As for the nickname, Mr. Hummer explains that Morgan had been a prospector in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 19th century. A 1917 article in the Alaska Daily Empire fleshes out the story:
“Morgan went to the Klondike regions in 1898. He was accompanied by two friends. They packed their own outfit of 8,000 pounds over the Chilcoot Pass, whipsawed their lumber from native spruce, built their own boats, navigated the Yukon and ran Five Finger Rapids and Whitehorse Rapids….Morgan and his partners killed all their own game….” Morgan prospected in the Dawson area, “with the usual miner’s ups and downs,” according to the paper, which also notes that Morgan “was never successful in panning any great number of nuggets.” However, “[w]hile in Dawson, Morgan promoted and played in the first baseball game ever staged at midnight,” on 21 June 1898. “When mining got too poor, Morgan went to work on a Fairbanks newspaper as a Linotype operator and compositor. He returned to the States in the late winter of 1912….”

Mr. Hummer remembers stories that Klondike Morgan often slept outside because he had grown accustomed to it in the Yukon. Such a story adds to the sense that Morgan was a colorful character. Morgan certainly carried several nicknames besides “Klondike.” “Pete” was one, according to Mr. Hummer. “Pop,” “Doc,” “Dad” and “Eagle Eye” were others, judging from newspaper stories over the years.
Roswell Douglas Morgan, aka Klondike, owned the house on Maple Avenue, according to Fairfax County property records. Connie and Mayo Stuntz’s book on Vienna, This Was Vienna, Virginia, includes a photo of the house on page 342. The bend in Maple Avenue at today’s Follin Lane was known as “Morgan’s Corner,” a nod to the nearby Morgan property, according to the Stuntzes. The house was part of a tract that Klondike Morgan had inherited in the 1920s from his father, William E. Morgan. The tract sat on what today is the block between Maple Avenue and Church Street, from the western boundary of the Westwood Country Club to Wolf Trap Run (see figure 52). In 1937, R.D. Morgan married Edythe Randolph, according to newspaper and marriage records. His will suggests that he had adopted Edythe’s daughter, Alice Marie. Klondike Morgan died in 1952, according to his obituary.

Epilogue:
After his years in Vienna, Mr. Hummer spent the rest of his youth in Washington, where he graduated from high school. On scholarship, he earned an accounting degree and embarked on a successful accounting career. He married and with his wife raised a family. And in December 2021, David Edward Hummer took the time to give us a sense of what it was like to grow up as a boy in the Vienna area in the 1930s and early 1940s.
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Thanks for the interesting article! Among other things, I’d never heard of the Clarke School before. You mention it being on high ground near the current intersection of Percussion and Clarks Crossing. Would that make it the site of the current home at 9701 Clarks Cross Road? I had no idea there was a school there.
That’s right. From the 1937 aerial images, it looks like the Clarke School would have been where the lot for 9701 Clarks Crossing Road is now. From eyeballing it, it seems to me that the school would’ve been towards the western side of today’s 9701 lot. There are a few references to the school in the surviving school board records of the early 20th century, and there’s the deed with the Clarke family’s conditional transfer of the land for the school. Descendants of one of the local families of the era, the Dyers, have a photo of the school and a photo of a group of students. I’m hoping to feature those in a future article. Thank you for reading!
Right, so it was probably on Clark’s Crossing between Percussion and Clark’s Glen Pl. Thanks for posting the photo!
By the way, love the web site! Are you going to put some of your earlier articles from Next Door on here as well? It would be great to have it all in one place, it’s so hard to find old posts on Next Door.
With two readers expressing interest in the Clarke School, I’ve posted a photo provided by Barbara Hymas months ago, rather than wait until I get around to writing the Clarke School article. The URL: https://viennavahistory.com/2022/11/13/photo-of-the-clarke-school/.
I didn’t get your email for some reason. Please send again. In the meantime I’ll find the photo. My grandfather, Albert Dyer, went to that school and I assume his siblings did too. I remember my great-grandmother, Annie Follin Dyer very well. She died in 1964 when I was 12. Unfortunately I never tasted one of her cookies.
