Elizabeth Gill

Interview with Elizabeth Gill
Interview Date: August 6, 2024
Interviewer: Randy Norton
Transcriber: David MacKinnon
Editor: Diane Platt

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.
Not to be reproduced without permission.

START OF INTERVIEW
NORTON: Good Morning
GILL: Good morning, Randy. How are you?
NORTON: I’m fine. I’m Randy Norton, and I’m interviewing Elizabeth Gill. It is August 6, 2024. We’re at Elizabeth’s apartment at number 312 at Collington Retirement Center. Where are you from originally?
GILL: Teaneck, New Jersey, five miles from the George Washington Bridge.
NORTON: How long did you live there?
GILL: My parents bought the house before I was born. They’d just moved back from Switzerland with my two older brothers. They lived there until I was a junior in college. So my whole growing up.
NORTON: Where did you go to school?
GILL: I went to the public schools in Teaneck, and then I went to Smith College in Massachusetts.
NORTON: When did you graduate from Smith?
GILL: 1974.
NORTON: What did you major in?
GILL: Art history.
NORTON: Really?
GILL: Yeah.
NORTON: Cool. My next question is how did you get to DC?
GILL: It was love. It was 1977. The older of my two brothers, Michael, had bought a house on Capitol Hill on Eighth Street NE in the 600 block that spring of 1977. At Christmas time, he invited my parents and me and his in-laws from Illinois, all to come to Washington for Christmas.
NORTON: When was this?
GILL: This was Christmas of 1977. His in-laws came first, so they got the guestroom in his house. So, the question was, where were my parents and I going to stay? He had a friend who he had worked for in DC government named Dick Gill who owned a house on 12th Street SE, a block and a half south of Lincoln Park. And he said, “Dick, my parents and my baby sister…” That was really sort of softly said. Dick never even heard the part about the baby sister. I’m only seven years younger, so I sort of take exception to the idea of being the baby, but anyway, “My parents and my baby sister are coming. Could they stay at your house, and then we will include you in our Christmas celebration?” Dick said, “Sure.” I was living in Massachusetts. I drove to Connecticut, where my parents were. We drove down to Washington on Christmas eve, and Michael took us over to Dick’s home on 12th Street at the corner of Walter Street across from Mott’s Market, and that’s what brought me to Washington. Within two and a half months, I’d moved in with Dick [laughs]. There’s more of a story there if you want it, but I don’t know [laughs].
NORTON: It’s okay. If you want to tell it, I’m always happy to hear it. That’s great. So you were still in school, or had you graduated?
GILL: No. I had finished school. I had spent a year in New York working at Columbia University in the office of Art Properties. Then I had gone back to Massachusetts. I worked at UMass [University of Massachusetts] at Amherst where I was the registrar of the university gallery. Then, as the economy wasn’t so great, and Governor Michael Dukakis had to make RIFs, reductions in force, I was one of the RIF victims. So, I was out of work, which made it very easy for me when there were inklings of romance to leave Massachusetts and move to Washington.
NORTON: What did you do in terms of employment when you got down to DC?
GILL: The nice thing was that Dick was a GS-15 in the DC government, so I didn’t have to…and he was very generous…so I didn’t have to race to find a job. I was already in the midst of applying to graduate school, and I added a DC school to my list. I applied to American University. I wound up that fall, after I’d moved in, going to AU for a master’s in art history. We got married that Thanksgiving time, so this is now 1978. We were married at the Hotel Washington, which is now the W, or maybe not even the W anymore. I don’t know what it is these days. [Hotel Washington]
NORTON: It’s a nice spot, and it has a nice view of the White House.
GILL: There you go. We were up on the roof deck, and it was all lovely. By the spring, I thought, “Every time I’m at school, I want to be home. Every time I’m home, I want to be at school.” So I left school, and we had our son [laughs]. We moved on to bigger things.
NORTON: Tell me about your kids.
GILL: We have two kids. Christopher was born in 1980, and Suzanne was born in 1983—both summertime babies. As I sit here now doing this interview on one of the hottest days ever—for both my kids, the summer during which they were born was at that time the hottest day on record. Now, if you see a list of the ten hottest days in Washington, they don’t even make the list of the ten hottest days. But back then it was hot. Being pregnant and hot was not a good combination. We’re very lucky now that everyone’s all grown up and they live close by. Christopher lives in College Park, and Suzanne lives in Alexandria—they’re both within half an hour of my home here, so it’s perfect.
NORTON: When you left AU, what was the next employment or education you [pursued]?
GILL: I did no further education. I wound up doing sorts of volunteering things. I volunteered with the Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op. I wound up being the president of the Babysitting Co-op, which was a great organization where you exchanged scrip for babysitting time. In fact, we joined the babysitting co-op when Terry and Geoff Lewis were the presidents. While I was still pregnant, we wanted to do some babysitting and bank some scrip.
NORTON: This is pregnant with Chris?
