20 November 2007

Googie on Glebe



I ran into Mardy One at the Staples office store on North Glebe. It was a completely random encounter, and we took a second to register our acquaintance since the context was so alien; I rarely stop there and don't know what her office supply needs might be.

I don't even see her at Big Pink since she took the second job at the funeral home.

I was looking for a memory card-reader to get the pictures of the demolition of Buckingham III off my cell phone without having to transmit them to myself at 25-cents apiece. She was looking for desk calendars to keep her dogs and funerals straight.

I thanked her for the parking advice on the visit to the mortuary, and how natural my associate had looked in his coffin. She said it was not a problem, pleased to have helped.

She was in her dog-walking outfit, and I was in formal black, since I have given up on colors. We chatted about the more interesting developments at the funeral parlor where she works when she is not walking other people's dogs. We had plenty of time, since there was one of those shoppers ahead of us who had a return with the Ethiopian lady behind the counter. It was not going that well.

The staff at the Staples is almost all South Asian or from the Horn of Africa, and I get to practice my broken Amarish with them. I had been learning a phrase a week from the ladies at the Starbucks.

“Talik buna, effendi-galu” means “I'd like a Vente coffee of the day, if you please.”

“Ama Secon alu” means “Thanks a lot” in Ethiopia.

I am a hit at all the parking lots, where the attendants seem to appreciate the small courtesy. The ones from somewhere else probably chalk it up to the American experience.

The Ethiopian was fine. It was the matron who was confused and disoriented. Everything was changing in the neighborhood and she could not find businesses that operated here for years. There was only the one register open, so it was exactly like the Visa commercial where someone tries to use cash at the register and time stops. Everything that normally moves in well-oiled harmony falls to the ground.

One of the other issues is that things are falling apart at the store. There is no particular reason to keep the stock up to date, since the place is not long for life. It is part of the parcel that went to the developers along with the Chevy dealership on the corner.

I guess it won't be that big a deal. Staples is a plain 1980s box, low and unremarkable. It is also a pain in the butt to get to, since the driveway is on the exit lane from Fairfax Boulevard, and you can't turn left, nor make a u-turn at the light. You have to do turn into the Holiday Inn and finesse it that way, plus the left turn lane is where that homeless guy camps out, using the long light to shake down people for spare change.

We aren't going to have to worry about that, since the store will close as soon as the finance guys put the package together for the new high-rise building that will go up on the corner. I am a little concerned about where to get new print cartridges when tax time comes around, but there are alternatives, just further away from Big Pink.

I asked Mardy One if there had been any interesting funerals lately, since I have the same morbid curiosity as everyone else. She said one of the recent civilian funerals had been that of a women whose head had been cut off by an angry son. I didn't think it was an open casket affair, but you never know.

You and I live life on one plane of existence, where people are not jimmying your lock and civilized discourse. Our desperation is manifested discretely. There are other planes going on around us, filled with chaos and mayhem, like life in the low-income slice of Buckingham.

Mardy One is in a position to see all kinds of crazy stuff at the mortuary. Some of her other customers are military families, taking care of loved ones returning from Iraq. Because of the improved body armor the troops wear, sometimes there is not much of the body left intact except what was protected.

I know the rules, and even if there is only a tooth left, the service member is entitled to the full casket. Mardy One said that one family insisted on an open casket at the viewing, even though only the torso of the young solder had come through intact. She thought it was really strange, and the funeral director had to be really creative in arranging the service dress blouse and medals on what was left, with a gold-covered cloth over the neck-hole of the jacket.

I said it sounded a little like Cindy Sheehan. Her son's death had driven her quite mad. Mardy One said it wasn't like that. The family was just pissed, not crazy.

She said she was considering getting out of the grief business, since there was too much of it. I asked if she had considered car sales, since Ms. Hamilton had recently vacated her position as the receptionist at the Lindsey Cadillac agency, and the position was open for a lithe young woman.

She laughed and said she would only consider it if the job was as close as Bob Peck's Chevy dealership, which was right next door. I laughed, since the cars had all disappeared and the chain link fence had gone up around the properly months ago.

