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Porchtales is a podcast by HumanitiesDC, Washington's humanities council, and an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each season we work with a guest producer to focus on a historic or cultural topic and dig deeper to learn and celebrate the unique experiences that shape our fascinating city. Whether jogging by the capitol or driving along the California coast, Porchtales listeners get to experience DC through the eyes of those who make up the fabric of our nation's capital. Have an idea or a question, send us a note at programs@humanitiesdc.org
*Any views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of HumanitiesDC or the project’s funders.
Podcast Open:
This is Porchtales, a HumanitiesDC podcast, where we hear the stories of those who shape the history and culture of our nation's capital.
Katie Davis:
This is Katie Davis. Welcome to Lanier, the block that raised me.
Music: Herman Burney
I take the shortcut by the firehouse all the time. I've been doing it since I was 10 years old. Into the alley, past the garages built for Model T cars, then back out of the alley, and there was a big front porch, John's porch.
The roof was shaded, and there was an old metal porch chair and a plastic one. Maybe there was more, but I couldn't see, it was so dim. It was part refuge, part watchtower. John and I lived a half block from each other, and all I ever saw were John's shoulders, like tubas looming over the porch railing.
I came to know more about John later, when I was in my mid-thirties, after I left my reporting job. I was outside all the time, leading a free summer camp for neighborhood kids, and I learned that sitting on the porch was John's job, one he created for himself. This is his friend Tina, who grew up across the street from John.
Tina:
Nobody could do nothing that he didn't know about, and if something should happen, he would be the first one there to protect me or whatever. He was always there for me. He was my best friend.
Katie Davis:
Tina says there was a daily drill. They started on John's porch and sat for a while. Then they went across to Tina's porch and sat there and then up to the park and eventually back to John's porch.
Tina:
That was basically the routine, park to the porch, the porch to the park. That was basically it. Sitting there on my porch, and those are the two main porches.
Katie Davis:
Tina said they sat and talked all day about the neighborhood and their lives.
Tina:
He always told me about things that happened in his past that I could relate to.
At one time, I had a boyfriend that was a fatal attraction, and he would tell me, "You need to let him go because he's not a good person for you, and he'll end up hurting you." And at that time, I didn't listen to him, but eventually I started to see what he was talking about. And it was true. I had to let him go because it was kind of crazy. It was bad for my health to be with that person.
John Holloway was like the mayor of Adams Morgan. Any and everybody knew him. If they didn't, they would know him in a short time. He was a great person. He was really nice. So popular with all the neighbors and always willing to lend a hand or whatever, advice or anything. He was always there to give you good advice all the time. He was great.
He's always there to protect the kids, to watch out. He was just like the monitor, the street monitor or whatever. He was always looking and investigating and making sure everything is right, copacetic all the time. He's always right there. He was just there.
Katie Davis:
How does that happen? How come one person becomes the monitor? Why here?
Tina:
Very outspoken. He never hesitated to tell you how he felt about anything. He never hesitated about that. If he saw something that didn't look right, he would make sure and take care of it. He just made sure everything was safe for everybody around. He was always like the protector.
I seen a couple fighting, and then these other guys came and jumped on the guy and started to pull out knives. He didn't really get in between it, but told them, "Don't do that. Don't do it here," and tried to stop it. And they happened to just leave, just because of his presence. He kind of scared them.
Katie Davis:
I told an old friend that I was talking to people about John, and he said, "I know another side of that story. You should come talk to me." So I did. Bobby grew up a block from John.
Bobby:
I used to hate John. I was really afraid of John. John was older than me. He was about my brother's age. He was, I think, 16 when I was 12. And John used to slap me around. John used to take my money, and that was taboo to have anyone do that to you in your neighborhood.
He was the one person that I used to dread seeing because he was racial, he hated whitey, and I was whitey. 99% of the African Americans in the community seemed to either accept or like me, or they seemed to. But John was just adamant about hating my white ass. So, I used to see him just go the other way. Now and then I couldn't avoid him, and he'd embarrass me. Because John was a scary guy, he was, he was angry, real angry. And this was during, right after the riots in DC, and there was big racial tension in the city.
John never was into sports that much. John was more into drinking some beer and smoking some reefer and selling pot and selling firecrackers around the 4th of July. Even when I got to the point, when I was 15, 16 years old, when I started to develop more physically, and I got less afraid of people and became a bit of a thug, a bit of a hood myself, he was still, to me, the ultimate hood. He was the type of guy that didn't have to leave his step. People walked by, and he'd shake them down.
But the strangest thing happened. I think I was about 17, and we were down at my buddy's house on Ontario Road at a party. I don't know how it started, but he punched me. He broke my nose, right inside the guy's apartment. People were looking, and I knew I had to fight him back. And a buddy of mine, Earl, and his uncle Kuda was his nickname - some wild names around here - they just kept saying, "Fight him, Bobby, fight him. You can beat him, Bobby." And they pushed me from behind into him. And when they pushed me, I just swung, and I hit him. He stopped fighting for a few seconds, and when he stopped fighting, I started fighting. And then he started fighting, and it became a legendary neighborhood fight, the kind that noses are broke, ribs are broken, and you can't really get out of... I didn't get out of bed for a couple of days, and he had to go to the hospital. It was a big turning point in my life. It was.
