Betty Ann Kane

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START OF FIRST INTERVIEW
HEALEY: This is Christine Healey. I am here interviewing Betty Ann Kane for the Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project. It is the early afternoon, May 31, 2024, and we are meeting here at 118 Fifth Street NE, Washington D. C. Good afternoon, Betty Ann.
KANE: Good afternoon.
HEALEY: You’ve had a career of over 44 years of public service in the District of Columbia and there is much to talk about. Let’s start with your childhood and your education.
KANE: Oh. Well, I grew up in New Jersey. My mother was a teacher, elementary school teacher, most of her life. And my father worked for Public Service Electric and Gas, which was the utility. He was a commercial salesman for them. I had a sister who was four years younger than me. I basically grew up in a town called Tenafly, which is in Bergen County, right over the George Washington Bridge. Although in my early years, I was born, like, two months before Pearl Harbor, [Laughs] four months before Pearl Harbor, in Teaneck, so, and, then, because of gas rationing, all those different kinds of things, we moved around a lot the first five years of my life. But from the time that I was five until 18, I lived in Tenafly. That’s where I went to school, went to high school, etc. and graduated from there.
HEALEY: And, then, you went on to college.
KANE: I went on to college at Middlebury College in Vermont, yeah. And from there I went on to Yale graduate school in English. I was there for four years.
HEALEY: At Yale.
KANE: At Yale. Mm-hmm.
HEALEY: Uh-huh. And, so, that sort of fills in that part. But what brought you to Washington, D. C.?
KANE: My husband did. He also went to Middlebury. He graduated a year behind me because he took a year off. And he taught at Cheshire Academy, a prep school outside of New Haven while I was finishing up my graduate work. And he decided rather than being a teacher, he really wanted to go to law school. So, in 1966 he applied to a number of law schools and Georgetown was his preference and he got accepted. You remember in 1966 we were at the height of the increased draft for the Vietnam war and he had a deferment, a draft deferment, as a teacher. But when he went to get it back as a student to go to law school, they said no, you can’t do that. So, he grabbed the job back. They were very happy to keep him at the school. He got his teaching deferment back. And we promptly got pregnant, because you could also get a deferment if you were a father. [Laughs] And I think I was about two months pregnant and I made the doctor confirm it. And we got it. I told Jessica that thanks to Lyndon Johnson she got born when she did. And, so, what Noel did, he deferred Georgetown and came the next year. Jessica was born in May of ’67, so she essentially grew up here, too, on Capitol Hill. And I had initially gotten the job in ‘66 to teach at University of Maryland. I had to give that up. And I ended up getting a job starting in ’67 at Catholic University. So, I was assistant professor of English there for two years. But we ended up on Capitol Hill —First of all, I’d say, our plan was, like probably a lot of people, was to do the three years of law school and then go back and probably live in Connecticut. I was from northern New Jersey. Noel’s parents were from Scarsdale and Westchester County. So, where we were in the New Haven area, which we liked, was an hour, hour and a quarter, hour and a half at the most from both sets of parents and grandparents. That was the plan. And the other thing was, it was six hours, just six hours and probably less, even less these days, from the summer place that Noel’s family had in Maine. But that didn’t work, [Laughs] because by the end of his third year in law school, we had our second child, Justin, who was born in the summer just a month after he graduated and we were here. But we ended up on Capitol Hill because Georgetown Law School at that time was down at Sixth and E, [near aly]where the Metro headquarters is ...
HEALEY: Northwest?
KANE: Northwest, downtown. Right where the old Hecht—I don’t know how long you’ve been around here, but where the old Hecht’s was. At Sixth and E, Sixth and F, that area.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: So, that’s where the law school was. And we only had the one car. And I knew I would have to commute up to Catholic University. There was no Metro. So, I put a pin in where the law school was and drew a one-mile circumference, figured he’d walk. And a two-mile circumference, figuring two to three miles so he could take a bus. And, so, the only residential area in that area was Capitol Hill.
HEALEY: That’s funny.
KANE: So, yeah. So, we rented for four years actually on G Street SE, right across from Christ Church. And then we bought this house after Justin was born in 1970. We just had a two-bedroom apartment and wanted a house. So, we bought this house in May of 1971, so 53 years ago.
HEALEY: Wow, wow. Right, right.
KANE: Not going anywhere.
HEALEY: Right. So, I guess maybe then the next question would be what prompted you to run for the D. C. School Board?
KANE: Well, [Laughs] we had been active in some things in the neighborhood. In New Haven there was a very progressive mayor who was very much—Dick Lee—who was working on, you know, restoring the city, bringing people back to live in the city. I was involved in a group there that was doing that. I was involved and Noel was involved with me I should say. We were involved in some political campaigns there. We were involved in stopping the freeway that was going to come through downtown called the Oak Street Connector. And a ramp was built and it’s still there and it doesn’t go anywhere. So, we got involved in some neighborhood things here. There was a plan that they were going to build the Madison Library and they wanted to take the whole St. Mark’s Church area. So, we got involved in helping stop that. And the Providence Park. They tore down Providence Hospital and Congress was going to build there and we worked against that. And we were involved with a group that was called the Capitol Hill Action Group that was helping people, older, mostly African American homeowners, restore their houses so that they could stay. And, so, we did a lot of that work. And, so, I knew a lot of the neighbors. I was involved with the babysitting co-op. And, then, when Jessica was three or four, we got involved in starting the Capitol East Children’s Center, which was a day care center. A mixed income day care center. And, so, we were both involved in the—but I had never run for office at all. And Noel was the political one. His father was the town chairman, Democratic town chairman, in his town. And his father ran …
HEALEY: In Scarsdale.
KANE: In Scarsdale. And he ran for county supervisor, unsuccessfully, but also trying to stop some sort of freeway that was supposed to go through northern Scarsdale. So, that was the long story but I’d never even run for homeroom president, you know. I was a committee person. I was active, I, you know, fund raising, all those kinds of things but never elected office. I told you I taught at Catholic University for two years and, then, we had the riots in ’68, my second year. And what happened—because that was in April of ’68, the end of the first year we were here. All the incoming students for the next year, enrollment went way down. Parents were scared to send their kids here, particularly a more conservative demographic like the kids at Catholic University. Their parents, they were mostly from New Jersey, Pennsylvania. Catholic, you know, conservative. Anyway, incoming enrollment went down. And I was the youngest, the newest, least senior of—and, so, all across the departments, people were let go. And there were no jobs available at American or Georgetown or George Washington either for the same reason. They were all cutting back because it [enrollment, aly] went down. And I had been finishing up my research on my PhD, which I never did finish, at the Folger [Shakespeare Library] because it was on the influence of Renaissance poetry on Milton’s sonnets. And the Folger, as you know, in addition to Shakespeare has got all kinds of other things. So, I was a regular there two days a week. I taught three days a week. And, so …
HEALEY: You were working for the Folger.
