Free Personal History by Katharine Graham Page A

happy times there when I was young, largely because there were children on the farm. As I grew older—say, from twelve to eighteen—I went on thinking of the farm as wonderful because as a younger child I had thought it was, but in reality, throughout my later childhood I had no friends in the neighborhood and felt completely alone there.
    It was not until I was much older that I realized we were almost totally isolated. Though we had many visitors for weekends or longer, there was little or no local social life. Only later did I learn that my parents had suffered from local anti-Semitism. They had, I believe, been warned when they first started to build the large stone house that they would be snubbed socially. And, in fact, they were never invited to their neighbors’ houses and were excluded from the country club until it went broke, at which time they were asked to join (and, I think, may have, just to help). But I never went there or even saw it.
    Until the end of my mother’s life, after countless return visits either with my children, who adored the farm, or later to visit one or both parents, I looked forward to being there, only to have painful realities return five minutes after entering its beautiful large front hall. The older I got, the more I disliked the loneliness of the farm, but in my childhood days, it was, as I wrote my father when I was ten, “a great old Place.”
    D URING THE YEAR I was in the fifth grade, we moved out of the Woodward house, which had been sold, and into a red-brick house on Massachusetts Avenue, a couple of blocks from Dupont Circle. My commute to school was a little longer. I used to walk up the avenue every morning, about eight blocks uphill, carrying my roller skates. Comingback was easy—I simply whizzed home downhill, carrying my book bag in one hand and reserving the other to grab the lamppost at each corner in order not to go flying into the street.
    After a two-year interim on Massachusetts Avenue, we moved to a large house owned by Henry White, an ex-ambassador to France, at 1624 Crescent Place, just off 16th Street. I was then in the seventh grade, and this was the real house in which I grew up, my home in Washington, and where my mother lived for the rest of her life.
    The house on Crescent Place, which my father rented for several years before eventually buying it in 1934, was designed in 1912 by the well-known architect John Russell Pope and initially had forty rooms. It was a very grand and rather formal house. The only somewhat cozy room on the main floor was the library, in which we spent most of our time. My sister Ruth and I again shared a large room, but as the older girls left for college, the house was done over and I was allowed to choose my own room and decorate it. I said I would like it to be modern. A special modern designer created a plaster fireplace, painted white, with no mantel, and the room had quite beautiful made-to-order modern furniture. It was a strange contrast to, and an odd oasis in, a period house full of Chippendale furniture as well as paintings and sculpture—Cézannes, a Manet, a Renoir, two Brancusis, a Rodin, and, in the upstairs hall, the Woolworth water-color series by Marin. In the front hall there was a beautiful Chinese screen, a bronze Buddha, and a gilt mirror, which later went to the White House to join its twin, already there.
    Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the atmosphere of the Crescent Place house intimidated some of my friends. One of them remembers lunching in the vast dining room, just the two of us and my governess, attended by the butler and a maid. When my mother was there, she was served first and ate at once and so quickly that she would finish before the last person had been served. We called that unfortunate seat “Starvation Corner” and tried not to sit there. We learned to keep a hand on our plates; otherwise they would be removed before our forks returned from our mouths. To this day, I eat