Bernadette and Jim McMahon

LEVINE: This is David Levine and I’m interviewing Bernadette and Jim McMahon for the Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project. It’s January 19th, Martin Luther King Day, 2026, and it’s around 2:30 in the afternoon. We’re meeting at Bernadette and Jim’s home on Independence Avenue SE. 

I’m quite honored to be doing this interview with you two. You have a long and rich history, both off and on Capitol Hill, and my hope is that we will get through most of that history and have it as a permanent record as part of the Overbeck Project. Let’s start with the period of time in which you each were growing up, but before you came to DC. Let’s just start with that, with a little bit from each of you about––where you were born, your family, where you were raised, what your career path looked like. Bernadette, we’ll start with you.

B. MCMAHON: Okay. I was born in Elmira, New York, to Bernie and Mary Malone. I’m the oldest of six children and the family started with me in the middle of World War II. My family had three generations there at that point—I guess I was the fourth generation—starting with Irish immigrants. So, I stayed there through high school, went to college in Rochester, New York, at Nazareth College, now University, and graduated in 1965. I came to DC the summer before senior year and worked just a summer job for the American Chemical Society. And I really had a good time. I feel like it set the path for the rest of my life, because I went back for senior year with the idea that I would come to DC and work here after graduation. And that’s what I did.

LEVINE: That’s great. And, Jim, you the same kind of period of time.

J. MCMAHON: Somewhat similar, though two years ahead of her time-wise. Was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1941, not too far from the street called Flatbush Avenue. I was the oldest of six kids. I went to the local grammar school and from there I went to Brooklyn Technical High School, which I’m very proud of. From there I went to Fordham University and majored in banking. 

Strangely enough, my last year of college, I got a draft notice in the middle of the Cuban missile crisis. So I went down to a  recruiter and they said, “Well, we’ll let you graduate. We won’t touch you until June of 1963.” And they did recommend going to Officer Candidate School. And I chose the Navy because a kid in the [neighborhood] went there before and said it was interesting for somebody “off the streets of Brooklyn, New York.” He said “It’s a complete change of life.”

I came to Washington, DC, on my second tour of duty with the Navy. I had first tour of duty aboard an aircraft carrier, went to Vietnam. I was not a flyer, I was ship’s company. And second tour of duty I was stationed here and I started law school at night at Catholic University. And, after that, I stayed here because this is where the jobs were. My first job was one of the Nader’s Raiders at the Federal Trade Commission. From there on, I imagine I’ll turn it over to Bernadette for the next phase.

LEVINE: Okay, Bernadette, why don’t you pick up and that’ll include, you know, what got you to DC and your professional life here.

B. MCMAHON: Well, when I got back here right after graduation from college, I worked for American Chemical Society again. It was a clerical job, but they liked hiring chemists or chemistry students, as I was the first year. The second year, I went from $300 a month to $500 because I had a degree. But it was still a summer job. 

By the time the summer was over, I had found a job with the federal government and started working in early October of 1965 with the Food and Drug Administration. I had a 34-year career there, working the entire time in the subject matter of pesticide residues in foods. I was a chemistry major and pesticides were hot then. Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring had been published two or three years earlier and there was a lot of attention to pesticides. DDT [the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane] still was major and Carson had pointed out that it seemed to be killing birds. 

It was really an interesting career because I was there in those early years as they, one by one, started banning some of those pesticides. And, when FDA started analyzing Great Lakes fish and finding pesticides, all of a sudden, the environment crossed paths with agriculture. And, in the beginning, in ’65, FDA was the major agency regulating pesticides. Five years later, EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] was created and took over that role mostly, but they left in FDA the responsibility for collecting and testing foods. Not meats and poultry. USDA [United States Department of Agriculture] did that. It was very “government” to have these little …

LEVINE: Divisions.

B. MCMAHON: …bailiwicks. So my job evolved over the years. I started out in the laboratory for eight years, but I knew before––and they learned––that that wasn’t my strong point. And, little by little, I did more work with editing and writing and collecting data and became the co-editor of the manual that FDA distributed to any government agency around the world, called the Pesticide Analytical Manual, Volume 1. And I was still doing that when I retired. 

But other things, too. The collection of data got me interested in … As computers became useful, I started using software databases to keep track of things. The same things we kept in typed lists previously. [Laughter.] And, so, after I retired in 1999 from FDA, I worked another dozen years or more doing database development on a consulting basis for clients. It was very different because each job was different, unlike that same set of data I had dealt with for FDA for so long.

LEVINE: So, we’ve got our chemist and our nascent social change agent. Let’s talk about how you met. And I’m sure that the explanation of how you met will be somewhat different from each of you. So, Jim, why don’t you start? How did you meet Bernadette?

J. MCMAHON: Well, as a lawyer, a daytime lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission, I still maintained my reserve affiliation in the Navy Reserve. And one day I bumped into an old Navy friend who told me about this interesting party up in Georgetown. And we got together with another guy––because I’d made a whole lot of friends––and the combined group went up to this party. And it was one of those highly social, highly conversational events that turned out to be a little bit of a drag. And word got [out] that there was a real humdinger over in Arlington. My friend and I began to leave this Georgetown place and he bumps into a girl coming in, which was an old girlfriend, and I was like a fifth wheel. So, I’m standing there and I just made a survey of the room. I saw this woman smiling. And something clicked. And before I left––I hadn’t said a word to her all night–– I walked over and I asked for her telephone number and she gave it to me. 

