In the summer of 1960, a family moved in two doors down from us. That afternoon, I watched as the movers unloaded a huge moving van. From my vantage point on the front porch, I saw a little girl of about my size climbing the front steps to the house. I walked inside and found my sister Missy. The people who moved into the Duddlesons’ house have a little girl, I said. Would you like to meet her? Missy replied. I think so. I was more than a little shy, but Missy was not.
The next morning, she took me by the hand, and we walked toward the house. When we got to the front yard, we found a different little girl swinging from a dogwood tree. Hi, she said and told us her name was Alison. How old are you? she asked. Four, I answered. I have a little sister who is just your age. I’ll go get her. And that was how the Bradfords entered the Reillys’ lives.
Having spent the first few years of my life tagging along with my brothers, Edith was the first little girl I became friends with. She was just as shy as I was, and we made fast friends.
Beside our house there was a children’s wooden kitchen set with a stove, refrigerator, a table and two chairs (how gender un-neutral was that?). Edith and I spent hours cooking and serving our pretend meals while our mothers sat in the kitchen, chatting and drinking coffee. Years later, Mom told me that she and Ann referred to us as the mice. From the kitchen we sounded like a couple of squeaky little mice playing with our tin pots and pans outside the window.
Ann Shanahan Bradford was a petite, pretty woman with a quick smile and just a hint of her hometown of Dahlonega, Georgia in her voice. Her husband Bill worked with the Agency for International Development and had served in Peru, Paraguay, and Japan. He loved language, travel, and classical music. He sang with several choral groups. Although it was clear he loved his family, to me he seemed more suited for solitary pursuits in a library rather than as the shepherd of a herd of six children.
The Bradford children’s ages closely mirrored ours, and so my friendship with Edith was only the first bond between the two families. Kevin played with Denis who had a great collection of dinosaur and airplane models. Missy became friends with Lane and Ann Marie. Dennis Reilly took Lane on a date, but the magic was not there.
That summer Ann Marie went with Joe and his friend Larry to Glen Echo, an amusement park just outside D.C in Bethesda, Maryland. Now the only thing left of the park is the carousel, but back then it was filled with cool rides. The biggest and best of these was the “Coaster Dips,” a roller coaster that rose 63 feet into the air and began with a gigantic plunge from full height nearly to the ground below. When it came time to get on, Joe and Larry couldn’t decide who should ride with Ann Marie, so they all got into one carriage.
As the car began to descend that first drop, Ann Marie screamed and slid beneath the metal bar that held riders safely in place through the rides’ dips and turns. Fortunately for Ann Marie, she was wedged between Joe’s and Larry’s legs. Although she couldn’t see the rest of the ride, or maybe because she couldn’t see it, she was absolutely terrified and continued to scream until the car came to a full stop. When the attendant came around to let them out, Ann Marie was still on the floor.
Bill Bradford’s work next took the family to the Dominican Republic. I was six when they left Washington. It was the first time I had ever had the opportunity to miss anyone. I remember sitting on top of the dryer in the basement laundry room, crying, while my mother reassured me that Edith would be back before I knew it. A couple of years was not that long — Really? It was a considerable chunk of my lifetime, to date. And in the meantime, she said, You’ll make other friends at school. Edith had given me a stuffed Huckleberry Hound for my birthday, and I clutched it to my chest, trying to imagine waiting a year for anything.
After his first year of college, Joe came back from Villanova and noticed that Lane, who had been very quiet when the family lived on Jocelyn Street, was also very cute. They started dating, and it wasn’t long before they fell in love. Lane stayed in Washington to go to the Washington School for Secretaries when her family went abroad. She received her certificate and went to work for Fannie Mae in D.C. She shared an apartment with her friend Gayle on Wisconsin Avenue.
Before long, Joe and Lane married and had three beautiful children. Joe decided to go to law school in New Orleans (see Lawyers, Guns & Money post). They sold their VW beetle and rented a UHaul truck (with no air-conditioning) to move their family and belongings to Louisiana. All five of them shared the truck’s bench seat for the 24-hour drive from Washington to the Big Easy that summer. The heat was nearly unbearable. And it did not lessen as they drove further south. As a matter of fact, the temperature didn’t dip below 80 degrees until well past Christmas.
Joe claims now that they were so homesick, they all drove back to D.C. that Christmas. I don’t know. I think the heat may have played a part in that decision, as well.
When the Bradfords came back to D.C. on home leave, our families spent lazy summer afternoons having barbecues in the backyard. Bill’s work in the Dominican Republic was followed by a tour in Guatemala and another in Brazil, but each time they returned, we spent time together, usually with lots of siblings and a new little crew of Reillys and Bradfords who had come along in the meantime.
When I was thirteen or so, we were all in the backyard with the grill going. Joe and Lane had come north for the summer. Dennis Reilly had gone into business with a bakery in Takoma Park supplying bread to restaurants around town. Kevin was working for Dennis, delivering the bread from a step van that was at this particular moment parked in front of the house. Any bread that hadn’t been sold by the end of his delivery run was up for grabs. Dennis left a couple of tall paper bags of leftover rolls on the screen porch at the back of the house.
The bags were filled with French pointies, a small baguette of about 8 inches that came to a point at each end. No one had taken a French pointie for their hamburgers or hot dogs. But when Kevin saw them sitting on the porch, he thought of another use for the leftover rolls. He carried the bags out to the backyard and surreptitiously lobbed one at Dennis. It missed and flew into the azaleas. Kevin threw another that landed with a small thud a few feet past the table. No one was taking the bait, so Kevin sat down.
Several minutes later Bill Bradford went in the house. None of us noticed that as he did, he grabbed a couple of the rolls. He walked through the house and out the front door, walking around to the far side of the house, closer to where we sat in the backyard.
Brian had stood to make his good-byes, not realizing that he made a tantalizing target for Bill’s first salvo of the skirmish. Bill threw a French pointie squarely at the center of Brian’s back, and everyone turned to see him retreat to a safer position beside the house. It was every man-child for himself. Dennis, Joe, Brian, and Kevin all ran for the bags of rolls at once, tipping them over onto the grass and lobbing them at Bill and each other. Some sailed into the house; others, into the neighbors’ yards. The skirmish didn’t stop until all the little baguettes had been fired.
But to this day, my most vivid memory of the afternoon was Joe’s face when he realized his staid, erudite father-in-law had initiated the battle. That was a moment that lives on in Reilly-Bradford lore.
Life of Reillys 