Aunt Bec and the Metro

My Aunt Bec was the little old lady who wouldn’t sell.

Rebecca Tedder was my grandfather Jacob Lenox’s sister. She was my mother’s aunt, and my great aunt. She owned a large property on Halpine Road in Rockville, Maryland – on The Pike – as the locals called it. Her house had an apartment upstairs, and she would rent out the unit to tenants. Aunt Bec was all of four-foot-six, if that, but she towered above everyone as a take-no-gruff landlord. I can still hear her calling me out for misbehaving when I’d visit. “Baw-brah,” she’d holler with a southern drawl, elongating my name to let me know she meant business. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, really. She just wasn’t used to having kids around. 

In my memories of her, I thought of her as being 90 years old. But this wisp of thing would hop on a ride-on mower and cut the lawn around her house, so surely, she must have been younger when I knew her.

Aunt Bec had two other brothers, Theodore (or Tony) and Henry, who also lived in the area. Her parents – my great grandparents, Anna and Benjamin Lenovitz – had emigrated to the United States from Kovna, Lithuania at the time of the Russian pogroms in the late 1880’s. They came in on a ship through the port of Baltimore, which was essentially the New York of the south. Anna and Benjamin were among the thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants who settled in neighborhoods around the Port of Baltimore. Eventually, they spread out and moved north into Maryland just outside of Washington, D.C.

By 1898, Anna and Benjamin built a general store on Halpine Road, where the Rockville Pike, the railroad, and the trolley lines converged. This was an ideal location for itinerant travelers to stop to fill up with gasoline, and for locals to gather to catch up on news and gossip. Basically, a community spot at the crossroads. It was called the Halpine-Lenovitz General Store, and my great grandparents were the proprietors. In an old photo, you can see that it was originally built as a house, and they lived in an apartment above the store. My Aunt Bec was born a few years later in 1902.

The store sold gas, food, and sundries, and had an ice cream counter. As a girl, my mother, Marilyn would travel by train from her home in New Jersey and visit Aunt Bec. They would go to the store together, and my mother would help scoop ice cream out of deep tubs.

According to an historical record of 1915-2012, from Reed Brother’s Dodge (which well into the 20th century was situated on the site of the store): “tradition has it that during the days of ‘Local Option’ when the sale of alcoholic beverages were forbidden in [Montgomery] county, the men of Rockville traveled to the Halpine store to gather on the broad front porch and sip its special brand of “coffee” served in tin cups.”

Many travelers would pass through the area and stop off at the store to rest from their journeys. This included Orthodox Jews who wanted to shed their obvious religious trappings that made them stand out as foreigners on their way to assimilating as new Americans. Travelers would leave behind their prayer tefillin, tallit (fringed prayer shawls), and other religious items; the store amassed a lost-and-found collection of Jewish prayer paraphernalia.

Rebecca Lenovitz married Robert (Roy) Tedder and they bought the Halpine Road house, which was just down the road from the store. Roy was drafted into the U.S. Air Force towards the end of World War II and then, while still on active military duty, he had a heart attack and died in 1947, leaving his wife a widow. Roy was only 36. As a World War II veteran and soldier who died in action, Roy was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with military honors. My Aunt Bec never remarried, and remained in the house.

In the early 1980’s, the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority that oversaw the Metro for Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, was extending the Metro’s Red Line northwest into Maryland. As part of a 7-mile, four-station expansion, they were building a new Metro station for the Twinbrook stop. Aunt Bec’s backyard ran right up against the land where they wanted to build the parking lot. 

The transit people approached her and asked if she’d sell her property. “Nope,” said Aunt Bec. She didn’t want to move, or sell the land. They kept approaching her, and each time she said, “no.” With each attempt, they raised the offering price for the land. It took years. Finally, the Metro people offered the right price. Aunt Bec took the offer, and sold a tiny corner of her back yard to the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority for a very fine price per square inch, thank you very much. The Twinbrook Station Metro stop opened for general use in December, 1984.

Aunt Bec died in 1992, when she was exactly 90 years old. Because her husband, Roy, was buried at Arlington, Rebecca Tedder also received a military funeral and is buried alongside her husband in Arlington National Cemetery.

She included my mother, my brother and me in her will, and we all had the Metro Transit authority to thank for Aunt Bec’s generosity.

Aunt Bec was a character, and I loved to visit her. While I was at college in Washington D.C. (where my grandfather Jacob had gone to engineering school), I would take the Metro up to Rockville so I could go to her house. I loved her quirky personality and her feistiness. She was a tiny woman, who carried a lot of weight and authority. 

The Metro people had no idea who they were dealing with.