Kathleen Donohue

Interview with Kathleen Donahue
Interview Date:   June 26, 2024
Interviewer: Mark Weinheimer
Transcriber: Betsy Barnett
Editor: Ellen Hirzy

photo by Elizabeth Dranitzke/Photopia

This interview transcript is the property of the Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project.
Not to be reproduced without permission.

START OF INTERVIEW
WEINHEIMER: Hi. This is Mark Weinheimer. It is … June 26, 2024. And I am interviewing Kathleen Donahue for the Overbeck Oral History Project. Good morning, Kathleen.
DONAHUE: Good morning, Mark.
WEINHEIMER: Kathleen was the winner of the [Capitol Hill Community Foundation] Spark Award in 2020.
DONAHUE: In 2020, although we didn’t get to celebrate it until 2021.
WEINHEIMER: ‘21. Yeah, because of the wonderful pandemic …
DONAHUE: Pandemic. Yes.
WEINHEIMER: … that we had. And, so we’re going back and trying to recapture some of the thoughts of the winners in the two years that we didn’t have the awards ceremony. And thank you, Kathleen, for agreeing to sit this morning.
DONAHUE: Thank you for being here. I appreciate it. As I mentioned, I am very much feeling like I don’t deserve this, but I appreciate you.
WEINHEIMER: Oh, oh.
DONAHUE: I love the program though. I love this project. I think it’s a fascinating project.
WEINHEIMER: It is. I did an interview last year with one of this year’s winners, knowing that she was going to be chosen, and it was a lot of fun. I learned a lot, and in my role as chair of the grants committee, in talking with her, we developed a new project …
DONAHUE: Oh, cool.
WEINHEIMER: … that got one of our big grants this year. So …
DONAHUE: That’s wonderful. Yay.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And productive. [Both laugh] So, Kathleen, you own and started Labyrinth, …
DONAHUE: Games and Puzzles [645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE].
WEINHEIMER: … a game store.
DONAHUE: Yes.
WEINHEIMER: God, how long ago?
DONAHUE: 2010. It will be 14 years this November.
WEINHEIMER: Wow.
DONAHUE: Yeah.
WEINHEIMER: How did you get into that? What was the impetus?
DONAHUE: [Laughs] We moved to Capitol Hill in 2003, my husband and I. My husband got a job up here in DC, and we moved up from Miami. And we moved into the Capitol Hill neighborhood because my college roommate lived in this neighborhood. And …
WEINHEIMER: Great.
DONAHUE: … at the time we moved up here I was working for a big international trade law firm. But I was working many, many, many hours. Many, many hours.
WEINHEIMER: [Laughs] Right.
DONAHUE: And they had an office here. And so, the plan was that I was going to work in the office here.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: But I was already working many, many hours. And then they wanted to add in me flying back and forth to Miami, which was the headquarters of the firm. Right before I was set to move up here—my husband was already up here—we had a partners and principals meeting, and I just broke. And I’m like, I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this anymore. So I moved to DC, to a very, very expensive neighborhood, without a job. And my husband kind of freaked out. So right when I got here, his son started having some issues. So we took him on. And then I found out I was pregnant. And, like, oh, this is all really, really hard for me to get a new job. So I took a few years off and then did little things here and there. I worked for a local Airbnb. I, you know, would go in in the morning and clean up the Airbnb and put out the breakfast and stuff.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah.
DONAHUE: And I did little things like that for a little while. And then my son was getting older, and, I’m like, well, I really need to work. [Both laugh] So I started working for a local consulting firm, and I was doing consulting for law firms because I had worked in this law firm. It was a very small consulting firm, and there wasn’t really anywhere for me to necessarily grow in the firm.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: But I did a lot—it was great because I worked mostly from home. I did all of the reporting, and it was all a lot of operational efficiency stuff, and so I had the flexibility to take care of both kids.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And it was really great. But then Ryan, my stepson, moved away. He left and went back with his mother. And then my son was in school full time, and I’m like, I really probably need a full-time, real job. [Interviewer laughs] But the idea of going back to a law firm and working those kind of hours was just not attractive to me at all, especially because I worked in international trade law. So I used to travel all the time and different things like that. And I was like, this isn’t the greatest idea when I have a six-year-old to go back and be traveling all over Latin America and the Middle East and things like that. So I’m like, well, maybe I’ll start my own business. And so I would come up with all these different ideas, and I would present them to my husband.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And he’s a finance guy.
WEINHEIMER: Oh, okay.
DONAHUE: And he would always shoot holes in my ideas. [Interviewer laughs] Like, that is the worst idea you’ve ever had. I’m, like, okay.
WEINHEIMER: Until the next one.
DONAHUE: Right. Until the next one. And, then, that was a terrible idea. I wanted to start a vegan kitchen where I delivered meals all over the place, and he says, do you understand you will never make enough food to actually make any money? And we can’t do that. And you can’t cook out of our kitchen. And I’m like, you need an industrial kitchen.
WEINHEIMER:  Right.
DONAHUE: And I’m like, yeah, maybe that’s a bad idea. And then I had the idea of opening a restaurant. And he said, no, you would be working all night, every single night …
WEINHEIMER: Yeah.
DONAHUE: … and da-da-da-da. And he’s like, that’s a terrible idea. So I kept coming up with these ideas and presenting them. And he shot them all down. And then I thought, well, maybe I’ll just go back [to the law]. But I really wanted something of my own. My father owned the largest liquor store between New Orleans and Jacksonville, a wine store. For many, many years. And I grew up in a retail environment. And I loved it. I love people. I’m very outgoing, and I just always loved being at his store and talking to the community. I always tell the staff here it’s like “Cheers,” where you come in and everybody knows your name.
WEINHEIMER: Right. Right.