Thanks for circling back. I’ve resent the email this evening (Saturday evening, 20 August). Thank you!
Thanks for the feedback, Ms. Hymas–it’s great to have a descendant chime in! I’d love to see the photo of the Clarke School. I’ve emailed you directly a few days ago, if it’s easier for you to reply via that means. Best wishes!
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Really enjoyed this history. I am the great-granddaughter of Herbert Dyer and Annie Follin Dyer. I have a photo of Clarke School if anyone is interested.
I would love to see a photo of the school.
A Clarke family lived there around 1985. That house is in the vicinity of the school. One of their daughters had a very serious accident on a small motor bike, and became invalided. They moved away soon after that. There’s a graveyard nearby.
Given the interest in the Clarke School, and given Barbara Hymas’s generous provision of a Clarke School photo several months ago, I’ve posted the photo of the school on the website, rather than wait until I could complete an article about the school. At this location: https://viennavahistory.com/2022/11/13/photo-of-the-clarke-school/.
Fascinating read. I’m glad I came across this! I live in one of the older remaining homes in Vienna, just down the street from where Mr. Hummer lived, at 311 Beulah Road NE (between Ayr Hill and Creek Crossing, almost but not-quite-visible in some of the old images you posted.) The family I bought the house from in 1995 had the surname Geib, and had been here for at least two generations. I see on the link to the 1860 maps you posted that the parcel was then owned by Charles Robey (possible alt. Roby.) I’m curious to hear if you have any information about this location! I’ll see if I can dig out the old photos of the property that the Geibs passed on to me to see if you might want copies.
Hi Mr. Bogusz. Thank you for your feedback on the article about Mr. Hummer. A) I’d love to see old photos of the property from Geib family. B) Regarding your parcel, it has a direct connection to one of the people mentioned in the article. Edward F. Clarke owned multiple Vienna-area parcels in the early 20th century, in addition to the one in the article on the west side of Beulah Road. One of these parcels was a five-acre tract on the east side of Beulah Road that included what is now your lot. C) The county property tax records list your house’s year of construction as 1900. However, I’ve gotten the sense that these records often use 1900 as a placeholder/estimate when houses were built around that time, and thus might not be accurate for the precise year. Based on the transactions below, I suspect the house was built either by Charles Delano Hine or the Bouton family. (In contrast, Charles Roby built and lived at what would later be the Louk house, mentioned in the article, according to the Stuntz book). D) Anyway, here is the lineage for your parcel working backwards in time:
1) Property records confirm your information about two generations of the Geib family owning the property.
2) In 1978, the parents subdivided their two acres into the five lots of the Robin Hill subdivision of today. Four of the properties were situated in a horseshoe around three sides of what is now your parcel. With the open end of the horseshoe being the Beulah Road side, of course.
3) In 1950, the Geibs acquired the two acres from Cosby and Miriam G. Brinkley.
4) In 1948, the Brinkleys acquired the two acres from Lenora H. and Grover C. Bishop.
5) In 1931, Lenora H. Bishop acquired five acres from the National Bank of Fairfax, including the two acres that would later go to the Brinkleys. Lenora Bishop paid $4500 for the five acres. The five acres extended back to what is now the western boundary of the properties on Westview Court.
6) In 1929 (early 1929, before the onset of the Great Depression), the National Bank of Fairfax received the five acres. The five acres were among five parcels from foreclosures on land owned by Edward F. Clarke and/or his mill partner, Alfred L. Adams. At an auction in late 1928, the bank had bid $1000 for the parcels plus the machinery of the mill.
7) In 1909, Edward F. Clarke acquired the five acres from Lillias K. Bouton and her husband, Edmond L.S. Bouton, for $800. (The Boutons owned the building that remains to this day on the northeast corner of Church and Mill Streets, Bouton Hall. Also discussed in the Hummer article as the post office where Eddie Hummer and his friend, Warren Heath, would play in the ’30s).