GILL: This is pregnant with Chris, so we’re talking about 1980, the spring of 1980. That was a wonderful thing. You knew you had a reliable babysitter—you hoped—because these were adults with children. You weren’t hiring a 12-year-old, a 15-year-old, or whatever. It wasn’t any cash, which at that time was pretty scarce, so that was a good thing. So I did that.
I volunteered at Capitol Hill Hospital. I don’t really remember doing much of what, but there were projects that they would have. I remember Jill Denton was one of the other volunteers. We did various activities to sort of engage the community. I wound up being put on their institutional review committee which had to review requests to use equipment or procedures that had not had final approval from the FDA. Believe it or not, as common as they were even then, at that time interocular lenses for cataract replacement did not have final [FDA] approval. Every time a doctor wanted to do a lens, you [he] had to go through the committee. Then, sometimes there were much more serious choices to be made…ethical decisions.
NORTON: How did you get on the committee?
GILL: I have no clue [laughs]. I’m not a medical person. I’m not an ethicist. I’m not a…
NORTON: Did they need a lay person?
GILL: Well, except that the only other person…it was not a big group. There were maybe four or five of us…the only other person at this point that I can remember [was] on it was Steve Cymrot. He, by training was a lawyer, although he didn’t—I’m sure he used his law knowledge in all his real estate business—he did not really practice law, but he had that kind of a mind. I don’t know what he brought either. He also was not a medical professional or whatever. We must have only been one group of people that it [the appeal] had to pass through to get approval. I don’t quite remember how it worked.
NORTON: How long were you on that committee?
GILL: A couple of years.
NORTON: This is approximately when?
GILL: Early to mid-1980s.
NORTON: How did you get hooked up with Capitol Hill Hospital, I mean originally? What caused you to volunteer?
GILL: It was the neighborhood hospital. Now it’s [BridgePoint Continuing Care Hospital] because the alternative neighborhood hospital was DC General, which you wanted to go to if you were shot, but other than that I’m not sure you really wanted to go there.
NORTON: And why did you want to go there when you were shot?
GILL: Because they had such great experience [laughs]. They were very good at that kind of trauma.
NORTON: Let’s go back. The whole time you were on the Hill, you lived in the same house.
GILL: Never moved.
NORTON: At the corner of Walter and 12th Street SE.
GILL: Exactly
NORTON: How did you find out about the Babysitting Co-op?
GILL: Because my brother and sister-in-law were in it, who lived up on Eighth Street. The ones who…
NORTON: …You came for Christmas.
GILL: …That’s right, that’s right. Michael and Mary Youdin. They were in it.
NORTON: How many people were in the co-op at that point?
GILL: I’m going to guess a hundred, but I wouldn’t swear to it.
NORTON: But there were a lot.
GILL: There were a lot, and there were different groups. They were organized by geography so that you didn’t have to go way across the Hill—not that the Hill’s that big—but when you’re coming home late at night…The advantage to being a babysitter is that the family that hires you has to take you home. But in the babysitting co-op, you were an adult and you got yourself home. So if they were out late and you were coming home at midnight or one o’clock in the morning, and you didn’t have a parking place, you had to find a place to park and then walk home. This, at times, could feel a little nerve-racking, and so… yeah. So they tried to keep it geographically compact; it seems to me that there were four regions, but I wouldn’t swear to that.
NORTON: And each region had a secretary, right, each month.
GILL: I think that’s right.
NORTON: And they had to call you, right.
GILL: Yes.
NORTON: You had to call them if you wanted somebody to sit for you.
GILL: Right.
NORTON: What do you remember about that? Did you ever serve as a service secretary?
GILL: No. I think I went right to the top [laughs].
NORTON: Good idea.
GILL: It was interesting. It was so much fun because you got to see other people’s homes. As I recall, the people who lived on Capitol Hill at that time were so interested in the homes and what other peoples’ homes looked like. I always remember, in particular, one family that didn’t have a television. I’m a big TV [fan]; I would name them but I don’t think that’s probably appropriate. Not what I’m saying is a mark against them. It was just I’m such a TV watcher, and clearly, they were not. They had all these very serious books. “What am I going to do all night?”
NORTON: What do you remember about the kids that you sat with? Was that different? Did some of them stay up late, some of them didn’t?
GILL: It depended on how old they were. No, I think they were mostly pretty good kids. I think they were used to this—adults they didn’t necessarily know coming into their home and saying, “Okay, now you have to brush your teeth. Now you have to go to bed. Yes, I’ll read you a story. No, you can’t have your fourth glass of water. Go to sleep.” I must say, I’m the kind of person who when something is over, I tend not to retain all the details. I remember it being a relatively easy job. I had been a babysitter when I was in high school. My daughter never babysat in high school. That would have been different for her. I didn’t think it was very hard.
NORTON: Before we move on, the Capitol Hill Hospital. What else did you do? Was that pretty much it, or did you volunteer…
GILL: Yeah. We tried to do some fundraising events for them. Again, I don’t remember all the details. The detail I do remember was I was working in an office with another one of the volunteers, and I was just pregnant, and the woman I was working with had recently had a miscarriage. She sat there and told me all the details. I went home and threw up [laughs]. The only time I threw up when I was pregnant with either of my kids. But she just went on and on. That’s my biggest memory about volunteering at Capitol Hill Hospital.