DONAHUE: And none of my young staff knows what that means. [Interviewer laughs] And they all look at me like I’m crazy. But that’s how my dad’s store was. It was very much a community kind of fixture. And that’s where I grew up. And so I started thinking more and more about just doing something where I had that direct personal contact with the community.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And so one day I was looking for a Mancala board for my son, for a birthday party that he was going to. Mancala is one of my favorite games of all time. I love it. I went out to Northern Virginia. I went to Toys “R” Us. All they had was this plastic, junky Mancala board. And no, I wanted a really nice wooden Mancala board. So I went to other—a couple of stores out there. Could not find a Mancala board. Was coming back into the city to pick up my son from camp and got stuck in horrible traffic on the 14th Street Bridge. We were not moving. And I was in the middle of the bridge. There was no way I could get off … So I called my husband, freaking out because I was going to be late picking up David from camp. And I didn’t have anybody’s phone numbers. This was still, you know, 15 years ago. I didn’t have things necessarily saved. And I was, like, you know, I’m in traffic. I can’t be making all these phone calls. Call somebody and find somebody to pick up David. He’s like, well, that’s what you should do. You should open a toy store on Capitol Hill. Because Groovy [Groovy DC Cards and Gifts, 321 7th Street SE] used to have a toy store, but then they closed [the toy section].
WEINHEIMER: That’s right.
DONAHUE: And so there was only Fairy Godmother’s book store to get birthday presents when I first came up with the idea. And like, more and more families were staying on the Hill. The schools were continuing to improve. So we had friends that had kids that were David’s age. And when my stepson was here going to school, fewer families stayed on the Hill.
WEINHEIMER: Oh, that’s true.
DONAHUE: He went through the Cluster School [Capitol Hill Cluster School: Peabody Elementary School, Watkins Elementary School, and Stuart-Hobson Middle School]. And you know, the Cluster School was really the only school that was really good when my stepson was going to school here. And, then, you know, by the time my son was in school we had Brent [Brent Elementary School, 301 North Carolina Avenue, SE] and Maury [Maury Elementary School, 1250 Constitution Avenue NE], and so many different public schools that were really much better and safer and things like that.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: So I’m like, you know, there’s not anything. And then I thought back when I was growing up near my dad’s store, there was a hobby shop that was called Kobe’s Corner, and it was one of my favorite places in the entire world to go. It had Iron Tavern Puzzles, and it was right when Dungeons & Dragons was coming out. And they had these old leather maps on the walls. And you could go in and  … they had all these puzzles and stuff you could play with. And I’m like, maybe that would work. I loved that store. And I started thinking about it, and I got so excited that by the time I got home out of the traffic I had already come up with this whole idea.
WEINHEIMER: [Laughs] You’d done the business plan.
DONAHUE: Yeah. In my head, on the 14th Street Bridge. And when I got home, one of my friends was there with my child, who she had picked up from camp, and I said, I’m going to open a game store on Capitol Hill. And she said, what? [Interviewer laughs] I hadn’t told my husband yet. I hadn’t told anybody. But I don’t like toys. I’ve always loved games and puzzles. And I was not a huge gamer before I came up with this idea. I loved games … I mean I grew up playing Trivial Pursuit and, you know, Scrabble with my mom. I was a huge puzzle person. I was an only child. So growing up I was really into—we sell wooden mechanical puzzles—so, I was really into physical puzzles and iron puzzles and things like that.
WEINHEIMER: Right, right.
DONAHUE: So, I had kind of come up with this whole idea on my way home. And then I went to the Martin Luther King library [Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, 901 G Street NW], and I checked out every book I could find on how to make retail work in today’s internet age. I mean, growing up with my dad and his liquor store, it was alcohol. Like, people are addicted to alcohol. You drink—and you have the same customers, repeat customers and stuff. I’m like, with games and puzzles of course I won’t have the same customers. How do I make this actually work? Little did I know that I think people are more addicted to board games than they are to wine… I had no idea. But yes, so I went and checked out all of these books, and the thing that all the books said was you have to make it a place where people want to hang out.
WEINHEIMER: Mm-hmm, right. Right.
DONAHUE: So, when I was thinking of that, I thought back to the place that I used to go as a kid and all of the stuff that you could play with. And I remembered when Groovy had the toy store, as much as I love the Groovy people, they used to get mad when the kids would touch the toys. They kind of told my son to put things down once when he was playing with some puppets in their store. And I thought that’s not the way I want to run a store.
So, that was kind of the basis of what Labyrinth became. I wanted people to be able to come in and try things. And now we have a game library of over 500 games. I wanted people to come in and play with the wooden puzzles and the Iron Tavern puzzles. So we have demos out all over the store of things that people can do. And I wanted it to be a community—that was my most important thing. I really wanted it to be a community center. And that’s why I won the Spark Award. [Both laugh] And that was a really long story to tell you the history of, kind of, Labyrinth opening. I had the idea in June and we opened in November.
WEINHEIMER: Wow. That’s fast.
DONAHUE: Yeah. It was crazy. When I do things, I do them quickly. I did all the research at Martin Luther King. We went to New York for my 40th birthday in August. I told my husband that I was doing this. The joke is he took me to New York … We went to all my favorite places in New York. And we were sitting there having dinner, and I told him, I’ve decided to quit my job and open a game store. And he said, that’s not the present I was planning to give you [Both laugh] for your 40th birthday. So we call this my 40th birthday present.
WEINHEIMER: Right, right. Well, a long-lived 40th birthday present.
DONAHUE: Yeah. And then, so, the next week, I went to visit my parents—my dad was still alive at the time—and I told him my idea. And they watched my son while I wrote the entire business plan. And I presented it to my father, and he said he would back me if I needed the money.
WEINHEIMER: Good.
DONAHUE: ]And he told me that I had to go talk to his banker about it, though, and present the business plan to him.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, because he’s little biased, right?
DONAHUE: Right. And, well, his banker said it was the worst idea he had ever heard in his entire life. [Interviewer laughs] But, you know, they were from Pensacola, Florida, this little bitty town. And I’m like, well, of course this wouldn’t work in Pensacola. But I think it will work in DC. And luckily, I was right. [Laughs] … A lot of people did not think it would work.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, well, retail for the last what? You know, since Amazon exploded.