The Peck Dealership was a local legend. Bob started out down in Clarendon, back in 1939, the same year the Buckingham project started and just after the streetcar lines shut down.

A lot of people from the neighborhood bought their cars there. Bob moved out to the Glebe Road location after the war, and added the dramatic new space-aged façade in 1964.

It was intended to make a statement about Arlington and the future, and he engaged architect Anthony Musolleno to build the structure in the “Googie” manner, a style that had swept the nation.

The term for the kidney-shaped, glass-walled architecture style was already starting to seem kitchy to the pros, but regular people loved it. Drive-ins and motels all across the country had adopted the style with a vengence, and a term was needed to describe restaurants that looked like space-ships.

Googie's Coffee Shop on the Sunset Strip is the place that gave us the name.

It opened in 1949, and was not the first of the breed. A man named John Lautner evolved the look, starting with three Coffee Dan's shops in LA during the war years. People were working multiple shifts in the aircraft plants and needed their caffeine, just as we need our Starbucks today.

Lautner's style was pronounced by the time Mr. Googie approached him for something with a touch of the surreal. He liked the vaulted roof-lines, bold glass and futuristic angles for his building.

Professor Douglas Haskell of Yale was the man who associated the coffee shop with the genre: Googie Architecture. He had been driving down with a photographer buddy at the beginning of the Fifties. He stopped to gawk at the place, and wrote about it in House and Home Magazine.

“Googie” soon became a term of derision for serious architects. But we all remember it. Almost all the bowling alleys of the 1950s were Googie-influenced, and there were upswept roofs, domes and boomerang shapes everywhere.

Googie was about the future. It was the space age.

What Bob Peck commissioned was a remarkable thing, even for construction from the period when cars had fins like jets. His show room resembles a flying saucer hovering over plate glass, the edges rolled over with a pastry wheel.

Tony Mussoleno got a fee for the design, but for erecting it, he got something else. Two new Corvettes, a '64 and a '65 when the work was done.

Around the Jetson's futuristic diamond motif canopy, letters spelled out B-O-B-P-E-C-K-C-H-E-V-R-O-L-E-T on colored plastic.

In the day, Bob moved more than 2,700 cars a year off that lot, and his property became one of the most recognized in the County. His fame increased and he juggled lacrosse balls on his TV commercials. He was elected to the school board and the county council, and chaired them both.

The Soviet news agency Tass once ran a picture of the dealership as an icon of capitalism, which is pretty high tribute.

Bob stayed in the business until he was almost eighty, and lived until he was 84. He loved his work, and he became in institution.

His son Don finally couldn't resist the price he was offered by the JPG group, one of the anonymous development concerns. The price for the corner amounted to eleven million dollars an acre. JPG is going to develop the crap out of the corner, just as soon as the coming recession is over.

I had hoped they might keep the weird showroom and incorporate it into whatever big is going to come next as a historical quotation on old Arlington. The developer made noises about it, but you know as well as I do what is going to happen. When it is gone, Googie will disappear from Arlington.

Bob would never have put up with it. He cared about his customers, and got a lot of repeat business from Big Pink.

One of the very best customers was a guy named Roy, who lived up on the seventh floor. I don't know many of the folks up there, or don't yet, since I think it is my fate to live on all the floors before I depart this mortal coil. I certainly didn't meet Roy, though people still talk about him.

He had been a big-time businessman, a mover and shaker, and had lived in Big Pink since before it went condo. He used to travel a lot, a real high-roller, and knew everyone. As the years passed, though, he seemed to know fewer and fewer and by the time he left the building in the ambulance with lights but no siren, he knew no one at all.

The long decline had its moments. He would often misplace his car in the lot below his seventh floor place. His approach was not to wander the lot looking for it, but rather to take a cab over to Bob Peck and buy another car.

Bob was happy to oblige. At one point Roy had at least three new cars, haphazardly parked around the sprawling campus, which made at least one of them easy to find at any given time. He also cut Roy a deal on the trade-ins, since there were so many of them, and all came with low, low miles.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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