The party in Arlington was just as poor as the one we came from and I got home at 1:00 and I called her up, at one in the morning. And she asked why [I] called up and I said, “I think I’d forget if I didn’t call up right away.” And she seemed a little bit piqued at this. I asked her for a date for the next weekend and she was busy that weekend. I asked for a date for the next week. She was busy for that weekend. And, a third, she was busy. And I said, “Well, when are you available?” Well, she said “Yes, I’m available … ”  It was about a month. And we had a first date and we hit it off very, very well. After, I don’t know, about ten months, we were married.

LEVINE: Oh, let’s leave it at that. Now, what do you want to edit in that?

B. MCMAHON: I’m not going to say another thing. [Laughter.]

LEVINE: You agree that that’s the way you met.

B. MCMAHON: Yes.

LEVINE: And that’s the way the relationship evolved.

B. MCMAHON: It did, it did.

LEVINE: But what was going through your mind? We know what was going through his mind. [Laughter.] What was going through your mind after the 1:00 call and the date that you set for a month later?

B. MCMAHON: Well, okay, I will add that I was leaving town for two weeks, going to a class somewhere. I really wasn’t putting him off. [Laughter.] But I was impressed that he was so eager that he would call me at one in the morning, until he was … I learned that night how honest he was when he told me that he was afraid he’d forget if he waited two weeks for me to get back into town. So. It was different. Jim was much more open about his feelings than anybody that I was used to.

LEVINE: And the marriage was when?

J. MCMAHON: In St. Peter’s [Church, 313 2^nd Street SE].

B. MCMAHON: February 13, 1971. Next month, 55 years.

LEVINE: Anything specific about that marriage that we ought to save for posterity. About the wedding?

B. MCMAHON: Don’t get married in February. [Laughter.] It was the worst weekend of the year.

J. MCMAHON: We had a fairly nice reception at Fort McNair. In the Officers’ Club. And the reason why I could do it was I was a member of the service. And, by the way, I changed my designation from a ship driver to Navy JAG. 

LEVINE: Navy JAG?

J. MCMAHON: Judge Advocate General.

LEVINE: Uh-huh. Good, so here we are. You’re married. And what often happens to people who get married is they have children. So why don’t you speak a little bit about when the children arrived and their impact on your lives. As I understand it, until then, basically, you were doing what you described to us as doing. So now you’re married. You decide to have children. You waited a bit.

B. MCMAHON: Joe, our oldest son, was born about three years later in early 1974. We should mention that we were lucky enough––because we’re both frugal and had been working five years prior to getting married––we were able to buy a Capitol Hill house before we got married. And we did that. We settled about a month before the wedding and lived at 17 Seventh Street NE.

LEVINE: Now, why did you wait three years?

B. MCMAHON: Hmm. I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea. [Laughter.]

LEVINE: Okay. I can understand that. Wanted to make sure of the marriage and each of you.

J. MCMAHON: Sure. Exactly.

B. MCMAHON: Yeah.

LEVINE: So, then, how did the arrival of these kids change your lives and your plans during their early years, like when they were doing preschool?

B. MCMAHON: Well, let’s finish with the other child and not leave him out.

LEVINE: Okay, I’m sorry. So, we have Joe.

 B. MCMAHON: Joe was born in ’74. We really had gotten to like our block there on Seventh Street. There were a number of other young couples and we were suddenly having children. We wanted a bigger house, but we didn’t want to leave our block. And we found out, when Joe was almost a year old, that the next-door neighbor was selling their house. So almost exactly four years after the first one, we bought 19 Seventh Street and moved next door. And because we were influenced by people buying extra properties, we kept the original one and rented it. So, we became landlords for the next 25 years, 26 years. 

Kevin was born about a year after that in April of 1976. So, they grew up. We had two boys and they were only a little more than two years apart. So how did they change our lives? Well, as children do, totally. But we kept working. I changed my job to a part-time position. I was in kind of a niche position doing that manual. Most scientists don’t want to write and I did. So I had some leverage there. When I had Joe, after maternity leave, I went back on a half-time position. And I managed to work half-time or part-time for the next 16 years.

LEVINE: And, Jim, what’s your sense of how the kids’ arrival changed your life?

J. MCMAHON: Well, the one thing I liked the most was my two little boys walking beside me. I felt like king of the hill. It was terrific. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was, with a smart woman, good mother, and it made me more of a homebody, which I wasn’t afraid to be. And [laughing] the first thing I did when the number one came along was I bought a color TV because I knew I was going to spend a lot of time at home. [Laughter.]

B. MCMAHON: I forgot that.

LEVINE: Yeah, good.

J. MCMAHON: But, boy, I just, I loved those kids. I really did. And, you know, how they responded. I was …

LEVINE: And they went to local preschools?

J. MCMAHON: Yeah.

B. MCMAHON: Yes. I would say that was our introduction to really getting involved with the neighborhood. I think we joined the babysitting co-op, which was a big deal on the Hill in 1974. I think we joined that as soon as Joe was born, if not before. And we started getting to know other parents that way. There were 200 families in the babysitting co-op at that point. The neighborhood had already changed a lot. It had started gentrifying, at least in the close-in part, and there weren’t typical situations where you’ve got all ages. A lot of people did leave the Hill when their children got older. Schools were still considered questionable. So, there weren’t teenagers to hire. And I think older women that you could hire charged two dollars an hour. That was a lot of money. 