KANE: No, I was doing my research.
HEALEY: I see.
KANE: I was just a researcher there.
HEALEY: Mm-hmm.
KANE: But, when I lost the job in the summer of, well, at the end of, oh, this would have been May, June of 1969 after two years there, that was just the time that the old director was retiring and O. B. Hardison was coming in and there was just kind of the idea of opening it up to the public. I was hired to be the assistant to the new director of public programs Richmond Crinkley because I was there. So, that’s …
HEALEY: And you wrote a book for them.
KANE: Well, right before I left, I wrote, yes, a book of the history of the Folger. That was in ’76. So, I was there seven years. Oh, it was six and a half years. But one of the things that I did about the second or third year in was that I started a program with teachers in the D. C. public schools, high school teachers, English teachers, to try to see ways that we could teach Shakespeare more … This was the era, you know, in 1969, ’70, everything had to be made relevant. But it was good. And the Folger had some traveling exhibits that went around. You know, little models of the Globe Theatre, etc. But, so,  I started a program with about eight teachers from high schools, selected teachers, high schools, and from —we had a grant. We got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And we involved the Junior League, which I see is still involved in volunteering at the Folger. And the theater group had just been started at the Folger, semiprofessionals. So, we put together this whole program working with teachers, sending actors into the schools, particularly African American actors, trying to make relevant comparisons between, oh, say, the street fight in Romeo and Juliet and how gangs, you know, and those kinds of angers. The sort of West Side Story stuff. And it was great. I loved it. And I worked with a great group of teachers. And that was probably ’72, ’73. Well, then, you know, in 1973 we got home rule. And the only elected position we had had, aside from the non-voting delegate, was the school board. And it was quite powerful. And four people resigned from the school board. Our Ward 6 person, Marty Swaim, Ward 5, and one other ward, Ward 3. And, then, Marion Barry, who was at-large and was the school board president. And he resigned from the school board because the law then you had to resign—they all wanted to run for city council, obviously. And, so, the school board was going to appoint people to replace them temporarily until they got to the next election cycle. And all these teachers that I was working with said oh, you should do that. You should try that. And I thought, well, all right. And, then, we had the Ward 6 seat was open because Marty Swaim was also running. And, in the meantime, I had also not only the Capitol East Children’s Center but gotten involved with Peabody School and trying to get people to use Peabody School. And that’s a whole different story because people wouldn’t go there. It’s amazing when you look at what’s happened today. But I was working with the Capitol East Children’s Center and Jessica got to be five and, then, she was going to be six for first grade. Peabody was kindergarten through fifth grade, I think, at that time. Fourth grade, kindergarten through fourth grade. And Edmunds School was fifth through eighth. But there were hardly any white children in the entire school. But we had this beautifully integrated children’s center in the basement of the Presbyterian church. And I had always done public school. My mother’s a public school teacher. I said, no, Jessica’s going to go there. So, she went, she and Andy Hackett of the Hacketts over on Constitution Avenue. They were the only white kids in the kindergarten class. And, so, I said to the—what we did with the, not that I did it all by myself, but the Capitol East Children’s Center, I said—and it was getting big and it was growing out of space. They had all this space at Peabody because it was very under enrolled. I said why don’t we just move? So, we moved the day care center into Peabody. So, parents had to go in there. And they actually began to see that their little children were perfectly safe. That it was a beautiful place. There was a terrific principal. And, so, gradually … And, so, I was involved with that, too. But, again, as an activist.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: Anyway, so teachers said, why don’t—I said all right, all right. I’ll go, you know. It was an appointment. They were going to appoint people. So, this was in June or July of 1974 and I got some people, the teachers, all there to testify at the hearing for me and write some letters of support, etc. Well, the school board decided at the end of July that they didn’t want to have the responsibility of filling four out of eleven seats. They went to Congress and they got the law changed so that there had to be an election, a special election.
HEALEY: I see.
KANE: And I was up in Maine. And I said, well, I’m not going to run for office. I’ve never run. But Noel said oh, go ahead. It’ll be fun. I’ll run it. And, so, I did. And the reason I ended up running at large, which was the seat that Marion Barry had, instead of the Ward 6 one, was that there was a woman who was very active in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association], an African American woman, whose name at the moment I can’t remember. I can—her name was La Nita Proctor. Anyway, she was going to run. And, so, I said all right, I’ll run at large. You know. There’s this other seat. I had no idea what I was getting into. I was the most surprised person in the world on, you know, in November 1974 when I won. Now, there were like 15 people running. And I got about 15%, 20% of the vote. But there I was.  I was the first white person elected at large.
HEALEY: You got more than the other people.
KANE: I got more than the other people. And that was just—there was no run off or anything. You just got to get one vote more than the next person. So, I always say I kind of backed into it through education and through, you know, just child care and other things. And, then, I had to run again the next year because it was just to fill the one seat. And that was a very difficult time because of Barbara Sizemore who had been hired as superintendent. She had to be fired. And we spent that whole first year—no, not that first year—1975 re-election, after that where they had a real re-election, then we started firing her. That was very difficult. All those hearings. We had police protection for the children and everything. But I was hooked then.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: I never finished my Ph.D. I worked—There was so much to do that ’75-’76 year because of the hearings and the firings that I stopped working at the Folger and all I did was finish up the bicentennial exhibit and the book. I wrote the book on contract after I left there. Then I worked for Warren Robbins at the Museum of African Art for three years. But I could do that part time, raising money. That was when the …
HEALEY: That was here on the Hill?
KANE: Here on the Hill when it was at the Frederick Douglass house on A Street NE. Warren had started that with his own money. He was a retired foreign service officer, collected all that stuff. And, so, I was doing fund raising for him and, then—and I could do that working around the school board hearings and everything else. And also did the work to get that moved to the Smithsonian, to get the African Art Museum established with him. He was a genius. So, I did that for three years. And, then, I ran for city council because it became obvious that that’s where the power had shifted to.
HEALEY: I see, I see. Were you paid on the school board at least?
KANE: Yeah, $100 a month.
HEALEY: Ah. [Both laugh] Oh, dear.
KANE: $100 a month. But the second year I was there, the second year I was there, they gave each of the school board members a small stipend. It was probably $3,000 or $4,000 to hire a part time assistant. And I hired Sharon Ambrose, who was a friend. And she …
HEALEY: I read her interview on the Overbeck.
