The Pastel Dream Of the Developer

"The Little House shall never be sold for gold or silver and she will live to see our great-great-grandchildren's great-great-grandchildren living in her."

Edwards can't say whether such longevity will bless her little house, but her life so far suggests that it might. And her story provides another parable: Things always change, yet somehow remain the same.

'The Money Is in the Land'

Thelma Terry grew up on a 42-acre farm in Fairfax County but couldn't wait to get to the big city. Her mother was a postal worker and a descendant of Thomas Jefferson; her father was a Baptist minister who maintained the farm and always counseled his eight children that "the money is in the land." At age 16, in the thick of the Depression, the girl nicknamed Tim dropped out of high school against her father's wishes, to move to the District with her two older sisters.

She found work as a low-level secretary at a building supply company that had five trucks to provide material for the growing metropolis. She says she was fired "for cranking things out too fast" and rising too high; the company had 60 trucks when she left her post as its corporate secretary.

Having never gone to college, Edwards thinks, was the key to her success: "I never learned all the things you couldn't do."

One night in 1936, at a beer joint on Georgia Avenue, she met a pilot and liquor salesman named Billy Edwards. He was six years older, tall and dashing, with a jack-o'-lantern grin that emerged when he was in the air, flying her on dates in his Piper Cub out over the countryside. He taught her to fly, too. When she went up alone for the first time, the engine cut out. She remembered what Billy had taught her, and managed to glide to a landing. A half-hour later, Billy made her go up for a second run -- otherwise, he worried, she would never agree to solo again, and he couldn't get serious with a gal who couldn't fly.

"He wasn't fit to live with if he wasn't flying," Edwards remembers.

They married, he carried her over the threshold of a tiny house in American University Park, and three sons later she thought they needed a bigger place, which she found squarely atop a hill in Friendship Heights surrounded by two acres of rolling lawns. It was her dream home -- she longingly called it the House on the Hill. It was too expensive for them, but they bought it anyway.

"Billy asked me what I thought I was gonna do about money and I said, 'I don't know. I'm gonna sit down and think about it.'

"All I knew how to do," she says, "was to be an executive!"

A friend worked in a real estate broker's office, so she applied there, striding into a back room to meet the three male brokers. By the end of two years she would outsell them all -- handling 39 of the 108 houses in the 32-acre triangle of Friendship Heights.

"I was on the PTA," she recalls. "I was a mother. People trusted me." But "if being maternal didn't work, I would take reverse action and be tough as nails."