So the babysitting co-op thrived and it was all volunteer. It was pre-internet, of course. And they had this whole set of rules that reads like the U. S. Constitution, thanks to all the lawyers who helped write it. You paid each other in scrip, little pieces of paper that were each good for half an hour. But we got to know lots of other people that way. And, then, Joe went to a co-op play school for two-year-olds and a co-op nursery school for three-year-olds that was located at the Baptist Church at Sixth and A Street [NE]. They had some nice space and they were still making up to the neighborhood for the fact that they had torn down Mary’s Blue Room in ’72. And that story’s been told in other interviews, so, I won’t repeat it.

LEVINE: But what were you and Jim doing related to the tear down of the Blue … or the aftermath for preschools with the kids?

B. MCMAHON: Well, Jim went out and joined the [Mary’s Blue Room] protest the day that a whole lot of people were protesting.

J. MCMAHON: Right. The first protest I ever attended. Honestly, we just didn’t do that in Brooklyn, New York. I don’t remember ever doing it. But I felt like I was exercising my constitutional rights. [Laughter.]

LEVINE: About when was this now?

B. MCMAHON: 1972, as I recall.

LEVINE: And what did you all succeed in? What did this protest succeed in?

B. MCMAHON: It didn’t. It failed. Mary’s Blue Room, which was at the corner of Fifth and East Capitol [NE], got torn down. And, in my mind, it triggered—and not just my mind. I think it’s considered by many to be the final straw that led to the creation of the historic district. That some owner, even if it was a church, could tear down an historic building … So, I don’t know that we did—I think that just started the cooperative. 

I’ll point out now, we may get to it later in the interview, many of those people that were part of the babysitting co-op or that we met through the babysitting co-op we continued knowing until today. And many of them showed up as people who were starting and participating in the Capitol Hill Village, that was created during the 21^st century and that we are part of. So it’s that kind of consistency of neighborhood activity that has been so attractive here.

LEVINE: And, as the kids grew up, did they go to high school around here or did they go away to high school? And during their high school years, I assume your volunteer agenda continued or grew.

J. MCMAHON: St. Peter’s [St. Peter School, 422 3^rd Street SE] was good until the sixth grade. And, without demeaning the seventh and eighth grade, a lot of the kids left and went to prep schools. And we chose St. Anselm’s [Abbey School, 4501 South Dakota Avenue NE], run by Benedictine monks, true scholarship.

B. MCMAHON: But not away. It’s here in DC.

LEVINE: Yeah, I know it.

J. MCMAHON: It’s here in DC. And we got involved in volunteer activity there. And we got involved in volunteer activity, both civic and in St. Peter’s [Church]. In St. Peter’s I was a member of the parish council, the finance council, assistant scout master, and usher.

LEVINE: So, up until a certain point really, your kids’ lives defined your engagements. Is that a fair statement?

J. MCMAHON: That is an accurate statement.

B. MCMAHON: Yeah. I think we made a deliberate decision that we would put our time into things involving children. I was involved with the parents’ association at St. Peter’s, part of the committee that put computers in school for the first time, in probably 1984. That was interesting because the pre-k teacher was all in favor of the computers and the eighth-grade teacher didn’t believe in them. [Laughter.] It was a tough time for teachers who were expected by parents to adapt. But the boys did go to St. Peter’s from kindergarten or pre-k through sixth and then St. Anselm’s from seventh through twelfth, where I got involved with the PTA [Parent Teacher Association] again. And, in both cases, I spent a total of ten years involved with school auctions. And I feel like those haven’t been discussed enough in the Overbeck Project. [Laughs.]

LEVINE: Well, say a little about them.

B. MCMAHON: So, it was a very interesting thing. I remember walking to work—I forgot to mention that my work at FDA was right in nearby Southwest Washington in a building that is now the Tip O’Neill House Office Building [200 C Street SW]. But it was a brand new FDA building at that time when I was there. I got to walk to work and I used to go along East Capitol. And at that time the Capitol Hill Day School was still being run out of two different churches, one of them being the Lutheran church in the 200 block. I saw a sign one day …

LEVINE: 200 block of ?

B. MCMAHON: East Capitol. I saw a sign one day that advertised an auction they were having and they referred to it as a “silent auction.” And the whole rest of the way to work, I was trying to figure out how you could possibly have a silent auction. And I’m not sure when I found out, but I learned. And we did that. St. Peter’s PTA hadn’t done too much in the way of fundraising, but the year I agreed to be the treasurer, the next thing I heard was they had decided to learn from the Day School people and have an auction. 

And it was interesting. It was a huge amount of work. The same thing happened when the boys moved to St. Anselm’s and I again agreed to be the treasurer and found out they had just decided to have an auction. And, as treasurer, I decided I would be in charge of the money because I was going to have to deal with it eventually anyway. But it was challenging, it was fun. It changed through the years because, in the beginning, there were so many things donated that were personal services. I think the very first year somebody volunteered to do two hours of ironing. And I thought that was great, that you didn’t have to have a lot of money to give something that somebody else wanted to buy. Through the years, that changed a lot. I don’t think there are any auctions anymore that have much in the way of that kind of service.

LEVINE: Yes, there are.

B. MCMAHON: Do you think it is?

LEVINE: In small organizations. The larger organizations look for … 

B. MCMAHON: Yeah, yeah. People here on the Hill have a lot more money now. And I think that is one of the changes we saw happen.