KANE: Yeah. And, so, that’s how she kind of got more into politics, too. And, then, she went with me to the city council. But you know, I was trained as a teacher. Education is what’s my thing. The longer I stayed on the Council I moved away from that because the Council, except for the funding, didn’t have that much to do with the contents of the school and how it all worked and all. Yeah.
HEALEY: So, why don’t we start talking about your work on the Council and …
KANE: Well, I ran at large, again because there was an opening. Doug Moore, Douglas Moore, who was an at-large member, decided to run for chairman, I think, in ’78. The kind of second four years—because the elections were every two years. So, I didn’t run in ’76 because I’d just been re-elected to the school board in ’75. And I was chairman of the finance committee for the school board. We actually had to sue Walter Washington because he was taking the money from the schools that had been appropriated. I testified at Congress. But I realized that the real power, even if you wanted to do something for the schools, was the Council. That’s where it was shifting. So, I ran. That was a difficult one, ’78, because there was still a lot of animosity after the firing of Barbara Sizemore, racial animosity, etc. But I was well known because I had been on the school board by that time for four years. I was at large. I had gone to all the schools. I really made a point of that. And all the PTAs and everybody else, so. On the Council I was elected in ’78, ran again in ’82. I had made an abortive attempt to run for mayor in ’82. And I was re-elected in ’86 and then decided in ‘90 I wanted to run for the delegate [non-voting delegate to the U. S. House of Representatives]. I was finished kind of everything I wanted to do at the Council. But I had focused on, first of all, on finance and management. I chaired the government operations committee and—People always ask you what kind of legislation are you most, you know, proud of having gotten done
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: And there’s one called the Funds Control Act, which sounds very nerdy, but it changed the way the city did its accounting and it put a lot more controls on what’s called reprogramming where either the funds would be appropriated for a particular purpose and, then, the mayor had the authority just to go change it. So, kinds of restraints were put in.
HEALEY: So, you put in some checks on the mayor’s ability to …
KANE: Checks and balances and shifting some of the power back to the Council. And making a better balance. It had to do also with, you know, the whole control board and the financial problem that the city got into during the last years of Marion Barry’s. And I was very involved with historic preservation and city planning and, so, as well as support services for the schools. And, you know, it’s like deja vu all over again. I saw there was some big discussion at the last—I don’t watch Council meetings anymore, but I had picked it up somewhere, maybe it was just in the paper—about having adequate nurses in the schools. Well, I did a whole resolution and a whole thing back in probably 1976 about school nurses. [Laughs] And, so. Yeah, I enjoyed being on the Council. It was an intellectual challenge, too, and it was a challenge, you know, to get people to get votes for things and to educate people about things. Yeah.
HEALEY: Well, how would you describe your fellow Council members and your relationship with the Ward 6 council member during that time?
KANE: I had a good relationship. Nadine Winter was the Ward 6 Council member there. And the rule of the at-large, at least the rule that I played by and I modeled, was that if you’re an at-large member you really should focus on some of the more city-wide issues. You know, the basic stuff that would apply. But you could support a ward council member and be helpful to them. And, you know, give them your vote if they needed it for something, if it made sense. But not to get into one ward versus the other. But, of course, Ward 6 being—and a lot of people still think I was the Ward 6 council member. You know, I had a good relationship there with her and always supported the things that the people wanted. Ward 6 was a different—and in 1980, because they did redistricting, but Ward 6 used to include across the river the area of Anacostia and up Good Hope Road and so that was all part of …
HEALEY: Frederick Douglass house?
KANE: Uh, yes, yes. And all the way up to Marbury Plaza, almost up to the top of the hill up there. That part was all part of Ward 6, too, if I remember. And it was all the way up Naylor Road. That was just part of Ward 6. But, being at large, I could, you know, do everywhere. I think I had a good support, pretty much city-wide in most of the elections. I’ve been sorting through, I have it all upstairs in my workroom, all of the election results sadly, deciding what to do with those. But, so, you know, the Council, of course, was still pretty new. When I went to the Council, it had only been there for four years and, you know, Marion had been chairman of the finance committee. Sterling Tucker was the chairman. There were some very liberal people. Hilda Mason I was very close with, who, she came on I think in the special election when Julius Hobson died. So, it was very much finding its way and still setting up protocols and the power of the chairman and the relationship with the mayor. So, it was an exciting time, interesting time.
HEALEY: Did you have as many as—what was your relationship to Congress during that period?
KANE: Well. [Laughs] Congress was still very much fingers in the pie and very much—because everything had to go to Congress and they would look at things much more closely than we do now. The big thing that happened vis-à-vis Congress—and I had to work very closely with them—was on the whole personnel stuff. Because, you know, the District government personnel was part of the federal government. People were essentially federal employees and they were in the federal Civil Service pension system. The whole benefits and retirement and all the job classifications and the GS [Government Service] levels, they were all just federal government. And, so, when home rule came in, they said we would keep the federal system for the District until 1978. Give us four years and we could start doing our own personnel system. So, then, all the city did when that deadline came was they just made everything like DS instead of GS and they didn’t change anything else. And the home rule legislation also said that anything that the city changed, that any benefits employees had, such as sick leave or retirement, as of I think it was October 1, 1978, when it had to change, they couldn’t be diminished. So, then, they didn’t change anything and, then, in 1986, I think without very much notice to the city, the Congress was changing the federal Civil Service pension system into the new FERS [Federal Employees Retirement System] system they have. I don’t know if you were a federal employee. My son, Justin, works at the Capitol, so he's in the FERS. So, they did that for the federal employees. And they said, oh, by the way, no District government employees can be in the Civil Service Retirement system anymore if they were hired on or after October 1, 1987, you know. And, so, we had—I think Marion must have known about it—he made no plans for it. So, and I was chairing the committee that …
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: So, I had to do a whole, really quick piece of legislation called FERS Light, a pension system which they have never since changed, which was terrible. It’s no good at all for anybody who wants to retire. But I had to work very closely—I had to—And they wanted to impose residency requirement on all District employees.
HEALEY: Who was the “they”?
KANE: The Congress. We’re talking about Congress. That was part of the whole thing. For any new hires they had to be DC residents. So, I had to work very closely with the congressional committees on that to get, you know, transition time and talk them out of—I remember Mike Barnes was the Montgomery County legislator, congressman, and he was very interested in District things because he had a lot of District employees who lived in his jurisdiction. Worked with him on that and with Senator Mathias that had an interest and with the Virginia congressman, Mike, um …
HEALEY: Tom Davis?
KANE: Tom Davis, yes. And, also, oh, gosh, the name—the mayor of Alexandria, who went on to become a congressman from …
HEALEY: Moran?