DONAHUE: Yeah. It’s hard. Well, especially retail selling nonelectronic games and puzzles. Like, a lot of people thought I was insane.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah.
DONAHUE: We had lots and lots of people come in the first couple of weeks saying, our kids won’t play these games. And I’m like, yes, they will, yes, they will.
WEINHEIMER: And they do.
DONAHUE: They do. Summer camp started Monday, and we have 30, 40 kids coming. We’re running camps all summer long and have hundreds of kids that are going to be in summer camp this summer.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, I know several years ago—it’s five years ago. Our grandson was staying with us for a week, and I tried to enroll him and it was too late. [Both laugh] You had already filled up that one week that he was with us. So we went to ball games instead.
DONAHUE: I love Capitol Hill.
WEINHEIMER: How does that [being on Capitol Hill] influence business?
DONAHUE: Well, I think when I was originally coming up with the idea— So, there was the idea of it having to be community focused. I also wanted to make sure that we could have products that would serve the widest possible consumer … areas as possible. Right?
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: I wanted—  My original idea was a place to buy birthday presents for kids, because that’s what I was having a problem with. But then I’m like, okay, but how do I get seniors to come? How do I  get young adults to come? How do I get this person and that person? So, my thought was we have a lot of really, really intelligent people in the neighborhood, obviously. And games and puzzles have always been very mentally stimulating to me and a very big part of my heritage and what I do and how I keep my brain active. So I’m, like, okay, so, we’ll have things for all these different groups. And there’s tons of people on the Hill (and I love the Hill very, very much, and I love all the people who live here) who want to look smart, so they might come and buy intelligent gifts for their friends.
WEINHEIMER: [Laughs] Right.
DONAHUE: Or attorneys might, you know, have corporate gifts that were wooden puzzles or something like that. So I was trying to think how I could serve as many different markets as possible. And that’s kind of, I think, where Capitol Hill really took my thoughts—who lives on Capitol Hill, who works on Capitol Hill, and stuff—and directed our product launching. Because at first, I was like, oh, and I want to do hobbies and I want to do this and that. And then I looked and I had, you know, 2,000 square feet. I’m like, I can’t fit all of this stuff in this store. So, I made kind of five ideas of what I would carry. It had to be nonelectronic, no electronic components. It had to be recognized as an extremely good product, both in quality but in …
WEINHEIMER: So no plastic boards.
DONAHUE: Right. No plastic. Yeah. It had to be an excellent-quality product.
DONAHUE: We didn’t really do anything that was licensed for a very long time, stuff about Harry Potter or Star Wars. I mean, now we carry Star Wars stuff. But we didn’t carry, like, Blue’s Clues type puzzles. Or we didn’t do licensed materials because a lot of times games that are licensed are not very good mechanically, or the game play is not necessarily good because they’re depending on Snoopy or, you know, whoever the latest hotness is, to sell the game. And not necessarily the game being an excellent game on its own.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: So, we really focused on award-winning products. I tried to focus on locally sourced things or things made locally. So we carry a lot of games by local designers [and] local game publishers, things like that. We also host quarterly local game designers who come in and play-test their games that they’re working on. So, it was a lot of, How do we do the kind of thing which would be interesting to the people who lived around here. Little did I know we’d get people that come from a very long way away now because we’re so well known.
WEINHEIMER: Designers have come?
DONAHUE: Oh, yeah. We have designers that come from all over the place, but we also have customers who come from all over the place. I remember, I think, one— Well, there was a family from Japan who used to come every summer. But we had a woman— I was on NPR [National Public Radio] one day talking about puzzles, and I had a woman from West Africa who had heard the NPR thing in Africa who specifically, when she was in DC, came because she wanted to meet me from hearing me on NPR. That blew me away.
WEINHEIMER: That’s funny.
DONAHUE: Yeah. But we have a lot of people from Brazil and from the Middle East and things that come in specifically because they’d heard about this store. You know, we get a lot of national and international tourists here, and the gaming industry is a very small … kind of well-networked thing. So Labyrinth is very well known in the gaming industry. So if we have board game people or people in the industry, if they happen to come to DC, they all tend to stop by.
WEINHEIMER: So, is it like— My wife used to be a librarian and so she’s into books, and your next-door neighbor, East City Books is a favorite of hers. And when we travel, we go to the local bookstore. She knows which bookstores …
DONAHUE: It’s very similar. Gamers will find a game store and we’re the only game store in Washington, DC, proper. So.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: And we’re also— You know, I have won a lot of awards, the Spark Award being one of my absolute favorites because it meant a lot to me. But we have won a lot of awards in the game industry as well. We won, I think, ’20-’21— Right around when I won the Spark Award, I won a big award from the Game Manufacturers Association about being one of the most influential game retailers in the country.
WEINHEIMER: Wow, great. And all from being stuck in …
traffic. [Both laugh] Now, on location, getting back to that for a moment, you know, obviously, you opened on Capitol Hill. You could have opened downtown. Right?
DONAHUE: Yes. Well, I mean, part of that was me wanting to be in the community where I lived. I mean, I live on 11th Street SE, right next to Frager’s [Frager’s Hardware, 1115 Pennsylvania Avenue SE].
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And my son, at the time, was going to St. Peter’s [St. Peter School, 422 Third Street SE]. So, this was directly between my house and my son’s school. So, it was very easy. I wanted to be near the community that I had really fallen in love with. Like, we moved here in 2003, so we’d been here for seven years before I opened the store and I really— I love Capitol Hill. We’re never, ever leaving Capitol Hill.
WEINHEIMER: Oh, I know the feeling.
DONAHUE: My husband and I really want to travel when we eventually retire, but we have always said we will keep some kind of thing here on the Hill because we love it. It’s kind of like— I mean, I grew up in a relatively small town, but I love big cities. And I’ve always lived in big cities. But Capitol Hill feels like a little town inside of a big city, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: Which I love. So that’s why I picked here. It was hard to find a place because, like I said, most people thought I was crazy. So I had looked at two or three different places and, you know, I said I came up with the idea in June. I wrote the business plan in August. And I’m like, well, if I can find someplace to do this before Christmas, I’ll do it. If not, I’ll put it off until next year, and we won’t have it. So I had looked at two or three places and none of them would rent to me. Because they’re, like, …
WEINHEIMER: Because it’s a new idea, untested.