LEVINE: Well, when you all—we’ll get to it—got involved with the Overbeck Project, a lot of stuff changed for you. Before we move to that, is there anything else you want to add about your lives before you got involved with the Overbeck Project?

J. MCMAHON: Oh, by the way, sticking to this auction business, all of our vacations were won in the bidding process. [Interviewer laughs.] And, if we didn’t, we never would have went on vacation. Honestly, that was great. During the interim, we bought a house in Lewes, Delaware.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, dear.

J. MCMAHON: And it turned out to be a bust. It was something like 70 or 80 years old. It was a two-family house. We went to summer in the upper one and we worked on the apartment below. And I thought we could have a rent, you know, that was enough to defray the cost of the mortgage. Well, rents were very low. The most I could get for a whole floor was 30 bucks a month. [Laughs.] A hundred and fifty bucks less than what I expected. So we decided to sell it after two years. And, just at that time, interest rates went up to 18%. Nobody could afford to buy a loan. Finally, after how many years, Bernadette, did we …?

B. MCMAHON: We owned it eight years.

J. MCMAHON: Owned it eight years. The state of Delaware issued housing bonds for people who couldn’t afford homes. And some woman from Dover, Delaware, or up from Dover, Delaware, decided to buy it. And we couldn’t be happier. Couldn’t be happier.

LEVINE: A lot of houses and stuff around, but you maintained the house on Seventh Street.

B. MCMAHON: Two of them.

LEVINE: Two of them, for a long time.

B. MCMAHON: We did.

LEVINE: Yeah. Anything else before we move toward Overbeck?

B. MCMAHON: No. I would say we did change, after the boys were out. They left for college in ’92 and ’94. We were still paying for college until ’98. But, then, things were different. We were empty nesters from then on and realized we could get involved in other things. I remember getting involved briefly with Sharon Ambrose’s first campaign for DC Council. And I think it was [‘97]. That was the year our previous councilmember, Harold Brazil from Ward 6, had moved on to be at-large and so there was a vacancy. And my recollection is there was no primary. There was just [a special] election. And 12 people wanted to run. We knew Sharon through St. Peter’s. Her kids had babysat for ours sometimes. So, we were working on her campaign. And it didn’t get us really into politics, but it made me even more appreciative of working with the neighbors and the kind of people that are here. We had talked about, like most people do when you retire, whether would we want to live somewhere else. And we decided no. We would just stay here and keep getting involved in other things.

LEVINE: Well, that certainly sets the stage. 

J. MCMAHON: Yeah. Just before [we get to that], how I got to Capitol Hill itself. My tour of duty … I came here with my second tour of duty in 1965. And about a year after that I reached the august rank of lieutenant commander, enough to get out of the BOQ [Bachelor Officer Quarters], which was a frat [fraternity] house. And I was getting older, so I got a room at 115 Fourth Street SE, right in the middle. And I said to myself, “Hey, I like this place! The trees, the convenience. Everybody parks their car for a month and walks for the rest of the day.” And I really learned to enjoy the comfort of the environment. So.

LEVINE: That’s great. I mean, you both, by then, had a lot of years on the Hill and a lot of connections on the Hill. Given the deep involvement you had with Overbeck over the years, tell us what the genesis of that was. How did your engagement with Overbeck come about?

B. MCMAHON: We had known Steve and Nicky Cymrot from the time our son Joe was a two-year-old. They had a boy born the same year and they were in the two-year-old co-op playschool together.

LEVINE: Now, the Cymrots were the heads of the Capitol Hill Community Foundation.

J. MCMAHON: Yes, yes.

B. MCMAHON: That’s right, that’s right.

LEVINE: So, they were also very active …

B. MCMAHON: Oh, very much so. Very much so. Our kids never again went to school together, but we knew each other. We’d see each other. 

I’ll drop back a little to before we got involved. In 2000, Ruth Ann Overbeck realized she only had a short time to live and wasn’t going to be able to write the definitive––that’s the word––the definitive history of the Hill as she had hoped. She had been collecting material for 30 years. Instead, she told Nicky Cymrot that she’d be willing to be interviewed. And, because [Ruth Ann] was a professional historian and she knew the importance of that kind of thing. Nicky called upon John Franzen, who did the interview. Ruth Ann did die in early 2000, April of 2000. 

Then, they got all the interviews that John and she had done transcribed and put together. As I have been told, the Community Foundation people were so pleased with what had come from that that they didn’t, kind of, want it to end. And they ended up deciding to start this oral history project and name it for Ruth Ann and do interviews to collect information from people who had either lived here a long time or who had grown up here a long time ago. 

Nicky is great at finding people to do tasks. [Laughs.] They had put together the committee, they had raised money. They had even bought equipment. And they realized they needed a day-to-day manager. Nicky knew that we had both retired, and she called and asked if we would consider doing it, being the managers. And …

LEVINE: You said yes.

B. MCMAHON: That’s the short answer, yes. [Laughs.]

LEVINE: And, Jim, anything that you would add to that or …?

J. MCMAHON: Bernadette relished it. She really did. And I liked history a lot. I said, you know, “Maybe I could pitch in.” And I pitched in by doing interviews and writing people’s histories.

LEVINE: Getting involved in Overbeck originally, you were kind of tagging along with Bernadette or …?

