Wally Mlyniec

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COLLINS OFFNER: I am Molly Collins Offner. I'm interviewing Wallace J. Mlyniec for the Overbeck Capitol Hill Oral History Project. Today's date is January 22, 2026. Wally has had a storied, legal, and academic career devoted to juvenile justice. He is the Lupo-Ricci Professor of Clinical Legal Studies at Georgetown University Law School. He was the founding director of Georgetown University's Juvenile Justice Clinic and led its work for decades. He's the author of many articles and books on criminal justice and laws relating to children and families. And he is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his work. We will include links to Wally's legal and academic work in the posted transcript of this oral history. We are conducting this interview on Capitol Hill at my home on the 100 block of 4th Street Northeast.

So let's begin, Wally, with your origin story. Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

MLYNIEC: So I was born in a town called Cicero, Illinois. It's the first suburb, west of Chicago, “right across the street.” It was at that time, mostly a white immigrant community, divided in sections. The Italians lived in one neighborhood. The Bohemians lived in another neighborhood. I lived in the Hawthorne neighborhood, which was Polish. Both of my grandparents, all My family actually has an interesting history: when my mother died, we had lived on the same block for over 100 years. My family came early to the Hawthorne community, helped build the Polish Catholic church there. I got to address the congregation three times, actually from the pulpit even. Which was quite scary, and interesting [laughter]. But I went to Northwestern University from Cicero. Let me also say this about Cicero. The first race riot that I was aware of took place in 1955. I was 10 years old. The first and only black family tried to move into the neighborhood. And within a day, their house was set on fire while the police and firemen stood and watched. So very early in my life, I was confronted with this strange notion that people could be burned out of their homes if they were not white. And I carried that, actually, for a long time with me. It really never disappeared, and I think it still affects me to this day when I look at what's going on in the country today.

But anyway, I left Cicero and went to Northwestern University. And after that, the war, of course, was the Vietnam War and was heating up. I did not want to go and fight that war. I just had an instinctive notion that something was wrong there. So I applied to law school, and got accepted at Northwestern, got accepted at Georgetown, got turned down at the Ivies for the most part, and came to Washington. That would have been 1967.

COLLINS OFFNER: So… you arrive in Washington. It’s 1967. Your interesting campaign work [had already started]. I thought I would probe you on it, as you were a student. Undergraduate.

MLYNIEC: Well, undergraduate was kind of strange. I mean, it's hard to believe, but Donald Rumsfeld is considered a liberal back then. And Cicero, even though it was a straight through working class neighborhood, voted against Roosevelt all the time. Because the Republicans, I learned later, cut a deal with the city of Chicago and the Mafia, that they would not … The Mafia was very big in Cicero. Al Capone had his hotel there, and conducted much of his business, when he was not in Chicago, from Cicero. So they cut a deal that if the citizens continued to vote Republican––maybe this is myth, but this is what I was told––they would make sure no black people would move into Cicero. Donald Rumsfeld, at that time, was a liberal Republican. I was … already pretty liberal and the Democratic Party in Chicago was controlled by, not the mob, but by the machine, the Democratic machine. I'm almost ashamed to admit this, given what happened to Donald Rumsfeld. I actually was a campaign worker for Rumsfeld in my first year, I guess it was my first year, at Northwestern.

[Senator George McGovern [D-SD] gave the commencement speech at Northwestern, and so I became familiar with his work. George was one of three Senators that opposed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which immersed us in the Vietnam War. [This was later corrected to note that while Senator McGovern opposed the intervention in Southeast Asia, he regretfully voted for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.]  And he was also a great liberal. He's from South Dakota, that old farm labor party that worked in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and those places. And he was very instrumental in getting the food stamp program set up and things like that. So I was sort of watching his career from the side. So that's what I was doing in Northwestern. I wasn't that particularly active. I went to my first anti-war demonstrations while I was at Northwestern, where the dean threatened to take our draft cards and turn them into the military. He was a very nasty man.

But then I came to Georgetown in the Fall of 1967. And, in [Spring] 1968, if you recall, Martin Luther King was shot, Bobby Kennedy was shot. The streets of Washington were loaded with demonstrations or violence after the Martin Luther King [assassination]. That would have been my first year in law school. I was living, actually, in Virginia that first year. So I could not get into the city. Actually, I hitchhiked down to Florida because I knew I couldn't get into the city and hitchhiked back and had a nice time.
But in Washington, what was going on was that Georgetown became a central legal spot for the defense of people [who] were getting arrested during the Martin Luther King insurrection. It was called the E. Barrett Prettyman Program. It was the first graduate program of its kind that provided lawyers for poor people. And so Georgetown, by the time I came back, after the so-called riots––I like to call them an insurrection––it was already developing this gestalt for political liberalism that was not shared by the faculty. I would also say that the students who were coming to Georgetown at that time––there was a cohort of very strong liberal students amidst a larger group of conservative students.

Georgetown is a Catholic school. They had a history of bringing in Catholics into the student body and also into the faculty. If you recall, the Catholics and the Catholic Cardinal in New York [were] strong supporters of the Vietnam War. So there was this ferment, not only of politics, but of what was going on internally in the law school. Students were demanding more relevant courses. “Why were we not hearing about courses in human rights, why were we not seeing courses in discrimination?” They were not in the curriculum. It was a pretty traditional curriculum. So step by step, I was getting immersed in a world very, very different from Cicero, Illinois.

Pursuing your question, next step in the [US] Senate elections that were going to take place in November of 1968.  [Senator] George McGovern [D-SD] was up for reelection. [Senator] Wayne Morris [D-OR] of Oregon was up for reelection. [Senator] Ernest Gruening [D-AK] of Alaska was up for reelection. And they were …the two votes against the Gulf of Tonkin [Resolution of 1964 authorizing US troops]. So, three of my liberal friends still in Cicero and I decided we would pick one and go up there and work for them as campaigners. Alaska seemed the most interesting.

Meanwhile, one of my friends had been working for [the presidential campaign for [Senator] Bobby Kennedy [D-NY], and we were leaving, actually, the day that he [my friend] was in Nebraska. My friend, Michael, was in Nebraska when Bobby got shot in California. So he said,” I'm not going to Alaska.” The other guys just dropped out, so here I was, hardly traveled in my life, going off to Alaska to work for Ernest Gruening, a man who I only knew by politics.

When I got up there, I realized he was the territorial governor appointed by Eisenhower, when it was still a territory. He was a New Yorker. He was not an Alaskan, and Alaska is a pretty traditional place. It wasn't Republican at that time. It was staunchly Democrat. But he was challenged by a guy named Mike Gravel, who later went on to infamy, trying to take credit for things that he really didn't deserve credit for, including releasing the Pentagon Papers and later running for president. So I went up and worked for Ernest until it was pretty clear that he was not going to win this election. He was going to lose to Gravel, because he was a little too liberal for what was happening in the state at that time––oil was being discovered, Prudhoe Bay was being discovered. And so a bunch of wealthy people picked Gravel to take on Gruening, and it was clear to some of us that Gruening was going to lose.

At the same time I was making this decision. my friend Michael, who had worked for Kennedy, was now working for George McGovern, because the Kennedy people decided to support George McGovern at the Chicago Convention to make sure [Senator Eugene] McCarthy [D-MN] and [Vice President Hubert] Humphrey didn't get nominated. Michael calls me up and says, “Would you like to come to the Chicago Convention in 1968 to work for McGovern?” I said, “Well, we're losing up here. It doesn't matter. I'm coming down.”  

So I went to Chicago in 1968. Younger people don't remember what Chicago 1968 was like. I worked for McGovern, and that is where my liberalism became radicalized. I was walking out of the Blackstone Hotel with McGovern, and I watched the Chicago police literally push demonstrators through this huge window of the Conrad Hilton cocktail lounge, which coincidentally, I was a night manager of when I was at Northwestern, to make some extra money. But they were beating people up. McGovern was not going to win. I think Humphrey had secured the nomination just around that time. He had the votes. And so after what I saw at the Conrad Hilton, I went into the park and joined the yippies, not formally, but the demonstrations were all over the city. So I was in the streets, I got gassed, and then I decided … Well, school had already started, Georgetown already started.  And I had to decide, “Am I going back to school, or am I going to do this full-time?” And I decided I wasn't ready to become a full-time radical.  

So I went back to law school, but immediately fell in with that Prettyman Program. I became a research assistant for the director. And so throughout my entire law school career, then, I became a marshal for the demonstrations, meaning people that watched the police, so that if the police were going nuts, there would be evidence of that. And I continued through my law school career doing that.

Strangely, I ended up going back to Alaska after my law school days [in 1970] to work another political campaign for a guy named Joe Josephson, who ultimately lost the Democratic primary. At that point, I graduated. I had no future in Alaska, particularly. It was my first time being up there where it was dark a lot. So I decided to follow my friend Michael, who got me from the Chicago Convention, to Boston, because he had now become a schoolteacher in Boston to figure out what he was going to do next. So I went there and I tried to get a job with the Boston Public Defender.

It's a funny story actually. I got the interview through a guy who I worked with, a senior guy in the McGovern campaign, who was a senior guy in Bobby Kennedy's campaign. I worked with them at the convention. So he arranged for me to get the interview. So I got there––was in Washington, took the train up to Boston––and talking to the guy about the job, and finally, he stops and says, “How did you get here?” And I said, “Well, I took the train.” He said, “No, no, that's not what I mean. I want to know how you got here.” I said, “I'm sorry, I really don't understand.”  He said, “Well, this office hires Italian kids, hires Irish kids. We don't hire Polish kids, so how did you get here?” I gave him the guy's name that referred me, and he immediately said, “All right, so here's your interview. I've done what I'm supposed to do. He did what he did. He's satisfied, you're satisfied you got the interview, but you're not gonna get the job.”

So I came back down to Washington, and my faculty member, Addison Bowman, who is ultimately a major influence in my life, was running the Prettyman Program. I became his research assistant [while in Law School]. So I started doing investigations for the public defender service. I think I actually started doing that while I was still in law school. He [Addison Bowman] hired me to be a researcher on the project on criminal law that he had. So, the convergence of my origin story, my evolution of politics, my rejection in Boston, all led me back to Washington, which ultimately then led me into my juvenile justice career. There you go.

COLLINS OFFNER: And what inspired that focus on juveniles?