NORTON: Your kids were born. You were involved with the Babysitting Co-op. What’s the next thing you remember you were involved with on the Hill?
GILL: I wound up volunteering at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop [CHAW]. Having been an art history major in college, I was interested in art. When I was in graduate school, I worked part time at the American Institute of Architects [AIA], the foundation in that wonderful little corner building that is sort of nestled in the arch of the AIA building. So I thought, “Well, this is at a local [level] and promoting the arts.” So that was very interesting. I just did sort of office work and gradually was found to be a responsible person and a reliable person, and I was given a part-time job. The Arts Workshop was going under a lot of change at that time. Raye LeValley…
NORTON: When are we talking about?
GILL: When are we talking about. Just let me just do the math. Suzie was born in ’83, so it’s probably the late 80s.…the very late 80s. Ray LeValley, who had been one of the founding artists, had decided to move to New Jersey. So she was leaving. The  real founder of the Workshop was Sally Carlson Crowell. The board decided that they wanted a hiatus from her. [Worked at CHAW 1990-1997]
They wound up offering me the position of executive director. There had never been an executive director before. There had been a director for education and a director of administration. They decided that this should be one person, and they asked me to do it. So I said yes.
That was another big shakeup because Sally had done a fabulous job getting the building. Cleaning it out with the Marines. All the things she had done. All the shows that all the kids were in that all the families loved to go [see]…for her being separated from that against her will was a really unfortunate community hurt. It hurt.
NORTON: Do you remember it being against her will? Because she remembered it differently.
GILL: Oh good. I’m glad. That was certainly my sense. If I’m wrong, I couldn’t be happier because it was very unpleasant. There was another employee whose position was kind of faded out because there wasn’t enough money to have me suddenly be full-time. I’d been part-time up until then, and she felt that she was owed a job. That was unpleasant. But it worked out well.
The Arts Workshop at the time was still a financially struggling organization doing really good work—providing great classes of a variety of things. While I was there, there were three entities that were founded as part of the Arts Workshop. One was the Capitol Hill Art League. Nicky Cymrot was the founding force, the driving force behind that. There was the Capitol Hill Chorale, which is now an independent entity. The driving force behind that was Parker Jayne and Bonny Wolf. Then there was the Theater Alliance, which is also now an independent entity. The founding forces behind that were Adele Robey and Linda Norton.
NORTON: All this happened while you were executive director?
GILL: Absolutely. Yes.
NORTON: How long were you [the] executive director?
GILL: I left there in 1997, so probably four years or so, three, four years [seven]. About that, yeah. I was feeling very stuck about the financial situation [worked at CHAW 1990-1997].
NORTON: Which was tough at that point.
GILL: It was very tough, very tough. I often held my paycheck. That kind of thing. My husband took great exception to that because he had his own business, and he often got paid last [laughs]. Not that I was making very much money, but one of us should have been paid on time [laughs]. And that wasn’t happening. By that point our kids were in Capitol Hill Day School. So we had substantial financial obligations.
One of the board members of the Arts Workshop at the time was Sharon Raimo. We were just chatting one day as friends, and I sort of casually said, “You got a job?” She said, “Yes.” She hired me away from the Arts Workshop to work at St. Coletta where I became the director of operations.
NORTON: Just so we’re clear, St. Coletta’s is…?
GILL: St. Coletta School  is for children with mental retardation, autism, and secondary disabilities. At that time, its campus was in Alexandria, Virginia—in Old Town. It also provides adult services for people with mental disabilities or cognitive disabilities. Since then, it has moved its school program into the district, and the original school building in Alexandria now provides adult services. I worked there from 1997 to 2002.
NORTON: Let me back up just a little bit. The Arts Workshop. Before you became executive director were you or your kids involved in any of the classes or anything like that or the shows or anything?
GILL: Yes. Absolutely. I took pottery classes there, which I loved. Gail Spane was the instructor and there was always a broken kiln.
NORTON: Down in the basement, right.
GILL: Down in the basement, and she somehow, with wire and duct tape or whatever, got them running again. She was great. My kids took Steve Johnson’s acrobatics class, of course. Was there anyone who didn’t? People have different levels of athletic ability, but Steve pulled out everything from anybody. He was great. So they did that. Suzanne took clarinet lessons.
NORTON: Do you remember who from?
GILL: I can picture her. She was a petite little thing. A young woman who lived over by Potomac Yards. But I don’t remember her name. Bess Nuland took clarinet at the same time. There were a few other people. They were all a little gang of clarinetists [laughs].
NORTON: Anything else that you remember, your kids or you? Were you involved with the shows at all? I know you were when you were executive director.
GILL: I didn’t create things that got shown. But I was a good purchaser. As I look around my apartment now, I see several things that came from the Art League exhibits.
NORTON: The Capitol Hill Art League exhibits, which they would have and put them right there in the…
GILL: They were like monthly or so, and there would be a nice little opening reception, and then the works would stay up for a month or so.