KANE: Moran. Jim Moran, yes, thank you. [Laughs] Yes, I worked very closely with those. I was very active with the Council of Governments, realizing that, you know, that the District needed those allies with everything we wanted to do and to get the Congress to keep its hands off the District.
HEALEY: Right, right, right.
KANE: Sometimes successfully. So, yeah, I worked very—it was much harder than when I was on the school board. Because, when I chaired the finance committee for the school board and would go up there and testify, there was William Natcher from Kentucky who chaired the Appropriations Sub-Committee for the District of Columbia. And I think I did this three years in a row, I went up there. And he’d say, well, Mrs. Kane—he always said Mrs. Kane—do you all still let the Boy Scouts have their meetings in the basements of the school buildings? I’d say, yes sir. I think he had one other question. He said okay. [Both laugh] That was it. That was it.
HEALEY: After you did all sorts of hours of preparation, no doubt.
KANE: Oh, oh, yes, you know. Per pupil ratios and all this, you know, school-by-school budgeting, about everything. So, that easy. But that was his only concern. Yeah. So, I did a lot of work with the Congress and I could see—and, again, I knew that when Walter Fauntroy announced in, oh, I guess in March 1990, he announced in the end of 1989 that he was going to quit the delegate seat, which he’d had since 1971 and run for mayor, that opened up. And I just said I was, I said to Sharon, I’m going to do it. I’m going to run. So, it was me who said—and, you know, I felt I’d done everything I wanted at the Council. It had really gotten to be a really good working organization. So, you know, I was not successful but that was it. I came close.
HEALEY: Well, you were running against your neighbor across East Capitol Street.
KANE: Yes, yes, yes. She came in from the outside. I mean, she wasn’t involved with D. C. things but she did.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: And that was an interesting one because where I really lost, frankly, was among the white liberal vote who felt very strongly that the delegate should be African American. So. It was close, but not …
HEALEY: Right. [Both laugh]
KANE: Close doesn’t count, as I knew from the first one. But, you know, I was—I have no regrets.
HEALEY:  Because then you moved on to the D. C. Retirement Board.
KANE: Well, I didn’t right away though, because that was in 1990. That election was in November. Well, September was the primary. In 1990 I considered going to law school figuring—let me say, in the meantime, I had also started working part time for a law firm, doing their lobbying. I was chairman of the committee at the City Council that was doing the cable television franchise and, so, I had gone to a couple of conferences that this law firm spoke at. And had asked the head of that firm—a very small firm just specializing in helping cities and counties with telecommunications issues—and the new federal cable act had been passed. And, anyway, to make a long story, I ended up working part time for them as a lobbyist at the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] on communications issues for cities and counties and protecting the rights of cities and counties in franchising, in their rights of way, etc. I was very active with the National League of Cities as a council member and with the law firm. Did a lot of work for them. Anyway, so, I was considering going to law school. And, then, I took the LSATs [Law School Admission Tests] and I could have gotten into Georgetown or to GW [George Washington University], I think. At least, GW, I know. They told me I could get in. First of all, my husband said, “Over my dead body are you going to be a lawyer.” His law was totally different. I would have become a tax lawyer or something like that, because that’s what I was interested in. He had his own private practice here on the Hill. He did what he called death and divorce. He had a long established—this was in 1990 so he’d been doing that for ten years. We’d have been totally different. So, he was kind of joking, except that I always got better grades than him [Interviewer laughs] when we were in Middlebury together, so …
HEALEY: You could have been Kane and Kane.
KANE: Yeah. Well, yes, but. But what I really figured out was, you know, that’s four years. It’s four years if I went part time. Three years if I went full time. I was making decent money at the law firm even as a non-lawyer and I looked at what my billing rate would have been and it just didn’t make any economic sense. So, instead, I continued the lobbying business. And I worked for them pretty much full time for six years, until ’96. And I had done some work in between for—I worked for Defenders of Wildlife for about three months after I left the Council. I had a friend who was there and I did some work, educational materials for them. But, then, when the law firm was absorbed by a larger group, I went off and did my own clients. But I was appointed to the Retirement Board as a trustee in 1993 by John Ray. I had always been interested in that because it went back to the fiscal foundations of the city and keeping that pension fund solvent. It was a big drain on the city’s finances and bond rating, etc. And I had actually asked—I was interested in it when Sharon Pratt Kelly became mayor but she had somebody else in mind for that. So, in ’93, when John Ray was temporarily acting chairman of the council, when John Wilson died and Sharon was working for John Ray, he appointed me.
HEALEY: Oh, Ambrose.
KANE: Yeah, Sharon Ambrose was the chief of staff for John Ray by that time. It was before she ran for Council herself. And, so, I was appointed as a trustee of the Retirement Board—and I continued. But that was just a part time thing, too. It was an hourly rate, probably $15,000, $20,000 a year, I think, depending on how many hours you put in on it. So, I continued to work at the law firm. Then, when they broke up, I took some of their clients myself. Not the FCC ones but I took the city of Laredo. I had some local clients. And I ended up also working for the court system, for the executive, where they had to call it not lobbyist but government relations advisor to the executive director of the D. C. court system. Because, this was in ’96, ’97, as a result of the whole Control Board act and all of that, the courts were moved out from being funded by the District taxpayers, became federally funded, which the judges thought was wonderful, until they realized [Laughs] what they were getting into. Instead of having to come down once a year and testify before the city council and get their budget, they were moved into this whole federal thing. The big thing there was, I know I’m going on and on too much, but they were in the process of rebuilding and restoring the old Superior Court for the Court of Appeals down there on E Street. And it had been funded as a D. C. capital project, which the city did with bonds.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: So, they become part of the federal government, all of a sudden GSA [U. S. General Services Administration] says, oh, no, now we’re in charge. You’ve got to start all over again and it’s pay as you go. Well, so, I knew the chief judge because Noel was very active with the bar. And, long story short, they hired me to work on that project and on protecting the court employees because they didn’t know what to do with them in terms of their pension.
HEALEY: I see.
KANE: They had been, you know [Laughs]—They were in this old D. C. system or they were in civil service pension system but they didn’t want to let them stay in the old, those who had been there before ’87. Anyway, so, I did a lot of work there.
HEALEY: Yeah, got it.
KANE: And, to make a long story short, during that time, I became chairman of the board of the Retirement Board, which became a pretty full-time activity because of all the whole splitting up the pension, working with U. S. Treasury, getting it set up on a viable basis, etc. I was probably doing that pretty much full time from about ’96 to 2002. And, then, the …
HEALEY: And when that happened, when you were a trustee and you became the chair, you were also what they called the executive director?
