November 11, 2021
When Mal was a child he lived for a few years on Kirby Road in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1966, his parents bought this split level house on Kirby Road for $38,000.
The house was recently torn down and in the next photo you can see the new house that replaced it. We are not sure what the new house would be worth but it is a safe assumption that it would sell for something in the range of $2 million. In another sign of the change of the times, compare Mal’s parents’ gas guzzling Chevrolet Biscayne parked in the driveway with our brand new electric Tesla.
Some of the original houses on the street have survived. The following house belonged to our next door neighbors, the Gregorys. They were an older couple who used to look after Mal reasonably often. On one memorable occasion, while babysitting, they took him downtown to a jazz club. Mal can still remember the small cocktail lounge and the band’s drummer allowing him to play on his drums between sets. Mal can’t recall whether his parents were bemused or upset on learning that their seven year old son had spent the night hanging with DC’s martini sipping, cigarette smoking, DC jazz enthusiasts.
Here is another of the surviving original homes on the street.
But most of the original homes have been torn down and replaced with much larger rebuilds. Here is what Kirby Road looked like in the 1960s.
And here is what it looks like now.
It’s not just the homes that are being replaced or renovated. We walked by the three schools where Mal and his siblings attended. Mal’s older brother, Russ, went to Thomas W. Pyle Middle School.
Named for a Maryland educator, the original school was established in 1962, not long before we arrived in Bethesda. Now it one of the largest and best performing schools in Maryland with over 1,500 students.
Just around the corner and up the road from Pyle is Walt Whitman High School, where Mal’s older sister, Christine, attended for a while.
Named for the famous American poet, Whitman also opened not long before we arrived in Bethesda. In 2019, it was named Maryland’s highest performing school. Based on the size of the school parking lot, many of the schools’ over 2,000 students appear to drive to school.
The elementary school that Mal attended was called Whittier Woods and stood right next to Whitman. It closed in 1977 and for many years the original buildings were used by the Maryland Board of Education for administration. Recently, it was torn down and has been replaced by a large modern addition to Whitman.
There were not too many homes in the neighborhood that we deemed interesting enough to be photo worthy. Many appeared to be standard developer rebuilds. But here are three exceptions.
Mal and Lauren 