J. MCMAHON: Yes. Oh, yeah. Bernadette was the moving force. And, by the way, I’d like to say, if you want a thing done on the Hill, you went to Nicky Cymrot. It’s as simple as that.

LEVINE: I’m aware of that. We try to support them every year.

J. MCMAHON: Sure.

LEVINE: To at least some degree. And, so, when you got there, there was no project.

B. MCMAHON: Right. 

LEVINE: Right. It was like, “Well we interviewed Ruth Ann and that was really good and we have that interview transcribed and published. Now, what the hell are we going to do next?” So, once you were named managers, how did you create the institution you managed for 20-some odd years?

B. MCMAHON: Yeah. About 21 years. John Franzen was the head of the steering committee. He was really the one in charge. We were called project managers. He had a lot of ideas. And, as I say, they had already bought tape recorders. We used cassette tapes in the beginning. 

One of the things that publicized it from the beginning … If you remember, there was another Capitol Hill newspaper, called the Voice of the Hill, at the time. Bruce and Adele Robey founded that and managed that. They were quite involved with the Community Foundation, I believe, so that publication over a period of six months ran this transcript, [John and Ruth Ann’s] interviews, serially. They ran in the Voice of the Hill. And, I mean, Ruth Ann went back to the Native Americans and then told the history. Because she was getting sicker, they skipped a hundred years ahead toward the end because she did want to talk about this period of what we now call “gentrification.” I don’t think that word was used back then. But about the mid to late 20^th century, changes that took place on the Hill. So they really did not cover the entire history. 

Of course, [with] the oral history project, you’re dealing with people who are alive and they only go back so far. But we did manage to interview people, as you know, people in their nineties. You did one of those.

LEVINE: But how did …

B. MCMAHON: Oh, how did we start? How did we get started?

LEVINE: The mandate was, if I understand it right, your mandate was to figure out a way to continue Ruth’s work … 

B. MCMAHON: Well, in a little different way. Oral histories are personal ones. I consider each one a snapshot, and it’s the collection that tells the whole story. We were not historians. I’m trying to think of the name of the man—I won’t. One of the things that we did right in the beginning, with those Voice of the Hill serial publications of the Ruth Ann interviews, [was include] a sidebar in each one [that] told what we were doing. That this project was going to start, who to contact. Our phone number was listed. What they were looking for—volunteers who were willing to do interviews or transcribe or other things. Recommendations for people who should be interviewed. And, little by little, that’s how it came together. I started right away keeping track of people who volunteered and who said they would do it. People who were recommended.

LEVINE: Were you also doing a lot of the interviews and transcriptions in those first years?

B. MCMAHON: No. No, I did not. I took seriously the idea that to manage it I needed to not get myself too busy with other things. What Nicky didn’t know, when she asked us, is that I was by then doing the database development work. And I was pretty good at keeping track of things. I created a database on my own computer to track all of this, pieces of data. And I …

LEVINE: So, I must be on that list, because, at some point, I asked to be interviewed and they told me I was too young.

B. MCMAHON: Well, you told me when you were born and it was the same year I was born. [Laughter.] Truthfully, we were really concentrating then on people in their eighties and nineties. You and I were what? In our sixties, maybe at the time?

J. MCMAHON: Kids.

B. MCMAHON: Yeah.

LEVINE: Kids. So, about how many interviewers did you have access to and how much equipment?

B. MCMAHON: Well, I no longer have that database. It became obsolete because it was so old and I just recently got rid of the computer. And it was something I bought used in 2006. So, it was …

LEVINE: What is your sense of …

B. MCMAHON: It was antique. There were, I’m sure, at least a hundred interviewers over the time. I used to be able to go to the database. Somebody wanted numbers every year and I was used to that from government work. The database could give me the answers. I can’t do it now from my head. But a lot of people did it once and never again, especially transcription. That’s a tedious job and a lot of people discovered right away they didn’t really want to do it.

LEVINE: So, you never got swallowed into doing all those things?

B. MCMAHON: I didn’t do more than three or four the whole 21 years.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah. I did a lot of transcription, but I didn’t mind it as much. It wasn’t tedious to me because of the content. The content.

B. MCMAHON: Jim did interviews and he did transcriptions. He finished a lot of them that other people had worn out doing.

LEVINE: So, over the years that you were doing this, how did the Overbeck Project change? Did it change in any way or was the original conception exactly what you did?

B. MCMAHON: It stayed very close to the original plan. A couple of things got added on. Very soon after we got started actually doing interviews, we had a first session of training volunteer interviewers at John Franzen’s house in the fall, maybe September, of 2001. In fact, John used to point out that on 9/11 [2001], Jim had an appointment to go over to John’s house because they were having a planning meeting. I’ve forgotten exactly what you were doing. And they did it, despite what had happened that morning.

LEVINE: Yeah, yeah. As I understand it, then, over the years you all created a wondrous collection of interviews that can be accessed by name, by profession, all kinds of different ways. 

B. MCMAHON: Well, the access came along a little later. And Rick Hamecs, who was somebody John knew, who did maintenance of websites for people as a profession, [volunteered to help] set up a website very early on because we knew this wasn’t worth anything unless we could share it.

LEVINE: Yes.

B. MCMAHON: And, by then, of course, that was the way to do it. This was 2001. John knew somebody who designed the website for us. She was a young woman whose name I’ve forgotten. She never was involved again. She, I don’t think, lived here very long. Rick stayed with us for years and took care of things. It was pretty basic. We didn’t have filters for looking at that, but the entire transcript was searchable. Because of the way it had been put up there. And so, to me, that became a very important thing, that this was a resource for other people. You needed to know what was in there. Nobody’s really going to sit and read multiple transcripts.

