Deborah Edge, M.D.

Interview with Deborah Edge, M. D.
Interview Date:   April 22, 2024
Interviewer: Randy Norton
Transcriber: Betsy Barnett
Editor: Bernadette McMahon

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

START OF INTERVIEW
NORTON: Okay. Yes, it seems to be working.
EDGE: Yay! [Laughs]
NORTON: All right. I am Randy Norton. I am interviewing Deborah Edge at her home, 909 Massachusetts Avenue NE, Washington, DC, and it is April 22, 2024. Good morning.
EDGE: Good morning.
NORTON: Or it’s actually afternoon.
EDGE: It’s afternoon, but that’s okay.
NORTON: Okay. [Laughs] All right. Where are you from originally?
EDGE: I’m from the Chicago area. I was born in a suburb called River Forest and I moved when I was about ten with my family to another suburb called Winnetka. W-I-N-N-E-T-K-A. [Droning noise grows in background]
NORTON: Isn’t there a jazz song …
EDGE: Many people—yes, there was a song.
NORTON: “Big Noise” …
EDGE: “Big Noise from Winnetka.” They moved there because of the schools, like many parents. I think my mother really wanted to live in ritzier Winnetka, too. On the North Shore, right on Lake Michigan. Am I talking loud enough.
NORTON: Yeah. It’s just we have the …
EDGE: Oh, yeah. The airplanes.
NORTON: But that’s fine.
EDGE: I keep thinking that I have to be closer to this. This is the mic so it doesn’t really matter. So, we moved to Winnetka and I grew up in—so it’s a suburb on the North Shore of Chicago. It’s got a very well-known high school named New Trier High School. And, so, that’s where I lived. Not a diverse neighborhood, let’s say that. Very WASPy. [Laughs]
NORTON: Did you go to New Trier?
EDGE: Oh, I went to New Trier. I went to New Trier. Music was a huge part of my high school. That was my major extracurricular activity starting in music. And we were all playing instruments. I have a brother who’s a year and a half younger than me and another brother who’s five years younger. But David, the one closest to me, and I were playing in an orchestra by junior high school. And David had started the violin when he was in about fourth grade, so I guess I was in about fifth grade. And it was even clear by junior high school that it was likely he was going to go on and play the violin, which he did. That’s what his job is, as a violinist. And I was playing piano. And, you know, in junior high, not high school, but in junior high, you can play piano with the orchestra. And somewhere around sixth grade, the conductor, who was a good friend of my mother’s—my mother was quite a good musician—and Milton and she had a conversation. And he said, “Ah, Mary, we have got to get Deborah onto an instrument because, if you want her to play in an orchestra in high school, she needs an instrument”, you know. “She’s not good enough on the piano. [Both laugh] She’s never going to be a pianist.” Well, it was definitely true. And, then, Milton said, “and I need a bass player.”
NORTON: And Milton was the …
EDGE: Milton is the orchestra conductor. He was the head of music in the Winnetka public schools. He was brilliant. He was one of the first people to—he studied with Suzuki. In fact, was one of the first people to teach Suzuki in the Chicago area. And his daughter was in my class. She’s a cellist. She’s still an extremely good friend of mine. And, so, my mother, bless her soul, said okay. [Both laugh]
NORTON: So, it wasn’t your choice. It was hers.
EDGE: No, it wasn’t my choice. And he said, “And I can have her playing in two weeks.” You know. So, I used a school instrument; I’m sure I used the school instrument. And they got me a teacher, Mr. Greenbaum, who was young. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts he was in his 20s. I mean, he seemed old enough to me but I bet _______ thinking about it … And, sure enough—string bass parts for orchestra in junior high school are pretty rudimentary, like long whole notes, open strings. [Laughs] So, sure enough, he was terrific, he was great. Well, turns out he was also the history teacher at New Trier or one of the history teachers. He was one of the crackerjack history teachers at New Trier. And I went on, at New Trier my freshman year, to be in a special class for gifted kids—which is when I met Maygene [Daniels]—that was a combined social studies and history and English course. So, we met a lot. We wrote really interesting papers and he was one of these lecturers. And you sat there and you were like, aah, that’s so cool. He was so good, you know. So, he morphed into my history teacher. By the time I went to high school, I had a different bass teacher. So, then I grew up in Winnetka and, you know, spent my four years in high school, mostly my extra was Girl Scouts, good old Girl Scouts, and music. Played in the senior orchestra all four years. I was principal bass by junior year. My brother was concert master by his sophomore or junior year, I can’t remember which. I think maybe even sophomore year. And Maygene Daniels, then Maygene Frost, was first clarinetist.
NORTON: I was not aware you knew Maygene from way back.
EDGE: Yes. Maygene and I met the first day of high school because we forgot our gym suits. [Laughs] If you remember those gym suits.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: I don’t know what happened to us but we—and, then, it turned out that we were in every class. We were in this combined English-social studies class together. We were in Latin together. That might have been the end of it. But we were in a lot of classes with each other. And we were both Girl Scouts. And we were both nerds. So, you know. Total dorks. [Laughs] We didn’t know how to be bad.
NORTON: [Laughs] Ah, yes. So, when did you graduate from high school?
EDGE: In 1966.
NORTON: Me, too.
EDGE: Yeah. We’re both of the same age. So, we, yeah. So, I toddled on. You know, besides the orchestra, the school performed two musicals a year. The big one in the spring. I’ve played most every Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical. And they usually did one in the summer, so I did all that. On my bass. And, of course, then we played a lot of classical music. And, you know, back in those days, schools had, in the Midwest, every day the last period of the day was orchestra, for 45 minutes.
NORTON: Really?
EDGE: Every single day you played in the orchestra, if you were in it.
NORTON: Well, what did the other kids do? I’m just curious.