MLYNIEC: All right, here's another funny story. Prior to May 1967, children who were accused of crime in the juvenile court did not get lawyers. If they were in the adult court, [U.S. Supreme Court decision] Gideon v. Wainwright had recently said, adult defendants had to get lawyers. But children did not get lawyers. It [the Juvenile court system] was treated more as a social work court. You could have a lawyer if one came, but they had very little to do, because it was the judges, the social worker, and the police officers doing most of the talking.

In May of 1967, just before I come to law school, the Supreme Court changes that in a case called In re Gerald Gault [387 U.S. 1 (1967)]. A 13 year old from Arizona who made some dirty phone calls to a woman named Mrs. Cook got effectively an eight year juvenile sentence in a reformatory for something an adult would have gotten a $50 fine for. That case went up to the Supreme Court, and ultimately the Supreme Court said, in an eight to one vote, children deserve lawyers. It's [juvenile court] not quite criminal. It's not quite civil. It's kind of a kangaroo court with processes worse than the Star Chamber [Star Chamber was the 17th-century English court known for secret proceedings, lack of juries, and abuse of power]. When they [U.S. Supreme Court] decided that decision, the DC juvenile court was only a block away from the law school, and it had 6,000 backlogged cases, and they had to figure out who gets a lawyer or not. And so they're seeking volunteers.

So I went down, volunteered, and learned about the travesty of juvenile court, but at the same time, saw this group of lawyers coming together. DC at that time had giant lawyers––Edward Bennett Williams, [Neil] Hartson, and [Frank] Hogan, and those guys all trended liberal. A lot of them were old New Dealers that were there. And they decided to rewrite the juvenile code into a very modern code. So by the time I had graduated in 1970, the code had been passed by Congress and was going to go into effect in 1971.

So that's where my interests spurred, and I had gained this knowledge. My knowledge increased because the project I was doing required me to actually pick up some cases and represent people. I did a couple of adult cases as a second chair, at which point we realized that that might be a statutory conflict of interest with the U.S. Code. So we all convened and they [the project directors] said, “Well, look, we've got this new juvenile court statute. Pretty much it's the same as the adult statute, except for sentencing and pretrial options. The conflict statute doesn't apply in juvenile court. So why don't you pick up the cases there?” So I started picking up cases there in juvenile court, and looked around, and what I saw was some young prosecutors who really wanted to be U.S. attorneys, and this was their stepping stone. There were a bunch of retired lawyers from the federal government who never had any criminal or juvenile experience. They just wanted to go to court and hang around, and basically get $50 a case, and not do much work. And I found it outrageous. Just completely outrageous.

But at that time, there's not much I could do about it. The public defender here would send people through the juvenile court, but they were also on the way to doing serious adult felonies. Magic, again, strikes at that moment, because clinical education is developing at Georgetown. Remember, I said that students that were coming in in the 60s wanted some relevance. And one of the relevant things that happened was the establishment of clinical education, where law school courses would give you credit for going into court and trying cases. I was one of a handful of people who wasn't over 60 years old and didn't want to be a prosecutor or a serious felony lawyer who had any knowledge [of juvenile court]. So, Judith Areen, who was faculty member, later the dean of Georgetown [Law School], hired me. She recommended that the dean hire me. He hired me on a handshake. I said, “I'll be here for two years. I'll set this up, and then I'm going to go off and become a full-time public defender.”

Fifty-two years later, I left that position [laughter]. Having become, with no planning––I like to talk to my students about serendipity and how important it is––but there was no planning for me to be a law professor. I graduated slightly above the middle of my class. There was no plan for me to become a clinical teacher. No plan for me to become an expert, a total expert in juvenile court. But because I was there at that moment in time, when all these things were started, I was able to rewrite the juvenile code. I was able to rewrite the rules. I was able to become one of the founding generation of clinical education in America. Now it's the largest section [in the Association of American law schools]. There are [now] over 2,000 clinical teachers. And I was one of a handful, maybe 25, that were there at the beginning, and it was the same thing with juvenile justice defense. There was just nobody doing that work. There was some work going on in New York, and one of those guys, who was a juvenile defender in New York, started a clinic like mine in New York. We started one month ahead of his, so ours is the longest existing clinical juvenile program in legal education.

COLLINS OFFNER: Serendipity.

MLYNIEC: Serendipity, you know! And amazing, intricate connections that all sort of fed off each other. And so it's easy for me to have the serendipitous conversation with my students, but it's easy for them to say, and I think they're right, “Well, that was then. You know, those things like that don't happen now. If I don't have a job coming out of here to pay off all my law school loans ”  [My loans] were small because tuition was low back then.  They said “That can't happen today.” And so what they do is they go to law school, often they'll get a law firm job to pay off their loans, and then they'll start gravitating towards the public interest that they want to do. We teach graduate lawyers at Georgetown, and we teach them to be clinical teachers. So we have over 250 people who came out of that program over the last 40 years now teaching in [American] law schools. So it's a different progression, but in some ways, they are very fortunate, because we only take 13 fellows into the program a year. We don't take a lot.

COLLINS OFFNER: Into the clinical program.

MLYNIEC: Into the graduate teaching program for clinics. So we get hundreds of applications for these jobs, and 13 people get lucky like I did.

COLLINS OFFNER: Amazing legacy. So, there are other things that you explored at Georgetown. One led you to London.

MLYNIEC: Yes. I had decided after, 40 years––we had just celebrated the 40th anniversary of the clinic––that I would step down as being the director because I had a very talented deputy director. She was actually the first African American clinical teacher at Georgetown. Two of the African American women on the traditional faculty and I basically did our own little private search to try and recruit. And I recruited her, first as one of these graduate fellows, and then she went to the public defender for five years, and then came back as a visiting professor, and ultimately became a clinical teacher at Georgetown.  And now she is one of the most famous people in juvenile justice in America. Her name is Kristen Henning. She’s got a bestselling New York Times book about children [The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth].

So that was good, but what do I want to do next? It was also during that period, and we'll get to this later, the last 10 years of that 40 years, I was also doing construction for Georgetown. But I wanted to see whether I could break away entirely. I was getting older. It was now 2018. I don't know how old I was then …old. [Laughter.] And Georgetown has this really interesting program in London. It's situated at King's College, but it involves law schools from maybe 12 different countries. And each year, those schools send six students and a professor each semester to the program. Georgetown sends a bunch of students, and we send the academic director, who spends the entire year. I didn't know much about international law. There was a time early in my life when I thought I'd go back to Chicago, get rich as an international lawyer. That certainly changed on every level [laughter].

But I went to the dean and I said, “You know, I think I'd like to do this. I know I'd have to develop an entirely new course. I could do an international course on juvenile justice. There are so many international treaties, many of which we don't subscribe to, because of federalism issues, and other stuff, even the UN charter on children, we don't subscribe to that.” So I said, “Can I go?” And he said, “Well, it's interesting. You've been an administrator as well at Georgetown.” I was the clinical dean for over 20 years besides being the head of the juvenile clinic. He said, “That program needs some administrative help. So why don't you go to London for a year and put it in shape so that we could regularize the whole process of selecting people, make sure that people here [at Georgetown] knew what was going on.” And I thought, “This is what I do, right?” So we went. My wife got a leave of absence. My wife, Abby, got a leave of absence from the Library of Congress, where she had worked for a long time. She thought it'd be a good test for retirement, whether she could do nothing [laughter].

They have strange rules in England. She couldn't volunteer because if she volunteered, it would suggest she was taking a job from somebody who would have been hired. Very strange, but she still hung out in the library, and did something, you know, and maybe stacked books, I don't know. So we spent what was supposed to be a year. And lo and behold, in March of 2020, COVID hits. I've got students from Australia and New Zealand, which got hit hard, calling me up and saying, “I can't come back because of my family, my grandmother died. My father lost his business.” I have students calling me from Italy saying, “The Italian government will not let anybody leave. I can't come back.” Georgetown's calling me, saying, “Send back your students and close down the whole program.” And I'm saying, “You're jumping the gun here.” I said, “First of all, I've got legal counsel from 12 schools. I had the laws of the UK, we’re situated at King's, which is not closing down. So I am telling you, it will take me months to close down this program unless everybody else closes it down.”

So, the main campus, which sort of controls Georgetown Law too much, you know, way too much, makes the call on this. Our dean [of the Law School] at that time went up there [to the University administration] and said, “Wally knows what he's doing, just cut him some slack. He will make sure that our kids come home safe because he will not leave them there if they're not.”

So we're going to continue classes, but now I have to figure out how to use Zoom, which [at the time] nobody knew how to use it. Fortunately, I had a wonderful administrative staff and between us, we were able to do live classes for the kids who stayed. Zoomed for the kids who could be in the same time zones and recordings for the kids who were getting classes, you know, in the middle of the night. And we managed. I had a conversation with [the other] faculty saying, “I can't tell you how to grade your courses.”  We don't do that at Georgetown, it's just not something we do. But these are extraordinary times. And, “I'm just going to let you know, I'm going to be a little easier on my students in my class this year, because they're struggling, and they're under great strain.” Everybody passed, everybody took their finals or wrote their papers. Everything got done, they got their credits from their home university. But ultimately I had to close down the London office and leave in March [of 2020]. But classes continued virtually through May. So instead of having a year in London, I basically had nine months.

COLLINS OFFNER: Ahhh.

MLYNIEC: Which was too bad, because London is a great place to be. I did get to travel a little bit around England. But it was transformative. In fact, I just did a review of the program for the dean, the new dean coming in. And I said it was transformative for me. It taught me t things that I didn't know about the rest of the world. American law is kind of isolated, even with these international firms now. It is kind of isolated. Law schools are isolated because they teach American law for the most part. I learned that I could do something totally different than I've been doing for 40 years, although I have had, arguably, five different jobs sitting in the same chair at Georgetown––teacher, lawyer, academic administrator, property developer, construction manager. I got to do all that in the same chair. But never in a different country, you know, where I had to adapt to different customs.

And England has a very strange government, as far as I'm concerned, the way they run things, where the Prime Minister is both the chief executive and the chief legislator. So that's what I did in London, and then we came back and we were in the middle of COVID here. So I immediately became part of the Dean's COVID team since I had that experience. And then the following year, I actually became codirector [of the London program[ again, but from Georgetown. I did it. I just did the administrative part, I didn't teach. So that's my international experience. It was quite wonderful.