DONAHUE: It’s a retail, crazy …
WEINHEIMER: It wasn’t a restaurant.
DONAHUE: Yeah. It was not a restaurant. And, you know, nobody thought that retail could make it and especially not a game and puzzle store. I had multiple people tell me how nuts that was. And then I got really lucky in this place. They were supposed to have an ice cream place come into this place, and because of how weird this building is, they couldn’t get the certificate of occupancy changed because they cannot make it handicapped accessible, which kills me to this day.  But they had just had—like, they had been negotiating with this ice cream place for a long time, and they had just had it fall through. It wasn’t even up for rent when I looked at it. And there was a sign on the front door saying something like …
WEINHEIMER: Coming soon?
DONAHUE: Coming soon or whatever. But it had the number for the property manager. And, I’m like, well, maybe I’ll just call them. Maybe they have some other place located around here or whatever. So, I called them and, I said, hey, you know, I’ve been trying to find a location within two blocks of Eastern Market Metro, and I was just wondering if you had any other properties. I saw that this place had already leased. And they’re like, well, actually, that lease just fell through. If you want to come see it tonight, you can.
WEINHEIMER: Wow. Yeah.
DONAHUE: And so I came that day and saw it and I’m like, okay, I think this could potentially work. And so I called my husband, and he came the next day with me. And we looked at it and we negotiated and signed the lease in two days. [Interviewer laughs] And so I had this, it was—I think we started our lease on October 1st and we opened on Black Friday [Friday after Thanksgiving] of 2010.
WEINHEIMER: Wow.
DONAHUE: So, it was a month and, like, two weeks after we signed the lease that we were open. And, yeah. It was all very, very, very fast. And I do not recommend— If anybody’s ever listening to this [Interviewer laughs] and thinking about opening a retail store, do not ever open on Black Friday. It was the worst idea I ever had in my whole life. [Both laugh] It was crazy.
WEINHEIMER: Well, because of the short amount of time? Or …
DONAHUE: Because everybody was so— Well, because of the short amount of time but also because I started without very much money. I mean, I self-financed. My dad said he would back me if I needed any extra money. But I basically self-financed everything. So, we didn’t start with a lot of inventory. Like, it was very much …
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, what you could afford to buy.
DONAHUE: You know, yeah. I mean what I could afford to buy— And, then, you know, I think one of the things that I do think I’m relatively good at is marketing. And so I reached out to CHAMPS [Capitol Hill Area Merchants and Professionals] at the time. Julia [Robey Christian] was there. And she really helped me. And we did a pre-opening launch. I don’t remember if you were there.
WEINHEIMER: I may have been.
DONAHUE: But we had all types of, like, really cool Capitol Hill people that came in, and it was right when Pound Coffee was opening [621 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, now closed]. And so Pound did all the food. And we had this cocktail party, pre-opening party the Tuesday before Black Friday. And so we kind of created this buzz on Capitol Hill. And then, there had not been a game store in the DC area for a really long time, not a good game store, really.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: At least at the time. And so all of these game people were also, like, who is this person and what is she doing? And she’s opening a game store on Capitol Hill. This is crazy. So, all of these, like, game designers came in and hardcore game people and they started calling my house before this happened [Interviewer laughs] and saying, who are you? Because, like I said, I was not a huge gamer before this.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, yeah. You weren’t part of the industry.
DONAHUE: Right. I was not a part of the industry at all. So, I had all these game publishers calling me up, going who are you, and why are you opening a game store? And actually, they helped me immensely. Like, I don’t think we ever would have been able to survive without some of the help that I got from the game industry. There was a guy who owned a game store out in California who helped me immensely, and several local game publishers put me in contact with other game store owners. And I never would have known what I was doing without that assistance. But it created this enormous buzz, and then Black Friday on top of that. We sold almost everything in the entire store on Black Friday. And I’m, like …
WEINHEIMER: What do I do now? [Laughs]
DONAHUE: Oh, my, what do I do? We don’t have anything— I was calling all of these suppliers going you have to overnight me more stuff. [Both laugh] It was just —it was crazy. But that first Christmas was — But the good thing about it was we have been in the black ever since we first opened.
WEINHEIMER: [Laughs] That’s great.
DONAHUE: But it was insane. Yeah. It was really crazy. 2020 obviously was hard and we were very, very not— very slightly in the black, not really in the black, but pretty close. But 2020 was hard.
WEINHEIMER: Well, as I remember, in 2020, you—because of the pandemic and everything having to be closed—you and several other neighborhood female entrepreneurs got together.
DONAHUE: Yeah, and we’ve all become such good friends after that. It’s been really wonderful. But, yeah, I had the idea when they shut me down in 2020 …
WEINHEIMER: They shut everyone down.
DONAHUE: They shut everyone down. They shut everyone down in 2020. I remember the last thing that we did. And I just started getting phone calls because at that time we were running programs in schools, afterschool programs in 16 local schools. So I started getting calls from that. [Interviewer laughs] We were supposed to have this huge event at the Smithsonian [Institution] that weekend that everything shut down. And so the Smithsonian called me and cancelled. And all these people were calling and cancelling. And then, the city announced that everybody had to shut down. At first, because I had not taken a vacation in ten years, at first, I was like, I get a vacation. I get to stay at home and not do anything. This was amazing. And then, about five days into this vacation, I’m like, oh, my god, how am I going to pay all my staff? This is bad. What am I going to do? So the manager and I came to the store secretly and sneaked in the back door and built a website in two weeks. And then, we were going around and delivering things by hand, somewhat illegally. But I’m like, I’ve got to figure out how I’m— I had 12 staff that had no savings. They’re all pretty much, you know, living paycheck to paycheck.
WEINHEIMER: They’re all young, as I remember.