EDGE: Oh, well, there were other classes but, I mean, if you were in that particular orchestra it was kind of there was other orchestras and band, you know, but certainly not all day. But it was the opportunity to play every single day, besides take lessons at the school. And my parents bought me what was considered a reasonable bass. And it was really crummy but I didn’t realize that for about 20 years. [Laughs]
NORTON: And, then, after high school, what?
EDGE: So, then, I had—you know, real early on it was clear that I was going to probably go into science or [medical school]. This is where we go to legend, or the story is, though I actually remember enough of it to think it’s probably true, that actually in elementary school, because when we moved, I went to the elementary school for fourth, you know, I was like ten. I think I was in fourth grade.
NORTON: That was when you moved to Winnetka.
EDGE: In Winnetka. We had moved to Winnetka and I went to the local elementary school that I could walk to. And, apparently, I came home, I had read a book about Florence Nightingale and I announced to my mother that I thought I would be a nurse. And she looked at me and said, you’d make a terrible nurse. You like to tell people what to do. Be a doctor. Which [Laughs] was (1) true but was a total amazing statement for a mother to make to her daughter in the 50s.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: Or early …
NORTON: Yeah, it would have been 50s.
EDGE: In the 50s, late 50s. In the late 50s, to tell their daughter—most of my friends, most of the women friends in medical school, of which there were not many because there were not many, their parents had actively discouraged them to going to medical school and were not providing them any financial support and did not think that was a correct profession for a woman, etc. So, I was really, really fortunate.
NORTON: Yeah. So, where did you go to college?
EDGE: So, then, I decided, however, that I wanted to get out of Chicago, so I applied to colleges on the west coast to the east coast. And my parents supported it. They weren’t against it. I ended up going to Tufts University which was in—Jackson College, I think the application was technically to Jackson College. It became officially [Tufts] University in Boston. And that was great. Yeah. I had a good time. And I, again, I mostly, being a dork, studied.
NORTON: What was your major?
EDGE: I had a double major in biology and chemistry. [Laughs]
NORTON: I’m impressed.
EDGE: Was it biology or physics? Well, anyway, it was like senior year I realized one more—I think it was biology and physics come to think of it, because I realized I could take one more physics course and I would have a double major. It was like, oh, well, what the heck! Take one more. And, yeah. So, basically, I did studying and lived with basically the same three other women the whole time. We were sort of next door roommates freshman year and then we on purpose ended up close to each other the next two years in dorms and senior year they finally let women live off campus. And we were off, so fast. Back in those days.
NORTON: Yes. Well, it must have been something because I can remember how restrictive it was for women in college. I was at the University of Virginia. We didn’t have women. [Both laugh] That’s another story by the way. Not until the year I graduated. So.
EDGE: Well, the most egregious thing I remember—I mean, boys weren’t allowed in your room. You know, on Sundays they could be in your room with the door open. All that garbage. But the worst was that the library closed at 11:00 but women had to be back in the dorm by 10:30. [Laughs] So. But I had a good time. I joined—I guess my major social outlet other than, you know, a couple of friends was the Tufts Mountain Club and went hiking and rock climbing. I did a little rock climbing and decided that wasn’t really for me. But a lot of hiking and rock climbing in the White Mountains. And skiing.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Yeah.  I was skiing.
NORTON: Were you still doing music at Tufts? Or Jackson College?
EDGE: No, no. So, what happened at Tufts is I went to Tufts and I joined “the orchestra”. What they did not have is they did not have a good fine arts department. And …
NORTON: A good what department?
EDGE: Fine arts department.
NORTON: Oh, right. Okay.
EDGE: And the orchestra was terrible. I mean, I had taken my bass with me and all, but the orchestra was awful and I quit. I just stopped playing. I was too busy with my courses and things, you know. And I just quit playing. And, in fact, I didn’t play the bass again until the late 80s.
NORTON:  Okay.
EDGE: I didn’t play it again. That and the horrible Latin teacher who would come in and—I had to take one year of language so I decided to take a fifth year of Latin. And my last year of Latin at New Trier had been superb. This woman, Dr. Duda, taught. We read the first six books of the Aeneid as this piece of literature. It was so good.
NORTON: How do you spell …
EDGE: Aeneid? A-E-N- …
NORTON: No, no, no, no. The doctor.
EDGE: Duda? D-U-D-A. And she always wore blue. Her hair was tinted blue, her stockings were tinted blue, but she was terrific. So, then, I get to Tufts and the Latin teacher was very perfunctory and uninteresting and he would come in almost every day and look out the window and go [Sighs] “There’s Harvard.” [Laughs]
NORTON: Really? With a big sigh like that.
EDGE: With a big sigh like that. Obviously, we were all in the wrong place. Anyway. So, yeah. So, I graduated and I applied to medical school and I applied in the Chicago area. Did I apply to Tufts? I think I did. But I really wanted to try something new again and I ended up at Northwestern University downtown, which the campus is right by the water tower in …
NORTON: Was this just the medical school campus? Is that where it is?
EDGE: Yeah. The medical and the law school are right next to each other down[town], yeah, very close to the water tower on the lakefront. And, yeah.
NORTON: So, you went straight through, after graduating college.
EDGE: I went straight through. I went straight through. That was before everybody took time off.
NORTON: What was med school like?
EDGE: Oh, it was a lot of work.
NORTON: I bet it was.
EDGE: [Laughs] A lot of work. Freshman year I lived in the dorm. I had a roommate who I haven’t spoken to since, who was in this six year program where she came out of high school and in six years she got her bachelor’s and her M.D. One of these super “brilliant” people, but socially a bit inept. And she had this boyfriend who was a couple of years older than us, also in medical school, and she would kind of commandeer the room at night. I would come home from going out in my not very interesting social life, like going to the opera with my parents and then playing cards with the boys until midnight and come in and find that, you know—she wouldn’t put a note on the door. I’d just start opening the door and hear scuttling and I’d go away and I’d go back to the men’s, the floor where my men friends lived, and sleep in one of their rooms. [Laughs]
NORTON: Well, other than your mother’s advice, why did you decide on medicine?