COLLINS OFFNER: Wonderful story. So let's pick up on your property management construction. I did note that there was a reference to a City Paper article that dubbed you “the cult construction blogger.”

MLYNIEC: They did. They did. They found me, too. I didn't go hustling for that story. So here's how it starts. The law school that I went to in1967 was built in the 1890s. It was a magnificent building in the 1890s. Richardsonian Renaissance architecture, I forget the exact term.  But it did deteriorate dramatically. And so Georgetown built a new building where it is now. Richardsonian Romanesque, that is what it [the old building] was called. And it was an engineering marvel at the same time. But it deteriorated over the years, and so Georgetown built a new building where it is now, on the corner of Second Street and F Street [NW]. While I was on the faculty, the dean then, Robert Pitofsky, raised money to build a new library, the Edward Bennett Williams Library named after a legendary DC lawyer. So I wasn't directly responsible in that, but because I was his head of clinics––not the dean, but just head of clinics––I appointed the person to be on the building committee, and so I was sort of feeding information, getting information on that project. So when Bob retired as the dean, the library was built, beautiful building. Hartman and Cox, Washington School architects [designed it].

Judith Areen, who hired me [to run the Juvenile Clinic] in the first place, had become the dean. The first thing she did was make me associate dean for clinical programs. Because it had been, my goal to build that program. We had about four or five clinics at that time. Now, I think we have 17, and about half of those were created under my term as clinical dean, which lasted almost 20 years--longer than Roosevelt was president. That is what I said when I resigned that slot [laughter].

But what was interesting is that, if you go to law school, you'll find that most law professors are traditional. They lecture their classes, they grade their finals, they read papers, and they write papers. They are not people of the city. They are not. It is more so now than ever before, especially at Georgetown, because people come in and out of the government. But at that time.  

COLLINS OFFNER: When would that have been?  

MLYNIEC: Probably around 1990. You know, we had some refugees from the Carter Administration on the faculty, but we had just gone through the Reagan years, the '80s. The Reagan years, disaster for the country. So when something had to be done with the city––we didn't have a large administrative staff at that time––the dean would usually try and find one of her associate deans, of which I was then clinical dean, associate dean for clinics, to handle this issue. We had a general counsel at the main campus, but at that time, the integration was very loose between us [the law school] and the main campus. So, we'd be sitting there––there were four of us––and she'd tell us what the issue was, and she'd sort of go like this, moving her head from side to side. And any time it had something to do with the city, I just saw her eyes landing on me. So I had to become pretty familiar with [DC] Office of Planning. I had to become pretty knowledgeable of how the [DC] council worked, because she had plans to grow the campus. So the first building she built was the Gewirz Residence Hall. It was an apartment-style building.

At this point, you have to realize the interstate highway, the I 395 [highway], cut a ditch right in front of the law school that continued off to New York Avenue and then stopped. And so we were sort of isolated. There was nothing there. The Library was on G Street. Across F Street from us when the [main law] building opened in 1971, there was a greasy shrimp carryout, the Salvation Army was there. It was just a deserted property, the property where the library was. Georgetown had quietly bought all that property, so it was vacant except for the library. So basically, there was nothing there. I think there was maybe one hotel [in the area] at that time, maybe the Hyatt had opened. I'm not sure. But there was no place for students to live. They had to go live at Dupont Circle, or, like me, had moved to Capitol Hill, which was a cheap neighborhood back then. I moved to Capitol Hill then in 1968 when I came back from Alaska, when I actually moved into the “A Street Zoo” at 618 A Street, [NE].

So, anyway, getting back to construction, though, I was on the committee to build that building, and then became the head of that committee when the person who was the head got a sabbatical to go do his writing.  So I took over that project. In the meantime, the Tobishima company had purchased the land just to the east of our [new] building. But it was a vacant parking lot. Tobishima was a big Japanese corporation Their plan was to build their flagship American presence there. So when we were building the Gewirz Student Center, we decided the best way for Tobishima, and for us, was to zone the entire block as one piece of zoning, and we would take all the residential requirements, and they would take all the commercial requirements.

Shortly after that, the Japanese economy tanked, nothing was being built. They [Tobishima] realized that in DC, if you don't develop your property for five years, your property taxes skyrocket because you don't want vacant property. So, we started negotiating with them about a possible purchase, even though we had no money, just to see how that would float. Their first price was ridiculous. Their second price was not so ridiculous. But by then, Tobishima had collapsed entirely. We then realized we were talking to the wrong people anyway. Fuji really owned Tobishima. But Fuji was on its way out as well. And so we ended up buying that property for less than Tobishima paid for it.

COLLINS OFFNER: Oh, my goodness.

MLYNIEC:  Another windfall. But it was empty, and so on Friday afternoons we would sort of sit in her [the Dean’s] office and look at this empty lot, saying, “Well, what do we need? What could we do?” And she would say, “We need a gym.” And we'd say, “Who's gonna pay money for a gym? Nobody's going to give us money for a gym. This is a law school. Should build more housing.” “No, we should build a gym. And we need more expansion space for programs. You know, your clinics are in several different buildings.” We brought some of them back when we built the library with an extension underground, which is another story that I probably won't tell. We wouldn't have time for all these stories.

So we went out on the road, looking. I didn't go on the road. We had our own fundraiser at that time looking for money. And the first guy we went to, apparently, was a guy named Scott Ginsburg, who made his money in Texas, bought up a lot of small radio stations. Because Texas is big, [he] had a lot of radio stations, and got quite wealthy. And again, the story is––I wasn't there––when our developer, our fundraiser, walked into the office, he said, “I wonder why it took you so long to find me.” So the ask was easy. He was willing to give us money. But he said, “You know, I want you to build a gym.” And we said, “A gym? We need program space.” He said, “You need a gym. That area is isolated. There's nothing there. The students who live in that building, you know, their brains are frying from law school, the other students come and go. There's nothing to keep them on campus. Build me a gym.”

As we said, “Okay. We'll do that.” So, but the gym doesn't take up all the property. We've got all the property, so I think, “All right, what can we do on this other edge of the property?” And there's a man named Eric Hotung, very wealthy man, who's now dead, in Hong Kong. Had his house on the highest hill in Hong Kong, built in a Feng Shui method. Was a go between, between everyone in the world, with the Chinese, mainland Chinese. He himself bought a ship to create relief for the refugees. This was a seriously wealthy man. Who, for some reason … I think it was his father, married an Irish woman, and sent him to Georgetown University for school. But he never gave us a penny at that time. And so our dean, Judith Areen, goes to the University president and says, “Can I go to Eric Hotung?” They [the university development staff] laughed and said, “Sure. And when the pigs fly, you'll get your money.” Eric took a shine to her [the Dean], and he said, “I will build you a building. I want my name on it in perpetuity. And I want an apartment in that residence hall you have. And in my office, I want a suite. That I will pay for separately designed in Chinese fashion. And it will have a soaking tub for me.” Thank you, Mr. Hotung! [Laughter.]

So, here we are now with commitments for this money––not enough, of course. You never get enough for a whole building. We had $20 million in reserves, $20 million in gifts at that time, both from those two gentlemen who were the main givers, and some others. So we had to raise another $20 million. So we went back to Scott and said, “You know, we're a little short.” He said, “Well, I'll tell you what, I will give you some more money, but you have to build me a clock tower. On the building.” So, “Okay, we'll do that.” But it wasn't feasible. There was just no way to make this clock tower work. So we came up with a plan to build a freestanding clock tower, which exists. I went back to him and showed him the designs, and he liked it. So he gave us another million just for the tower. He spread some more money around Georgetown, both the main campus and the law school. And we were able to build what we then called the campus completion project, knowing that that was kind of a joke. And I was in charge of that whole program.

And so, during the construction of that program, by the way, there was another wing that I had built in between all this, on the original building. But as I built that building, I was writing emails to the students and to the faculty about what was going to happen. And I was doing it in advance, so they'd know in advance, because at that time, they still pounded piles, and we had to drill––pound piles into the ground right next to the dormitory. And so I wanted them to know that. And we created sound barriers. We created special events for them, all sorts of stuff. But I would meet with that construction team on a daily basis. The reason I was able to move away from the clinic, even though I was still director, and from the clinical programs, is that I had this new deputy director, and I was grooming somebody to take over my role with a graduate program, so I could spend full time as Georgetown's developer and property manager. In the course of that, I started sending out these emails to people. And I started getting emails from strange places, like Indiana, Yale, saying, "I read your emails, they are very interesting. Can you put me on your distribution list?” So that list started growing. [Laughter.]

And then my friends, you know, my non-work friends here, wanted to see them too. And so Paul Dickson, who's a friend of mine, who's written 60 books, said, “You know what? I think you should make a book.” So, with him as my publisher, I wrote a book called Construction Notes, which was how we built this Georgetown Law School campus, from literally nothing into a six acre, beautiful campus, with a clock tower that then Ben Forgey, the [Washington] Post architectural writer, hated. And hated it so much, he didn't even write a review of our buildings after he had written glowing reviews of all the others. And now that tower is the central landmark of the campus, it's on all our stationery and everything else.

So that leads to the article that you mentioned. There was this I-395 ditch [a sunken interstate highway] across from pretty much the entire law school. We still owned the property on the corner, even though it hadn't been developed at First Street and E Street [NW].  And there was a friend of Marion Barry, a guy who owned the developer rights, but they were terrible development rights. If he had built it [his development over the highway] the way he wanted, Georgetown University would be looking at a two story wall at the curb line across the street for a parking lot because he wanted to build the parking lot on top of the highway. He couldn't do it. The engineering was, at the time, impossible. The funding was impossible, but he had the zoning rights for it. They were not being perfected because he wanted to go across Mass Avenue, but he hadn't perfected the zoning for that. Meanwhile, he had renovated the DC Council building and was in a pissing match with the entire city over payments for that.

Again, the dean and I are sitting looking out over this highway, and I said, “Judy, I think I have an idea on how to either make him to do it or not.”  So I called our lawyer, Maureen Dwyer, who's our property lawyer, and I said, “Has he ever perfected the second phase of his zoning?” She said, “No.”  I said, “Let's ask him to do it. Make the zoning commission exercise its authority, because they'd been sitting on it there for years.” So they exercised their authority and killed the project. He turns around and sues the government for $10 million or something like that. In the meantime, nothing's happening on that property, other than that we know we're probably going to get him thrown out of the project and somebody else will come along.

