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The following quote is from "Behind the Mirror", The Washington Post Magazine, August 30, 1992, by Paul Hendrickson. Mr. Hendrickson is a resident of Takoma Park, a Post staff writer, and the author of three books ...
Looking for the Light: the Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott
The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War
Seminary: a Search

They fell out one day from behind the bathroom mirror: yellowed, crinkly at the edges and folds, looking lighter than parchment, but amazingly preserved. I felt as if I'd discovered Dead Sea scrolls on newsprint. I took them to be a kind of earthly and proof-positive sign of something I was already pretty sure of: that there were spirits breathing on the other side of the plaster walls in our Takoma Park bungalow that we'd purchased with nearly all our savings a year earlier, and that happens to be the first house of any kind anywhere we've ever owned. It's far from a palace. It's just a two-story wooden dream with a white slanting slatboard porch in the middle of a green village on the Maryland side of the line. But it's ours. We love it. And what I like to think about this house now, our four-walled zone of family security, is that 70 years ago this summer it sealed away-for us and no one else to discover-two artifacts of its earlier existence.

For the last six weeks or so, I've been carrying around these decrepit treasures, studying them on the subway as I ride to work, taking them along when I go to the park at lunch time. I've got them in plastic sheet protectors and l handle them as carefully as possible, but still they're starting to disintegrate, pulverize, before my eyes. I've got to get this story finished, and then get them stored again in some secure and maybe even airtight resting place in our 80 year-old frame home so that someday, long after I am gone to dust, some other occupant of the house can come along and find them again. Can feel all over again the sense of continuity and thankfullness I am feeling. Frankly, it's a continuity and thankfulness I didn't expect to have. Which may only indicate how much I was longing for connection, for a sense of place. And didn't know.

I said there were two papers. One is an edition of the Washington Herald from Saturday, July 1, 1922. The other is an incomplete Washington Post from June 27, 1922. This isn't really about their contents, though I should say that their classifieds and box scores and news stories and comics and display ads have been holding me fairly captive. I keep poring over them - all that faded but very readable ink on those old wide sheets - thinking they must contain hidden clues. Clues to what? I couldn't tell you.

But I can say in a more exact way how I found the papers. I said they "fell out," and it's figuratively true. I would not have discovered them had I not been in a fit of mild rage that Sunday. Had I not become sick and tired of bobbing and weaving like a punch drunk fighter in my pajamas every weekday morning at about 6:45, trying to locate my whiskery face in a corroded and warped piece of glass. I'd been doing it since we moved in. You see, there are four of us, and since we all have to get ready at about the same time, I'm the one consigned to the downstairs bathroom in the morning. They get to use the one on the ground floor.

As a reflecting surface for shaving, that ancient mirror, set in its wooden frame on the door of the vanity cabinet, was about as useful as the side of a tin coffeepot. I think I've shaved better at campgrounds with the aid of some coffeepots. But anyway, having nicked myself again, vowing this would be the day I'd go to the hardware store and get a new mirror or else begin a beard, I took the cabinet door off its hinges, laid it on the dining room table, swore at it, pried off the backing with a screwdriver - and there they were.

"Jeez, Honey, come and take a look at this," I said, when my wife got back from the Giant. Did you know that six smackers would get you a pair of "low shoes" at Raleigh Haberdasher in the summer of 1922? Brogues and plain models of Scotch grain; also Russian and Norwegian calf. Also gunmetal dress oxfords. All sizes. You don't like 'em, hey, no problem, your "Money Cheerfully Refunded." That's in the fine type in the lower left.

Dr. Lehman, dental surgeon, plate specialist, was in business at 307 Seventh St. that summer. Crown, bridge and porcelain work. He'd repair the plates for a buck-fifty while the customers waited. I can tell you now what time "Life of a Coal Miner" came on coast-to-coast radio. And how Mrs. Edward Bartlett of tbe Wardman Park Hotel "was severely cut about the nose and face wben tbe automobile sbe was learning to operate crashed into a tree near tbe Tidal Basin in Potomac Park." (She survived.)

Washingtonians, and presumably Takoma Parkians, went to Atlantic City in gangs for tbe Fourth of July holiday Ah, Atlantic City, Playground of the World. You could take the Pennsy, you could go via the big B&O streamliners. What was the forecast? Sultrifying, what else. Local storms late.

However, it'd been a mere 78 the day before in Asbury Park and 88 in North Platte.

The Herald announced it was going to start serializing a novel called The Beautiful and the Damned by a writer named F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was his second book. It was the tale of Gloria and Anthony, "caught in a current of dissipation that whirled them from one gilded cafe and apartment house party to anotber."

Saddle and Boots ran first in the Myrtle Selling Stakes at Aqueduct and - closer to home "Starting at 8 o'clock this morning, in order that the business of the Senate may not suffer for the lack of a quorum, 12 United States senators will fight a golf battle at Chevy Chase Country Club against a dozen members of the Senate press gallary."

Peoples Drug was selling giant jars of Barnard Complexion Cream for 69 cents. "At the First Sign of a Freckle," as the jingle went.

You could get a slightly used 1920 Big 6 Studebaker touring car for $995 at an M Street dealership.

A "cozy bungalow" in Takoma Park was being offered in both the Herald and The Post at $6,900. Wasn't ours, though. It was on Aspen. ...

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