EDGE: Well, why did I—you know, I don’t know that I ever sat down and thought about it a whole lot. It was what I would—it’s interesting, it’s very interesting. I liked working with people and it was what I was—there was a lot about it was what I was going to do, that I was kind of programmed to go to medical school. And a couple of times during college I threatened to go to other majors. One time I came home, it might have been the middle of freshman year, I came home and said, you know, maybe I’ll be an English major instead. [Laughs] My mother said “What? Why?” I said because it’s so easy. All you have to do is write papers and it doesn’t matter what you say. [Laughing] You don’t have to go take labs and you don’t have to memorize the Krebs citric acid cycle.
NORTON: Or any of that kind of stuff. All right. You’d better spell that for our transcriber.
EDGE: K-R-E-B-S.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: Citric, C-I-T-R-I-C, cycle.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Which, we’re now in the late 60s, was a—oh, no, we’re now, by medical school, we’re in the early 70s. But that was hot stuff. That was new.
NORTON: What was the Krebs citric cycle, since I don’t know?
EDGE: Oh, the Krebs citric acid cycle was the cycle where proteins come in and develop energy called—so, ADP comes in and various enzymes transform it to this, to that. I can’t do the whole thing anymore. And they go out and other things come in and it gets transformed into ATP, which is the active component. So, it’s a cycle of energy that happens with subatomic, you know, with molecules that had just been defined. I mean, DNA had just been—that was in the late 50s, I think. But, you know, we were just really getting into that molecular level of biology. And it’s one of these things that just doesn’t make—you don’t just look at it and go, oh, that makes sense. So, you’re doing just rote memorization and I had sort of one of those moments in the library one night when I was looking and I went, oh, I get it. And, then, it was easy to remember it. Except I don’t remember it now. It’s not one of those things you use every day.
NORTON: No? Right. [Both laugh]
EDGE: So. I threatened that. That didn’t last very long, fortunately. And, then, you know, I did not major—most pre-meds, many pre-meds, major in, like, biology and zoology and they took comparative anatomy and I didn’t do any of that. I majored in botany and chemistry and physics. So, I was in a little bit of a different field. And I did a lot of biochemistry and the biochemistry teacher I had was really, really great. He spent some time trying to convince me that I really ought to go into research. But probably what was his failing is he said things to me like women shouldn’t be doctors. You should do research. And I’d go arrrrr. [Laughs] In fact, I had a boyfriend in about the middle of college who was left over from high school …
NORTON: He’d gone to high school with you.
EDGE: Yeah. We’d gone to high school together. We had not dated in high school. We had dated in college. But he was in college in Michigan and, so, we had phone calls, you know, on these pay phones in the middle of the dorm.
NORTON: Which was an interesting thing.
EDGE: Well, yeah, yeah, that’s another thing that we don’t do anymore. And one night we were talking, you know, talking about the future, I don’t know, whatever, and he wanted to get married and I—well, you know, I’m going—and he finally said, “Well, I’ll let you go to medical school. “And a red light went off in my mind! I said, “You’re toast.” [Laughs] That was the end. Enough sense to say you’re not marrying somebody who will let you go to medical school. That’s not the right attitude. [Both laugh]
NORTON: Well, you know, as you’ve alluded to and, I mean, this must have been an issue back then, there weren’t very many women in medical school back then.
EDGE: No, no, there were not.
NORTON: There weren’t very many women in law school when I was there.
EDGE: No, there weren’t. No. It was like ten percent.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: You know. In my medical school class, there were 160 people in my class and 16 were women. It was—right.
NORTON: Was it particularly hard being a woman in medical school or …?
EDGE: Oh, most of the time, no. I mean, most of the time it was just—you know, I was—if you’ve already majored in the sciences you’re used to being one of the less—you know, it wasn’t a—you know, all my friends were guys, sort of, most of them. There were a couple of women. And, you know, when you’ve only got 16 people to choose from, you’re not best friends with everybody. Yeah, you know, I don’t consider medical school as being hard because I was a woman. It was hard but …
NORTON: But you indicated that a lot of your women classmates …
EDGE: They had a hard time just because they were not encouraged by their families to do it.
NORTON: Right, yeah.
EDGE: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But they all persevered and, as far as I know, did well.
NORTON: All right. Anything else you remember significant about medical school that … That’s all right. We can …
EDGE: No. You know, although I had lived in a dorm for one year and that was horrible and so, then, I got an apartment. I was supposed to roommate with one of my women colleagues but I think her finances fell apart. I think that’s what happened. So, I ended up renting, living in this place, this dump, by myself. It wasn’t a real dump but it was right on the edge of Rush—I don’t know how well you know Chicago, but Rush and Pearson. It was right on the edge of the—what’s the right name for the sex [Laughs]—all the prostitute area.
NORTON: The red light district?
EDGE: Red light district, yes. So, walking to and from was interesting sometimes, but it was actually perfectly safe. I lived through it anyway. I could tell you lots of stories but nothing of great import.
NORTON: All right. After med school, then what?
EDGE: Well, so, after med school, you go into your internship. And this is where my Capitol Hill story begins because I knew that my parents, my father, would pay for me to go interview for my internship just about anywhere I wanted to. So, I interviewed on the west coast. And, once again, I’m, okay, I’ve been in Chicago for a while, time to …
NORTON: Move on.
EDGE: Move on. So, I interviewed on the west coast. But Maygene and Steve had just gotten married. They got married in—so, Maygene and I had stayed in touch. When we graduated from high school, her family moved to Detroit. So, she did not come home to Chicago. She went home to Detroit. So, we didn’t see each other that often but we wrote letters. [Laughs]
NORTON: Another thing of the past.