Meanwhile, engineering has improved, and a company out in New York, at that time, was called Louis Dreyfus, Incorporated. It changed its name to PGP something. I can't remember what the name is. PGP [Property Group] Partners. Goes to the city and gets a closed offer to settle the lawsuit by paying the money [$10 million to Conrad Mont]. Getting Conrad Mont out of there and developing the property across the entire deck of Route I-395. People coming to the city now don't realize that the area between Third Street NW and Second Street NW used to be an Italian community. All that's actually left of it is the Italian Church, but it still has the grandchildren of the original people living in that area coming to the church every Sunday. It [the neighborhood] was torn out for this highway, but the church was saved only because [Speaker of the US House of Representatives] Sam Rayburn [D-TX] needed the highway moved a little bit so it wouldn't interfere with the building that he was going to build with his name on it.

So they got to save the church, but the entire neighborhood was destroyed. And the highway was sunken because the plan. You can still see vestiges, it was a plan of bringing interstate highways all through the city. So Whitehurst Freeway is part of it. When you come off Rock Creek Parkway onto Virginia Avenue, and you have to go underground for a while around 23rd Street, that was supposed to be covered over as well. All these things were supposed to be happening, but Sammy Abbott, who was then the socialist mayor of Tacoma Park, managed to kill the entire highway system [that would have gone through the downtown]. K Street was going to be a highway, Route 295 is now part of that process. many parts of the plan were killed. The highway that goes down the Southwest Freeway of what used to be the south end of Capitol Hill, but now it extends to that street by Eye Street, SE, there. That was all part of that plan. You can see it on the link to the I-395 extension. You can see the entire map. It's frightening to an urban developer today. Because it'd be terrible. It would have been terrible.

So anyway, they got the deal. PGP got the deal. And we approached them because we wanted to change their plan a little bit. They wanted the garage to open on F Street, and we wanted to keep F Street closed. In the meantime, over the years, we had closed our section of F Street, but just with the long-term easement. If they [PGP] opened up that street between Second and Third, we would lose our easement in the street, and it would be opened all the way to North Capitol Street. It's a silly street today anyway, but it's the most famous east-west street in the L’Enfant Plan. That's another funny story.  But anyway, so I went to a meeting with them, made my pitch. They didn't like it. We got into a pissing match at one point where they called Georgetown and said, “If you don't get these guys off the project, we're going to kill your, you know Georgetown.” And the city was calling us saying, “We're going to kill your bond issues.”

So we backed off and we took a different tact and said, “Look, you're going to do what you're going to do. But if you let me sit in on your weekly construction team meetings, I will save you weeks of grief from my students picketing your site, calling you up to complain.” They [PGP] had a 24-hour construction contract. That's unheard of in DC. They were drilling piles in the middle of the night. They were building [24 hours a day] and these poor kids are living next to that. One of them, when he left that building, punched a hole in the wall, he was so angry at us. And I said, “And besides that, I will start writing. Here's my book, read my book. So you know what I'm talking about. And I'll start writing emails about your project to the entire city and my entire mailing list.” I thought it was a good idea.

That's when I started writing these emails. My daughter, for a Christmas present, said, “This should be a blog.” I said, “I don't know what a blog is. She said, ‘I'll set it up for you. You send the emails to me, and I'll put them on the blog.”  So that was my Christmas present. It was great. And those were going all over the world. Literally all, well, all over America, maybe not all over the world. And people loved them. People just loved them. They were being read in Yale architectural school, a woman from Indiana … They're not just about what's going on. It was the history of construction, the history of windows, poetry. I get poems that seem to apply, and at one point, I was writing about concrete, and I said, “No one writes poetry about concrete!” [Laughter.]

I get an email from somebody (from Indiana)  who says, “I'm an engineer, and I've written a poem about concrete.” And so it's on my next blog, you know?

So that's how this woman, Amanda, [reporter from City Paper, Amanda Kolson Hurley] somehow found me. Somehow she got on the blog as well and came and said, “Can we talk?” And I said, “Sure.” And so that's how that happened. And so I was on these projects until our last one, where I stepped down and somebody else took it over. So we have a new building planned that somebody else took over.

When I finally did retire last June, June 30th [2025], I had successfully found a world class lawyer, clinician, writer, to run the clinic; a nationally famous clinical teacher to run the graduate program; and a guy who knew about construction because his wife was a zoning lawyer, to take over the construction projects. That's not a bad end to your career. Especially when it starts off as, “Who is this guy?”

COLLINS OFFNER: Job well done. Well, this has been all been fascinating, but I thought we should shift focus a little bit.

MLYNIEC: Sure, Sorry.

COLLINS OFFNER: Your involvement in DC and through the 60s, 70s, .witnessing the social upheaval, as a young lawyer establishing, you know, the important work you're doing with juvenile justice. But paint a picture for us, what it was like to live in DC on Capitol Hill and some of the characters you met.

MLYNIEC: Sure, sure. So most of the action, demonstrations and stuff like that, did not take place on Capitol Hill. They took place on the Mall, they took place downtown.

COLLINS OFFNER: This is civil rights and anti-war.

MLYNIEC: Martin Luther King was merging civil rights and the Vietnam War. He had come to expand his thinking about economics and not just racial justice. And he saw the Vietnam War as an economic issue as well as a racial issue. So there was sort of a convergence between those two. A lot of the civil rights demos, while I was in law school, were actually taking place in the South––freedom rides, and things like that. But there was a church in Adams Morgan, and a coffee shop called The Potter's House. It was this sort of central location for DC's civil rights work. Topper Carew had an arts program that was affiliated with that [The New Thing Art and Architectural Center]. [Topper Carew is a documentary film director, screen writer and was an undergraduate at Howard University in the 1960’s.] All of the beautiful posters you see in the 1960s about art in DC were done through Topper’s organization, and the prime artist was Lou Stovall, who lived to the age of 90. Had three retrospectives at 90. [Lou Stoval was a renowned Washington, DC-based visual artist.] I actually became friends with him over the years. You can go to any museum in DC and see all his work.

And so the civil rights stuff was going on, but the Vietnam War stuff took over because that brought more white kids to the demonstrations, right?  Because black people were fighting for freedom. White kids were demonstrating, in part, because they didn't like the war, but they also didn't want to go. Even during my years as an anti-war person, I believed we should have kept the draft because I thought the draft is what gives people an outlet for being angry. And so I was disappointed when [Senator] Wayne Morse [D-OR] created the volunteer army, because I thought that it is what creates tyrants. And I think we are seeing exactly that problem today. If we had a draft, this [Trump’s aggressive foreign policy and his use of the National guard to enforce domestic policies] would not be happening the same way. A draft with an outlet for other public service like other countries have. Because people would be mingling cross race, cross economics, cross ethnicity, cross everything, if you had these programs. Now, the only place where that happens is in the military. For years, before [President] Trump, the military was sort of the leader in DEI [Diversity Equity and Inclusion]. You know, they knew what they needed to do. And corporations as well. And now, Trump is sending a private army into … I hear they're going into Maine because there are Somalis in Maine. You know, how many Somalis can there be in Maine, right?

But anyway, so these things were merging, but the focus in Georgetown was the war at that point. The Prettyman Program was representing everyone. At some point, I was running the bail fund. There was a volunteer bail fund. We were still in the old building at that time, and I would be running to court with literally thousands of dollars of $10 bills in my pocket, sent from all over the country, saying, “Bail my son out, he has been arrested.” I didn't bail anyone out specifically. I just went down there and started laying $10 bills down to get all these kids out, because they'd be released on collateral. If they didn't show up for trial, they'd lose their $10 and then be back in the streets immediately. There was also something called mobilization against the Vietnam War, and they were the ones that were conducting these demonstrations all over the city. Kids from AU [American University], kids from Georgetown, kids from GW [George Washington University], formed the legal marshals for these things. Our job was not to patrol the demonstrators. It was to keep an eye on the special division of the police called the SOD. I can't remember, Special Operations Division, which was led by a guy who liked tear gas and batons. So our job was to try and keep our people from responding violently. The nonviolence was still part of that, at least until the Weathermen formed.

I actually knew, still know, one of the leaders, Bernadine Dohrn, of the Weatherman program. She was the engineer for Days of Rage in Chicago in [1969] who ultimately went underground for years, surfaced, got convicted. Couldn't be a member of the bar, but got hired by the MacArthur Foundation to run a grant at Northwestern on juvenile justice. So we've been in touch ever since. She is as radical as ever. As is her husband, Bill Ayers, and they actually became friends of [President] Obama when he was teaching at the University of Chicago, because Bill teaches at the University of Chicago. So I'd be running into these people. The Chicago 8 Trial, Chicago 9, then Chicago 8. You know, those guys, before they got convicted, were making speeches all over the city. Mitch Miller would and come and sing, Judy Collins would come and sing. I get to meet all these people.

But I'd also got to meet all these characters that run the fringes, who would be passing through town, and needing a place to stay. And, you know, they knew a friend, who knew a friend, who knew a friend.  And the A Street Zoo [618 A Street, NE] was always available. But they didn't answer many questions. So, you know, even then I had suspicions that maybe this is something we shouldn't be doing. My roommates, back then, were an interesting array. There was me, far to the left, There was another guy, strict Democratic liberal. Another guy who had worked for Gerald Ford, and his father worked for Dow Chemical, and is getting checks from Dow Chemical [creators of Napalm] to pay his tuition at law school. And the third guy got letters from the John Birch Society, which is, of course, very right-wing, and had been at the US Air Force Academy. So we were a strange group of friends, all a little bit crazy in some fashion or other, living together quite harmoniously. Couldn't happen today. And having parties where you never knew who would show up at the party, and who was on acid, who was on psilocybin, and who was just smoking pot. We tried to keep them out of the house if they're doing any of that stuff. But we weren't successful, of course, so you could tell. And parties would go on forever, and our neighbors didn't care. They came to the party [laughter].