LEVINE: And so we have the project. There were a lot of acknowledgements of your work, a lot of awards. Why don’t you talk to a couple of the awards or acknowledgements that you’re most proud of.

B. MCMAHON: Well, the main one, of course, is … The Community Foundation awards a Community Achievement Award to three different people or couples every year. And, in 2018, we were recognized with such an award. Mostly for the work we did with the Overbeck project. And that was a big deal.

LEVINE: It certainly was. Yeah.

B. MCMAHON: That’s a very nice thing to have. We joined a legion of other people similarly awarded through the years and feel very honored to be there. I will say the project, very soon after it got started, at Steve Cymrot’s urging, started a lecture series. And, by that time, I had caught on that I couldn’t take on any more of the activities. So I never was directly involved with the lectures. John led it for many years, and other people took over when he stopped. But we went to the lectures, we handed out programs. We kept track of who had signed up and checked names at the door because it was so popular right from the beginning.

J. MCMAHON: I was like a bouncer.

LEVINE: You needed one, I … 

J. MCMAHON: You bet. Exactly. You could walk in off the street! [Laughter.]

LEVINE: And I learned quickly that I had to send in my reservation request within a day or two ...

J. MCMAHON: Yeah, yeah.

B. MCMAHON: Yes.

LEVINE: … or it was filled.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah. Right here in the neighborhood. You could walk to it, you know. It was great.

B. MCMAHON: Right. I think the people who started it were astounded at how popular it became. One of the big things back in the beginning was that we were using as a location the meeting room of the Masonic Temple, the Navy Yard group. It was called the Naval Lodge, the Masonic Naval Lodge. At Fourth and Pennsylvania SE. I had lived here 30 years by that time. I didn’t know that existed.

LEVINE: First time in it was for one of the lectures.

B. MCMAHON: Yes. So, Ruth Ann’s husband had been a Grand Master there. Apparently, she had played the organ there. And that’s how we managed to get that space. And that went on for years. And [the lectures have] since moved to the Hill Center, which is a very nice place but not exotic like the Masonic Lodge was. I think a lot of people went there. But John did a really good of picking out topics, speakers.

LEVINE: I mean, you were involved in creating an extraordinary resource for the future for historical research. As you look back on the years with the Overbeck Project and its offshoots, all this stuff that’s closely linked, how do you feel about that?

B. MCMAHON: Oh, I’m still very fascinated by it. I think we did great things.

J. MCMAHON: Worth every moment, honestly. Sometimes it was tedious. Sometimes you had to deal with difficult people. Sometimes the interviews were great and, then, sometimes the interviews were really dull after putting so much work into it. But still it was worth it and people still thank us for it. And it’s as simple as that. So.

LEVINE: Good. Now, how’d you get out of it? [Laughter.]

J. MCMAHON: Bernadette was the one who’d done so much work and she was tiring. You know. It was enough.

B. MCMAHON: There was another big issue. And it was that database. Everything about the project, except the lectures, was in my head and my computer. And I was getting older. I was very concerned at the lack of accessibility of all that information to anybody else. Nobody else would have been able to get into the computer and, as I say, it was pretty antique by that time. I also worried that that computer was going to die. I had another computer, but it wouldn’t run that program because of the software. So that really worried me and I think it’s irresponsible not to prepare for that kind of thing. So. But I didn’t think I could continue managing the project and take care of turning over the data to somebody else. It took some extra work to get that in a format other people could use. So I decided it was time to wrap it up. And I told them back in the summer of ’22 that I would like to retire. I had time to, you know, help with the transition. But that’s what happened.

LEVINE: So, what was the transition? To whom and how was it transitioned?

B. MCMAHON: Well, Nicky called meetings and there were people who already had been involved with the project in one way or another. Maygene Daniels and Elizabeth Lewis have ended up being the main people running it now, with different people taking care of the lectures. Nancy Metzger was involved for a long time with the lectures. Now, Beth Hannold and maybe other people are managing that. Nancy is still involved. And Beth, when she retired, decided to help.

LEVINE: So Maygene and Elizabeth …

B. MCMAHON: Are the main people now.

LEVINE: Are the main people. And is it still operating?

B. MCMAHON: Oh, absolutely. They took some new turns. Jim’s right. I was also kind of getting tired. I was still focused on much older people because they still kept showing up on our horizon. I’d say the biggest change is they have gone with much more recent happenings to talk about. But they’ve had some very eager new volunteers doing the interviews. Randy Norton has done a bunch of them, and Ken Jarboe.

LEVINE: It must be great to see that it has continued.

B. MCMAHON: True.

LEVINE: Of course, I’m sure it’s evolved in ways other than you already mentioned. But, you know, children have to grow up. [Laughs.]

B. MCMAHON: Right. I don’t think they …

J. MCMAHON: But it has something more than our personalities. It has staying power in itself, you know.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, yeah. And they have done interviews to record things that have happened in the neighborhood in the business area. There are several, at least several, interviews done about the topic of formation of the Capitol Hill Business Improvement District. Many of the people who were directing that whole operation were interviewed.

LEVINE: So, you actually did this transitioning in ’23?