8) In 1902, Lillias K. Bouton acquired 10 acres from Charles Delano Hine. The ten acres included the five acres subsequently sold to Edward Clark, plus the five acres that extend the parcel to the north to what is now Creek Crossing Road.
9) In 1899, Vienna notable Charles Delano Hine acquired 60.75 acres, of which the 10 acres were a portion, from Fairfax County Circuit Court commissioner R.W. Moore. The court in 1896 had ordered the sale in a case involving Bertha Elizabeth Lynn, an apparent descendant of the previous owner, John Lynn. The court hadn’t been able to offload the 60 acres in a public auction, so it subsequently authorized a private sale. Hine paid $1600 for the 60 acres. The 60 acres extend the 10 acres to the south, so that much of today’s Church Street-Ayr Hill block from Beulah Road past East Street is included, and to the east back to roughly Wolf Trap Run.
10) In 1873, Charles Roby sold to John Lynn of Loudon County, for $1500 dollars, the residue of his land “on the Georgetown Road on the Waters of Wolf Trap.” This was apparently 60 acres of the 75+ acres that are listed on the 1860 map as belonging to Charles Roby.
11) Between 1846 and 1850, Charles Roby had acquired from Reuben and Jamina Strother and Lewis Johnson and his wife what seem to be 80 acres in two transactions.
12) In 1844, commissioners appointed by the Circuit Court of Fairfax County sold to Reuben Strother and Lewis Johnson the 230 acres that the late John Follin had acquired from George W. Gunnell in 1836. John Follin had died in 1841. Strother and Johnson paid $806 for the parcel.
13) In 1836, George West Gunnell sold to John Follin for $1035 the 230 acres that he had inherited from his mother, Sarah West, and that were in the area of Wolf Trap Run.
(The following is from the Connie and Mayo Stuntz book, This Was Vienna, Virginia).
14) At the unspecified time of Sarah West’s death, her son George West Gunnell inherited his mother’s land, a 230-acre parcel in the area of Wolf Trap Run.
15) In 1782, the property of the late Hugh West Jr., some 672 acres, was divided between his three daughters after his eldest daughter had turned 18 in 1780. Sarah West inherited the westernmost 224 acres, around Wolf Trap Run.
16) In 1768, the, widow of Hugh West Jr., apparently Elizabeth Minor, died. Her daughters were still minors, so the brother of Hugh West Jr., George West, was in charge of the Wolftrap Plantation of some 672 acres.
17) In 1767, Hugh West Jr. died. His will divided his 672 acres equally between his three daughters, who would inherit after Hugh’s wife, apparently Elizabeth, died.
18) Circa 1754, Hugh West Jr inherited from his father, Hugh West Sr, some 672 acres that the senior Hugh West had assembled from multiple parcels, including the 360 acres of the Samuel Wilson land grant. The property was known as the Wolf Trap Plantation.
19) In 1746, Hugh West bought the 360 acres from Margaret Harrison and her husband, John Howell.
20) In 1725, Margaret Harrison inherited 360 acres from Samuel Wilson.
21) In 1724, Samuel Wilson received a grant of 360 acres, presumably from the Fairfax family. Very roughly from today’s Beulah Road between Creek Crossing and Maple Avenue to the northwest to Old Courthouse Road.
I appreciate the interview and valuable information about my family on Clarke’s crossing road. My great grandfather is Benjamin Franklin Clarke. I did not know that my great uncle Edie lost the Vienna mill, and their home because of the armistice. Thank you sincerely.
Particularly regarding the mentions of motion pictures of the time — I was in the Buckhead Theater (Atlanta, GA} – we had moved — when the film stopped, the lights came up, and we were informed that the Empire of Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor. I went straight home to find my parents glued to our Grunow radio. Our lives had changed forever.
As I was born in 1928, (Youngtown, Ohio – not Vienna, VA) this story brings so many memories flooding back — I’ve reread it several times. So much like my childhood — I appreciate your publishing it.
What a great article! Fantastic research! I was born first year FDR became president so I was able to relate to many things I read in this article. I didn’t move to Vienna until 1960 but I to have seen a lot of history in the town.