COLLINS OFFNER: And this was on Capitol Hill. This was on 618 A Street. 618 A Street Northeast. That's the A Street Zoo

MLYNIEC: Yes. That's Northeast. And we lived there for 3 years, and I lived there when I came back. I lived there in law school, and then I lived there when I came back [from Alaska], until I finally moved out, got my own apartment. It was an interesting block, because it was, when I moved to Capitol Hill in 1968, it was still a transition neighborhood, but most of the transitioners were renters. As well as, people who were flipping houses–– Henry Lange, and Beau Bogan [owners of prominent Capitol Hill real estate firms] and all those people. DC's always been a real estate industry [city], you know, from the day when George Washington brought [the Capital] here.

But getting back to the war, so there are all these people, and at the same time, a lot of us are working at the Hawk ‘N’ Dove. And so, there were people who were senators, there were people who were judges. There was a judge who could have conceivably made it to the Supreme Court, from the DC Court of U.S. Court of Appeals for DC, but somebody said he had smoked marijuana at some point. He was a patron of the Hawk ‘N’ Dove. I mean, I met McGovern in the Hawk ‘N’ Dove, reminded him that I worked for him. But busloads of people were coming in.

The one place where the race thing was different from the anti-war thing was Resurrection City. I can't remember the year that happened [Spring 1968], but the idea was to bring people to the Mall in wagons and buses and build tents and houses.  And create, like, a little city on the Mall to get people to understand just what was going on in the South, mostly. DC.was still somewhat of a southern city back then. And they had all kinds of professionals doing this, so the structures they were building were architecturally designed. There were meeting areas. There is a fascinating history of the people who actually did this. So I went there and was one of the people that was working to build it.

Unfortunately, we had torrential rains. And so the whole area turned into a swamp. And over time, it just didn't work. It didn't work. All the plans were not getting fulfilled architecturally. There were people just coming in [to build], homeless people were just coming in. Drug people were coming in living there. They thought it was another Woodstock, and it wasn't, it was a serious civil rights demonstration. But it ultimately disappeared. But I worked on that, and [Reverend] Ralph Abernathy was part of that. Martin Reverend Martin Luther King] was already dead. [There was] what's his name from Chicagoz––[Reverend] Jesse Jackson, and [Ambassador] Julian Bond. I ran into all of those guys at one point or another in my life. Peter Edelman, of course, a Bobby Kennedy guy, ultimately Georgetown faculty member, and his wife, Marion Wright Edelman [founder of the Children’s Defense Fund], also did juvenile justice work. We actually did a case together that got 400 so-called handicapped kids out of institutions and into foster homes, back home with their families, and (other) placements. So that was, that's what was going on.

But Capitol Hill was interesting because we had RFK [stadium] parking lots. So when there were demonstrations, the buses would get to park in those lots, and you'd see these streams of demonstrators coming down East Capitol Street, coming and then coming to the Hawk ‘N’ Dove [329 Pennsylvania Avenue SE], and hanging out [at different places]. There were like, three or four Whitby’s, [one was at 319 Pennylvania Avenue SE], the Hawk ‘N’ Dove.  Uh, God, I forget. [Laughter.]

COLLINS OFFNER: The Gandy Dancer was maybe one of them.

MLYNIEC: Well, the Gandy Dancer was in Northeast. That was a little bit later. Before that, it was The Man in the Green Hat. [I was] one of 17 owners of The Man in the Green Hat.

COLLINS OFFNER: Yes, but back to Pennsylvania Avenue.

MLYNIEC: Yeah, but back to Pennsylvania Avenue. And even that was sort of new. I mean, Stuart, Long opened Hawk ‘N’ Dove, in I think 1967…1968. One of those, maybe late '67. I know he painted the sidewalk green in 1968 [March]. I started working for him in 1968, but there were still the old time bars there. There was the Neptune Grill, which was on Third [Street and Pennsylvania Avenue]. Stuart bought that, made it Yolanda's [228 Pennsylvania Avenue SE]. I cannot remember what it is now. The Tune Inn [331 ? Pennsylvania Avenue SE], of course, was there with the original owner Joe (Nardelli).

COLLINS OFFNER: Mr. Henry's ...

MLYNIEC: Mr. Henrys [601 Pennsylvania Avenue SE] was there. Neil's Imperial Inn had a beautiful, beautiful bar. I don't know how long it had been there. But Neil’s ultimately closed. Stuart bought the bar, and then the block was torn down. That's where the banks between 6th and 7th [SE are located]. That modern building, that was where Neil's was. Down on Potomac Avenue and Pennsylvania Avenue, there was an Irish bar that then became, it's still there, became a Mexican restaurant [La Lomita Uno, 1330 Pennsylvania Avenue SE]. So there were all these bars, and there was a mix of old-time Capitol Hill, Irish Americans, Scottish Americans.

A lot of people had moved out because of the integration of schools. So that's why there were places for all these kids to rent and people to flip houses. I was reading that, I think, in Stuart Long's Overbeck [interview on this website]. And next to the Tune Inn, where Roland's was [333 Pennsylvania Avenue SE] was a grocery store. But before Roland's, there was a honky tonk [bar] there called Julie's.

DC was actually a stop on the honky tonk circuit. In Georgetown, the Shamrock was there. Country Gentlemen started playing there. In Waldorf [Maryland] I saw Dolly Parton and Porter Wagner at the Stardust [Motel and Lounge] in Waldorf. And Julie's was a honky-tonk as well, but they didn't have live entertainment. I don't think I ever saw live entertainment. They had roughnecks in there, real redneck roughnecks. And one day, I walked in there with three other people, to see what it was like, and we sat down at a table, and we're not being waited on. Waitress comes back, back and forth, past us, not being waited on. Finally, a guy gets up from one of the other booths and walks up to our table. And he says, “You boys college kids?” And one of our smart ass [friends] said, “No, we're law students.” The guy pulls out a gun, puts it on the table, and says, “You really don't belong here, do you?” We say, “Well, I guess not.” And we got up and left. [Laughter.]

Ultimately, it went under, like a lot of other things that went under. Maybe Stuart Long, maybe Henry Lange bought the building and just evicted them. I'm not sure. Henry owned a lot of that property between Third and Fourth [Streets]. Stuart, unfortunately died too soon, was a really great character.

But there were all these people, Julian Bond's uncle [Dr. J. Max Bond Sr],
lived two doors away from the A Street Zoo. He's a very, very distinguished man, a former ambassador. His wife lived there, and they just tolerated us. And they brought us over for tea, and gave us stories about his life as a diplomat. Who was the senator from New York? Not Javitz, the other one I can't remember his name. But anyway, he had bought a house across the street from us that won, I think, one of the first historical society awards. It still has a plaque on the wall. [Later is was established that the Senator was Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.]

But it was so vibrant. There was so much going on, you know, because there were so much, so many people there. You know, a lot of white people thought cocaine was not illegal for white people, so there was a lot of cocaine flowing around Capitol Hill at that time as well. So there were undercover agents. We knew they looked like undercover agents. And so they would come into Hawk ‘N’ Dove, have a couple of drinks, and see if they could find anything. I know of no drugs ever being passed in the Hawk ‘N’ Dove.  And I worked several nights a week while I was there. And I don't think there were, you know. What happened on the outside, you know, it was probably different. I mean, you know, '60s people joke––sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and that's what it was.

But all percolating. DC was so … It was exciting, but at the same time, you knew people were getting beat up. People getting killed, not only in the South, but in the North, you know. Detroit’s Miss Liuzzo gets shot. You know, she was from Detroit. She was shot because she was traveling with a black guy from Mississippi or something like that. [Miss Viola Luizzo was a civil rights activist and was murdered transporting voting rights marchers near Selma, Alabama.] And it was quite painful. And Georgetown then legally was a center of all that. So when May Day happened, the big May Day demonstrations anti-war demonstrations], that's where I was.

COLLINS OFFNER: What year was that?

MLYNIEC: That was ‘71. That's where I was funneling the money to court to be able to get all these kids out because they shut the city down. They blocked the bridge. Nobody could come in. And I think it was at the same time that there were underground cells operating in DC. Crazy left wingers. I remember, I got a call one day from a lawyer I worked with as an investigator. This was when I was still in school [1970]. I remember, it was also the time of the Symbionese Liberation Army. There were a lot of German gangs. Danny the Red [organized May ’68 civil unrest in France], all these people. I got a call, and he [the lawyer] said, “So I just got a call from the people from this newspaper in Adams Morgan.” I forgot what the newspaper was called in Adams Morgan [DC neighborhood]. He said, “Hey, just got a tip that the feds are coming in to search their building. Can you go over there and monitor it? Because I can't go in.” So I did.

It was called the Voice of the Motherland or Voice of the Mother People [Voice of the Mother Country]. I think that is what it was called. So I went there [1932 17th Street, NW] and, you know, surprisingly, they [the Federal agents] let me in. I said, “I'm a lawyer. I'm here working with them.” I wasn't a lawyer yet. I was still a law student. And they let me in, and they were finishing up at that point, And I said, “What did you find?”  They said, “We found drugs, we found guns, we found no people. We found no identification. That's all I can tell you.”

So those things were happening, but a lot of it was underground. Weather Underground was underground, before it emerged as, you know, the Chicago Days of Rage. That was a riot. [Three days of riots in Chicago in October 1969, organized by Weather Underground.] There is Bill [Ayers] and Bernardine [Dohrn] [both leaders in the Weather Underground], who are still not sorry about that. And, I'm not saying anything that's not on record. They said it themselves. So that's what was happening.

The Congressional Library [Madison Building] wasn’t there. We had baseball games on the lot where the Madison Building is now. We used to call it “Teddy Mach Field.” Teddy Mach was an electrician. I think he was at the Library of Congress. So we named it after him. And the Hawk ‘N’ Dove would challenge anybody who wanted to bring nine people out to play. It got more sophisticated after that A full bar league formed at Bullfeathers.  That was a legitimate league. People laughed at our team when we started, but we won that year. We won the tournament [laughter].

Peter Waldron, who I think is also an interviewee for the Overbeck project, was the team captain. A lot of the people in the Overbeck histories are people from that era that all knew each other like Donna Scheeder. I went through the list just to see who I knew, and there was a lot of people. But I feel the same way about the civil rights movement. When I went down to Atlanta for a juvenile justice conference. I went to the Civil Rights Museum there, and they have the wall of heroes. [So many of them came through Washington during that period.] And walking along it literally brought tears to my eyes that I knew all these people, and so many of them were now dead, or they were old and infirmed, and it was quite a moving moment for me. It still is.