KANE: No. I was just the chairman and Jorge Morales, who was the only—Jorge Morales had been the first employee of the Retirement Board in 1978. It was set up as part of that whole 1978 District has to have its own personnel system. He retired in 2002. He lives over, still has his house over on Maryland Avenue right by Eastern Market. And, so, I had essentially—In his last year, he knew he was retiring. He deferred to me as chairman of the trustees to do all this work with Congress, etc. So, I what the hell, you know. So, I applied and I became executive director of the Retirement Board for three years. And, then, again, I’d really done what I wanted to do there. We took over the processing of all the people—not just managing the money, because the Retirement Board was set up to manage the money. But, if you wanted to retire, you still had to go to D. C. Human Resources and all of that. Or the police department or the fire department. So, I got legislation through. We consolidated all—I went from eight employees to 42. I moved us to new space. It was fun because I always wanted to be an architect. [Laughs] And I built out the space. And, so, you know, I had done what I wanted to do. And, so, I retired for the first time. I actually did retire. I took my pension, my civil service pension. I took my Social Security the next year and I had my own clients. I had the firefighters, I had the taxi industry, I had …
HEALEY: So, you were able to go back and be a lobbyist at the Board?
KANE: Yes.
HEALEY: At that point …
KANE: Not at the Board, no. I had my own company, just my own clients there. For a year. And, then, the position on the Public Service Commission came up. And I was appointed to that ...
HEALEY: And you stayed there until ... What were the years that you were at the Public Service Commission?
KANE: 2007. I was a trustee of the retirement system from the end of ’93 to almost the end of 2002. And, then, from 2002 to 2006, like March of 2006, I was executive director. The following year, in 2007, I was appointed when Adrian Fenty became—and I had let him know my interest. I mean, I liked having my clients but I really liked running something. [Laughs] And I liked changing, you know, trying to transform or improve an agency, which I had been able to do at the Retirement Board. So, I was—well, I was just appointed a commissioner. I wasn’t the chairman at the Commission. And they all dealt with the telecommunications stuff, too. Telephone and a lot of FCC stuff as well as gas and electricity. And, then, two years later I became the chairman. So, I was there from March of 2007 to the end of 2018, almost 12 years. Then I retired for the second time, third time, I guess, if you count leaving the council as retirement. I didn’t take a pension when I left the council in ’90, but I did when I left there at the end of 2018. Noel had a stroke in 2017 and I worked that whole last year because my term still wasn’t up. I told Muriel [Bowser], who was the mayor by that time, that I couldn’t do it again. So. But I filled out until the end of the year. And, then, I didn’t do anything. In 2019 we went up to Maine. I wanted to get out of the way of the new chairman at the Commission and let him have his people become loyal to him because I knew, otherwise, they would call me. And, then, we went up to Maine. And we came back. I didn’t do anything. I took care of him. He got worse. We went up when the pandemic started, 1st of June, 2020, stayed in our place in Maine. By that time, I had bought out Noel’s cousin that we owned it with so we had the whole—It’s a year-round house now that we had built in 2007. And we stayed there. And, at the end, 2021, in May, just about three years ago now, Noel was stable. We thought he was going to be okay. My daughter’s a nurse and she lives up there, too, now. And she could take time off and stay with him. So, a friend, who was a trustee at the Retirement Board, who had been a trustee with me, called and said we’ve got a problem. Our executive director has retired and we’re in the middle of a search for a new director and the person who we appointed, the deputy who we appointed acting, has to leave. And we’re looking for someone to—and everything was shut down because it was during the pandemic still—to kind of keep things going for a couple of months while we finish up the search. And do you know anyone who would be interested and would you be interested, by the way? I said, well, let me think. I said sure, you know. I mean, I knew the staff. I’d been away there for a long time. I could help out.
HEALEY: You could do it remotely.
KANE: Not totally remotely, but I only had to come down about once every two weeks. I actually wasn’t aware, I hadn’t focused on how much—that everything was remote, you know. Because I wasn’t working. And, so, I came down about—actually in the beginning I came down once a week. I should have bought stock in Southwest Airlines. But it was easy. I mean, it’s an hour and a half flight. It’s 40 minutes from where our place is to the airport. So, I could come down, be here for four or five days, do the meetings with people, you know, have people come in one on one, keep things going, put the fires out, etc. And, then, actually, then Noel died in September and by then they had hired a new guy. And he said to me could you stay a little bit and help me with transition? And, so, it was a godsend. Actually, it helped …
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: … to get over. Because he wasn’t—it was sudden. He got an infection and so instead of a slow decline for more years, he was gone. So, I came back mid-September, a couple of weeks after he passed, and started working pretty much full time for the new guy. He was a very good choice but he didn’t know D. C. government. And, so, he wanted me for—I was a special adviser. Worked with him, you know, this is how the council works, this is a good time to meet the mayor, and set up all those kinds of things that you do. Anyway …
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: And that, still, I was supposed to be 60 days. Then he said, well, let’s do it to the end of the year. And, then I ended up staying until last May. I ended up staying two years.
HEALEY: You ended up staying three years?
KANE: Two years. I just, yes.
HEALEY: Oh, my goodness.
KANE: Because at the end, almost the last year, what I worked on was reforming and reestablishing their contracting process, which had been given over to one of the city agencies because they didn’t—it was ... Anyway, that’s what I did the last thing.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: And, then, I said, look, I’m done. I am done. So, I retired May 31st, a year ago today. And I meant it this time. I really meant it. [Both laugh] I’ve not been tempted to do anything.
HEALEY: So, when you were in those positions at the Retirement Board and at the Public Service Commission, did people from Capitol Hill understand what you were doing? Did they …
KANE: I think so.
HEALEY: Do you think they understood the impact?
KANE: Yeah, certainly. I don’t know about the Retirement Board, except for understanding that getting it on a sound financial basis impacted everybody’s taxes and, you know, the health of the city in general. There are not a lot of—because the Retirement Board is police, fire, and teachers. So, there were not a lot of retired police, fire, and teachers who live—well, maybe some teachers [living on Capitol Hill? in D.C.? aly] … I remember our numbers. A very large contingent of police and fire who are in Florida, for example. But, chiefly, the older ones. You know, you retire after 20 years as a police or fire. So, you could be—I think you have to be 45 or 50. But they usually would get another job in this area. But a lot were in Maryland and Virginia. So, yeah. The teachers—there’re more teachers. They understood what I was doing very much, which is great. Speaking to a firefighter when I was at Eastern Market yesterday, who gave me a big hug [Laughs] and said thank you for everything I’ve done. And Amy Mauro is a Capitol Hill person. I love, you know, what she’s doing now with this firefighters’ foundation.