DONAHUE: Right. They’re all young and I pay them as much as I possibly can. But, we don’t make enough to pay them enough to really save. Right?
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: So, I was like, I have to take care of these kids. I cannot let them go without getting any money. So, yeah, we were secretly sneaking around delivering games and puzzles, especially jigsaw puzzles, to people. And, then, I’m like, okay, this is not going to work. But at that time, they were still allowing restaurants to do takeout. So, I called Mary, who owns Mr. Henry’s [601 Pennsylvania Avenue SE], and I’m like, would you mind …
WEINHEIMER: Right. Mary Quillian Helms.
DONAHUE: Mary Quillian Helms, who is a very good friend of mine now and was a little bit at that time. But I’m like, would you possibly consider delivering games to people when they came and picked up food? And she’s, like, sure, that’s a great idea. We can’t have anybody in the restaurant anyway, and they have to come and pick it up. So, we started doing deliveries every day to Mr. Henry’s.
WEINHEIMER:  Mm-hmm.
DONAHUE: And then we told East City Books [645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE] that we were doing it, and then Leah Daniels at Hill’s Kitchen [713 D Street SE]. We were, like, hey, we’re doing this. Would y’all like to do this with us? And so the four of us got together, and we promoted people getting dinner at Mr. Henry’s and picking up their book stuff and games and kitchen and stuff.
WEINHEIMER: And stuff to cook the dinner with.
DONAHUE: I mean, everybody was making bread.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: So, at home, everybody was baking and stuff, so everybody wanted Leah’s stuff. And they needed books, and they needed games and puzzles. Puzzles were insane during that year.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: But it was still really hard because we couldn’t sell as much as we do when we were open.
WEINHEIMER: Sure, sure. Because people couldn’t look at it and try it out.
DONAHUE: Right. And, like, nobody was buying party games, very few people were actually buying kids’ games because the kids were at home, and they needed stuff for the kids to do that were not with their families. As much as, you know, we had always promoted, you know, spend quality time, with your families with games and stuff. All these people were working from home going no, I need Legos. I need stuff for my kids to do so that I can work, because they’re driving me insane. So we sold a lot of Legos, a lot of jigsaw puzzles, and a lot of two-player games. [Both laugh] That was pretty much it. So. But yeah, it was a very, very hard year. I think it never really got back to normal, until this year has felt a little bit more normal, 2024. But even last year was weird because the prices were going up so much, and inflation. And so all of our cost of goods and my rent and insurance and everything skyrocketed last year [2023].
WEINHEIMER: And people may not have been buying as much.
DONAHUE: Right. And last year was a hard year. So, it’s really been hard since 2020. But this year it feels a little bit more normal. We can get products. 2021 and 2022 was just— the supply chain was crazy.
WEINHEIMER: I’ll bet. Yeah.
DONAHUE: Especially anything plastic. Like, I remember—we sell sleeves for cards. So, if you play fancy collectible card games and stuff, you want to put those cards in plastic sleeves. There were six months where I could not find any plastic sleeves. Like, they were using all the plastic for masks. So there was a huge problem with getting anything plastic. It was really weird. That’s history.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. Thankfully, it’s history.
DONAHUE: I hope so. I really hope so.
WEINHEIMER: Another part of doing business on Capitol Hill—you alluded to it earlier. You’ve got a lot of connections with the schools on the Hill.
DONAHUE: Yes. Well, I remembered from when I worked in my dad’s store, he would get calls constantly.
WEINHEIMER: He wouldn’t work in the schools. [Laughs]
DONAHUE: No, he did not work in the schools, but he got nonstop calls asking people to donate liquor for various different things.
WEINHEIMER: Events. Right.
DONAHUE: Events and benefits and nonprofit things and stuff. And I remember he used to do this really cool wine tasting every year. And the wine tasting, all the benefits would go to different charities and things like that.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: But he used to tell me, he’s like, I can’t give to everybody who asks because we would go broke or whatever.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: So I knew that I would get those calls. And I was, like, what do I want to do about those calls? And my son was in school. And my son had gone to— my son went to lots of schools on Capitol Hill. We never really found a good fit for him. And I knew from my stepson going to school in the Cluster School how much our local schools needed support of our community. Like, our schools really have come a very, very long way in the last 20 years. But when my stepson was going to the Cluster, I was very involved in the PTA [Parent Teacher Association]. I was very involved in, you know, my son going through the schools and different things. And I knew what I wanted to do with charitable donations was to support the schools.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And then, right when I opened up, this wonderful woman named Vanessa Ford, who was the science teacher at Maury Elementary School [1250 Constitution Avenue NE], had come in. She ran the science program at Maury and it was called the Think Tank. And it was all inquiry-based learning, this whole program at Maury. And it was a fascinating program. And one of the reasons my son ended up going to Maury because he fell in love with Vanessa Ford and this whole science program that she was doing. But she came in and she’s, like, oh, my gosh, your products are like the perfect thing for inquiry-based learning. Like, gaming is inquiry-based learning basically.
WEINHEIMER: Right, right.
DONAHUE: Because you’re asking questions. You’re thinking strategically. You’re thinking about thinking, metacognition, all of the stuff. And she didn’t know anything about games. And I really didn’t know all that much about education through games. So, we partnered up and wrote a grant request for the Capitol Hill Community Foundation to get a game library into Maury Elementary. I provided the game expertise, and she provided all the educational expertise. And part of the grant was for us to go into the school and teach the teachers how to use the games in their classrooms …
WEINHEIMER: Oh, as part of curriculum.