COLLINS OFFNER: So, we're on Capitol Hill.

MLYNIEC: Yeah.

COLLINS OFFNER: You've left the Zoo, and where did you go from there?

MLYNIEC: Getting respectable. Yeah [laughter]. Well, you know, I'm now working at Georgetown. So I have to be respectable. Somebody once asked me if I wanted to be a judge, and I said, “Well, you know, I like being a lawyer who could still wear his roller skates and cutoffs at the Hawk ‘N’ Dove. I don't think I'll ever want to be a judge.”

So I started living in a series of different places. In between my first and second year of that project I was working on. This is 1971. I had a grant that was going to take literally five months for the grant to get renewed.

COLLINS OFFNER: This is the juvenile justice [project].

MLYNIEC: This was at Georgetown, but it was when I was working for my faculty member, just as a researcher. So I decided I had never been to Europe, so I was going to go hitchhike around Europe. So I went there and hitchhiked around for about five years. But I got sick, and when I got back, I had no place to live, because I'd moved out of the Zoo [618 A Street, NE].

COLLINS OFFNER: Let me just pause... You were in Europe for five years?

MLYNIEC: Five months! Five months, okay. Five months. Did I say five years? Yeah, five months. Just camping, you know, and I had money and a credit card, so occasionally I'd get a hotel. It was quite thrilling. It's my first time in Europe, and I actually went to my “landsman village” [family’s ancestral village] in Poland, which was great for me, not for them, because they thought I was going to be their hero and get them to the United States. That was not going to happen.

But anyway, so when I came back, I called a friend of mine who was living on 4th Street, near I Street, and stayed with him until I got healthy. And then we lived together, right around the corner from Distad's [gas station] on Ninth Street [SE]. Sure. We had a house, and then finally, he wanted to move in with his girlfriend, so I got my first solo apartment, on the corner of Ninth and Massachusetts Avenue [NE]. Literally now across the street from where my daughter lives on Eighth and A [Streets, NE], which is nice.

And then at some point, the guy I lived with on Fourth Street and I decided to live together again. So we moved to another house on 12th and Walter [Streets, SE] which was pretty dicey still back then. We weren't the only white people on the block, but Walter was pretty much still an African American neighborhood. It's an interesting demographic about Capitol Hill. When I first moved to Capitol Hill, the word was, “Don't go east of 8th Street.” So moving up to 12th was a bit of a thing. Lincoln Park was still pretty dangerous. Stanton Park, not so much by then. But Northeast developed slower than Southeast.

But ultimately, I decided it was time to really grow up and buy a house. So I found a house on 14th.  Donny Denton [Capitol Hill realtor]––again, a friend for life––found a house for me on 14th Place, [NE] between, one of the Carolinas [Avenues].  I'm not sure which … Carolina and C Street. I bought that house for ... $52,000. The pipes froze all the time. They were in a crawl space. I endured it for three years and decided, “I can now make some money on this house.” So I made 20 some thousand dollars in three years on that house. And I thought, “Now I know what these flippers are doing!” And I bought a house on the corner of  Fourth and A NE  [corrected to 401 D Street, NE]. It was the big yellow house. It has a side yard along, what is that street? Oh, over here. Got my directions [confused].

COLLINS OFFNER: Near The Frederick Douglas?

MLYNIEC: No, no, it [the Douglas house] was at Fourth and A. My house was at 401 D [on the corner of Fourth and D Streets, NE]. I loved the house. Had one kid. We had gotten married. To Abby Yochelson. Yeah, we'd gotten married by then. And were having a second kid.

COLLINS OFFNER: What year would that have been?

MLYNIEC: When we got married? I wouldn't get married before I was 40 years old. So we got married. So, actually, we were living in that house. How did that work? 1981. I must have moved to that house in ‘81. Right. So we were living in that house and not married. I got married in 1985. I think that's right. Yeah, I got married in 1985. We lived in that house. We had been together for years. Lived together in that house until we were going to probably have another kid. And so it was nice, and I liked it, and I liked the neighborhood, and I didn't want to move just anywhere. And I wanted light. This house had light on three sides, pretty rare on Capitol Hill. So I thought I would buy the house next door to me and break through the walls. Donny Denton said, “This is crazy.” I said, well, “I know two people who've done it.” Who was a great actor in Capitol Hill? [Robert] Prosky. He had a double house. And a teacher, I think, at Capitol Hill Day School, had a double house. So I bought the house. Paid too much for it. And the market collapsed.

So after a couple of years of trying to figure this out, I sold it at a big loss. Because Abby was pregnant at that point, pregnant with our second kid. Had my first kid in '90, second kid in '92. We needed a bigger house. Donny found 227 8th Street, SE. And we went there, and, you know, we turned it down a couple of times because it just seemed dark. We couldn't understand how a house with four sides of windows, that sits on a double lot, [could be so dark].  So we're going to have four sides of windows. And, you know, they kept pushing us to buy it, and nobody else was buying it because the market had sort of crashed. So one day we walked in, Donny and I walked in, we said, “Well, look at the paint. It's midnight blue in one room. It's forest green in another room. Everything else is in gray. If you paint this house, it's going to be bright. And look at these lights. They come down to a foot above your table. Why would you do that instead of having lights on the ceiling?” So we bought it. Immediately set about painting. We bought it for so little money. Seemed like a lot then, you know, it really was a stretch for us, but seeing what was happening, we knew the market was going to come back no matter what. And we didn't want to move ever again. So we bought it and renovated it. My brother-in-law was a very skillful plumber, so he replumbed the whole house for us. Did a lot of work. And we've lived there ever since.

So that house is fascinating because it was built in 1921, and it was originally owned and built by a merchant at Eastern Market. And he ended up building three houses on that property, two adjacent to ours. And one day, we were sitting out there in our living room, maybe on the porch, and a group of people came by, and they were staring at the house. And finally, one of the younger people comes up and says, “You know, my grandmother was born in this house and had her wedding in this house, and she's wondering if we could come in and take a look.” And so we said, “By all means!” And they came in and spent an hour, maybe longer, maybe two hours, in the house telling us about the history, about her father, and about her wedding. And it was just fascinating, just fascinating, talking to her. I can't remember why they ended up selling or moving out. Maybe she moved out and then her parents died. And it got sold to a guy who turned it into a halfway house for St. Elizabeth's patients. And he raised Chihuahuas in the basement. On a floor, a tile floor, so that when [the dogs] peed, it seeped between the tiles. We always knew there was a smell down there, but we weren't sure what it was and then we found out. Sometime later after we bought it, somebody came to the door asking me if it's still a halfway house for St. E's. He had gotten released and was looking for a place to live.

But the people in between, the third owners, are the people I bought it from, and they were going through a pretty ugly divorce. And so that's why we got it. They needed to get rid of the house, so that's why we got it fairly cheap for the size of it. But, I had to close the deal because they hated each other so much by then. And real estate agents on both sides were women, and this guy just hated all women at that point. So I went there and over a six-pack of beer and looking at his dirty magazine collection. No names. And I doubt anyone remembers them anymore. But I closed the deal and we bought the house. Sometime later, while we were living there, the woman who owned the house and moved away [the third owner] came by as well, and said, “Can I see what you did to the house?

So, you know, that's the house. Abby then did a house history, so I have a history of the house, and went to the original deeds and stuff like that. So, it's a wonderful house, but it's so different from a Capitol Hill house. It looks like something that would be in Oak Park, Illinois. It's brick, and the brick is iron brick. So for some period of time, people would put iron nails into the brick as they were baking it. So, you can see, it has these dark red splotches on the brick and the brick is sort of orange. Abby doesn't like the color. I love it. But if anything ever happened to the house, I'd never be able to replicate them. So thankfully, the trees around it have been cut down because one was kind of sick. And it got cut down, so I was sort of thankful about that.

But that street is a very tight street. everybody on our block knows each other. As soon as we moved in, someone from three doors away came by and said, “We'd like to throw a block party. Can we use your yard?” Because it was so big. We said, sure, and we met everybody on the block, and still are good friends with everybody on the block. A lot of people have lived there…I think right now, we may be the longest continuous family on that block. Other people moved in a little bit later. There may be one [owner] that's been there a little bit longer, but I'm not positive. But the block also has three houses that were moved there from Lincoln Park. Apparently, in the 1800s, it was cheaper to move a house than build a house. And again, what I've been told is that they were moved from Lincoln Park. Typical Italianate style house.

COLLINS OFFNER: So, a lot of changes on the Hill during this time, neighborhoods changing, schools changing, gentrification. You need, to think about schooling your own children.

MLYNIEC: We did. Very interesting., When we lived on Fourth and D Street, the guy across the street was on the school board. I can't remember his name. It was Bob [Bob Boyd]. And that was the time when the cluster school was going through its Golden Age. It had that wonderful principal [Veola Jackson] and our friends sent our kids there, and kept them in the upper school, even though there were very few white kids, and loved it.  Because that school was great. Everything was great. So we had all our plans where to send our kids to DC schools. When my son was ready for Pre-K. they went to that church on Independence and Fourth Streets. There was a Pre-K there. My daughter was in the Library of Congress Pre-K. But when it was time to actually enroll in real school, that was when they found asbestos in the majority of schools in DC. And the judge, [Kaye Christian], who happened to be a former student of mine, basically closed down the school system, and said, “You cannot send children to these schools.”

COLLINS OFFNER: So what year is this, then?

MLYNIEC: Well, it would probably be my son. Mid-1990s, so around 1995, '96. I am not sure. So, I had also interviewed the then-principal at the, sort of, middle school, Watkins. I didn't warm up to her. I didn't warm up to her. I thought, you know, I was an educator by then for a long time myself, and she talked a lot about what she did and was, and not much about the program. And so, we're vacillating, vacillating, about Capitol Hill schools. We had applied to Capitol Hill [Day School]. You know, just because. And we decided we can't trust what's going to happen in the DC schools. And so we went to Capitol Hill Day School, which was interestingly going through a renovation process at the time. So I joined their committee on the building, and ultimately took over with Jim Woolwine, who was the in-school construction manager. He and I managed that project.