Katie Davis:
Okay, so time passes.
Bobby:
Yeah, time passes. John and I became friends. Who would've thunk it? Who would've thunk that? Oh, John and I became good buddies. The neighborhood also started changing. More white families moved on John’s street and John, to my surprise, became less bigoted.
I think John's thing was, what it became was if he sniffed out one hint of prejudice from a white person, he hated them. I think gradually John learned to give people a chance. John learned to give his neighbors a chance, and John made some white friends.
Gradually, we became friends, and we started drinking our beers together and just talking about our families. If one of us was overdoing the party scene a little too much, we'd sort of tell the other one.
Katie Davis:
Is that what you meant when you said you knew another side of them?
Bobby:
Yeah. Yeah, and it's something that this community, I believe, helped him develop, because he was a hateful, hateful man as a young, well, as a teenager. He was very angry. To see the guy that he became was night and day. He just mellowed.
Katie Davis:
Well, it's interesting becaus you described him, sitting on his porch and shaking people down. I know him more sitting on his porch, hanging out, but keeping an eye out too, specifically.
Bobby:
Yeah. This neighborhood didn't have a lot of positive role models. It didn't, and John had a sense of community. He had a sense of community that I didn't have. John had it, and he had it, I think, partly because his family was intact, and they lived on the same street for so many years.
I think, over the years, John realized that everybody's not out to get him, and he doesn't have to be the bully. John started caring more about what went on his street, what kids were going down the road that he went down, and he would pull them aside and give them big-time tough love. He'd tell them he's going to kick their little stupid ass if he catches them breaking so-and-so's window. And "Don't what can happen to you if you get caught stealing out of the store around the corner and telling young girls,” Why are you hanging out with these idiots who all they want to do is take you home and don't care nothing about you once you're pregnant?'"
And John, he started to care. Maybe he always cared. Who am I to judge? Who am I to say whether he always cared or not? But I think he learned to show it. Stuff that people in the community would tolerate, he wouldn't. He wasn't afraid. But he took a much larger stand than I did. He did. He was a lot more secure in who he was than I was.
So, he became like the mayor. He did. He became sort of like the mayor in this neighborhood.
My buddy, my buddy.
Around the mid 1990s, Margaret and Jeffrey moved in next to John's house, and their porches were squeezed close like stools in a diner.
Margaret:
If we were out on the porch because we get up really early, in the summer months, we'll sit out there with our coffee, and we would see him come out, clearly having just woken up, yawning, and stretching. He would sit there in the evenings, well into the, not the late night, but often would have people over, sitting on the porch with him in the evening. That was kind of like his living room in a way in the warm months.
Jeffrey:
Yeah, it was social, it was a gathering place. I really got to know him when I sat out here for two months and scraped the bay window of all the paint off. He would just sit there and say, "You're putting in a lot of work on that." And he was right.
Later on, I found out that he was on disability because of some heart issues, but... I like to sit on the porch, but I can't see doing it for 16 hours a day.
Margaret:
See, I have a love-hate relationship with the porch because I don't like that it's not private and that I don't know... Everybody who walks by is looking at you and stuff. I think that's what Jeffrey is attracted to about the front porch.
Anyway, in the summer months, Jeff would sit out there at night sometimes and chat, and I would be more likely to come inside after a little while. In fact, we're thinking of getting a deck built in the back that'll probably be my porch, so I could sit out there alone. Jeff will be on the front.
Jeffrey:
You see a lot sitting on the porch.
Margaret:
That was the thing with John is that he was sort of the commentator of what was going on. If somebody was trying to parallel park, and they couldn't get in the spot very well, Jeffrey was right up there with him in terms of criticizing the person's parking job. But John was the one who would make the proclamation. Or one time there was just this crazy man who came and was trying to get money from or something. But anyway, the guy started walking back over towards our house and John's house. And John, I remember looking at him, and he just stood up. It was like he was defending his territory. He stood at the entryway to the porch and basically said, "You, take your stuff and you get out of here," and kind of ran the guy out.
Then a car came, and the guy was trying to stop the car in the middle of the road. I don't know what his deal was. Clearly, he was having an episode. But John, I think, got off the porch and went and just said to the guy, "Get out of here", and just chased him out.
It was that feeling of where things would be taken care of. As long as John was around, he would know what was going on. The fact that he had lived here for such a long time, that he knew everyone, and so he knew who belonged and who didn't.
Katie Davis:
I only talked to John once. I was headed to the park to watch some kids play basketball. And on that day, John nodded to me from his porch, and I smiled back. And then he said in sort of a rough voice, "Why don't you do something for the kids instead of just watching them?"
