From Pioneer Lawmaker to Granny

"This guy is phenomenal," she said. "You know there are a lot of good golfers coming out of the high school in my area."

Without missing a beat, Lawlah returns to discussing her reasons for retiring. She can leave office now, she said, because she's pretty much done everything she set out to do. "I would love to see rail across the [Woodrow Wilson] Bridge, but that is the only thing that I can say that I sought that hasn't happened," she said.

With a strong South Carolina inflection, Lawlah rattles off a list of her accomplishments over the years: securing the Metrorail Green Line to Branch Avenue, procuring funding for the new Woodrow Wilson Bridge and constructing Oxon Hill High School.

The younger of two children, Lawlah, and her sister, Gene, grew up in the "great metropolis" of Newberry, S.C., population 8,000. Her mother was a math teacher; her father was a technical engineer for a bank building.

After graduation, there was no question that the sisters would head to college. Lawlah went to Hampton Institute (now University) in Virginia, where she earned a bachelor's degree in social studies, and Gene went to Spelman College. Lawlah studied journalism at Hampton and says she probably would have gone into journalism if she had not instead decided on becoming a teacher. For years, she helped students at Terrell Junior High School in the District put out their student newspaper. In 1970, Lawlah received a master's degree in English and administration from Trinity College.

"When I came along, education was your only way out, or you were going to be in a white person's kitchen," Lawlah said.

It was at Hampton that Lawlah met her husband, Jack, whose family had moved to the District in the 1940s from Chicago. Jack's father came to the area to take a job as dean of Howard University's College of Medicine.

"He came to Newberry and proposed," Lawlah said. "I followed him here and married him here."

The two initially settled in LeDroit Park, near Howard, in the District.

But that changed when Lawlah's mother came up for a visit. "She asked where was the basketball court, where was the space to play horseshoes," Lawlah said.

After all, Lawlah had those resources as a child. Her father built a regulation-size basketball court and a playground on their own farmland because she and her sister couldn't play at local segregated playgrounds.

"We had two cornfields, and he built us a regulation basketball court, not just a basketball court, but a regulation basketball court," she said.