But I also became a member of the board, and I served on the board for several years after my kids graduated. I think, from that school, both of them there for full eight years. And it was going through its own interesting period. Capitol Hill Day School started off in two churches, and they went to school, I think, in the church basement. And the Dent building was the first real school building they bought, and it was surplus DC government school property. So they got it at a decent price, but it needed to be renovated. And they did. And the first renovation, I guess, was finished. It must have been finished by the time my kids started. But they then did another big fundraising event, and that's when I got involved in their committee as well. Interesting thing, I have a graduate student for whom I'm supervising a paper on now regarding the Dent School  [the school’s prior name]. The Capitol Hill Day School was one of the original black schools. She showed me a picture of it in her thesis, and I'm looking, and I said, “Oh, my kids went to school in that building.”

COLLINS OFFNER: Oh, as Dent School...

MLYNIEC: Yeah, as Dent, it was called Dent then. But it had Cemmy Peterson, legendary educator in her own right [Capitol Hill Day School Head]. But it did not have a professional board. It was a volunteer parent board, which I think is a good idea as long as you have some people on it who have the skills that it needs. So, Nancy Deck was the chair while I was on it, and a guy named Sam Maruca was on it, and we looked at the finances, and the budgeting processes were in need of some fixes. Because private school was expensive. Not as expensive as it is now.  Staggering, what it costs now to go there. But it was hard to guarantee the number of students because a lot of kids would leave at [Sixth Grade] to maximize their chances for the high schools they wanted to go into, which had full K through 12 programs. So we were often juggling around for money.

So we started a process of creating specialized funds, and doing fundraising for different funds, and planning the budget on a more realistic assessment of what the enrollment was going to be, not just this year, but for three years ahead. And over time, we got the school into sound finances and created a tradition of a stronger parent board. Because there were still parents who wanted to send their kids there, but didn't want to give people [teachers] raises because they [the teachers] loved their job, you know. Why should they get big raises? And our thought was to keep ourselves in the middle and between the highest and the lowest [of private school tuitions]. We can never go to the highest. At least at that point, I don't know where they are now. But it's become a very successful school. It now owns three or four buildings, I think. Jason Gray [current school head] is another incredible, incredible, not just educator, but a manager of things. And the school always has a wait list, you know, even at the upper grades now has wait lists.

But things have changed. You know, there are people on Capitol Hill who can afford Capitol Hill Day School. Even then, I thought I was making a fairly decent salary at Georgetown, and I kept wondering how all these people were affording this school.  And it turned out there were a lot of rich people on Capitol Hill, even back then. But now, what's happening, I've been told by someone who was on the board, there is a lot of wealth transfer. And so grandparents are now paying for the kids. But it was a real change. I mean, it tries really hard to get African American kids to be part of the program. But it's hard because, you know, to move them, it's hard to move from the DC [public] school into the Capitol Hill Day school or any other private school. Because the catch-up is too hard. Socialization is different. But they try mightily, and they do a good job. One of my kids also went to Burke, which was going through the same sorts of growing pains, and I ended up on their board as well.

But in terms of the neighborhood, things were really changing. People, house prices were going up, real estate agents were booming. Houses were flipping left and right.   And they were not just flipping for somebody as an investment to renovate a house and sell it and move on to another one. These are people who are consciously saying, “Right, this is my first house. When it goes up, I'm going to stretch myself and buy the next one. When it goes up, I'm going to stretch myself and buy the next one.” Which has, unfortunately, occurred here, and all over the country, and has convinced younger children that their first starter house should look like they have things. That doesn't work that way, you know, unless you get a parent transfer of money, which is hard. But the neighborhood, it's changed. I mean, Capitol Hill used to be, as I said, Eighth Street. Down by the highway, especially as you got further east, was dangerous. Now, Capitol Hill goes to M Street [SE]. Capitol Hill goes to, the [RFK] stadium. Capitol Hill goes to H Street [NE] at least, and they're trying to push that to K [Street NE]. As I say, and it's all a real estate hype. But it worked. And so, [the Hill is] safer. People don't realize that Capitol Hill and DC generally is safer than when Richard Nixon was president.

But it's an urban environment, you know, and so you always keep an eye open. I mean, I take the subway all the time, come back late, and my urban skills are always on high alert, but that's serendipitous. It is not like somebody is, you know, selling drugs on every corner here, which used to happen. There were drug sales.  Eighth Street, when we were living there during the '80s, Rayful Edmunds years, when coke was crazy in the city all over. Eighth Street was the passage street between Northeast and the river area, and Southeast, and further north. And these guys, you know, they would have black minivans that were called the murder vehicles, because that was what they were using for their killing, killing other gang members. They would have people with guns in the back of the minivans. Back sliding doors pop open. They rake [shoot a large number of bullets] the neighborhood, they close [the door] and take off. They also [traveled] in cars, there were a lot of Mercedes, and they always had those speakers that blared outdoors at 2:00 in the morning. And we had the fire engines [so] that we were sort of used to noise on Eighth Street. But that doesn't exist anymore. I mean, that doesn't exist. And people do get hurt, and people do get robbed. Nobody wants to be robbed. I think I've been robbed or burgled or car theft at least seven times, eight times. Only once at gunpoint, but I had two vans stolen, got them both back. The wheels stolen off my Volkswagen when I had one because they [the wheels] were very hard to find. But that was a long time ago. I consider Capitol Hill a safe neighborhood.

When my daughter was at Maret, she had to go to her friends’ houses [in Northwest] for parties, because they didn't want to send their kids here. And the notion that my daughter rides the subway blew their mind, you know. They live in that isolated “Upper-Caucasia” up there where they hardly ever see anybody who is a brown or black person unless they're working in their gardens. I'm sorry, being disparaging of my DC citizenry, but it is true. It is a very different world when you get up into those Northwest neighborhoods. We still, you know, we still like to think we're the hippies that moved here in 1968 and we are not. My daughter keeps telling me I'm not a man of the people anymore [laughter]. She's probably right, you know. Man of the people doesn't live in a house like that.

You know––and is it for the better?–– gentrification happens. People move. Americans are moving people, and where I grew up, now it's an all Hispanic neighborhood and black neighborhood. That couldn't happen when I was there. Is that good? Well, it's a place where new immigrants come. These are the new immigrants, you know. And so that is good. But they had to go through a spate of very high crime.

We moved my mother out finally when, when people were being murdered at different areas, not in our area, but in the town. So we moved her, she never forgave us. She was old by then, she was, like, 88 years old, living alone.

But what's happened now because of COVID and because of Trump and because of even Biden, who wouldn't bring people back to work when he should have, I worry about the Hill, in ways I never had. In different ways than I used to worry, worried for the last 20 years. Eighth Street is being loaded with fast-food restaurants. That's not healthy. We used to have nice restaurants on Eighth Street. The area between Seventh and Eighth on Pennsylvania Avenue has drug emporiums and vacant buildings. You know. There's no retail to be had. Seventh Street, across from the Market, has Tunnicliff’s, which positively has improved over the years, but, you know, when Acqua [al 2 restaurant, which has since returned] closed, the restaurant that moved in was terrible. It had bad service and most terrible food, at high prices. The new one that just moved into Boxcar has high prices. I haven't eaten there yet, because the high prices are saying I can go to get a hamburger next door at Tunnicliff’s, you know. Tunnicliff’s fed us during COVID. They were open for carryout. Mr. Henry's is still there, which is great. Hope it never closes. Don't like the new Hawk ‘N’ Dove, but I like the sign still there. Yeah, you know, it says Hawk ‘N’ Dove. Tune Inn will never change. But, you know, the crazy right wing is moving into three of those buildings [in the 300 block of Pennsylvania Avenue SE]. [They are] to the right [politically] of the Heritage Foundation, for God's sake.

On this side of the Hill, the northeast side of the hill, when we opened The Man in the Green Hat in about 1975, I think, something like that. I think we were the first $1 million gross on Capitol Hill restaurant. And there was The American Cafe down there. There was a beautiful French restaurant down there, La Brasserie [239 Massachusetts NE]. It was great. You know, and then the German restaurant [Café Berlin, 322 Massachusetts NE] hung on, which is nice. Two Quails is gone, but the French one's [Bistro Cacao, 316 Massachusetts NE] okay. But again, it's worrisome because having owned restaurants, even though I sympathize with unions and workers, and I want them to get a fair wage, you know, owner's margins are very, very thin, very thin. So what that means is that only wealthy people can go to wealthy, high priced restaurants. So I hope nothing happens to Tune Inn, Hawk ‘N’ Dove, even Sonoma's not so bad, you know, in terms of price. But we also have a better Folger [restaurant], stronger Folger, I think. Theater is great. It's a great neighborhood. It's a great neighborhood to raise kids. There are so many kids that I saw at Capitol Hill Day School who are living on Capitol Hill.

COLLINS OFFNER: Including your daughter.

MLYNIEC: Including my daughter, but she's paying big rent on her own. The rest are buying houses with the help of their grandparents. So I don't know.

COLLINS OFFNER: Well, this has been an enchanting morning to spend with you. I thought I’d just turned to you and see if there are any parting thoughts that you would like to share.

MLYNIEC: Parting shots. Well, when Trump was selected the first time, I reminded my students, they shot Lincoln, and we survived that. So, I'm pitching hope this year. [The interview was January 2025.] Pitching hope this year. And I'll leave it at that. I have some dark thoughts about Trump's person, and everybody else who's in Congress in the Republican Party right now. But I'm pitching hope and I think we'll survive.

I think, you know, there's resistance in certain cities that have sort of given hope to us. It's sort of interesting to me here. I write to my friends in Minneapolis and San Francisco and Chicago, and I say, strangely, I am not affected by the fact that we have troops. I said, they stand around in the metro stops and do nothing until they see somebody who doesn't look like me. Um, you know, I wasn't a government employee, and I’m now retired, so I have a pension. I have money, but I think we'll survive.

I think we'll survive, and I think Capitol Hill should never be sold short. There's a feeling of … generosity and grace in the people who live here, newcomers learn it real fast. There are block parties. There are great organizations, Hill Center, Capitol Hill Community Foundation, which is great. Overbeck which is great. CHAMPS (Capitol Hill Association of Merchants and Professionals) has emerged into the foundation and also the BID (Business Improvement District), which is great. The Hill, it's clean, which is great. The leaves are picked up, which is great. There are so many things that are great about this neighborhood, and people learn really fast. You see people improve, people who move here improve the neighborhood.