"You don't even know me," I said.
"Oh, I know. I heard you left your reporter job, and now you're running around with the kids. Do something for the kids. They got nothing."
I ran into Bobby at the corner store, and I asked him what John meant. And Bobby said, "He wants you to do something big, like an all-neighborhood tournament, like how it used to be in the seventies when the park had baseball games and basketball games all the time, back when we called it Ghetto Park."
Later when I planned a basketball tournament in the park, I knew John was the reason. I hired professional referees and ordered real trophies like he told me to.
John came and sat courtside just in case things got out of hand. But they didn't.
Across the street from John, there was a boarding house, and the owner, Mr. Mills, was John's friend. Sometimes John sat on that porch too. And Tina says he also checked out every potential border.
Tina:
Really, Mr. Mills would ask his advice about this person. "You think this is a good person to rent a room to?" And he would look at him and say, "No, I don't think he's the right person", because there would be a lot of drug addicts wanting rooms and whatnot. They would not get a room if John had anything to do with it.
Katie Davis:
The first time I was ever on John's porch was when I took food to his family after John died from heart failure. I sat with his sister and brothers and told them I was glad to know John, that he taught me something about the neighborhood.
Tina said things on the block started to change.
Tina:
After he left, Mr. Mills would just take any and everybody, and it just got out of hand. People were running in and out all night, up and down, in and out.
Margaret:
To follow that story along, a year ago this past New Year's Eve, when Mr. Mills got - what would you call? - attacked by his tenant...
Jeffrey:
Beat up, yeah.
Margaret:
Jeff and I were taking a nap. It was New Year's Eve at 4:00 in the afternoon. The sun was setting, and all of a sudden, we woke up from our nap and heard screaming and then sirens. We could see the lights of the police cars on the roof of our bedroom. Jeff knew right away what had happened. He said, "Somebody attacked Mr. Mills." And we both dashed out of bed. By then, there were three or four cop cars. They pulled Mr. Mills out and rushed him out, put him in an ambulance and stuff.
But it was this weird feeling that if John had been around that somehow that wouldn't have happened, because I think John was pretty upfront with Mr. Mills about the caliber of people that Mr. Mills was renting to. And that caliber of people really changed in the five-year period. There was basically a drug dealer that was living in the basement, and Mr. Mills seemed to know about it and not do anything or care about it. John, I think, would not have put up with that. He was pretty open about that.
It did not occur to me until several months later, when I thought back on it, that it's kind of relating to what this whole conversation is about, that in some ways, you can't know the meaning of someone or the impact of someone until they're not there. If you take somebody out of an equation and see what happens, and in some ways, I think I was a little surprised by it, when I thought back on it, because what you were saying, in some ways it could have been very easy to dismiss John and kind of dismiss his meaning, particularly in a city like Washington, where people put so much stock in how important they are, how much money they make, or how many hours of work they do.
Contrast that with John, who, his purpose sometimes seemed to be sitting on the porch from sun-up to sundown. It did kind of surprise me in a good way because it reminded me again that you can't judge a book by its cover and that you have to really look inside a little bit more.
Jeffrey:
We all have a purpose here. And who defines that is, I don't know. And here, nothing has been replaced by John because, and I don't know, I kind of feel like since I'm a porch sitter that maybe the mantle's been passed to me. But I can't devote quite the time that John did.
Katie Davis:
Oh, yeah. Do you find yourself yelling at the kids? "Okay, cut it out. That's too much."
Jeffrey:
Not since I got hit in the head with a rock.
Margaret: I forgot that part.
Has anyone even halfway taken his place?
Tina:
No. Nope. Not even halfway. One of the roomers in Mr. Mills house, one of the - what was his name? - Melvin thought he could, but he wasn't there long enough. You have to be a lifelong member of that block to have that type of thing. I can't tend to think that I took over as the mayorette. I want to be a voice. I want to be heard. I want to be seen all the time.
Katie Davis:
Good. Do you find yourself sometimes saying, "Hey, quit that mess"?
Tina:
Oh, yeah, yeah, especially the young kids in the park. They be carrying on. Sometimes I give them strong advice. "That's not a good thing to do. You want to do that somewhere else. You don't want to do that here. You don't want to start no commotion. This is a loving community. We want to keep it that way, keep it to your community, and leave ours a happy one."
Jeffrey:
I think Margaret and I will be out front or walking down the street and see something going on, and we'll just comment that John would never allow that to happen.
Margaret:
Yeah, it's supposed to become sort of a figure of speech in a way.
Music
Katie Davis:
The engineer for this episode is Flawn Williams, and the editor, Art Silverman. Thanks to Herman Burney, and David Schulman for the music. As always, thank you. I'm Katie Davis. Look for the next episode coming soon on Lanier.
Podcast Close:
Porchtales is produced by HumanitiesDC. If you want to share your DC story, check out the link in the show notes, and be sure to rate and review us wherever our podcast lives on your favorite podcast player. This season is made possible by funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities.