Its' Tough To Be The Hometown Team In No One's Hometown!

I soon found this out for myself, because in those halcyon days it was legal to drink beer in the capital at the age of 18—or younger, really, if you could produce even the most makeshift counterfeit identification, inasmuch as so much attention was paid to making sure that drinkers were sitting down that little vigilance could be directed at the age of the participants. The legal age of consumption in Maryland was 21, and since there were many rock-'n'-roll joints around 14th Street in Washington , the finest young stock of Baltimore would drive down regularly to patronize these amiable saloons.

Understand, I am not just reminiscing. I bring this up for two good reasons. First, to note, with some pride, that I feel very much at home in Washington , because I was journeying there (and in my formative years, no less) for booze and the fair sex long before the public realized that our elected government was motivated to go there for precisely the same reason. Second, it is my contention that the only people who can properly assess Washington are those from Baltimore . Most of the country holds Washington too much in awe, or is confused by it. New York is merely jealous of it. But we from Baltimore hold the capital in just the right beer-swilling perspective.

People could not comprehend how Spiro Agnew could take the money, take it right there in his office, right next to the White House . How could he do it in Washington ? Well, you see, he came from Baltimore , and what is Washington to us but just a larger version of Annapolis or Ocean City ? The District of Columbia was, as you probably know, carved out of Maryland . Virginia gave up a piece, too, but took hers back in 1846. For a long time, Washington , as a city, lay in the shadow of Baltimore , Maryland 's own metropolis, which was much the more populous until the Depression, when Washington grew with wild abandon.

In fact, in the pre-abandon days the families in Washington who were not involved with government—"cave dwellers," they are still called—very much resembled the plain folks up in Baltimore , and native Washingtonians even speak with the nasal drawl that is known as a " Baltimore accent." Hyman Perlo, director of community relations for the Capital Centre , who grew up in Washington before the War, recalls, "Now you can go downtown and feel the power oozing out. But when I was a kid, we knew that the government was here only because we could see the buildings. For most of us, it was just a smaller Baltimore ."

All the cave dwellers knew each other. There were only a handful of high schools. There was no night life to speak of and only a couple of passable restaurants. "Until a few years ago, if you weren't at my joint, you were camping out," Duke Ziebert says. Georgetown was a d�class� neighborhood. One of the town's great amusements was Sunday "industrial league" baseball, played on the Ellipse in back of the White House . It was all so quaint. For pickup basketball, the favored place was the gym at Huerich Brewery, on the site of what is now Watergate. Monday was fight night, usually at the Uline Arena, which was adjacent to an icehouse. In season, fans would ride the trolleys down Florida Avenue to Griffith Stadium, a tiny little trapezoid of a ball park.

Wet and stifling summers—"bilious fevers are universal," an early visitor warned, and things never improved until the advent of air conditioning—caused Congress and the wealthier whites to take off en masse for the mountains or the shore. Then the place couldn't even resemble Baltimore—in Baltimore people had to keep on working in the summers—but was more like Savannah or Charleston , that is, Dixie rustic. The District's non-voting Congressman, Walter Fauntroy, who grew up right around the corner from Griffith Stadium, recalls spending many summer afternoons perched in a huge elm tree that afforded him a view of the baseball game over the stadium's high rightfield wall. "The chief official personages who people the scene are villagers, with a villager's attitude and a villager's background," a foreign observer sniffed in 1932, just before Franklin Roosevelt came to office.

"F.D.R. changed everything here; he made Washington ," Clayton Fritchey says. "Before him, we all admired U.S. Presidents simply because they got to meet New York bankers." When John Adams arrived to set up presidential shop in Washington on June 3, 1800, there were 131 federal employees. In the next 133 years, the total number working in the Washington area grew to 65,400, but in F.D.R.'s first seven it more than doubled. Now there are 360,000, and because every business, association, charity and fraud must have a nagging voice in the capital, tens of thousands of others are trying to harvest the federal soil that the 360,000 till. Washington is now the eighth-largest metropolitan area in the nation and, given its disposable affluence, it should be a sporting paradise.

However, only the Redskins draw crowds commensurate with the size of the city, and there's a hitch: a mere 15,000 season-ticket holders control nearly all the seats at RFK Stadium . Thus, VIPs can't always freeload in, and many spectators bring binoculars, not so much for the game, but—as Kremlinologists study the review stand at the May Day parade—to discover which lucky government functionaries Edward Bennett Williams has deigned to invite to his presidential box.

In an hors d'oeuvres town, appearance often counts more than the standings. Don't forget that in Washington many of the most attractive people are election losers who hung on, stayed visible and, often as not, accumulated more money and style than they ever did as winners. One of the acknowledged reasons why the Redskins gained such acceptance is that George Preston Marshall made it a priority to get local jobs for his players and encouraged them to mix and mingle. Duke Ziebert, whose restaurant is the sports hangout downtown, maintains that the Bullets' lack of popularity stems from their failure to do this. "You never see the Bullets hanging around," Duke says. "It's not a race thing. The 'Skins—black or white—are always part of the community, always in all the joints."

The Redskins also get almost all the endorsements. Says Charlie Brotman, a District native and sports public-relations executive, "When the Senators were here and the Redskins were bums, not even Frank Howard could take endorsements away from the football players. Pro football has a special place here. I don't even consider the Redskins a sport."