EDGE: Periodically.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: Not a lot. And we did see each other once in a while. And I went to their wedding. And we all had a great time. Went to the wedding with one of my other friends from high school, who I’m still friends with, who’s very uptight and conservative. And we get to the wedding and there was a, the best men, all the men were part of the party the night before in the bar afterwards and we were—they invited the women to come down and join them. And I said, “Well, Chris, there’re some really nice looking guys down there. We ought to go down there.” She—oh, no, no. I have to get my sleep in this little—. You’re nuts. [Laughs] So, I went down there and I ultimately dated three.
NORTON: Three of the guys who were in the wedding.
EDGE: Yeah.
NORTON: Now, where was their wedding?
EDGE: Their wedding was in Detroit, in Birmingham, Michigan. So, I knew that I could come visit Maygene and Steve here in Washington if I interviewed at the Washington hospitals. So, I set up interviews at GW [George Washington University] and Georgetown [University] and it must have been in October, it must have been in the fall. And it was a beautiful fall day when I came. And I stayed with them and they already owned their first house on Capitol Hill, on Fifth [near] East Capitol Street, just off of East Capitol Street. That little tiny house. You probably know it. You walk along down Fifth Street. There’s a little tiny, I think it used to be pink, and it’s like two little stories with a driveway. It’s very different. And I really liked DC Besides liking the program and all that. But, you know, there are a lot of good programs across the country. It doesn’t really matter that much which one you choose. [Laughs] So, I really liked DC I really liked the program at GW, I don’t think Georgetown as much. And we had a great weekend. I got to do such fun things as chipping the paint off of their radiator one day.
NORTON: Another very Capitol Hill thing to do.
EDGE: Very Capitol Hill thing to do. So, when it came time to rank where I wanted to go, I put GW at the top and I got my top choice. You know the ranking thing. So.
NORTON: Yes. I mean, I don’t know it well but I’ve heard of it. Yes.
EDGE: Well, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, you rank your top choices, they rank their top choices, and they start matching them up, and you pretty much have to go where they send you. But it wasn’t a problem. So, then it came time to find an apartment to move to. And, of course, where did I look? Yeah, I don’t think I looked anywhere but Capitol Hill. So, I came out in the spring. It turned out to be another beautiful day. And I rented an apartment here on the Hill.
NORTON: So, when was that?
EDGE: That would be 1974, the spring of ’74. Yeah.
NORTON: Okay. Sounds right.
EDGE: Yeah, spring of ’74. And, you know, I wandered around. I still remember some of the buildings where I didn’t take an apartment. You know, a couple of them were close calls but I ended up in—I don’t remember what the address is—6-something. It’s on the Mass [Massachusetts] Ave, the building that’s now condominiums. Stanton Park Manors, right across from Capitol Hill Hospital then, there was a big empty parking lot where they’ve now put townhouses. So, I ended up with a nice little one-bedroom apartment there, looking over Mass Ave. It was very nice. It worked out very well. Moved in just before July 1 and started my internship. But I wouldn’t have necessarily moved to Capitol Hill at all if it weren’t for Maygene and Steve, because they were the only people I knew here in DC really.
NORTON: All right. What was it like?
EDGE: Yeah.
NORTON: I mean, you’re obviously working as an intern, which takes up a fair amount of your time, I suspect.
EDGE: Well, yeah, basically all my time. [Laughs] So, well, so, I, you know, I lived there and it takes up most of my time. I’ve always been a biker. I used to bike to school even as a, you know—I told you I was a dork. I biked to school in high school when nobody else did. Well, you know, it was an hour walk, a 20-minute bike ride. And you could do public transportation and that took forever. And, if you were really rich, your parents bought you a car. But, not me. So, I had not biked in Boston because there’s too many hills, but I had or obtained a bike here and I actually biked down to GW a lot during my year. Like I got them to give me a place I could lock my bike up overnight where it was relatively safe. And I drove. By then I had a little orange VW [Volkswagen] bug that I did weasel out of my parents when I did a rotation in Chicago at Cook County Hospital in pulmonary medicine. And my mom—I think it was my mom because she was, like, you can’t do that. How are you going to get there? Well, I’ll take the El [elevated train] and I’ll walk. [Laughs] It’s in a bad area of—
NORTON: So, was that when you were still in med school?
EDGE: That was when I was in medical school, so that was, like, that was ’72 or so or ’73. But, once given a car, you don’t want to—the plan was they were going to give me this car and then they were going to give it to my brother for some reason. But I didn’t want to give it back so my father bought David another VW bug and I had—so, I had the car. So, I drove some of the time and I biked some of the time, and that was—biking’s a great way to …
NORTON: Well, particularly around here.
EDGE: Well, yeah. I mean, it was just a great way to get rid of some of the tension. So. But really long hours. I mean, you go in at seven in the morning and even when you’re not on call you often don’t get home until seven at night. And you’re on call every third night for the entire year. So, I had a little bit of a social life in the fall. Let’s see, somebody got married. Oh, my brother got married in the early fall.
NORTON: Where was that?
EDGE: Oh, it was in Long Island.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: It was on Long Island. And somewhere along the line I met this gentleman who was a friend of a cousin of mine and we went out for quite, you know, for two or three months in the fall, maybe more. And he was fun to go out with because he was really rich. So, he would take me to nice places or to shows. But he had a problem. He could never remember when I was on call. And, so, he kept asking me out when I—you know, when you’re on call, you’ve been on call that night. The next night you’re totally wiped. You just have to go home and go to bed. Then you get up and go to work the next day. The next night, you’re modestly functional and you can do something. And, then, the next night you’re on call again. So, once every three weekends you have a weekend where you’re on call Friday night and you get off on Saturday at noon, if you’re lucky. And Sundays we covered for each other, so, you didn’t have to go into work until Monday morning. That was big. [Laughs] You got a day and a half. But that just kept churning the whole year. So, around October, November, I met Neal [Mann] who lived in the apartment next to me.
NORTON: How did you meet Neal?
EDGE: Well, he knocked on my door one day. He’d obviously been watching me. [Both laugh] I guess I was—and he introduced himself and we started talking and he asked me out to, you know, and …
NORTON: Was he better at understanding your schedule?
EDGE: Oh, well, so that’s the motto. Neal was the first person I ever dated who could count to three. He’s a computer programmer. He can go one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. He never missed.
NORTON: So, he always had the right day.
EDGE: He always had the right day. And, so, he told me, you know, we’re going to go to this restaurant, a steakhouse out at Seven Corners—which in those days was a long way away because there was no Route 66—and it’s really good. It was November because it was getting cold and he said, but I have a VW camper and it doesn’t have very good heat, so dress warmly. [Laughs] So, I did. So, we drove out there, it was like 45 minutes in those days. We get all the way out there and they were closed on Mondays. So, we ended up at some diner but we had a great time and, so, we really, really started going out and a few weeks later I remember sitting in the apartment and talking to Neal and, you know, blah, blah, blah, having a great time. Except that I had a date with this other guy that evening and I finally said, “You know, Neal, I have to get dressed to go out.” And he just sat there on the couch and said “Okay. Go ahead and get dressed.” So, I went in the bedroom and I got dressed. Closed the door. We weren’t intimate yet. [Laughs] I don’t think. So, I got dressed and I came out, you know, and the doorbell rang. I said, “Well, I have to go.” “Okay.” So, he went to his apartment and I went out on this date and I came home. I thought, oh, this is nuts. [Laughs] I bagged the other guy. Pretty much.
NORTON: You bagged the other guy?
EDGE: Yeah, I bagged the other guy pretty soon.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: So, yeah. It’s pretty hard to have a very vigorous social life in medical school. But, so, yeah, my remembrance of the internship is meeting Neal and developing a relationship, sort of semi—and basically moving in with each other, though. I mean, he had his apartment and I had … But the weekend his parents came was like a fireman’s drill.
NORTON: So, his parents were coming down to visit. You all had …
EDGE: His parents were coming down to visit. We were all going to Monticello for the weekend.
NORTON: So, all the way down in Charlottesville, yes.
EDGE: It was actually a weekend that I, you know, had that window of time. It had been carefully planned that way. And we were going with his Aunt Grace. So, it was his parents and Aunt Grace and Neal and me. Oh, and, Ruth. Ruth is a woman he had met in South America when he had been traveling who had come to stay and was … So, at the moment this happened, Ruth was sleeping in his apartment and Neal and I were sleeping in my apartment. [Laughs] However, his parents are very strict Presbyterians. I don’t think he even told them about me particularly. Well, they knew I was involved but I don’t, you know—so, we do a quick rearranging. I think, in fact, Ruth was even sent to live in my apartment, but I don’t remember the details.
NORTON: So, Ruth, we would [play] musical chairs.
EDGE: We had musical chairs or beds. And his parents come and we hop in this wonderful van. Maybe we hopped in their van and went down to Monticello. And we get to this rinky-dink motel. And there were three rooms, six people, three rooms. There was this discussion, I’ll never forget him. Neal’s father saying, “Well, who’s going to room with who?” And Neal says, “Well, I assume you and mom will be in one room, and Ruth and Aunt Grace will be in another, and Deb and I will be in another.” And his father said “No.” [Both laugh] “You and I will room in one room, your mother and Aunt Grace will room in another, and Ruth and Deb will room.” And that’s the way it was. [Laughs]
NORTON: I see. All right.
EDGE: Anyway, I was upset but there was no way you were going to, you know, totally aggravate your potential in-laws. I don’t know that I saw them that way. It was so long … Anyway, so, it was a long internship. And there were some issues going on in the program at GW.
NORTON: So, the internship is how long?
EDGE: It’s one year.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: One year and that usually flows into the residency, which is another two years. But there were some academic issues. The chair of the Department of Medicine was leaving for some political reasons, and there were some questions what was going to happen with the program, and somehow I got caught up in all that thought and I decided to apply for a residency in medicine somewhere else. And, so, I applied and got into a really good residency program in Chicago at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s. And, then, that was before I met Neal. [Laughs]
NORTON: Ooh. Okay. You got in before you met him. I see.
EDGE: Yeah, right. God, I applied before I got in. Then, when I got in, it was considered quite—when the guy called me, when Jensen called me and said, you know, he’d be happy to take me and I actually said, “I need to think about this for 24 hours.” He was, like, stunned that I would want to think about it.
NORTON: Who’s Jensen?
EDGE: Oh, he was the chair of the new department.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And, so, anyway, you know, I decided to go. And this man [Neal] decided to sort of go with me. Are we still recording?
NORTON: Yes. I can put you on “pause” if you’d like.
EDGE: Yes, put me on “pause” for …
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: So, we’re in …
[Recording stopped briefly, then resumed.]
NORTON: We were off the record for just a second but we’re now back on.
EDGE: So, I moved to Chicago and Neal had a job and lived on the Near North Side of Chicago in another really decent apartment. So.
NORTON: So, did Neal move because you …?
EDGE: Well, sort of, kind of. So, we had had a week off in between and we had a nice camping trip getting out there. And, you know, I introduced him to my parents. My mother thought I’d lost my mind again because I was moving into a two-bedroom apartment on the Near North Side of Chicago, which was technically more than I should have been able to afford, because this guy was going to be living with me. Except that he wasn’t really going to be living with me because he had a job here in DC with his computer work. And, so, he would work in DC for three weeks and come back and stay with me for a week or two. And, then, you know, it was a long-distance relationship. But he was there probably a third of the time. But she had no idea whether he was dependable or not. However, he won her heart, talking about—maybe you’d go over to that because [?] …
NORTON: All right. I’m going to go on “pause” again.
EDGE: Thank you, Neal. [Background talk] Oh, it’ll work a lot better if I plug it in like this. [Background talk] All right. Get yourself some lunch. [Background noises] And a nap. [Background talk]
NORTON: All right. We were briefly off the record and, then, sort of off the record. [Laughs]
EDGE: Oh, okay.
NORTON: Because Deb had her knee surgery and she was putting ice on it and Neal was helping her …
EDGE: Do it.
NORTON: … set up the ice machine here. So.
EDGE: So, Neal would, you know, spend time with me and, you know, again, residency wasn’t much better than internship, especially my first year of residency in terms of call. I think that I [sometimes] did every fourth night instead of every third night. But it wasn’t much less intense.
NORTON: And how long was the residency?
EDGE: Two years.
NORTON: Right.
EDGE: But he won my mother’s heart very early on one of the first times we visited in Winnetka. She had this huge bird of paradise that she’d had for a couple of decades that was in a pot like this on a platform that could roll around.
NORTON: When you say “like this,” that’s about 18 inches across maybe.
EDGE: Right, right, right. Yeah. Huge.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: And she kept it on the porch in the summer and then it had to be wheeled into the living room to survive the winter. And, so, the project every change of season—this was summer—was to find somebody who could move it, because she and my dad couldn’t move it. So, Neal single handedly moved the bird of paradise to the porch and that won their hearts. They were pretty good after that.
NORTON: That’s great.
EDGE: Yes. And they noticed that he did keep coming back. I think she just thought he was going to set me up with this apartment and go away and never show up again. So.
NORTON: But that didn’t happen.
EDGE: That didn’t happen. No, that didn’t happen. And, so, we, you know, waddled through my residency. I did not bike down to Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s. It was way too far through the center of Chicago, but I did bike a lot again. I learned to drive a motorcycle. Neal had a Kawasaki.
NORTON: Kawasaki motorcycle.
EDGE: He had been to Alaska and back with his brothers. So.
NORTON: On the motorcycle?
EDGE: Yeah.
NORTON: Oh, okay.
EDGE: But, no, they actually didn’t start motorcycling, I don’t think, until Vancouver. And, yeah, I did learn to drive the motorcycle by going around the block and through an alley and around the block and through an alley. And I finally went and took my driver’s license on the motorcycle and I think they passed me out of pity. But, therefore, I still technically have a motorcycle driver’s license.
NORTON: So, how’d you get back to DC?
EDGE: Well, so, so, two years later, we come into the end of my residency and the obvious place to come back was DC because Neal’s work was here. Pretty much. Entirely. And, so, I chose a couple of health plans to—I didn’t want to set up my own practice. For a long time I sort of planned to go do work on a health plan. I kind of believed in them, so, as a way to deliver more equitable health care and all that. And, so, I interviewed seriously—I don’t think I interviewed with Kaiser. I can’t remember. But I interviewed seriously with the GW Health Plan and the Georgetown Health Plan. And I got job offers with both and I decided I’d rather be in town than out of town, so, I took the GW job. And, then, we had to find a place to live. And we decided we would buy a house. And, so, we dutifully looked all over the Washington area. I mean, we looked on Capitol Hill, we looked at Northwest, and we looked at northern Virginia, and we just kept coming back to the Hill, you know. So.
NORTON: And this was around what? ’76?
EDGE: That would be ’76, yep, yep, yeah. Uh. ’77. Yeah, ’76. June of ’76. Something like that.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: So, we ended up settling on our first house at 218 E Street NE, a two-story red brick house with a basement that was not finished at the time. And …
NORTON: The basement wasn’t finished.
EDGE: The basement was not finished, no. It had been renovated but the basement was not finished.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And it had a garage, which was kind of unusual for the Hill.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: And there were still garage-type buildings in the alley space in the back, at least one of which was the stable where one of the horses was kept that drove those carriages around town.
NORTON:  Oh, really?
EDGE: Yeah.
NORTON: So, it was still a stable.
EDGE: It was still a stable early on. I can’t remember if my girls remember that or not. So, I don’t remember when it really stopped. And we decided that, instead of going right from my internship into a job, that I would take six months off and that we would travel. And that we would travel in sort of three hunks and in between each hunk he would come back and work for two or three weeks.
NORTON: So, where’d you go?
EDGE: So, the first—[whispers to herself]—okay, so the first hunk was when we went to Europe. And Neal had worked and lived in Europe for about three years around the Nixon years. He got out of the country on purpose. [Laughs] Those were another era where you wanted to leave the country.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: [He?] spoke fluent French and had made contacts with people that he still kept up and, in fact, we had been to France during my residency for six weeks. I finagled to do a six-week rotation in infectious disease in Toulouse, France, with one of his friends.
NORTON: Wow.
EDGE: When I finagled it, I didn’t speak a word of French. I managed to take Berlitz French and keep my head above water. Let’s just put it that way. It was pretty bad, but I had a wonderful six weeks and I learned a good amount. And I had to do a little project that I had to show my boss and he was relatively happy. And, you know, we went on. And, so, we stayed with friends there for a few weeks, or for a while, and, then, we—I think it was a six-week trip—and, then, we went to Greece and the islands and had a good time doing that. And we came home for a few weeks. And, then, the big trip was—I’m trying to think of the timing. Now, maybe that was the second trip. The first trip was going backpacking out West in Idaho and going to a bunch of the National Parks. And we took a cousin of mine, a second cousin of mine, from England with us.
NORTON: And this was the first two weeks of your …
EDGE: The first six weeks we went out West. That’s what we did. We were doing a backpacking trip because our last trip was to go to Nepal and we had never been backpacking for longer than an overnight before. So, we went on a week backpacking trip in the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, really choosing them because Neal has relatives that live in Idaho and it was a jumping off place. Except for the fact that my cousin got chickenpox in the middle of the backpacking trip, we had a great time. [Laughs] Ohhh.
NORTON: Interesting.
EDGE: Yeah. And we had spent two nights, or three nights, in Las Vegas three weeks prior to that with Janine …
NORTON: His cousin.
EDGE: Well, Janine was not related [to Neal]. Janine was my second cousin.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And Bruce, the person we spent the night with in Las Vegas, was [Neal’s] brother. And he was divorced and his eight-year-old son had spent some time with them. And, after Janine had slept in his eight-year-old son’s bed, where he had not changed the sheets, he said the next morning, “Well, I assume you’ve all had chickenpox.” And turned out Janine had not had chickenpox. [Laughs] And we went around, you know, we went around and around about whether she should come on this hiking trip or not and she had her heart set on going on it. And probably a bad decision but we took her.
NORTON: Sure enough.
EDGE: Oh, I’ve never seen more lesions. We finally had one day when we just didn’t do anything. We just stayed in our encampment. And, then, we had two days to get out and I said, “I guess we’ve got to do it.” Fortunately, I’d brought drugs. I gave her Benadryl and Valium or anything I could think of. [Laughs] We walked out with Neal in front and me behind. And I’d come up to her and just say “Walk.” And she would—and, of course, we took over her pack. So, Neal and I had a pack and a half. But we made it. She ultimately recovered. So, then, we did the Europe-Greece trip early in the fall and, then, late in the fall, in November, we did our six-week trip to Nepal, which was phenomenal. So.
NORTON: So, where’d you go in Nepal?
EDGE: We took a bus to Pokhara, which is in Western Nepal.
NORTON: How do you spell it?
EDGE: P-O-K-H-A-R-A.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: In Pokhara, instead of going up to Everest—and once we got there, we hired a guide, a Sherpa …
NORTON: A Sherpa guide.
EDGE: A Sherpa guide with two other women that we’d never met before but who were also looking for a Sherpa guide to do about the same thing. So, there were four of us in our party. And we got to Pokhara via bus and, of course, a bus trip in those parts is a story in itself. And …
NORTON: Yeah, I guess.
EDGE: [Laughs] Well, on the way to Pokhara, we sat inside the bus and I caught something and was then sick for about a week. And, on the way back from Pokhara, three weeks later, we were smart and we rode on top of the bus like everybody else that was smart. Which, you know, wasn’t all that safe. But, by then, you’ve given up on those things. You know, early in the trip you’ve still got your Western idea of what’s safe and what isn’t safe. By the end of the trip, you’re ahhn. So, we left Pokhara and we hiked for 21 days up. There is no flat land in the Himalayas. It’s up or it’s down. And a lot of it’s stairs that they’ve carved into the—you know, it’s not all just a trail. A lot of it’s stairs. And this is how they get from village to village. And that’s basically what we were doing, is hiking from village to village, up these gorges and stuff. And we hiked all the way up to a famous temple named Muktinath at 12,000 feet.
NORTON: Can you spell that?
EDGE: M-U-K-T- — I think it’s sort of how it sounds. [M-U-K-T-I-N-A-T-H].
NORTON: That’s fine.
EDGE: That’s close enough. We spent two nights there, thinking that would adjust us to the altitude. Har-har. We were there on Thanksgiving night. It was a full moon. It was gorgeous. And then, the next day we got up and packed up our things and we went over Thorong Pass. So, we hiked up to 15,000 …
NORTON: Thorong Pass?
EDGE: [T-H-O-R-O-N-G], Thorong Pass. And we hiked up to 15,000 feet and back down to 12,000. [Laughs] And I’ve always said that was the highest and the lowest day of my life. If I had not had somebody like Neal with me, I don’t know if I would have made it, because I had definitely had altitude sickness to the extent that I would walk 20 feet and say “I’ll just sit down here and rest. You guys go on.” And he would go, “You get up and walk.” [Laughs] And, when you get to the top of the pass, there’s a glacier coming down on one side and a glacier coming down on the other side and this pass, you know. And, then, you go and you can look down into the Manang Valley. And our Sherpas had already made it faster than we. I mean, they were trying to put up our Jansport Trail Dome early, dome tent. But, you know, you could see it was down there and, you know, the same thing you experience here if you’re walking on a hike and you’re going uphill and you’re huffing and puffing. And, all of a sudden, you’re going downhill and it’s oh, tralalalala. Well, it’s the same thing at 15,000 feet. The minute you go downhill it was much, much better. But everybody had headaches. And, then, we walked back through this other valley. It was the first year that the Nepalese had allowed Westerners to officially hike this route. So, there were almost no other trekkers, Western trekkers. And the Tibetans were all coming down for the winter from the high mountains.
NORTON: And they do that every year?
EDGE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were coming down to a warmer clime.
NORTON: So, how long did this trek take?
EDGE: Oh, the whole trek was 21 days, the actual trek. The trip was closer to a month, but, yeah. The actual trek. And we ultimately ended up back in encampment, too. And I was actually sick a great deal of the trip, but I really don’t remember that much of it.
NORTON: Okay. You don’t remember much about the sick part.
EDGE: About the sick part. Right, right.
NORTON: That’s good.
EDGE: Yeah. But when we got back, I was having GI [gastro-intestinal] issues and I’d lost 20 pounds. I didn’t mind that I’d lost 20 pounds. But I’d lost 20 pounds and I was—I remember walking up the Smithsonian steps at the Natural History Museum to get in. It made me breathless.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: Yeah. But …  So, we bought the house despite the fact that Neal—my father’s friend who had moved to Rockville, one of my parents’ best friends and wonderful people, but Walter, this friend, called my father and said “Peter, you’re not going to let Deborah buy a house on Capitol Hill, are you?” [Laughs] I think many of us might have had that experience.
NORTON: Exactly.
EDGE: And my father said, “Well, I think I can’t tell her what to do anymore.” So.
NORTON: All right. So, you bought a house.
EDGE: I bought a house on Capitol Hill. I went to work for the GW Health Plan. It was a good job. I enjoyed it, kind of got into being a real doc. Very different than being an intern or a resident where all you’re dealing with is very sick patients. And back in those days you didn’t get a whole lot of outpatient experience. So, you did mostly …
NORTON: When you were in your training regimen.
