Travelogue – Washington, D. C. for a day and for more memories than discoveries

By Temple Ligon

Even though I had only one night in Washington, I took advantage of that afternoon and the next morning before boarding Amtrak for Columbia on my last leg following Phileas Fogg’s run around the world. Actually Fogg left New York City for London, terminating at the Reform Club on Pall Mall just in time to collect his wager, while I left the Capital City Club on March 14 for a return to the club on June 3, just in time to lend a little poetry to the trip.

Having repeated my bar hopper’s returns to my favorite Washington watering holes, I didn’t have time to do everything, but I did have time to recall some of my favorite Washington memories, beginning with the summer of 1962.

Between junior high school and our freshman year in high school, two busloads of us Columbians took a summer week in Washington, where we learned to appreciate the cafeteria in the Commerce building. We stayed in a suburban Howard Johnson’s, one next door to the McDonald’s sign that said, “More than six million sold,” but we had breakfast at the Commerce Department almost every morning. This was when downtown Washington was still doing well with retail anchors like Garfinkle’s and Woodward & Lothrop, if I remember those names right.

Great trip, but I didn’t get back to Washington until I was out of the military and back in college as an art history major. Road trips to New York City, the world’s capital of the visual arts – and just about everything else – were almost a monthly event for my four undergraduate years, but we would always try for the National Gallery in D. C., either going up or coming down.

In December 1978, we two Ligons spent our honeymoon at the Homestead in Hot Springs, Va., but as Houstonians we wanted the rare opportunity to visit Washington as part of the train ride to western Virginia. It was another four years before I got back to Washington.

In November 1982, I was project director on a student condominium building, 54 units, in College Station, Tex., across the street from Texas A & M University. On Saturday morning, November 10, I decided it was time to tell Mrs. Ligon I thought my war record was something worthwhile and something to recognize with pride, much to her chagrin, and I drove down to Houston Intercontinental to fly by myself to Washington for the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day, that Sunday.

Educated in architecture and urban design, I really admired the design of the memorial by Yale’s Maya Lin. She was a senior in college when she cranked out one of the world’s best war memorials, if not the best, beating out something like 1,500 other designs in the competition. Actually, Lin’s design was originally for a studio project at Yale, which she later submitted for the competition.

Just keep in mind how profound was the idea to have one end of the wall point to the Washington Monument and the other point to the Lincoln Memorial, taking a site off the main mall axis and putting it in play with President Washington and President Lincoln. L’Enfant, the man who laid out the streets of Washington in 1790, would surely approve.

Besides the dedication and the parade, I wanted to visit with my drinking buddy, 1LT Tom Davis of Las Vegas, whose name was on the wall. To some people these things are hard to explain, so I never tried. After poor Davis wrapped up his time as an infantry platoon leader, several months as a prime target but never hit, he got a cushy job as an advisor to the indigenous forces, riding in his driver-equipped Jeep all day. His Jeep hit a land mine, what is now called an IED. Whatever it’s called, it’s typically enough to blow away the Jeep and everybody inside.

I stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, where little Al Gore lived when his daddy was the U. S. Senator from Tennessee. The Gores lived in the Fairfax Hotel, and by the time I got there, it was the Ritz-Carlton, just off Dupont Circle.

When I checked in it was already Saturday night, but I wanted to ride the subway since Houston didn’t have one, just to remind myself how the rest of the big-city world lived. I stood still on the escalator, heading down for the subway ticket machines, where I discovered I needed change. I rode back up to Dupont Circle to find change, which I got in a transaction at the liquor store. I asked for a half-pint of Remy Martin, and I gave the guy a twenty, and I left with adequate change for the subway, but I also carried cognac, one of the minimum necessities for military reunions.

The next day, parade and dedication day, I went to a little trouble to look like I knew what I was doing. I wore my Brooks Brothers grey flannel three-piece suit, the one Brooks made itself instead of outsourcing, like they do everything now.

I found the South Carolina contingent, and there was Spartanburg’s General William Childs Westmoreland, my father’s Boy Scout buddy when they attended the same Episcopal Church on Main Street next to what became the Piedmont Club. He was my commanding officer when he was the Chief of the Army in the Pentagon while I was a hill-humping artillery forward observer in the Central Highlands. General Westmoreland was dressed in full uniform, looking good, but our fellow South Carolinians dressed like little nobodies with nothing to do. Leadership was in order to improve appearances, but General Westmoreland was leaving us to lead the parade, and the rag-tag lot of Sad Sack South Carolinians was fixed for the day in their uniforms of throw-away clothes. Too late for a dress code enforcement. Where the hell was the governor’s office? This crowd needed to be told how to look to march with the Bostonians, all in suits. Oh well, at least they showed up.

After General Westmoreland and I shook hands, I pulled out my half-pint of Remy and invited him to share a snort. He did.

When we got to the end of the parade at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I doubled back to finish up with my old outfit, the 173RD Airborne Brigade. A pretty good turnout, we paratroopers thought it necessary to separate ourselves, kind of like the missions we got stuck with in South Vietnam.

Among us gathered with the 173RD Airborne Brigade was our infantry company commander’s radio-telephone operator (RTO), and the two of them humped the hills with me and my own RTO. Since I was on my second combat tour, I had only six months with the 173RD, not the usual year; but this RTO, Native American Robles from the Dakotas, never got the word. So when I left for an R&R after about five months, I never returned. Robles heard I bought the farm. He came to see my name on the wall in the same spirit I came to see Tom Davis’s. I was supposed to be dead. Happy to disappoint.

Twenty years later my lady friend and I were in Washington for the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Rock Creek Park. After a day at the matches, we took a cab to Galileo’s, at that time Washington’s only five-star-rated restaurant. It was on 21st Street, just off M.

About the time we were finishing our espresso, from the back came Julia Child struggling with an aluminum tube wheeled walker, and her oxygen tank was dangling from her neck. She looked awful, but regardless how I look, I hope people take me to a five-star dining experience when I get that low.

As she walked past our table – we were in the front section where all the others had to pass to exit the place – I couldn’t lose the opportunity. My dining companion was not a foodie, but I sure as hell was, and I couldn’t let Julia Child pass without a hello. I stood up – she was almost a half-foot taller – and I said my South Carolina buddies wanted to hear about the time I rubbed shoulders with the great Julia Child. She stopped, leaned down to where her shoulder was low enough and said go ahead. Which I did. I rubbed shoulders with the great Julia Child.

That was in August of 2002 on the Saturday night before the Monday when Ms. Child was supposed to dedicate her kitchen installation in the Smithsonian. That’s the exhibit in the closing scene in the movie Julie & Julia, one of the most charming movies ever made. I love you, Julia.

Another five years and I was back in Washington to see the Jasper Johns retrospective at the National Gallery, sponsored by Target, no less.

I put the word out that if any South Carolinian wanted to see the work of our fellow South Carolinian Johns with me, meet me Saturday morning at 10:00 at the entry doors to architect I. M. Pei’s East Building at the National Gallery. Yeah, right, who in the Palmetto State is going to that kind of trouble in the visual arts?

Twenty-five or more South Carolinians were waiting for me at the entry doors at 10:00, including Bull Street developer Bob Hughes and banker Mack Whittle and their wives. They came up on the company plane.

We picked up another 25 tag-alongs as we worked our way through the paintings. I was the unpaid docent, but what everybody heard sounded professional enough. Most of the first 25 Johns followers walked up Pennsylvania Avenue with me to the Hay-Adams for lunch in the Lafayette Room, and I got back to Union Station that afternoon for the return train home, the same train I took for the last leg of my 80-day trek, each time arriving in Columbia about midnight.