Oral Histories Of The City Of Greenbelt


Betsy Wood Walters -- family counselor
Before we moved to Greenbelt when I was in the third grade, there were family discussions. My parents were excited by a dream of Eleanor Roosevelt and Rex Tugwell, of a planned community where no child would have to cross a busy street to get to a school or playground. My grandmother said you could build three Greenbelt communities for the cost of a single battleship. It was exciting to be accepted for this special experiment.
Mary Clare England -- librarian
Subsidized housing was unheard of. That was the biggest change Roosevelt brought, the idea of using government money to help people who had been hurt by the Depression. There were no mortgage subsidies to help people buy houses, so everyone rented except for the very well-to-do. There was some criticism about the building of Greenbelt. And I know there was a fear of socialism. That was always the implied, or stated criticism about WPA labor -- that it was just bums who weren't good workers, leaning on their shovels, so to speak. The fact is that people got hit willy-nilly in the Depression.

There was a sense right from the beginning that we were pioneers starting a brand new town out in the middle of nowhere. There were no blacks. Washington was rigidly segregated in those days, so it is not likely that blacks, or colored people as we called them back then, would have applied. Whether other nationalities were screened out too or just didn't apply, I have no way of knowing, but there were no Orientals or Spanish-speaking either. So, except for the Jews, who were admitted right from the start, Greenbelt started out solidly WASP. The craziest regulation was established at the behest of the first Town Manager. It's hard to realize this today, but some people found pregnancy offensive and Greenbelt became a beehive of pregnancy. Some people didn't want to see pregnant women lounging about in the Center, and certainly not in shorts.

Louise Steinle Winker -- secretary
My father had been out of work for three years and we had been living on what he could make from odd jobs and the kindness of relatives and friends. I remember taking what seemed like a forever drive to Greenbelt to look at the model home. It was furnished in "Greenbelt Furniture," beautifully simple in the Danish style. The colors were bright, and I remember even the dishes on the dining room table were in different colors for each place setting. It was nothing to compare with the cramped quarters we had to our upstairs room [in Washington], where my brothers and I slept on army cots which we folded under our parents' bed during the day. Best of all, we would no longer have to share a bathroom with three or four families. The house was so clean -- we had been living with roaches and mice. Then I had my own room and a brand new bed (I fell out of bed that first night, because I was used to sleeping much closer to the floor on a cot). I remember feeling the excitement my mother felt at having her own clean place.
Bernice Brautigam -- department store clerk and Red Cross volunteer
We were on exhibition all the time. People would come out to see Greenbelt, maybe interested, maybe curious, I don't know. You'd be sitting at your dinner table, and they'd be peeking in the windows just like you were in a fishbowl. No one dared to mess it up, it was too precious to mess up. Everyone took care of it, and we were very, very happy.
George Panagoulis -- police officer
I was the town's first employee. My salary at that time was $125 per month. Back in the early days, one of our biggest responsibilities was making sure all the clotheslines in town were cleared; another was making sure residents didn't start bringing in dogs and other pets. The Town Manager insisted that Greenbelt be a model community, so we enforced all regulations.

We did fire and rescue work. When the pool was open for swimming, one of the officers acted as lifeguard. Kids would climb the fence and swim at night and we'd have to stop that. When it snowd, we'd go out to the power lines after dark and turn our cruiser lights on, so the sledding could continue.


Robert Dove -- police officer
Greenbelt was broken up into blocks. D Block was the first one to open up. We were among the first one hundred families chosen, and when we saw 6-M, we decided we wanted it instead of an end unit because it had two shade trees in the yard. We didn't have hardly any furniture, and we were told we could buy some and include payments with our rent. We went to the Center furniture store and purchased our furniture: twin beds for our boys in white maple, light-oak dining room furniture, and our bedroom furniture of gum. Al this cost approximately $250 for which we paid about $8 or $10 per month.

On the night of December 7th when the war began, Johnnie Belton and I were sent up to guard the water tower because there were rumors that Germans or sympathizers might try to poison the water supply. We had a very active civil defense unit all during the war and a lookout post over the drugstore.

Ethel Rosenzweig -- housewife
There was no hierarchy here, no rich people looking down on the peasants. We were all equal. When we came here, we didn't know much about Greenbelt except that it was a new community that was much more attractive than Takoma Park where we had been living. We had two sons and Ben's mother, so we qualified for a three-bedroom house. Greenbelt was simply too dull for Ben's mother and she later returned to New York, but we had another child by then and so we didn't have to move to a smaller place.
David Granahan -- artist, assistant director of Dep't of Agriculture
Before coming here we had read about Greenbelt, about the New Deal town, the planned community patterned after English communities. The joke in those days was that you couldn't live in Greenbelt for more than a week before you became a member of a committee. And that was about it. We never received wages. We ran the theater, the gas station, the grocery store. We had meetings galore about the price of theater tickets, what films should be shown, whether the service station was giving good service, etc.

In Greenbelt, we became very much influenced by interesting people. It helps a lot if you are around people who are creative in their own selves, and I am not talking about the artists. I mean people who have creative thoughts about how a town should be governed.


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