HEALEY: I was aware that she worked there, yes.
KANE: When I was executive director of the Retirement Board, Amy had been working for one of the council members. I don’t actually remember whether she was working for the chairman. Anyway, she was a council staffer. And she decided she wanted to go to law school. And I hired her part time at the Retirement Board to do research for me on some of the legal issues having to do with grandfathering in firefighters. And she worked for me there with that. And, then, when she finished law school, she went to work for the Office of Risk Management in the D. C. government. And, then, eventually ended up working for the fire department as chief of staff. So, now she’s left there and she’s doing this great firefighters’ foundation. But I knew Amy way back and I hired her to work on firefighter issues.
HEALEY: Right. Are there other people from Capitol Hill that you hired over your career?
KANE: Yes, although I’m not sure, besides Sharon Ambrose.  Let me think now. Well, two of them are gone. Mike Schaeffer who lived next door, lived in the basement apartment next door. Mike was a lawyer and I hired him to work on my staff. And he worked on my staff at the Council when I was dealing with all the retirement system and the new personnel system, etc. So, when I left the Council in 1990, Mike was hired by the International City Management Association, their retirement corporation, which at that time had the contract to run the 457 program for the city. And, then, Mike bought a house. He bought a house while he was still on my staff because he got a decent salary. He’d been doing some freelance work. His sister lived across the street, Susan Sauntry. Mike bought a house on Sixth Street between Independence—between Independence and A. It’s one of those little stucco fronted separate ones with a little porch on front.
HEALEY: Mm-hmm.
KANE: Anyway. And he paid, I think, this was 1983, ’84, and he paid, like, $80,000. And we were shocked that it was so expensive because it needed work. [Laughs] Yeah. And, anyway, he died. Not while he was on my staff. But he died a long time after that. Who else? Yes, there was a George Williams and he’s gone, too. George Williams lived in a basement apartment at the Hacketts’ house, one of the Hackett apartments there. And George was retired federal government, older African American man, knew everybody. And I hired him because I knew him through the Hackett kids. I hired him to do constituent service work for me. He worked part time, just keeping it just under enough so it didn’t affect his federal pension. I don’t know. So, yeah, George worked for a long time for me and he passed away. I wonder if I hired anybody else on my staff. I had lots and lots of Capitol Hill people who worked on my campaigns. My first school board campaign, Terry Smith and Bob Smith, who were in the 200 Block of Seventh Street SE? [They were in the 100 block.  Bfb] We used their basement for the headquarters. They’re divorced. Bob moved up to—he was an attorney. He ran a project called the privacy project, the Privacy Journal, focusing on privacy law. When he and Terry split up, she got remarried and moved down south. He moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and bought a house around the corner from my brother-in-law. [Laughs]
HEALEY: Small world.
KANE: Small world. So, yeah. But, anyway. Yeah, so, a lot of Capitol Hill people. Dick Steinkamp was the chairman of my first school board campaign. You know, those are the people who aren’t here anymore.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: And a lot of them are my age. So, they aren’t here anywhere anymore, but ...
HEALEY: Right. But you had all these years on Capitol Hill.
KANE: Yes.
HEALEY: And how would you—I mean, if you just started to talk about how much Capitol Hill has changed since you got here, what would you say?
KANE: Well, I would say it’s changed and it hasn’t. I’ve always lived, first of all, close in on Capitol Hill. I mean, we were 621 G, then we bought on Fifth. And there was always activism, people involved in the community stuff, whether it was protests or whether it was starting the day care center or, you know, working on the schools, and certainly activism in schools. And that was something that was consistent, that I was involved in, too, as a focus. And, then, the renovating the houses was always—although it was … What has changed is, the economics of it have changed tremendously. And I was thinking about this the other day because when we bought this house, I was probably—Noel had started working at the Federal Trade Commission. He’d been there one year as an attorney in the antitrust division. So, he was, I don’t know, a 12 [a federal government General Schedule level] or something. And I was working at the Folger and they didn’t pay a lot, probably $6,000 or ... So, between us, we probably made $20,000. Which is a decent—it’s not—you know, we had some child care costs but that was about it. And we paid $30,000 for this house. We had $7,000 for down payment from my father-in-law’s estate. He had died the year before. So, my grand mother-in-law gave us $7,000, $7,500, 25% down payment. We did all the renovation and everything for that. [Laughs] Not all of it. We’ve done a lot more since, although we never did anything to the ceiling except paint it. And this was the kitchen.  But I was thinking, you know, proportion-wise, and, of course, the house needed a lot of work. It hadn’t had anything done. We had to do the plumbing, the electricity, everything, and paint it ourselves. So, you wouldn’t call it a renovated house. But a $20,000 salary and a $30,000 house. So, these days—and I guess they say you should buy a house that’s like two and a half times your salary—so, that would mean we could have afforded a $50,000 house. So, the job I was doing at the Folger probably pays $60,000 now. I don’t know what a GS-12 or 13 makes—well, we probably paid them $120,000 at the Retirement Board last summer, maybe. Straight out of law school.
HEALEY: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
KANE: You know, straight on. Yeah. So, you know, let’s say the couple’s making $150,000, $160,000. So, proportionally, you’re talking about being able to afford a $400,000, maybe $450,000 house. It’s nothing.  You can’t do that. They’re no …
HEALEY: Right. Not on Capitol Hill.
KANE: Not on Capitol Hill. Not, I don’t think, even way out. And, I mean, we had friends, because we were in the babysitting co-op, which was a great thing where you—so we would go and sit for—well, only one of us did it because we had little children ourselves. But I remember there was a couple on East Capitol—this was, I don’t remember their names. They had just the rafters. The whole floor was up. And they were doing everything themselves. But they probably paid $25,000 for this house. But it took them probably ten years to—but you could do that. I guess there are—and I don’t know any place in the city where, you know, save for that $400,000 unrestored house, where you could do it. So, the demographics of who could be here—the young, really young couples, really starting out—  …
HEALEY: Mm-hmm, yes. Right.
KANE: … that’s—I mean, my kids couldn’t, neither of my children could possibly afford anything here. My daughter, she’s a nurse.
HEALEY: If they’re working in health care or as a nurse or in government.
KANE: Well, she’s a nurse and Justin’s, you know, Justin’s at the [U. S. Capitol] Visitor’s Center, as a visitor assistant. You know. And, again, neither, my daughter’s divorced, my son never married, so—but even if they had that kind of partner who had a salary in that range, they couldn’t do it. So.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: So, my son lives here. Well, actually, he had an apartment in Salisbury, Maryland and he had an apartment in Alexandria and he had a very nice co-op in River Park in Southwest that was affordable but 5th Street is his home which fortunately we bought years ago.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: Anyway. So, I think that’s a big difference. And I don’t know how young couples do it. I mean, I don’t know, you know, how you afford anywhere near that kind of mortgage, frankly, you know.