NORTON: As you went to St. Coletta’s, were you still there when they moved over to DC?
GILL: [Okay, good.] [No.] St. Coletta’s had already hired Michael Graves to be the architect. We had the site at Reservation 13 all picked out.
NORTON: Which was down near the jail where old DC General [Hospital] was.
GILL: Nineteenth and Independence, so it’s near RFK stadium and DC jail. But I left before they even broke ground. I wound up at a wonderful organization. Somehow, I seem to have this—with the exception of St. Coletta—I have this attraction to small non-profits doing good work on a shoestring where their very existence is hanging by a thread.
So I went to a wonderful organization called City at Peace. City at Peace taught conflict resolution to teenagers through the performing arts…exactly…there’s a look on Randy’s face of amazement. Every fall they gathered a group of about 20 to 30 teenagers, maybe even more, who came from all across the region. Some went to private schools. We had kids who went to Sidwell [Sidwell Friends School]. We had kids who went to Maret [Maret School]. Some were from…you know…they had privilege, and they had second homes, and they had amazing vacations. Then there were kids with none of those advantages. They spent the first half of the program year talking about themselves, their issues, their problems, without it being a psychological treatment program. They nonetheless talked about the issues that were of great concern to them. From that, they developed a play that was performed as the capstone of the year in which they not only presented these issues but they proposed resolutions. The goal, the vision was to have a city of peace.
NORTON: Wow. Where was that located?
GILL: That was located up on Florida Avenue, NW in a building that now houses one of Rose Previte’s restaurants [Medina]. It was a charter school building, and we were in there, and there were several other non-profits in the building [the building used to be Manhattan Laundry]. After I left there, they gave up their 501c3, they folded…but, in the meantime, they moved to the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and they still exist in a somewhat different form as a program of the Atlas. Every spring, they put on a show.
NORTON: What did you do for them?
GILL: I was their executive director, so I didn’t do the program work. That was never my strength. If it was administrative, I did it. I rented the van to move the props. I paid the bills. I did the payroll. All the business work, I did. And, I did the fundraising. I wrote the letters and said, “Please give us money, we’re so worthy.” Just like at the Arts Workshop. “Please give us money, we’re doing good work, we’re worthy, please help us out.” It’s a very tricky thing to ask for money for an organization that is so on the edge because people don’t want to give money to something if they think it might fail…then they’re just throwing their money away. But it can really make a difference, and it can set an organization on an upswing. So it’s a very tricky thing.
NORTON: They’re the ones that really need it, of course.
GILL: My husband’s business, he wrote software. His major clients were law firms. IBM had a similar product. No one ever got in trouble for buying a product from IBM. To buy it from a little guy on Capitol Hill who nobody had ever heard of… [it]didn’t matter if his product was way better or not better. If you took the chance on him, and it’s sort of that way with this money, if you took your chance and said, “Oh if I give money to the Arts Workshop, it’ll really turn things around, well maybe…but if I give it to Arena Stage, they really don’t need it.” Except everybody needs it. That’s the thing.
NORTON: How long were you at City of Peace?
GILL: Five years. I left in 2008. Is that six years? I guess that’s it, yeah [2002-2008].
NORTON: Close, Five or six, yeah. Then where?
GILL: Then I started my own little consulting business. I wrote grant proposals for small, community-based non-profits. I got most of my clients from organizations that I had not necessarily worked for, but that I’d worked as an ally with. So, for example, Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop that works with returning citizens. It starts with young people. They work with juveniles charged and incarcerated as adults. They bring them books, and they read, and when they get out of prison, they come back to the community, and there’s a job training program [for them]. That’s a wonderful organization that has grown by leaps and bounds.
NORTON: That’s in DC too?
GILL: That’s a DC non-profit.
NORTON: And that was one of your big clients?
GILL: That was a big client. I did work for the National Council of Jewish Women, northern Virginia section because the head of that had been on the board at City of Peace, so that’s how I knew her. I worked for what became the Anacostia Playhouse when Adele Robey moved it from H Street NE to Anacostia and wound up, actually in the end, on their board at which point I couldn’t in good conscience let them be my client, so I wrote for them for free and wound up chairing their board at one point. So there, a whole variety of things.
NORTON: That’s pretty much what you did?
GILL: That’s what I did. Then around 2010 my husband became ill. That’s what I loved about consulting, because if I wanted to be up at three o’clock in the morning writing a proposal, I could do that, because I had to take him to a doctor in the daytime. It had all the flexibility I wanted, and frankly, I didn’t want to work full time. That’s what I really loved about that work. As time went by, it became apparent that we would need to find a way to get more care for him. That’s why in late 2016, we left the Hill. He had bought our house in 1976. So now it’s 2016, 40 years later, and we found a place at Collington, which is a life care community in suburban Maryland near the Commander’s stadium instead of the landmark everybody knows. Now I’ve been here almost eight years. He died in November of 2023, but had wonderful care. I’ve had friends who’ve said, “Now will you move back to the Hill?” I love the Hill. I absolutely love the Hill. I wouldn’t have changed those years for anything. The sense of community. The friendships that I maintain to this day. Now I live here, and I have friendships here and a sense of community here. It’s been perfect for me. It was the right thing to do for us at the right time.