B. MCMAHON: Well, you know, I was involved for a while. I was also working on exporting data from my database.

LEVINE: So, you know, is it fair that it’s been a couple of years since you’ve been involved?

B. MCMAHON: Yes, yeah. And I have stayed [involved.] I still do some editing for them. We go through a process where the transcriber—and I have to mention the two transcribers who’ve done the most are Betsy Barnett and David MacKinnon, who have done at least several dozen each. And quickly and well. They are such a treasure. [Transcription] was always a choke point. People said they would do it and then they found out how hard it was. So, editing—I used to be kind of the editor, I guess. I read all of them and made edits, if needed. Now, they have more editors involved, which was always important. And I do some of those now. But the management has been taken over. Maygene came over and took home a carload of things …

LEVINE: I bet.

B. MCMAHON: … that I had been storing all those years. So it’s a comfort to know that it’s in good hands.

LEVINE: You’ve been on the Hill a long, long time. You’ve seen a lot of stuff. If you can take kind of a step out of this, what are the main changes you’ve seen on the Hill over the last 55 years? Other than, of course, we have to mention affordability. But leaving affordability out of the equation.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah. Definitely, definitely. I don’t know whether it’s progress or the gentrification, but when we bought our house on Seventh Street, that was a fringe area. And now there is very little fringe area or no fringe area at all.

B. MCMAHON: It’s run right into the river.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah. Middle class, upper middle class. One of the things I do remember, in 1968, were the riots. And I remember soldiers with bayonets walking around Capitol Hill. That has stuck in my mind. And [laughing] I remember …

LEVINE: Predecessors of our current deployed National Guard.

B. MCMAHON: That’s right.

J. MCMAHON: Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And I remember a couple of stores were broken into and I had some shirts in a cleaner’s. I went there and it was burned out. I lost two shirts [laughing], my best shirts.

B. MCMAHON: But was that on the Hill? Or …

J. MCMAHON: Well, pretty close to it. I mean …

B. MCMAHON: It was maybe near Catholic U[niversity].

J. MCMAHON: Near Catholic U. But it spilled over  …

B. MCMAHON: Yeah.

J. MCMAHON: … onto the Hill.

LEVINE: Yeah. I remember the stuff closer to H Street [NE]. That was pretty nasty.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah.

B. MCMAHON: Well, what I tell people about the big change is Metro. There was no Metro when we came.

LEVINE: Until the 90s.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, no. I told you my son Kevin was born in ’76. 

LEVINE: Uh-huh.

B. MCMAHON: He’s one month younger than Metro.

LEVINE: Oh, really?

J. MCMAHON: [Laughs.]

B. MCMAHON: They opened it in time …

LEVINE: Yeah, yeah. I should remember that because I moved to the Hill just after that. Or I moved to the Hill in ’75.

B. MCMAHON: I’ve got a cool website—I mean, somebody has, I have a link to it—that shows the progression as a series of real fast slides as it grew. I’m quite sure––I’m doing this from memory––the first section that opened in March of ’76 was the Red Line, the bottom part of the long U that is the Red Line, Rhode Island Avenue to Farragut North. And it didn’t include Gallery Place because they had tried to get away without an escalator or elevator there and they got sued by accessibility people even then. And they wouldn’t let them open until they had added whatever was missing. So.

LEVINE: Any changes that you’ve seen in the attitudes of Hill residents?

J. MCMAHON: Well, look at it this way. Remember when Eastern Market burned down practically and how the community came together. I was astounded. Not only would they volunteer time, but [people] opened up their wallets. And I was just blown away. And I said, you know, “This is a nice place to live and here’s the evidence of it.” And it just made things better.

LEVINE: And through the years, we’ve had all kinds of people who want to make Eastern Market into a very different kind of destination.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, yeah.

J. MCMAHON: Exactly.

LEVINE: And the community has always risen up quite strongly to say, “You’re not going to mess with Eastern Market.”

J. MCMAHON: Yeah, exactly.

B. MCMAHON: That’s a whole story that never got told [by the Overbeck Project]. There are references to the 30-year war over Eastern Market, but we didn’t really cover that. In 2009, when they were hoping to reopen after the 2007 fire, that’s when I first met Elizabeth Lewis. Nicky knew her and she came on to help the Overbeck Project with focusing on people related to Eastern Market at that time. And we did 30 interviews that year. Yeah. And …

LEVINE: Maybe you should interview one of the long-term produce sellers.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, we have all three of the Calomirises.

LEVINE: Uh-huh, good.

B. MCMAHON: Oh, yeah.

LEVINE: Because they’re good friends, so I was going to say if …

B. MCMAHON: I have something else. I really do feel that the expectations are so different from when we came. 

LEVINE: Say more about that.

B. MCMAHON: We were part of a relatively affluent … I mean, we could afford to buy a house, but it cost $37,000. But we had professional level jobs. But, over and over, other interviewees have said, “Well, I couldn’t afford Georgetown, so I came to Capitol Hill.” These are people who came a long time ago. Now, we’re in this stratospheric level. I think it’s quite different. There was so much do-it-yourself back then. And, now, it’s professional gardening, and there’s just a whole different expectation because the people are at a different economic level.

LEVINE: You see any changes in the kinds of attitudes that you run into on the streets? Or any changes in the number of baby carriages?

