Gray is a former journalist who grew up on Capitol Hill — and, at 93, she has just published a book about her childhood experiences in early 20th century Washington, growing up above her family’s funeral home. She hosted two book signings last week for her memoir, “301 East Capitol.”
What inspired you to write this book?
I didn’t consciously sit down and say, ‘I’m going to write a book.’ All the material I had never used — it was here in my head and it all came together. When you get to be 90, you get a lot of material into you. … It was as if I were interviewing someone, but it was me. It was a very easy thing to write, but technically it was difficult because I don’t have a computer. So I wrote it with two fingers on a manual typewriter.
Can you tell me a bit about the book?
It’s kind of a Capitol Hill family story — both sides of the family tree extended only for about 10 blocks on Capitol Hill and not very many of them moved. My great-grandfather was the one who originally bought 301 East Capitol shortly after the Civil War. There’s a scene in there about his coming to the capital, wounded from Antietam.
What was it like growing up on East Capitol Street in the 1920s?
There were a lot of street theater people. There was a man with a pony, and we’d get our pictures taken on it. There was a monkey that came with an organ grinder. On Eighth Street, which was my grandmother’s home, right around the corner they had a lot of street vendors — there was Tom the huckster, and the ash man, and the trash man, and the ragman, and the iceman, and the washerwoman.