NORTON: Let me shift gears. What was the neighborhood at 12th and Walter Street like when you moved in there?
GILL: When I first visited there, Mott’s Market was owned by a Black family. It was sort of dark and foreboding and a little scary, and I didn’t go there. I would walk down the street to 12th and E to what was then Shelton’s Market Basket. It had previously been an A&P.
NORTON: Which is essentially right across from Watkins School where the CVS is now.
GILL: Exactly. That’s where I did my grocery shopping. I could walk down the street and do the grocery shopping. By the time I moved in, Mott’s Market had been taken over by a Korean family, the Kims, who later started a Karate studio. The Kims came to our wedding with their two children in their traditional Korean clothing. All their kids’ names started with a ‘K.’ So there was Kristina with a K and Kevin with a K…
NORTON: It’s all Kims.
GILL: Yes. Everybody’s KK. Luckily, they didn’t have middle names. It might have been KKK [laughs]. They improved the store. It was brighter and lighter, and it felt safer. They changed a lot of the merchandise that they sold. Over time, it got more upscale. There was suddenly wine, and there were gourmet cookies and things like that. But it was great for me because, although 12th Street could be a busy street, it was the first opportunity to let my children have some independence and go across the street by themselves and buy an ice cream treat after dinner or something like that, and “Oh, I’m out of milk. Go buy me a quart of milk.”
NORTON: It sounds like, from talking to kids in the neighborhood, Mott’s was many of their first ability to go and buy stuff for themselves.
GILL: I think that’s right. In fact, there was a family around the corner with three children, and the three kids had gone to Mott’s, and the littlest, the daughter, she had to go to the bathroom. and she couldn’t make it back home. The kids came and knocked on our door and said, “Could she use the bathroom?” It was so sweet, and I felt wonderful that I was known and I was safe. They would know it was okay to knock on my door to do that.
NORTON: …On the way back from Mott’s.
GILL: …On the way back from Mott’s. Right, exactly. I don’t know if you want to know whose kids they were.
NORTON: You can tell me.
GILL: It was the Deutsch kids. It was. At that time, they lived around the corner on C Street in a house with a pool.
NORTON: I remember that.
GILL: Yeah, before they moved to East Capitol Street. I saw a lot of change over the years. The improvement. The care people took with their houses. The yardwork. That was the thing for us. We met Mark Holler who now owns Ginkgo Gardens. He was a friend of our neighbor across the street, Ben Schaibly. He was then finishing his degree at the University of Maryland in landscape architecture. He designed our yard for us. Dick said, “I am not spending all this money on plants and have you ruin it because you’re too lazy to water it.” So we put in a sprinkler system.
NORTON: Oh, so he’s telling you this because he thought you wouldn’t water?
GILL: Dick tells me I wouldn’t water.  He was working all the time, and it was going to be my job. So we put in a sprinkler system. That got us connected with the Restoration Society because they got a stop work order put on us saying we needed a permit that we didn’t have. Well, it turned out we didn’t need a permit, and they were wrong, and it all got resolved.
NORTON: Roughly, when was that? I’m not asking precisely. I’m just trying to get a sense.
GILL: When would we have done that? Probably the late 90s. I’m really not sure at this point. Then Mark opened Ginkgo Gardens and has done a wonderful, wonderful job there. You know, seeing the community change like Hill’s Kitchen, which I think is such an anchor to the community and such a resource. Well, Leah Daniels was a classmate of my son’s at Capitol Hill Day School. It’s seeing these kids be adults, thinking that Langley Bowers has taken over Larry Bowers dental practice. Hearing about the kids of the neighborhood who stayed in the neighborhood or returned to the neighborhood and are making the community better. I think that’s something of the spirit of Capitol Hill that’s so special.
NORTON: Yeah, yeah. Did your kids get any part-time jobs on the Hill? I know sometimes kids did.
GILL: No. They didn’t work at Frager’s or any of those other things. That was a big place. No, no. I don’t know why I single out Suzanne,  because it’s traditionally a female thing to do, but neither of my kids babysat or did anything else.
NORTON: How about their education.
GILL: Christopher started at Peabody, and he had Miss Montez who had this long, long hair. She was so motherly. She was a wonderful teacher. That was his pre-K teacher, I think. He went pre-K and K at Peabody, and then first grade he went to Watkins because by then it was Capitol Hill Cluster Schools. No, I’m sorry. He did first grade also at Peabody, and he had Miss Evans who was the most well put together, gorgeous teacher. She didn’t look like she could possibly ever have a sticky fingered, snotty-nosed child anywhere near her because she was coiffed and beautifully groomed and dressed and it was fabulous.
Second grade he moved over to Watkins, and about midway through the year, he was beaten up on the playground while teachers were present, and they did nothing. He wandered his own way into the school. and the janitor said something like, “Boy, what are you doing here?” He was crying and said, “Oh, oh, oh.” He got to the office. At that point, we said, “Okay. I don’t care what his education is. I don’t care. Our kid’s got to be safe, and this is not safe if teachers were there and did nothing.” So we were very fortunate. That mid-year we were able to get him into Capitol Hill Day School.