HEALEY: Right. Who are in public service.
KANE: Who are in public service, yeah.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: Who are in public service. And, anyway, so you get a different demographic. That’s the other thing that’s happened, of which [?] I’m delighted, of course, is the schools now. I mean, you know, as I said, when Jessica started at Peabody there was her and Andy Hackett, white kids, in the first grade. And Justin started there in kindergarten. Now there’s waiting lists for PreK there. We couldn’t people to go into the school. And it’s great to see those schools have gotten so desirable. They were always good schools. The teachers were good, the principal was good. But the attitude and the acceptance of it was ... yeah.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: So.
HEALEY: I had a son who was in Peabody thirty years ago.
KANE: Yeah.
HEALEY: Yeah. When it was PreK and K.
KANE: Mm-hmm.
HEALEY: And, of course, they also had the nursery school, I believe, was still there. I don’t think it was called the day care center at that point.
KANE: Yeah. We called it Capitol East Children’s Center is what we called it.
HEALEY: Uh-huh, right.
KANE: And, so, that would have been ’74, ’75, that time period that it was moved over there from—Because it was started when Jessica was three. So, that would be 1970-71 that we started it. So, a few years later it was moved to the …
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: … yeah, to the school. And, so, yeah.
HEALEY: I think it was called the School Within the School.
KANE: The School Within …
HEALEY: Or School Within a School used part of Peabody.
KANE: Mm-hmm.
HEALEY: And, then, maybe Ms. Frances’s [Slaughter] nursery school class used Peabody. And, now, it may all just be Peabody, but I’m not positive.
KANE: It is, it is. And it’s not just PreK. It’s three-year olds, four-year olds, and five-year olds. So, they call it preschool, prekindergarten, and kindergarten. And it’s full and there’s a waiting list. So.
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: Yeah. And you couldn’t get enough kids for kindergarten through fourth grade from the neighborhood to be there.
HEALEY: Yeah. So, I think we’ve covered all sorts of things here, but I’m wondering if there’s some other things that we should address.
KANE: Well, it’s funny. I spend a lot of time in Maine now. And people keep saying, oh, you’re going to, you know, retire, live there. No. I had a house in Rehoboth. I was first on the planning commission, then on the city commission in Rehoboth, which was reserved. They had some special seats for non-residents because half the town is people who have second homes there. And people said, oh, you’re going to retire, live there. I said no. Capitol Hill is my home and it’s always going to be my home. I mean, I gave up years ago the thought that we’d move back to Connecticut, once we got this house, frankly. I mean, that was it. I always wanted to be an architect and my guidance counselor in high school in 1957, 1958 said, oh, you can’t do that.
HEALEY: Because you’re a woman?
KANE: Because I’m a girl. And you’d have to learn physics and engineering and all those things. [Interviewer laughs] And, well, it was true. I had to be tutored in physics and I only took, you know, algebra. But she said you could be an interior decorator. And I said no, thank you. So, I’m a frustrated architect. Having done [laughs] this, I’ve owned four different houses including this one. I still own three—my daughter, the house I live in in Maine, the house she lives in in Maine I own, and then—because there was no way again that she could afford to buy a house. And I had owned a house in Rehoboth with my mother. And my husband owned a rental in Lewes, Delaware. And, well, Justin owned the co-op by himself. And, then, I have the house that we have in Harpswell, Maine. So, that’s fun and we built that one, too. And I’ve moved two agencies into space where it was total buildout which was fun. But, no, this is home. And it always will be. I’ve got our plot. I bought a plot after Noel died at Congressional Cemetery. It’s a bench plot. I did a bench, a red granite bench that has his name and his dates. And, then, it has my name, my birth. My daughter and son both want to be there—their birthdates, and our cat, their cat, they want that [?]. And his ashes are there. And, so, you know, I’m going to be in Capitol Hill forever. [Laughs]
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: And I keep saying that. I just, you know, it’s just, when I come back in the summer, if I have to come back for something like for a doctor’s appointment, and it’s so hot I say what the hell am I doing here? But, other than that, it’s home. And even, you know, people don’t understand that I’ve got this lovely place, right on the water in Maine. Except it’s not home. I don’t know people there in the same way. People don’t know me. I’ve been going there 60 years, but we’re still summer people. I did stay during the pandemic and the year after that joined a social club. It’s always online in the winter. I do a book club up there when I’m—and it’s nice and it keeps me, you know, alert and reading some interesting books and talking to people. And there’s a Maine senior college network which is terrific. And I just did a course on religion and violence with them which was online. But it doesn’t stick the same way.
HEALEY: And the things that make this stick. What are some of those things?
KANE: Well, it’s just the history and everything I’m involved in. It’s the physicality of it. I remember, when I came down in July of 1967 and Jessica was six weeks old—she was born in June—yes, about six weeks old and we went down to Scarsdale. I left Noel and Jessica with my mother-in-law. My father-in-law, he had lung cancer. He was sick about that time, too. So, she wasn’t going to Maine for the summer. I took the train down to D. C., got off at Union Station, stayed in a hotel which isn’t there anymore. It’s on Franklin Square. No, not Franklin Square. Yeah, Franklin Square, 14th and K, 14th and L. And the next morning I got up and sat in the park there, opened the real estate ads, looking for places that were within my circle. And I took a taxi back to Union Station and I got off and I walked. And I walked around and I got to Eastern Market, 7th and North Carolina, where the coffee shop is now. Well, that coffee shop was a—what was … Libby…?
HEALEY: Sangster?
KANE: Yes, Libby Sangster’s shop. And she was sitting out front. And I walked by. And I remember how hot it was and how green and all the vines growing on everything. I thought what am I doing here? It’s so hot. You know, I grew up in New Jersey. That’s as far south I’ve ever—I had babysat at the shore but still, you know, there was a breeze. So, it was humid. This was July 8th or something. And there was a, what is now the, it used to be Hayden’s Liquor store, a liquor store at the corner. Libby Sangster is sitting out front of the house and she walked by and I said hello and I said I was, you know, just looking for a place to rent in the neighborhood. And she said there was a holdup over there just yesterday. [Both laugh] Thankfully she was the first person on Capitol Hill I talked to and I just, it kills me. When I come back, that memory comes back to me of this tropical place. And, then, that was the first day I was here. The next day, I had found, I think that was ... I found this place on G Street. So, I took a taxi from the hotel and he took me to 8th Street and he wouldn’t take me any further. He dropped me right there at the corner of 8th and G. He says, you don’t want to go there, lady. I said, yes, I do. That’s where I’m going. He said, you don’t want to go there. And he would not. And he just dropped me there.
