Devlin's view: Article written 45 years ago changed columnist's life By Gerard Devlin
One of the great miracles of our computer-driven society is just how much research is available with the press of a key. A case in point is Lexis-Nexis which makes available all kinds of old newspaper items.
Just the other day, for example, I came across a news item published Oct. 13, 1962 which fundamentally changed my life, although I never would have thought so at the time. In the business section of what was then called The Washington Post-Times Herald was a story headlined "Levitt Drops Prices on Some Models."
It informed the world that Levitt, then the largest builder of houses in the nation, was reducing prices on some of the new houses he had built in the Belair development near Bowie, Md. The article said "It is possible to buy a fully equipped 4-bedroom 2-bath Belair home for $14,900. Wow! The cheapest models had been selling for $15,990.
In those days, a thousand big ones was a significant amount of money. It was truly a major inducement and it more than caught my eye.
Now, at the time, my wife and two children with a third on the way, were living in a garden apartment on Riggs Road in Adelphi. Our recreation, such as it was, seemed to consist of packing the kids in the 1957 Chevy on Sunday afternoons and driving out on the old Defense Highway, the present Route 50 was then just a gleam of the state highway department, into a kind of wilderness to check out the model houses on what is now Sussex Lane.
In fact, we had been doing this since the model houses were first unveiled to the public Oct. 8, 1960. We noticed each time that the furniture was changed in the model houses and that the chairs and tables were a little smaller than usual, presumably to make the rooms look larger.
During this two-year period we learned a lot about Levitt merchandising but never made a move until that ad appeared in October.
Like most of those pioneer families we had never owned a house of any kind let alone one with central air conditioning, a luxury almost unknown in the early 1960s, as well as a dishwasher. Was this really the time to make the big move?
I thought it was. My wife, who tends to see half-empty glasses where I see them as half full, wondered about Levitt's motives. Was there something wrong with these houses which looked too good to be true? Since I was then teaching for the tight-fisted Jesuit Fathers at Gonzaga High School, could we afford the monthly payment and potential utility costs?
This was an argument worth considering because the competition was spreading the story that these "cardboard houses" were cheaply made and would not last. Planted stories began to appear about high utility costs at the Belair development. There was a story about a family who had a water bill which would make your socks drop. Unstated was the fact that the homeowners, who were portrayed as somehow typical, had been watering their lawn 24 hours a day for weeks. I learned this later.
Actually, during that autumnal season, Levitt was in a slump, as the scare tactics seemed to be working, at least a little. The firm's stated reason about reducing prices before winter was a bit of a dodge. After an auspicious start, the houses just were not selling as they had been. More than a thousand house buyers had made purchases before the first residents (the late Sen. Ed Conroy and his wife Mary) had moved in. They had all purchased houses sight unseen which was simply remarkable. It was a pace that it seemed they couldn't keep up.
It seemed like a gamble, but for our $100 down payment and $500 in closing costs, we could have our own house, at least until it blew away in a wind storm as predicted by real estate rivals. The $101 monthly payment which included principal, interest, taxes and insurance, was about what we were paying for the apartment on Riggs Road. With an attitude of what the hell, we put down our money.
By way of history, Levitt never repeated the practice of lowering house prices whose market values continued to soar, at least up to the present drop in real estate prices.
Of course, if we had been just a little more patient, we could have bought a Cape Cod for $2,000 less as Leo and Alhen Green did when they bought their first Bowie house.
Forty-six years later, we are still on the same street in the Kenilworth section. At a time of modest affluence in 1971 with our fourth child on the way, we sold our Cape Cod and moved next door to a four-bedroom Colonial model which we still call home.
When I was young, my mother used to argue that the term "Lace Curtain Irish" were foolish, since even the wretched poor had lace curtains in their windows. In her view, the mark of affluence was living in a house with two toilets. She used to refer to people living in the relatively affluent Boston suburbs as the "Two Toilet Irish." Unfortunately, she never lived to see her third son living in a house with three toilets. Is this the American dream or what?
Those were great days in early Bowie. We were so isolated that everyone knew everybody and neighbors made serious efforts to welcome the newcomers, a practice which has fallen into disuse, unfortunately. Friends of a lifetime were made then. Today people move in and out of the Levitt streets and hardly anyone knows them, which seems too bad.
It was an odd community where there were almost no old people and all the homeowners were about 30 years of age. Most had never owned a residential dwelling before and some looked upon Levitt as a kind of apartment super. The late Don Westcott, longtime director of community relations for the builder, told me that it was not unusual to get phone calls from new residents who wanted the Levitt folks to come by and cut the grass or perform some other kind of routine household maintenance. There really is a learning curve to becoming Mr. and Mrs. Harry Homeowner.
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The writer is a former state legislator, retired District Court judge, longtime civic activist in Bowie and regular columnist for the Blade-News.