He finished Capitol Hill Day School, eighth grade, and went on to St. Anselm’s Abbey School, which turned out again, fine academics, not a good match for him. So we went back…of course after the application deadline but somehow someone was smiling down on us…went back to two of the schools that he had applied to for ninth grade, and gotten into but had chosen instead St. Anselm’s. He wound up doing 10th, 11th and 12th grades at the Field School which was then on Wyoming Avenue—this was before they moved to their new campus. That was a great fit for him, and it was wonderful, and he flourished.
He then went to college at RPI, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He had won the Rensselaer Medal, so he had a nice scholarship that came along with that. Years later, he went to George Mason University to get a master’s in public policy.
NORTON: So he turned out okay.
GILL: He turned out okay. He’s now the father of twin eight-year-olds.
NORTON: Let me back up just a little bit. Before Pre-K, what did you…
GILL: Before Pre-K he was in a playgroup with one-year-olds. When he was two, he started at Wee Care, the nursery school at the Church of the Brethren. Suzanne went to Miss Frances Slaughter who I first met when she worked at Wee Care. By then she was on her own, and she ran a playgroup out of a home on…I think it’s G Street SE near La Lomita restaurant [Marcia Coling’s house on G SE, per CHH Slaughter interview]. She did that.
Suzanne went to that in the mornings. Then she must have eventually gone…I don’t remember that she went to Wee Care. I really don’t remember what she did. She started out at Peabody also and did Pre-K and K there. For first grade she moved over to Capitol Hill Day School. She continued there. Then for high school she went all four years to the Field School.
Then for college she went to Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio, where she majored in economics with a minor in history. Then she went to Prague for a year and taught English. Came back, and went to the University of Michigan where she got aa master’s in public policy. Interestingly, my son’s wife also has a master’s of public policy. So the three of them have master’s…
NORTON: A small world department here.
GILL: Yeah, but they do completely different kinds of work. And they went to very different schools… George Mason, University of Michigan…and my daughter-in-law went to Duke for the degree. So very different schools, very different career paths—all using the same degree and the same sort of skill base.
NORTON: What do you remember about Frances Slaughter?
GILL: She was…I remember her hugs.
NORTON: Who doesn’t, right?
GILL: Right. I remember the kids hugged her; she hugged them back. The parents hugged her. She hugged us back. She loved everybody. I hope she still does. I’m sure she still does. She had a crooked little smile. I think she may have had Bell’s palsy or something. It just made her all the more endearing. Her nephew had been…I guess Suzanne did go to Wee Care because I think they were in class together. She just always cared about young people. It was beautiful.
NORTON: You, I understand, were on the PTA board of the Cluster. When was that?
GILL: I was. That would have been the first year of the Cluster Schools, so honestly, I’d have to look back at a calendar to know when that was created from the three separate schools. Gary Abrecht, I believe, was the chair of the PTA, and I was the treasurer. Sharon Raimo at the time was working for the school system. So she had an office there. I remember the PTA…
NORTON: With Veola Jackson.
GILL: With Veola Jackson. I think Ulysses Stoneham was sort of her right-hand man. He was a wonderful and very sweet fellow. We did things like running the school picture projects. I remember seeing all the fascinating names that all these young children had. We raised…and this would have been over 35 years ago…we raised over $120,000 every year for that school. The Cluster Schools story was—and I presume this is true—it was the only school in DC Public Schools that had school books on the first day of school.
The school system had run out of money and the fiscal year didn’t start until October first, so they couldn’t get the books until October first. Talk about a waste of time to spend a month in school with no books. So we bought the books. It might have been more workbooks and things that were disposable, in that sense, but we did it. We also paid for a music teacher.
NORTON: Was that Mr. Lewis?
GILL: It was Mr. Lewis.
NORTON: Ned Lewis.
GILL: Yes, yes. I’d forgotten his name. The PTA was not just fun stuff or extra stuff, it’s stuff that in other school systems is thought of as core to the mission of the public schools. I remember the first time I heard that we were going to buy books, I said, “What do you mean we’re buying books? That’s the school’s job. That’s the city’s job.” Somebody looked at me and just shook their head in such disdain and thought, “Oh, Elizabeth, you don’t understand” [laughs]. But I came to understand. If you wanted something done you had to do it. Sharon Raimo was a go getter. She made sure stuff got done. I did whatever I could to help raise the money and do the projects and let it happen.
NORTON: Were you involved in any of the discussions about creating the Cluster at the PTA?
GILL: Yes. I remember a really contentious meeting at the home of Nicky and Steve Cymrot with a bunch of concerned parents. I said something inappropriate. I expressed it inappropriately about my concern for my children and their education and their experience. Two women in particular, Mary Jayne and Jan MacKinnon were like, “Well we care about our children too,” because they were opposed to this plan of making the Cluster.