DONAHUE: … as part of learning curriculum. And I got fascinated by that. And I just realized how important it was, especially for different learners. Both my stepson and my son both had different issues, but really had challenges. Both of them had massive challenges in school because of learning differences. And I saw what the games were doing at Maury with helping students who had learning differences interact with the educational process in a completely different way than I have ever seen before. So I got really fascinated by that. So, this was the other part of that: We had so many people come in and tell me that I was crazy and that their children wouldn’t play these games that I had started a summer game program the first summer we were here.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And all of these Capitol Hill parents wanted their three-year-olds to play chess [Interviewer laughs] because, you know, your kid has to play chess to be successful in the world. And I am possibly the only game store owner in the history of game store owners who hates chess. I absolutely despise chess. And so all these parents were asking me for chess clubs, and I’m, like, I don’t want to do chess clubs. So, I came up with this idea for a strategic game club that I could sell to parents because it was like chess. But I said we’re going to go through the entire history of strategic games, and chess will be included, but it will not be the focal point. And we started teaching kids with tic-tac-toe, so, a general concept of that. And, then, we moved on to Nine Men’s Morris, which is an ancient game that has a tic-tac-toe-like element but involves a lot more strategy. And then we moved into modern abstract strategy games and chess, but other games that are similar to chess but are much easier for kids to grasp the concept of the strategy than chess. Because I don’t think kids should really play chess until eight or ten, because that’s when their actual strategic minds are developed enough to handle the strategy of something like chess.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: There are many, many, many other games that are better for younger kids to develop those skills. So, we did that, and the parents and kids who took that class in the summer absolutely loved it. And so they wanted to continue into the fall, but the kids were going to school and all the parents were working and nobody worked from home at that time. I said, well, I’ll continue it but we have to figure out some way to get your kids from school. Because at that time I only had, like, two employees. I’m like, I can’t go pick up these kids or whatever. They’re like, well, what if we get you into the school? So, the first schools we got into were Two Rivers [Two Rivers Public Charter School, 1227 Fourth Street NE], and Brent [Brent Elementary School, 301 North Carolina Avenue SE], and Maury, with my connections at those schools. And so we started running afterschool game programs in local schools. And then, some of the larger companies who ran afterschool programs in the area heard about it. And one year we got in with one of them and they put us in, like ten different schools. And that was really one of the explosions of Labyrinth. That’s why I had to hire more staff, because of all these school programs. And it was very wonky though, because, like, we only needed people in the afternoon but ...
WEINHEIMER: For certain time periods.
DONAHUE: Yeah. But most people don’t want to work a ten-hour-a-week job, so— The store then started growing and growing as we had extra staff. So that was the school program, and we were in, I think, 16 schools at the time of COVID. And we stopped it during COVID and we have not started it back up, really. But we are still doing a lot of game things. But what I realized is [the afterschool program] was a lot of work. And wasn’t very financially rewarding. But it made a whole lot of gamers in our neighborhood though, because, you know, the kids would play games and go …
WEINHEIMER: Right. So, you’re building your market.
DONAHUE: I did. I built my market. [Interviewer laughs] And I also built my staff because  … the kids would start in these things and come to camp, and now we hire them as camp— like, tons of the kids who started in our afterschool game program became camp counselors for us. And now that first batch is out of college.
WEINHEIMER: Wow, wow.
DONAHUE: And, you know, some of them have come back and worked here and there while they were going to school, especially in the summers and stuff. So it’s been really fun.
WEINHEIMER: Good.
DONAHUE: Yeah. I love that. I love our kids.
WEINHEIMER: And, then, you’ve got—or you used to have, I know—game nights and things where …
DONAHUE: We do. We run over 500 events a year. So, we still go out to lots of schools. We do community game nights at tons of schools, almost all of the schools on Capitol Hill and some that are even out further.
WEINHEIMER: Uh-huh.
DONAHUE: We do events in the store every day we’re open, pretty much. We do birthday parties. We do game classes for kids. But we also have tournaments for adults. We do Magic: The Gathering, which is a collectible card game, on Tuesdays and Fridays. We have role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons on Wednesdays and some other collectible card games on Wednesdays. And then every Thursday night is board game night. We also have relationships with Mr. Henry’s and Valor Brewpub [723 8th Street SE] , where we do Boozy Board Game Nights. Prior to COVID we used to do it at Atlas Brew Works [2052 West Virginia Avenue NE] and some other places. So we take all the games there and people drink beer and play games and it’s really fun. Yeah, we do a lot of that kind of stuff.
WEINHEIMER: It’s different from, you know, the Trivia Night that some bars do. Yeah.
DONAHUE: Yes. Yeah, it’s just board games. Yeah, all kinds of board games. We’ll take tons of board games down there, and then my staff is there to teach people how to play them. We work very closely with Capitol Hill Village [1355 E Street SE]. We have the mahjong group come every other week, and Capitol Hill Village has a board game group that comes every two weeks. And I love them. They’re so awesome. Yeah, I love Capitol Hill Village. I’m very excited about growing old on Capitol Hill and working with the Village.
WEINHEIMER: And aging in place.
DONAHUE: I love them. Yeah. And aging in place as much as I possibly can. But, yeah, I try very, very hard to support— I’m on the board of Eastern Market Main Street. I’m the head of the promotions committee. So I try very much— I really want to, even if I— eventually I want to retire from the store, and I’m hoping to sell it to other people who will continue to keep it going. But I really want to stay involved in helping our schools and helping our small businesses. The biggest focus that I’ve had lately is really trying to support small local businesses on Capitol Hill, and that’s kind of become more of my focus post-COVID than school stuff. I really think that what we and East City Bookshop and Leah and the local businesses offer our community is incredibly important.
WEINHEIMER: Absolutely.
DONAHUE: And getting more and more difficult to make it work. And so I really want to try and continue supporting that.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. You know, with rents going up …
DONAHUE: So many businesses have closed.
WEINHEIMER: … and, you know, city and other requirements, it’s got to be hard.
DONAHUE: It’s very difficult. I mean right now Washington, DC, has the highest minimum wage in the entire country. We also have the highest property tax of most places. Like, it is really hard to run a business on Capitol Hill or anywhere in DC right now. And so many things have closed post-COVID that it just makes me sad. I think that …
WEINHEIMER: Mm-hmm.