HEALEY: He wouldn’t drive down A Street?
KANE: He wouldn’t drive me down G Street.
HEALEY: Or G Street …
KANE: No, he didn’t. He just said …
HEALEY: … to the church even.
KANE: No.
HEALEY: The church [Christ Church] was right there.
KANE: No.
HEALEY: And you were near the Marine Barrack.
KANE: The Marine Barracks is down there. Yeah. There was a liquor store there at the corner which is now—It was a florist and, then, it was an office supply. You know, the building I mean there on the corner. And, so, I walked down and we got the apartment. It was the second floor. It was the house that’s right across the street from the church. We wanted to buy it but the Detweilers who owned it, she wouldn’t sell it to us. She wouldn’t sell it period. So, anyway. So, you know, it’s home to me now. I mean, we bought this house when Justin was a year old. Justin wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. It’s home to Jessica. Jessica’s been in Brunswick, Maine, for 12 years now. She, before that, lived in Adams Morgan. Then they lived in my house in Rehoboth for—let’s say, lived in Delaware for 12 years. But she and my grandsons spent a lot of time here and my oldest grandson lived with me on 5th Street after college and my middle grandson is staying with me here now. And when anybody asks Jessica where she’s from, she says Washington, where she … So. She’d love to come back if she could. So, it’s home.So, that’s one thing. And it’s the history and the people and the things that I’ve been involved in, the things that I think I’ve helped build or helped make or helped … I don’t have that history with Maine. It’s beautiful. It’s a lovely place.
HEALEY:  Right.
KANE:  And there’s a little history because, you know, Noel’s grandmother was from Maine. That’s how we have the property and I know some people there. But it’s …
HEALEY: Right, right. You made a contribution here.
KANE: And it’s just part of me.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: And I feel part of it and that’s the difference.
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: Yeah.
HEALEY: Yeah. Well, I think that’s good enough.
KANE: That’s enough.

END OF FIRST INTERVIEW

START OF SECOND INTERVIEW
HEALEY: This is Christine Healey. I’m here on May 31, 2024, with Betty Ann Kane at 118 Fifth Street NE. This is a continuation of her interview and we’re going to talk about some events, such as the 1968 riots and some of the other events that happened that affected us here on Capitol Hill. You were saying about the …
KANE: I was saying about the riots that I remember three kind of big things that happened that were national things but obviously that impacted us directly, impacted me. And first was the ’68 riots. So, I said it was after the riots, the next year, that I left my job, was let go at Catholic University. But I was teaching at Catholic at the time, in April of 1968, and my daughter was up at day care in Riggs Park north of Catholic. And, so, word came into each of the classrooms that the university was shutting down classes and there would be a service. The bells started ringing at the, you know, cathedral of the Immaculate Conception up there. And first of all, the first thing I remember is one of the kids said why are we shutting down? I said because Martin Luther King was assassinated. And he said so what? And it was some of the—you know, they weren’t ... Anyway, I got in the car, drove north, picked up Jessica at Grace King’s house, who …
HEALEY: The family day care center.
KANE: Yeah, it was a woman who did it in her house. And, so, she—Grace Hill. Excuse me. Grace Hill. And, so, I put Jessica in the car and she said are you sure you don’t want her to stay here? No, I wanted her home. So, what I remember first of all, driving down, coming down across H Street NE, as soon as you come down, you know, that way. Past where Home Depot is and all that. That wasn’t all there. Come down from Catholic University and that intersection at 4th Street and H, where there’s an Ethiopian restaurant now, a building burst into flames as I went through the intersection. We were living at 621 G then, across the street from Christ Church and the Arthur Capper public housing was behind us. And all the next few days there was rioting and looting on 8th Street SE and tear gas thrown all the time into the projects, drifting up and into our yard. And Jessica got a very high fever. I had to take her to her doctor, which was up Connecticut Avenue. And we had to go through checkpoints for the … There were Marines. Of course, for the Marines Barracks they were there. But they were also camped in Marion Park there. And they were there for a week at least. So, that was very scary. We had only been in D. C. for one year, by that time. Not even a year. And, then, Noel was at law school. He was in his first year of law school. And he and a bunch of other law students volunteered and they went out to RFK [Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium] where they had put all the people who’d been arrested for looting. And as volunteers, with a volunteer—and I’m sure there were a lot of other Capitol Hill lawyers there. That was our first introduction to how something could, you know, really impact you on Capitol Hill. The next one I remember was 9/11 in 2001. At that time, I was working from home and had an office.  And Noel’s law office was over at Congressional House which is on the corner of Massachusetts and Third Street. And after the Pentagon was hit, then they closed down the Capitol and evacuated that. And Noel called me and he said turn on the television. I didn’t believe that. I saw the Trade Centers, the twin towers, hit there. But what happened was then, all of a sudden, everybody evacuated from the Capitol moved east. They came out, they came up Massachusetts Avenue, they were filled. I could feel people walking by here just getting away from that. And that was scary, to realize how close we were to the Capitol. And had that plane, you know, …
HEALEY: Right.
KANE: … that was in Pennsylvania turned around and come that way—and everybody thought it was going to hit the Capitol—we wouldn’t be here. And, then—well we’d be here, but—and, then, the other one that we were talking about was January 6th. I wasn’t here physically then. I was up in Maine with my husband who was not well. And we saw it on television and didn’t believe that this was actually happening, real, right there. Justin, our son, who works at the Visitor’s Center at the Capitol, was here. He was at home when that happened. It was a day they were shut down but they were going in periodically, probably at least once a week, once, yeah, once a week, to do training or other things over there. He didn’t happen to be there at that time. But he called me immediately to say that he was okay. But he had colleagues who never went back who were there. People up in Maine couldn’t believe it. Oh, you live near there? They’d go you live right near there?
HEALEY: Right, right.
KANE: It’s hard for people—two things I really understand that those things happened and that there’s a residential area so near. And that real people are affected, particularly people in those cases on Capitol Hill. And, then there are those people who don’t believe that people actually live in Washington. I remember when I was up in Maine at the post office and I had, you know, D. C. plates on my car and a woman came up to me and she said is that a real place? That’s what she said. Is that a real place? Because she’d never seen a District of Columbia license plate. [Both laugh] Yeah, it’s real, it’s very real. But, you know, I just thought that we ought to mention those. We survived, you know.
HEALEY:  Right. Right. Well, thank you. Thank you for all of that.
END OF SECOND INTERVIEW
Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Betty Ann Kane Interview, May 31, 2024

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