NORTON: No, Mary wasn’t opposed to the Cluster. [neither was Jan MacKinnon]
GILL: Maybe she was just opposed to me and what I’d said. Okay, because I was impolitic, and I felt bad about that, but I thought it sounded like a good idea, and a good way to get us all together and to have some consistency through the years. As it turned out, I didn’t carry through. Because of the experience Chistopher had, we didn’t stick with it.
NORTON: Other volunteer things that you did. Let me ask you this, were you involved with Soccer on the Hill? I know you keep saying that I was your daughter’s soccer coach.
GILL: I was involved insofar as I let my children participate, and I drove them to their practices and games. What I remember [is] Suzanne was the goalie as a five-year-old. This would have been in the late 80s. It was a coed team, and it was at the age when there was no subtlety or nuance to people’s soccer skills. There was no Bending Like Beckham. They saw a goalie, they thought, “Oh, I’ll kick the ball right there.” And they would kick right to the goalie, and Suzanne would stand her ground, and she’d stand arms akimbo and the ball would hit her in the chest. I think the team was the champion because nobody ever scored because she just took it [laughs]. It was hysterical. She had no particular skill. She was a tree [laughs]. When I was at the Arts Workshop, in addition to those three groups getting organized, we became the fiscal agent for the Hopscotch Bridge project.
NORTON: Okay, I was going to ask you about the Hopscotch Bridge.
GILL: It was at H Street NE going over the railroad tracks, and I don’t remember the name of the artist I’m embarrassed to say. [Deirdre Saunder]. She lived on the Hill and was very well known for these mosaic installations. She had a vision for the bridge and what it could be. A fiscal agent is an entity that has a 501c3 designation so it can receive charitable donations.
NORTON: So this is the Arts Workshop being the fiscal…
GILL: The Arts Workshop was the fiscal agent for this project. She sold the rights to these characters [sculptures]. We have one on the north side of the bridge. Dick and I did one with a little saying about the arts bringing us all together or something equally sappy, but well; we meant it [laughs]. Yeah, so we did that.
I was involved in a group  called the Twelfth Street Women. It was basically the 100 and 200 block of 12th Street and a few people probably a little farther. A few people down Walter Street. A few people along Independence Avenue but within that core couple of blocks. We met once a month on a rotating basis at people’s homes.
NORTON: How did you get involved with that?
GILL: I knew someone who was doing it, Diane Shages. I knew she was already involved in it. She said, “Oh, come on.” It was a very welcoming little group.
NORTON: What did you all do?
GILL: Talked. Bitched about our husbands. Talked about our kids, politics, the weather. There was always wine flowing [NORTON laughs]. I think the host, I believe, provided the food snacks. The members brought beverages as I recall. This is really funny. That was where I met Linda Ewald who lived in the hundred block of 12th Street SE.
NORTON: And she now lives out here at Collington.
GILL: She now lives out here at Collington, but they had lived up there. We’ve been neighbors a block apart from each other for 40 years, and I’d never known her before. I don’t think I’d ever seen her husband. Now they live down the hall from me. So small world.
NORTON: But you did know her, what, through the Twelfth Street…
GILL: I only knew her through the Twelfth Street Women.
NORTON: I found a roster. This is something. Your name’s on it. It’s called Capitol Hill Stitchery. Do you remember anything about that?
GILL: No. Not a thing. I don’t do stitchery. I don’t know why my name would have been on such a list.
NORTON: I don’t know. [The list was saved for some reason, and] I thought, ‘Well, what the heck, I’d ask you about that.” What else. Any other volunteer activities that you can think of?
GILL: Not that I can think of. God knows I was always busy.
NORTON: Yes, that’s true.
GILL: I don’t know. I did things like read at the kids’ schools. Went in to read with them. Stuff like that. The biggest thing that I remember was the Babysitting Co-op as a volunteer, and the paid thing was the Arts Workshop. That’s where I spent most of my time.
NORTON: You talked about the Restoration Society. You had a couple of not so pleasant experiences with them.
GILL: Sadly, I did. There was one I mentioned about a stop work order for putting in the sprinkler system. The other stop work order…we had a previous stop work order. We had put a deck on the back of our house. We had a very tiny, teeny, tiny back yard because living at the corner of Walter Street, what would have been our backyard was of course occupied by the perpendicular rowhouses. So we had very little space and we built a deck. Then the thought was, “Oh, well let’s give the kids something to do.” So we built up from the deck. There was like a loft to the deck. Well, unbeknownst to us, first of all, even though there had been a deck, you need a replacement permit in order to take the rotten one down—which was unsafe, and you’d think they’d be happy we’d get rid of it—and to put up a new one. Then more controversial was this loft. So we got a stop work order and we had to go…
NORTON: Who was behind the stop work order?