DONAHUE: You know, I mean, I love shopping online. I get it, I completely get it. The ease and everything. I do not shop with Amazon because I think Amazon is evil, but I love the convenience of it. But I think that the community— I mean, I also do almost all of my shopping, as much as I possibly can, local because I think the community— Me being able to walk into Hill’s Kitchen and Leah knowing that my husband has a vision issue and knowing exactly what she can recommend for a certain thing because of that is phenomenal. And me and us being able to do— like, last weekend was the big Eastern Market celebration about the strength of neighbors bringing the market back after the fire. Those vendors and all of that stuff makes our neighborhood what it is. And when we don’t have it anymore, I think the world will be a little sadder.
WEINHEIMER: Right. Oh, totally …
DONAHUE: But it’s getting harder and harder to do.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, I know.
DONAHUE: And I don’t think most of the world agrees with me. [Laughs]
WEINHEIMER: Well, yeah. On the one hand, I think people do agree in a sense. But it’s so easy, then, to get online…
DONAHUE: Except for when they shop on Amazon.
WEINHEIMER: Right, right.
DONAHUE: Mm-hmm.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. I see it with my neighbors who talk about, oh, you know, I just went down to Labyrinth and I picked something up for my kid and, you know, it’s a great store. And then I see piles of Amazon boxes in front of their house the next day. You know.
DONAHUE: Yeah. And all of the people who, you know, they’re all sad Radici closed and I’m, like, oh, when was the last time you bought something at Radici?
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: Oh, I don’t know. Three years ago.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. Exactly, right. Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: So, yeah. It’s sad, but …
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, it’s … Yeah. Everyone’s facing that and I don’t know how we’ll solve it except continue to publicize the work that you guys all do,
DONAHUE: I mean, I think, obviously, I do not want to exist if I can’t offer something to my customer. So, I think that it’s important for businesses to realize they need to adapt to be able to survive. I mean, that’s one of the reasons I win awards is because I’m constantly adapting things. Like, we built an online store in two weeks, because I had never wanted to sell online before. And now we have people who knew Labyrinth but live— because DC is very transient as well— So we have people who live all over the country who still shop with us because of what Labyrinth meant to them. But I can’t compete online. But what we offer is important to people.
WEINHEIMER: Well, you mentioned early that you looked at what books that the MLK Library had about setting up retail. And from what I know, having been a small business person myself, is that’s the personal touch. You described the relationship at Hill’s Kitchen, where Leah knows the customer, where you know your customers. And that’s what keeps people coming back. And the businesses that you’ve named, you know, all of them are led by people who are people persons. [Both laugh]
DONAHUE: Person peoples? Yeah. And, I think, I mean, one of the things that I think helps Labyrinth survive still is the community outreach, the knowledge of the customers, but our knowledge of our products, which I think is really lacking in all retail right now. And certainly online. I mean, you can read reviews and stuff. But you can’t walk in and say this is the kid …
WEINHEIMER: I’ve got a question.
DONAHUE: Yeah. This is the kid I need to buy something for, and these are all the particular issues. And my staff has played games with hundreds of children and can make a recommendation that most of the time is pretty spot on, which I think that— You know, our neighborhood, too, has higher net worth. They are all very intelligent. But that works. I don’t know that that would work anywhere else, right? Like, people want to support that. They want something easy. They want to be able to walk in and say— You know, I have moms that work at the Capitol, they call me and they’re, like, I have four birthday parties this weekend. [Interviewer laughs] These are the age of the kids. Just find me something, wrap it up, and then they call me as they drive past, and we go out and put it in their car. Like, I mean, our customer service is over the top.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And that’s what I teach all my staff. It’s incredibly important to me to have that. Extremely. Like, we always joke that we’re the Tiffany’s of game stores. Like, I want it—  I mean I even thought about having dads come in and me serve them champagne at Christmas [Interviewer laughs] and tell them here’s what your families need. Right? Like, that’s the level of customer service that I want us to have. But I think that it’s not as important to people anymore, the convenience of shopping online and buying things as cheap as they possibly can. Even if they’re Chinese knockoffs doesn’t matter to people. And I think it will be a sad world, but I think that’s where we’re going to end up. Unfortunately.
WEINHEIMER: For the larger population, you’re right. Yeah, it’s more convenient. It’s cheaper. But there’s still the need on the part of some people to make sure that it’s a quality product that you’re buying.
DONAHUE: Yeah.
WEINHEIMER: And that personal service …
DONAHUE: And not stolen IP [intellectual property] that was manufactured in China, but ...
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. Right, right.
DONAHUE: I mean, that happens with games all the time. Like, if you buy a game off Amazon, there is absolutely no assurance whatsoever that it’s actually coming from the actual publisher and that the quality is going to be the same quality as the game that’s published by the publisher.
WEINHEIMER: The original. Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: Yeah. There’s really, really bad problems with fraud on products all over. On both Temu and Amazon. They say that they do it but they don’t. I mean, third-party vendors can sell anything they want.
WEINHEIMER: Right, right. You’ve answered my questions.
DONAHUE: I know. I talk a lot.
WEINHEIMER: No, that’s fine. That’s great.
DONAHUE: It’s also, really— That’s I guess, why I’m good at retail. Because I love to talk to people. [Laughs]
WEINHEIMER: That’s right, that’s right.
DONAHUE: I love our customers. We have the best customers in the whole world. I mean, that’s what kept us going through 2020 really. We would not have made it without our customer base and without the other businesses on the Hill coming together. Like, I remember when I was secretly going out delivering all these things, we had at least five or six customers hand me checks for $500 or a thousand dollars or whatever. And, they’re like, Kathleen, just please, please, please take care of your staff. And, I mean, it was really hard because when everybody got sent home, like, a lot of my staff didn’t even have computers at home or internet or whatever. So, we had to— I went and delivered laptops to several different employees and got them set up with internet in their houses that was good enough to go online. And they were the ones that were from home putting all of our products online because we were— We had a phone bank the first week. We just had everybody answering the phones, taking orders as much as possible. And then it got overwhelming. So, we’re like, you have to send us an email and tell us to call you. And, then, we’ll call you back and take the orders and …
WEINHEIMER: Oh, I remember that. That’s right.
DONAHUE: Oh, god, it was horrible. It was insane.
