Ted Lerner did not lunch at the Palm yesterday, the day after he and his family became owners of the Washington Nationals.
“Wouldn’t know Lerner if I tripped over him,” Tommy Jacomo told me as I was leaving the restaurant.
Unlike James Carville, Paul Begala and other usual suspects who need to see and be seen every day at the Palm, Lerner probably has rarely been to the downtown steak and fish joint.
Lerner, on the other hand, was a regular at Duke’s, as in Duke Ziebert’s. On most days, Duke would greet Ted at the door and walk him to his table in the corner, until Duke closed down in the late 1990s.
Therein lies a metaphor: In being a Duke regular, Lerner was a member of a homegrown crowd of businessmen who came up together in D.C. schools, played together on the sandlots, and competed together in the local business game: buying and selling real estate.
In that regard, the Lerner family getting the Nationals is a victory for hometown Washington and a testament to Ted Lerner’s persistence; he first tried to land a team for D.C. in 1985.
“Ted Lerner is the first homegrown owner of a Washington baseball team, ever,” says Charlie Brotman, who should know because he’s the homegrown fan of all fans.
Did Brotman go to Roosevelt High with Lerner? Yes and no.
Says Brotman: “He was two years ahead of me.”
Their classmates in the 1940s included local boys such as basketball legendRed Auerbach and Abe Pollin, owner of the Wizards and Capitals.
Lerner represents a slice of Washington that is not well-known or well-advertised. He came up with people like Jimmy Moshovitis, a Greek kid whose father owned a luncheonette downtown. Ted and Jimmy were in the same class at Roosevelt.
“We didn’t have time to play sports,” Jimmy told me. “We had to work after school.”
Moshovitis got into the real estate game in downtown D.C. by buying corner lots that would become essential pieces in larger developments. Lerner got his start in the suburbs, first in Silver Spring and Bethesda, and then in Virginia, where he wound up buying much of the land under Tysons Corner.
But to understand Ted Lerner’s local roots, it’s instructive to go back to Duke Ziebert. Duke opened his first restaurant in 1950, and it thrived along Connecticut Avenue, just below L Street.
In the late 1970s, Lerner and his partners bought the corner and tore down the buildings. Duke was forced to close. When Lerner built International Square at the corner of Connecticut and L, he made a space on the second floor for a restaurant. When it was complete, he called Duke Ziebert and asked him to reopen the new Duke’s, which he did in 1983, giving Ted Lerner a club house to come to on many days, until Duke closed again for good in the late 1990s.
If Lerner names one of the eateries at the new stadium “Duke’s,” you’ll know why.
Harry Jaffe has been covering the Washington area since 1985. E-mail him at [email protected]