B. MCMAHON: [Laughs.] Oh, my. Well, that, yes.

J. MCMAHON: Yeah, this is true. 

B. MCMAHON: I think the kind of people who came and wanted to participate are still coming. I would say the status of the public schools on the Hill is real evidence of that. Look at how many are thriving. And it’s because there’re a lot of young children, but it’s all … Their parents are involved. And all the youth sports. You know, Soccer on the Hill predated us a little and our kids were only very briefly involved. They weren’t interested. But that’s gone on to be a whole lot of different sports now.

LEVINE: Jim, you must have some thoughts about who you encounter on the street. Why don’t you chat about …

J. MCMAHON: With, let’s say, the improvement of Capitol Hill and its socioeconomically rising, we’ve never been above it. We’ve never been snooty about it. [Interviewer laughs.] And I feel that, you know, there are not people on this Hill that look away when you walk by because you’re not on their level. It’s still a neighborhood community where we kind of have one another’s backs and I’d like to keep it that way. And, by the way, another little institution that we have that at least has dramatically [affected the neighborhood] is going to be Trader Joe’s. It’s so nice to be able to walk to a well-organized grocery store.

LEVINE: Too bad it’s in a terribly overpriced bizarre building.

J. MCMAHON: Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

B. MCMAHON: I will put a word in here that maybe will be appearing for the first time in an Overbeck interview. A NORC. Have you heard about NORC? N-O-R-C. We haven’t talked about Capitol Hill Village and I think we should because we’ve been members since the very beginning. And not real active, but we’ve participated.

LEVINE: Okay. Tell us about NORC.

B. MCMAHON: NORC stands for Naturally Occurring Retirement Community.

LEVINE: Okay.

B. MCMAHON: I don’t know who made it up. The people who made it known in this neighborhood were a couple named Tom and Fran Zaneillo who moved here from out of town to be near their daughter and grandchildren. And have been very involved from the time they arrived with Capitol Hill Village. And they were holding meetings a few years ago to talk about the idea that, if a group of seniors—and that’s what the Village is all about, it’s helping one another age in place or age where they need to be—if a group of them lived in the same place, even if it’s just an ordinary apartment building …

LEVINE: That’s a NORC.

B. MCMAHON: …  not a specialized senior community, not a health care community, but that, if it were, it would be beneficial to all of them. And I thought it sounded like a great idea. I chuckled at the thought that somebody was planning it. I thought is it really “naturally occurring” if you’re having meetings to talk about it? But, in the meantime, first of all, the Zaniellos did end up moving to the Residences at Eastern Market.  That place has become a NORC. Walk around there and see the number of people on walkers who are out taking advantage of all the things that are available on that block. And I would guess some people coming off the Metro just to visit might think that that building is a senior community. And it’s not, of course. There’s young children and families who are usually only there temporarily.

LEVINE: So, anything else that we ought to talk about?

J. MCMAHON: The Weintraubs used to live across the street from us on Seventh Street, so we got to know them very well. And Frager’s [Hardware, owned by the Weintraubs]. When Frager’s burned, they had to comply with the historic district and it took clearances three or four years to get through. And, by comparison, I was a docent at Eastern Market. Just to give you an idea of how city hall or the government looks upon Eastern Market––it looks upon Eastern Market as our little neighborhood city hall. And here’s what happened once: In the design of it, they had to have vents in the building, but it would have destroyed the architectural side. So, what they did was they dug down, underneath that alleyway and up right beside the pool. And the vent is on the other side. The people initiating the papers went down there and the clerk saw it was Eastern Market. “They’ll be ready by two o’clock this afternoon.” [Interviewer laughs.] That’s how quickly you can get things done if you attach Eastern Market to the name downtown. I love that.

LEVINE: Well, let’s hope that continues.

J. MCMAHON: Yes, it really does. Sure. [Reading from a list of questions] What are you doing now and in the future? History? I was a docent at the American History Museum, Smithsonian, for over 20 years. And I really enjoyed that. And I was also a docent at Eastern Market, a docent at the Supreme Court, and a docent at the Library of Congress. So, I know a lot about the Hill.

LEVINE: A lot about docent-ing.

J. MCMAHON: It’s volunteer work. You meet nice people, you meet knowledgeable people, people that care, that are proud of their community. You don’t become a docent of something that’s undesirable. Proud of your community. 

LEVINE: Yeah. There’s great consistency in your attitudes toward the community and in the contributions that you’ve made to it. And, so, you know, I think it’s really important that your lives become part of this project and I feel honored that you asked me to do it.

J. MCMAHON: Because you’re the best one. [Laughter.] You are the best one really.

LEVINE: Well, any final words?

J. MCMAHON: It was a great experience. Honestly.

LEVINE: Good.

J. MCMAHON: I recommend it for everybody. [Laughter.] 

LEVINE: And, Bernadette, any final words?

B. MCMAHON: I think we’re done. We hope we can stay here. We’re at the age that we’re contemplating what if we can’t take care of ourselves. We did move to a condo 15, almost 16 years ago now. We were on Seventh Street for close to 40. And, thinking about it, our closest son is in Columbia, Maryland, which isn’t too far away but it’s too far if we needed a lot of help. And, so, I wonder if he’ll be surprised if he reads this someday. [Laughs.]

J. MCMAHON: Right. I’m sure.

LEVINE: Well, let me close the interview with just saying once again what a pleasure it has been to do it. And I look forward to seeing the transcript. Shall I stop?

B. MCMAHON: Yes.

LEVINE: Stop, stop

END OF INTERVIEW

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