Md. Street's Soul Hasn't Strayed Far From Roots

The houses numbered among the million single-family homes started nationwide in 1949 to help house 16 million returning servicemen and women. The need was dire. Young families were living with relatives. Others found shelter in trailers, old trolley cars, Quonset huts. A New York City couple moved into a department store window to publicize their need for housing.

The Remmers, both now 81, were desperate for a place to live.

They already had three children in 1949. They were living in a one-bedroom rowhouse near Philadelphia when Harry, a Navy-trained electronics whiz, got a job with the fledgling Washington TV station WOIC. Harry came to find a place here to live.

"I had to do the best I could," he said.

The price in the ad was $9,250. Helen Remmers recalls that they paid $9,850.

It would be their home for five decades. Their family grew from three children to twelve, including twins. Their huge kitchen table seated 16, and Helen made a lot of meatloaf.

In those days, a family of 12 children simply melded into the Mason Street mix. The Humphreys, at the other end of the street, had eight. There were six or seven more in a house across the street. The Duncans, next door, had four, and so did the Rices, up by Grandview Avenue.

"We had 50 at one time on this block," Helen Remmers said. "Just in this one block."

Change All Around

One of those children was Alfred Rice Jr., the second of four children of Alfred "Buster" Rice Sr. and his wife, Marian.

His parents didn't have a lot of money in the mid-1950s. They paid about $12,000 for their house on Mason Street.

Rice played baseball in the street between summer thunderstorms and ate with his whole family at the dinner table every night. The world seemed safe and orderly.

"The way Mason Street was when I was growing up, nothing bad was going on anywhere," said Rice, 54, a computer technician who goes by Renny. He left home in the 1970s, married, was divorced in 1994 and the next year moved back.