GILL: I believe it was Dick Wolf, who was at the time the president of the Restoration Society and lived a block and a half away in the unit block of 11th Street SE. We had to go before the Board of Zoning Adjustment. In preparation for that, we had to go to the Restoration Society because our home was in the historic district. Our neighbor and friend John Shages, who was very active in the Restoration Society, came with me in support of our request to have this approved, and was, I would say, [dealt with] rudely; somebody used the words “Well you and your cronies,” referring to John as my crony in trying to do this surreptitious, illegal thing. As part of our defense—I mean, ignorance is no defense, and in fact we were supposed to have had this permit—I went around, walked up and down the streets of Capitol Hill and took pictures of every deck that had a high loft type portion to it and said, “This was not our invention, this is all over the Hill. This is within the character of the neighborhood.” In the end it just faded and went away. The complaint.
NORTON: Really?
GILL: I think it got lost in the shuffle, and no one ever pursued it.
NORTON: Is it still there, at least as far as you know?
GILL: Last, I know it’s still there. The people who bought our house did several interesting things, one of which I understand is they put corn in our front yard. They wanted to be farmers or something, I don’t know.
NORTON: It’s not that big a front yard for corn.
GILL: It’s not that big a front yard, and of course Mark Holler had made it all beautiful, and these people planted corn or something. As far as I know, yes, the deck is still there with the loft to it. I’m terrified of heights so I only ever went up in it once. But it was very well built. A fellow named Gary Baxter who was a sort of contractor—probably wasn’t a licensed contractor but he was a very good carpenter, handy man kind of guy—he’d built that. There were hand holds on the floor of the deck so as you climbed up the ladder you had a safe place to put your hands. Interestingly, his sister now lives here at Collington. At the time, she lived down the street at 250 12th Street in that red house that stands alone between C Street and South Carolina where later Sam Ford lived.
NORTON: Sam Ford moved in, yeah.
GILL: Gary had lived there and now his sister—her name is Graeme—and she lives here. It’s a small world.
NORTON: It is a small world. Let me go back to Mott’s just a little bit because I gather that the Kims didn’t stay there forever.
GILL: But it got passed down. Obviously I don’t know their business arrangements, but it appeared from the outside it got passed to cousins and siblings. It stayed in the Korean families. Always lovely people. Lovely, kind people. Yeah.
NORTON: Not only did it have some upscale stuff but it also had the stuff you needed when you ran out.
GILL: Absolutely. You could buy a small bag of flour or sugar. Syrup for your pancakes. You made pancakes and said, “Oops, what am I going to put on them?” [laughs]. Yeah. And they sold the newspaper. I remember Bernie Raimo used to walk over to Mott’s Market every morning to get the paper because he worked on the Hill for Senator Daschle, for Congresswoman Pelosi, for various people and he always wanted the final edition. If you got your paper delivered, you got an earlier edition, and that was not good enough. So every morning , you’d see Bernie walk over to Mott’s.
NORTON: That’s great. Do you know anything about the current efforts to purchase it or anything like that?
GILL: I really don’t. I saw the signs. I read the articles. I know that one of the people who made a contribution is the son of someone who lived on the Hill who now lives here at Collington. The son lives in Chicago. He made a contribution. This clearly is…
NORTON: Just out of memory, right?
GILL: Yes, exactly. It’s clearly not self interest in the sense that he’s not going to benefit whether the store’s there or not. But I’ve no idea what’s going on with it or how far they are down the path to reopening.
NORTON: I’m going through my list here. I’m almost to the point where anything else you’d like to talk about. I understand you made some notes, so…
GILL: I did, but I think we’ve managed to cover everything. Yeah. Every note I made, we’ve talked about. I will say, I just really want to emphasize what a wonderful community Capitol Hill was for us at the time. I imagine there were more stay-at-home parents—mostly moms—40 years ago than there are today. We would just hang out in front of our homes, and our kids would play together. Dick had a business partner who lived out here in Bowie [Maryland]. They had a son who was two years older than Christopher. I said to her one day something about, “Well where’s her son?” And she said, “Oh I don’t know he’s out playing somewhere,” And I went, “Uh, I can’t do that. I can’t let my children out alone in the neighborhood.” And she said, “Yeah, but when they’re 15, I’ll still be driving my son all over the place, and [you’ll be, you know] your kid will get on the Metro.” That’s exactly what happened. When they were four and five and six, we would sit outside on the stoop, and we’d have our kids…
NORTON: And you’d meet the neighbors.
GILL: We’d meet the neighbors. Stephanie Epstein had two kids, and she lived up on the next block. There was a little boy Christopher across the street, and the Lloyds—Erin Lloyd and her little brother. [There was] the Fox family who had a door knocker that was a fox…they lived closer to Independence, also in the 200 block. We all would just…the moms would hang out, and we would talk. The kids would play and be safe, and they’d have a ball. We’d go get it when it rolled in the street because, “It’s dangerous, children.” It was just such a great neighborhood. You could walk places. We could walk to the fireworks on the Fourth of July and the concerts on the Hill. It was wonderful. It really was.
When we left, we left at peace. We never looked back. We never regretted leaving. It had served its time at that time in our life. It was a wonderful place.
NORTON: Having given you the last word here, I think I’m going to turn this off. Thank you very much.
GILL: You’re very welcome.
NORTON: I appreciate it.
END OF INTERVIEW

Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Elizabeth Gill Interview, August 6, 2024

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