As this family settled into life in Kensington, church remained important to Dad. Everyone living at home attended Holy Redeemer Catholic Church, about a mile away on Saul Road. Attendance was one of the few basic conditions of living under Mom and Dad’s roof: no skateboards, no motorcycles, no dogs, and everyone goes to Mass on Sunday.
Money was tight as Mom and Dad adjusted to living in an affluent suburb of Washington, DC, on a civil servant’s wages. With no nearby family, they had to figure things out on their own. Once, when there was no money for groceries and Dad’s next paycheck was several days away, they raised a quick $40 by selling their high school graduation rings to a nearby jewelry shop. As kids we never knew our next few meals came at the cost of Mom and Dad’s high school mementos.
Fortunately, there were plenty of free things for a family to do. Dad organized countless budget-friendly excursions to explore the Washington area. An early favorite was the Billy Goat Trail along the Potomac River. He took us downtown many times to see the memorials and other sites on the Mall. In those days before the Metro subway was an option, we could take an L2, L4, or L6 bus that ran down Connecticut Avenue from Kensington to Federal Plaza in DC, a big open parking lot a few blocks from the White House where most of the buses into Washington ended their trips before turning around. The fare was forty cents: one quarter, one dime, one nickel.
Our proximity to Washington, DC, was one of the very best things about moving to Maryland. We could join the crowds at presidential inaugurations, traipse through the Capitol and congressional office buildings, and attend as many of the free Smithsonian museums as we wanted.
We were also close to significant historical events. Watergate remained the biggest news story after we moved to DC, ending with Richard Nixon resigning the presidency in August of 1974. We watched that live on the TV in our basement, alongside some members of the Sullivan family, longtime friends of Mom and Dad who were then visiting from Fairview.
At the end of the Iran hostage crisis in 1980, when the hostages were freed just after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president, I organized a few friends to paint a huge sign on the green Metro construction fence on Wisconsin Avenue just across from the Naval Hospital where I knew they were being taken. “Welcome Home 52 Freed Americans!” it said.
One morning in the 1970s, well before dawn, Mom woke up the four youngest of us kids with the unbelievable news: we were going to the beach. A few hours later we had our first glimpse of an ocean, at a free public beach in Delaware, where we broiled on a blanket and dashed in and out of the surf.
A year or two later Dad and Uncle Dick started a tradition that would live on for decades. They rented a house on a beach in South Carolina, at Edisto Beach. It was a mostly awful place with so many biting flies and thorn bushes on the beach we spent much of the two weeks inside the dismal house. The next trip was to a nicer house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and we’d soon go there nearly every year, to Nags Head, Duck, or Corolla.
The Durbin kids in Kensington went mostly to three different schools in Maryland. Parkwood Elementary School, for grades K–6, was just a few blocks from our house on Thornwood Road, so my younger brothers and I could easily walk there. Parkwood was also our local polling place. Mom served as an election judge there, steadfastly representing the Democratic Party for the next two decades, never missing an election.
For grades 7–9 some of us went to Kensington Junior High. KJH was a longer walk from our house than to Parkwood, down Everett Street and across Connecticut Avenue. Ken and Dave went to different junior high schools (now called middle schools) after KJH was closed.
Each of us from Bob on down—seven Durbin kids in total—attended Walter Johnson High School. It was not in Kensington but in Bethesda, near Montgomery Mall, so it took a car or bus to get there. Walter Johnson was named for a famous pitcher from the Washington Senators baseball team. His home was (and remains) standing a couple of miles away, where Old Georgetown Road meets Cedar Lane.
All seven of us at WJ played a musical instrument in the school band under the direction of the venerable Gilbert Muir. Mom would organize the Friday night potluck suppers for the annual band exchange with other East Coast high schools. She also worked on the school’s PTSA newsletter, The Big Train (Walter Johnson’s nickname).
In 1977, Mom and Dad celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary with a trip to Europe—their first ever. We kids gave Mom an opal necklace. Dad got a brand-new Fujica SLR camera with a detachable lens. I can still recall his disbelief as he opened the box.
That camera was never lost. And it never ran out of film before it was meant to.
Over the years in Kensington, Dad would be promoted a number of times for his excellent performance at work (whatever it was he did there), and his government pay went up a little bit each time. None of the raises were substantial, but with fewer mouths to feed as Durbin kids moved out, he and Mom could eventually save for retirement and even go out once in a while for an evening meal. In the 1980s, there was one place they went out to more than any other.
Ireland’s Four Provinces was an Irish pub and restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of Washington, DC. Opened in the late 1970s by the Irish immigrant Kevin Finney, “the 4Ps” featured nightly music, regulation dart boards, and reasonably priced beer and pub food. It was at the end of a couple of blocks that also included the Yenching Palace, a Chinese restaurant where secret negotiations to end the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis had been held, and the Uptown Theater, a classic movie palace built in 1936, which for decades had the largest movie screen in the city.
Family members frequented all three of those DC landmarks, none of which remains open today, but nothing brought more joy to Mom and Dad (and income for at least five of the ten Durbin kids who worked there at one time or another) than the 4Ps. Mom and Dad made countless trips there, inviting along anyone who wished to join them, where Mom especially enjoyed their Irish Coffee and Dad their corned beef and cabbage. And everyone loved the music at the 4Ps, memorizing songs like The Unicorn Song, whose lyrics remain with me to this day. There were green alligators, and long-necked geese…
Owner Kevin Finney once remarked that he should rename his pub. “It should be called the 4Ds,” he told my brother Ken. “Because there’s always four Durbins in here.”
Next: 26. The Last Stop
Previous: 24. Off to Washington
Michael Durbin 