WEINHEIMER: Yes, I remember that.
DONAHUE: We had to stop that when they made everybody go home. Like, we were allowed to be closed but in the store. And, then, the next week they said nobody is allowed to leave their houses. So, it was harder. We couldn’t get anybody into the store, so we couldn’t be near one another.
WEINHEIMER: Legally.
DONAHUE: Legally. I mean, I called Charles and said, I’m doing this. Charles Allen, the city councilman. [Laughs] Like, are y’all going to come arrest me? He’s, like, I don’t think so. Like, okay, good. So, yeah.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. We all pushed what we could do.
DONAHUE: Yeah. I mean, but like I said, the people—I mean, we had hundreds of people who bought gift cards. We got gift cards up online as fast as we could. And just tons of people just bought gift cards and never used them until— like, recently people are coming back and starting to use gift cards that they bought in 2020. But, like, that’s the only way we kept all of our staff on, and I paid full wages the entire time. But then, even the PPP [Paycheck Protection Program] loan—that was such a nightmare. And small businesses at first couldn’t get it. Like, they, you know, Wells Fargo and these big banks were just giving it to all these big people and the small businesses weren’t getting anything. And I posted on our Facebook page. I’m like, this is complete B.S. [bullshit], like, this is ridiculous. And I had people, staffers from Congress who had come here, that were, like, oh, my god, we have to help these businesses on Capitol Hill or whatever.  And so I had …
WEINHEIMER: Right. They did change the rules.
DONAHUE: Yeah. They changed all of the rules and they made, they forced Wells Fargo and a bunch of the other big businesses to really focus on smaller businesses.
WEINHEIMER: Small businesses, right.
DONAHUE: But, yeah, I had to testify with various senators and congressional people. I had all these people calling me after I posted on my Facebook, like, I can’t pay my staff. And I can’t get this loan that you said I’m supposed to use to pay my staff.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: And, really, if it weren’t for my location and some very high-powered people loving Labyrinth, I don’t know that that would have happened. So, it was incredible.
WEINHEIMER: Wow.
DONAHUE: Yeah. Sometimes you have to use your connections. [Laughs] But I kept everybody paid.
WEINHEIMER: You kept everyone paid, and you kept the customers happy.
DONAHUE: Yeah. And we’re still here, which I didn’t ...
WEINHEIMER: It’s a win all around.
DONAHUE: There were parts of 2020 and 2021 that I did not think we were going to be here anymore.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, I know.
DONAHUE: Yeah.
WEINHEIMER: Those were tough times.
DONAHUE: Yeah. But thank you.
WEINHEIMER: Thank you. Thank you for the interview. Thank you for being here.
DONAHUE: I still don’t think it’s historical but [Laughs]—or how useful [?], but I appreciate you.
WEINHEIMER: The tapestry of interviews and the different people— I told you I interviewed someone last year. She doesn’t live in the neighborhood. She has a program in the neighborhood people don’t know a whole lot about, but, hey, that’s a part of the neighborhood, too. You know, it’s …
DONAHUE: Yeah. I really loved, like, during COVID we weren’t doing the school stuff anymore because nobody was at school, so we started donating a bunch of games, and all of the money that we had for the teacher wish list fund that we have where we donate games to classrooms, we started donating that to all of the homeless shelters. Because a lot of the homeless shelters, they were all stuck there, especially with the kids. They had nothing to do. So we started giving out games to a lot of the neighborhood homeless shelters. So, that was really neat. And, yeah. So, I think our community is amazing and I love it very much. And I’m glad that I’m a part of it. It’s been my favorite place I’ve ever lived.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah. Yeah. We moved to Washington because I had a one-year job. And fortunately, someone at the agency that I knew from another life suggested Capitol Hill would be ideal for us. And that was 1980. [Interviewee laughs] The one-year project ended, obviously, a long time ago and, you know, we just fell in love with the neighborhood and decided to stay.
DONAHUE: Well, my husband got a job at Fannie Mae, and he’s still there. So. He’s been there now for 22 years or something like that. But, so. And I’ve been here for 14. So we’ll see. But I don’t feel like that’s very historic. I feel like Capitol Hill is so old that, yeah. I mean …
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, but not everyone …
DONAHUE: It is very transient though. So.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: I think that was one of the weirdest findings that I found. Because growing up in my dad’s liquor store, he had customers from the time he opened until the time he closed over tens of years. Like, he was there—I don’t even remember—35 years or something. But he had customers that were [there] that whole time.
WEINHEIMER: Right.
DONAHUE: I feel like every year, half of our customers move.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah, yeah.
DONAHUE: So, I have to do a much different marketing …
WEINHEIMER: You’re always promoting.
DONAHUE: Yeah. It’s a much different marketing perspective than somebody who has a business in a smaller town where the population grows up and kind of stays there.
WEINHEIMER: Yeah.
DONAHUE: Our population is so transient that we have— You know, I feel like half of the neighborhood moves in.
WEINHEIMER: It just means you get to meet more people.
DONAHUE: It does. Which I love. [Interviewer laughs] That’s great. I love meeting people. I love getting to know their stories, like, especially all the tourists that come in here. I love knowing where are you from and why are you here and what did you like best about DC? And it’s so great. That’s my favorite thing.
WEINHEIMER: Good.
DONAHUE: Mm-hmm. And playing games with people. Seeing the kids. Like, we have summer camp going on now. Seeing the kids all excited to come to Labyrinth to play board games and have the blast. And they just have so much fun. And seeing them laugh. Or when we go to a community game night at a local school and seeing all the families spending time with each other, not on their phones and playing together. It means the world to me. I love that. That’s what keeps me going, I think.
WEINHEIMER: It’s all because of a traffic jam.
DONAHUE: [Laughs] All because of a traffic jam. Fourteenth Street Bridge, I still hate it.
WEINHEIMER: [Laughs] Join the crowd.
DONAHUE: Well, anyway. Thank you very much.
WEINHEIMER: Thank you.

END OF INTERVIEW

Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Kathleen Donahue Interview, June 26, 2024

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