Unfortunately, it moved a lot of people out of the neighborhood, and there's no way to stop that. You know, unless the city is willing to own and well manage buildings for low income people … The real estate industry will never, never solve the housing problem. They're there to make money. You know, they're to make money. And they don't make money, even with the benefits they get by building some housing. They don't make money on those. They make it on the others. And so, the place on Eighth Street, (the former Hine school site) you know, if you look, if you walk past the big red building, where it is the market rates and walk past then that little browner building on the other side of C Street, and look in, you see it's all spec finishes [building across from The Residences at Eastern Market for low income individuals]. Those fluorescent lights would drive me crazy living there. They're not healthy for people who live with those kinds of lights. So, you know, they build them as cheap as they can, and at best break even, or agree to lose money and make it up on the other side.

So, gentrification will happen. And, if we ever become an economically fair country, there'll be people with as much money as the white people moving to Capitol Hill, there'll be black people and brown people moving in. There were more when I moved here. I mean, that's very visible to me, you know. See, even on the other side of 12th Street, even where I was living, when I lived on 14th  Place, I was the only [white] person on block. Now those houses are selling for $900 thousand. I should have held on longer. And I suspect it's mostly white people on that block now, but everybody on that block knew each other, black people, same thing with Walter Street.

Still too much crime in Northeast, mostly towards H Street. I got the alert system when I was at Georgetown. I was also in charge of knowing which way the wind blew, in case it was a nuclear explosion somewhere. So I get these alerts, and most of the crime is down by the ballpark, in that area, down along H Street. But the rest of us are relatively safe, until something happens to one of us, and you think, oh, yeah, crime is still here. But not that much. People have to understand, not that much, and these kids are not predators. You know, that's the other thing I want people to understand. These kids have had terrible, hard lives. Terrible hard lives, but trauma that most of us can't even imagine. And we all know it happens with trauma, you know, you come back from Vietnam, you have a syndrome for it. You're a little black kid, you're a criminal. Even though you're suffering the same kind of trauma. So I wish my neighbors would get that straight and stop badgering [councilmember Charles Allen] about crime. No, we have a great [DC] councilman, too. And a fairly decent city government, except for the mayor. Lost her way somewhere. Not sure why. Those are my closing thoughts.

COLLINS OFFNER: So we'll leave it on resilience for Capitol Hill and hope for the future

MLYNIEC: Yeah, I think that's a good way to... good way to say it. All right, thank you, Molly.

COLLINS OFFNER: Thank you. Wally.

MLYNIEC: This was fun.

[The interview resumed after a short break.]

COLLINS OFFNER: This is Molly Collins Offner again with Wally Mlyniec. We have a few additional stories to share [about Mayor Marion Barry and DC government].

MLYNIEC: So, Marion Barry. I was here for the [Mayoral] transition from Walter Washington to Marion Barry. Three people were running at that time. One was Sterling Tucker. One was Walter [Washington], who, I think, was elected and was running for a second term. He was either appointed or elected. I'm not sure which. And [the other was] this Young Turk named Marion Barry, who ran a group called Pride Incorporated. And Marion was on the school board, rattling cages as only Marion could do.

Marion Barry is a fascinating person, almost a Shakespearean tragedy, and most people only remember the bad things about Marion Barry. And there are some. But Marion Barry was a chemistry PhD student. Marion Barry was a SNCC [the civil rights group Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] organizer in the worst rural counties of Mississippi. Marion Barry was a loyal friend, good and bad. Marion Barry had great aspirations for himself and the utmost confidence in himself, good and bad. So, he throws his hat in the ring. Nobody I knew wanted Walter to be the mayor again. We thought, you know, he was just kowtowing to the federal government establishment. And Sterling Tucker, who was on the council or the board, whatever it was called at that time, was a legitimate, middle-class, African American, smart guy. And, I was supporting Sterling; everybody that I knew who I thought was rational was supporting Sterling.  

The not-quite-fringe friends that I had, and I myself included, were fascinated with Marion Barry. But I just didn't think he could win. I thought if I gave my vote to Marion Barry, I'd take it away from Sterling Tucker, who clearly could win. That was the morning of the election. I walked into the polling booth [November 1978], and I voted for Marion Barry. I just, I just felt it. I just felt the Marion magic. I think, there were three people, all with vote tallies in the 30% range, and the spread between them was no more than two [percent]. Marion came in first and shocked the city. But Marion had a charm, and so some of the early groups to support him were the Committee of 100, all the richer commercial guys in town, and the Federal City Council, another private group.

I can't remember what year that was [1979], but I was already doing juvenile justice stuff. Because I applied to be on his transition team to work on the juvenile justice. And he hired, as his head of juvenile justice, a woman named Audrey Rowe, who had worked for Marian [Wright] Edelman. I don't know if they talked, but somehow I got in the Marion Barry transition team, which was loaded with smart, committed, interesting black and white people who really wanted to see the city change.  Because for years, it had been run by a group of conservative Southern Congressmen, Nixon appointed this other group and appointed Walter as the acting-Mayor as it was called. I think he was called the Mayor and that sort of tainted him in our eyes, of course.

And then [Marion Barry] appointed me to this special committee called the Juvenile Justice Advisory Group. So I worked with Audrey and Shirley Wilson, who was his main juvenile justice person out of the agency. She was just, like, a jack-of-all-trades, jill-of-all-trades. So I got to see the mayor from time to time, plus Stuart Long was a good friend of the Mayor. And I was amazed at what the Mayor did here. He created the African American middle class by creating, which now no one could do, preferential hiring contracts. He appointed administrators that were not tied to the old-line black establishment here, but to the newer people who had moved in later, didn't have 100- year-old roots, who had literally more in common with the normal African American kid, and immigrant from the '50s, than those old-line people had. But he sort of lost some of his initial luster with a lot of people because he was hanging around with rich people.

But that first term, and the first two years of the second term, I was on this transition team both times, were stunning for the city––until it wasn't. Uh, and then money started not flowing very well. Marion's hubris took over. Stuart Long told me he knew him well enough to know that Marion never took a penny. But other people were taking pennies. Joe Yeldell, who was head of the Department of Human Services, was actually tried for bribery. A lot of people were tried for bribery, and crack [cocaine] was happening, and so money was disappearing, which led to [Barry’s] ultimately getting replaced by Anthony Williams.

But then he got involved with that setup [1990], Joe diGenova [former US Attorney], who was a classmate of mine in law school, hated Marion Barry. And he went after him with a vengeance and set up that sting that got him arrested. Was Marion using crack by then? Yes, he was. Was Marion drinking too much brandy, Grand Marnier? I think that is what he drank. He drank too much. Was he carousing all the time? Yes, he was. And he was a night guy. He was a night guy, you know. But his energy was indefatigable. But then the bottom caved in.

You know, I still have great respect for what he did in those first six years of his office. But I thought [in] his time on the council after he did nothing for that Ward [Ward 8]. But they idolized him, in part, because he was more like them than he was when he was mayor. I mean, Ward 8 didn't benefit from any of those years. The best benefit Marion gave to the Ward was his job program for kids in the summer. But he did a lot to create the middle class. The abject poor in Ward 8 didn't get much from it, in my opinion. A lot of people who disagree with me, certainly people who live there, think he's a hero.

Audrey Rowe was with us when we filed that suit I mentioned briefly earlier about these 400 kids in care [institutions]. They were neglected kids. We did this [law suit] [Bobby D v. Barry] with Marian Edelman's group [Children’s Defense Fund]. They [the kids)]had been diagnosed early with some sort of mental or physical handicap, and got placed in these institutions, and never got out. They would spend their whole life in these institutions. A lot of them were just hard to place children because of trauma, and they got put there because they had mental issues. So we brought this lawsuit on behalf of these 400 children; it was a class action. And because Audrey Rowe was the director at that time, she agreed to a consent decree that would reexamine, what do they call that, reevaluate every kid in the system. All 400 by the time we were done—by experts, outside experts, not internal people—and agreed to find other placements for any of them who could be put in other places. By the time we were done, there were just a handful [severely disabled] left in institutions, among them were kids who had almost drowned but didn't. And there was no way anyone could care for them, and there was no way they were ever going to be different. But a lot of these kids went home. Why they didn't go home sooner was because the agency wasn't doing its job. A lot of these kids could have been put in therapeutic foster homes, but there were no therapeutic foster homes. I believe that when I walk down the street, I could probably walk past any number of them that are just living their lives, living with their children. I know that's true because some people kept in touch [with me] for a while after they got out or their guardians did or their foster parents did.

That is probably the most important thing I ever did for the District of Columbia’s children. It sits with me all the time. Daniel Yohalem from the Children's Defense Fund was my co-lawyer, and he knew more about civil law, so I was along for the ride and for monitoring what was going on. Well, he did the hard legal laboring on it. But these kids got out of these jails. They were like jails. They were like insane asylums. And the hospitals wanted them gone, but the city had no place to put them, so they stayed in the hospitals. And [reevaluations and appropriate placements] would never have happened if Marion hadn't had the right instincts to appoint Audrey Rowe, and let her do this.

And also, I would say by appointing me on this juvenile justice advisory committee, I got to sit with all the people in the city who were involved in juvenile justice, and changes happened. Maple Glen, which was a juvenile facility for kids who didn't commit crimes, but were incorrigible, got closed down. Cedar Knoll, a place where, in springtime, the snakes would come through the walls, [frightening] for these kids from urban areas. And finally Oak Hill, which was a high-security facility. And now they're in a place that's a little bit more amenable. I understand it's deteriorating itself and overcrowded again, because judges too often don't have alternatives for them. Not enough group homes for kids like that, no foster parents who want to take a kid who's committed a crime, can't blame them. It's hard. Those that do are saints, you know. But Marion's fingerprints are all over that, and people will never know that, unless they read this.

COLLINS OFFNER: Well, thank you for sharing that.

MLYNIEC: Yeah. All right. I think we'll close out. I think we've covered everything we need to cover. Great.

END OF INTERVIEW

Note that Mlyniec’s biography and information on his extensive scholarship can be found at the Georgetown University Law school web site.

Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Wallace Mlyniec Interview, January 22, 2026

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