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In Memoriam
by Busy Graham
Born in Nanjing, China in 1946, on the cusp of the Chinese Revolution, E.F. Wen could not help but become part of that historical upheaval. Within six months of her birth, her father accepted a two-year fellowship to study journalism at Northwestern University and her parents left for the United States with her older sister, leaving E.F. behind for her maternal grandparents to care for. When the Chinese civil war ended in 1949, the so-called Bamboo Curtain made it impossible for E.F. to join her family in the United States.
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by Diana Kohn
Act One: Heyday
Motion picture fever had come to America early in 1906 when nickelodeons introduced the wonders of moving pictures. Within 17 years the District boasted 47 theaters with the most grand and opulent palaces centered along F Street NW.
In Takoma Park, the local Episcopal church began showing Friday night movies in 1920, which later moved to the Presbyterian Church on Tulip Avenue. Wilmer Pratt, the ex-mayor, was determined to bring a real movie house to Takoma Park. Even the horrendous collapse of the snow-laden roof of the 1700-seat Knickerbocker Theater in Kalorama, caused by January 1922 blizzard, failed to deter the Takoma residents from wanting a theater of their own.
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by Howard Kohn
Leicia Monfort is a 2003 graduate of Montgomery Blair and as American as American can be, although she has always known her roots were in Haiti. Her mother, Leticia, grew up in Port-au-Prince before emigrating in 1977 to the U. S. Counting pennies Leticia then saved enough to bring over and marry her sweetheart, Phillippe, and the two of them talked often about taking Leicia for a visit to their home country.
That trip never happened, the way things turned out, and in another era Haiti might have remained a Poloraid snapshot to Leicia. But this is the era of Facebook and cell phones. Modern communications brought Leicia close to cousins and nieces and family friends who, on January 12, were in the zone that an earthquake changed forever, even as she went about a usual routine, working her front-desk job at the Takoma Park Recreation Department, checking in with an aunt and heading to a Laundromat.
"My aunt said that something had happened in Haiti, but I was in a hurry and didn't think much about it until I got a text while I was doing laundry. As soon as I got back home my mom and my aunt were going crazy because they couldn't reach anyone.
"All the family we know in Haiti, all my Haitian friends on Facebook, we couldn't get in contact with anyone. The phone lines were busy or dead. We were frantic.
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A snowstorm, an intuition and the serendipity of neighbors
by Howard Kohn
Picture, if you will, this scene from December 19, on the evening of the mammoth snowstorm that shut down most goings-on in Takoma Park.
On Spring Avenue a silver-haired, rosy-cheeked woman, the neighborhood nurse and midwife, was watching "Ratatouille" on TV. Two blocks away, on a slick, middle-of-the-road incline of Allegheny Avenue, kids and dads were speeding fast and furious on sleds. Indoors one of the moms was opening the next bottle of wine for a few neighbors.
Then, shortly after nine o'clock, an ambulance and a fire truck appeared at the top of the incline and stopped. Tires churned but went nowhere. At the bottom of the hill there was an emergency they couldn't get to.
From a blue-painted house, with a Christmas tree shining in the front room, a woman ran out. She was long past decorum. "I'd say pretty close to panic," recalled Heather Rowe days later, sitting at a long wooden table in the blue house. "If anyone saw her, she was shouting her head off like she had no idea what was going on or what to do.
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Cedar Crossing Tavern & Wine Bar
by Will Marshall
Cedar Crossing Tavern & Wine Bar is the kind of place you would expect to run across on some breezy road in southern France. The kind of place where the owner welcomes you in as if you were family, then serves you wine and food that is so good that you spend the rest of your trip trying to replicate the experience. Cedar Crossing Wine Bar is that kind a place, only it isn't located on a breezy road in southern France; it's just footsteps west of the Takoma Park Metro station.
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