EDGE: Yeah. I have memories in my internship of riding down the Mall, say on a Saturday morning when I’d gotten off call on a nice day, and looking around going oh, how interesting. These people are well. Hmm. They’re not sick. I guess not everybody’s sick. I think everybody’s sick. So, yeah, and I learned, you know—I had a physician’s assistant that I worked with and God bless him because he taught me a bunch of things that I just didn’t learn, like…
NORTON: Practical things.
EDGE: Yeah. Like how to fit a diaphragm. I didn’t know how to fit a diaphragm. I look at my schedule. “Diaphragm fitting.” I go, Steve, how do you do this? Will you come in with me? [Laughs]
NORTON: So, how long were you at GW?
EDGE: So, I was at GW Health Plan for three years, from ’77 to, well, essentially three, yes, ’77 to the end of ’80. And, you know, met a lot of people there, some of which are still my good friends. And Neal settled, you know, back into his banking job, computer stuff job here. And we enjoyed our house and ultimately …
NORTON: Well, what sort of things were you—I mean, you finally had a little more time to enjoy the community.
EDGE: So, yeah, we enjoyed the com[munity]. We started making friends, you know, on our block and we saw a little more of Maygene and Steve. Still worked very hard. Neal and I are kind of workaholics.
NORTON: Both of you, huh?
EDGE: Yeah. He’s a total workaholic. He loves what he does so it doesn’t matter but, you know. And, yeah, so we went out more. I think we even did occasional things like actually go to a movie or go to a theater. And I wasn’t playing the bass yet. Somewhere in those years, though, those first three years we were here, my mother decided she really wanted to divest herself of the bass, which was now residing in her house in Winnetka. So, we did drive—and I smartly said, well, I don’t think I should give it up. I should not get rid of it. And that’s a big mistake instrumentalists will do. And, so, we brought it back and it stood in the dining room for a few years. So, then, we decided to have—you know, we weren’t married until ’91. So.
NORTON: I remember Linda [interviewer’s wife] came home and said, “Deb Edge said, I’m getting married.” She said her response was “To who?” [Both laugh]
EDGE: I got a lot of—mostly it was “I didn’t know.”
NORTON: Right. Well, no.
EDGE: It was like—well, you know, I didn’t go around announcing it. And, so, we decided to have a kid. And we made a conscious decision not to get married because Neal [noted that] we would have to pay more taxes if we were married and why do that? So, neither of us being able to cite strong religious reasons—so, we did not get married and, so, we had Rebecca. And that was when I left the Plan. I took technically three months of maternity leave. It turned out that when I got pregnant and I started looking into what maternity leave was at GW at that time, they didn’t have a policy because I don’t think they’d had a woman physician take maternity leave. Or, at least, argue to take decent maternity leave.
NORTON: Well, I mean, in …
EDGE: And, you know, that was still really uncommon.
NORTON: Were there many women physicians at the GW Health Plan when you were there?
EDGE No. I can only think of two.
NORTON:  Okay.
EDGE: Yeah. Gail Povar and Kathy Doner. But there might have been more.
NORTON: Gail Covar?
EDGE: Gail, Gail Povar, P-O-V-A-R. She’s still here. She became quite—she worked at GW for a long time and taught. She’s quite brilliant. And ended up in a practice in Northwest. Kathy was here for a while and then she moved to Florida.
NORTON: All right.
EDGE: And, so, I had to—I went into the medical director’s office. Didn’t like the medical director at all. And didn’t trust him either. So, I went in with a tape recorder in my pocket to talk about this. I had to tell him I was pregnant. He said, “Oh.” And I said, “So, what are your maternity, you know, benefits?” And he said, “Well, what do you think you should have?” So, I said—well I had researched and found out that in the main university women got three months of leave. So I said, “I think I should get three months of maternity leave.” And he said okay, so.
NORTON: And this was what year?
EDGE: That would be ’80 by then.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Yeah. Early ’80. And, anyway, so I, you know, took my maternity leave and, then, I just didn’t go back. And that’s the year I started my practice. So, I had met Bob Berenson, Robert Berenson …Do you want me to spell Berenson, B-E-R-E-N-S-O-N.
NORTON: Good.
EDGE: And he had been working at GW as well, on a different team, but we knew each other. And he was really a health care policy person. And had been hired by the Carter White House to come in and be one of the big health care policy people. So, he had an idea and I had an idea that what I would do is we would practice medicine half time. And he would practice medicine half time and we would cover each other by each covering the practice half time.
NORTON: And you would be a mom in your half …
EDGE: I would be the mom and, yeah.
NORTON: He would go and work for Carter.
EDGE: Right, right. So, right. So, we decided this probably early ’81, you know, when I was, you know, three or four months. And we started looking for a place to do this. And, then, I went to talk to Dan Waterman who already had established his practice on Stanton Park. I think it was probably about three to five years old. It wasn’t a hugely old practice yet. And I actually went in—because we wondered about how he would feel about us coming in competing. And he said, “Oh, there’s plenty of business, that’s not a problem.” But he said, “You know, Deb, this isn’t going to be easy. You will not take home a paycheck for three years.” I said oh. Well, he was right. I mean, I didn’t really take home substantial money for a while. I never took home substantial money. But, anyway, I never took home a real paycheck. And he said private practice is not, you know, what it might be cracked up to be. Anyway. So, we started looking around and we found a space at Eastern Market on Seventh Street.
NORTON: Right across the street from the Eastern Market.
EDGE: Right across from the Eastern Market, back down that little alleyway next to Prego’s. And we started talking to Capitol Hill Hospital about getting admitting privileges and working with them. And I would go from one meeting to the next with Rebecca in my Snuggli because I didn’t have a babysitter yet. I remember going down to the District to get plans—we were renovating the space that we were moving into and we had to get the plans approved. And I went down to get the plans approved and I am absolutely sure the fact that I had a baby with me in there that they just kept getting me out of there. Get this woman out of there.
NORTON: Whatever it takes.
EDGE: Whatever it takes. I don’t know that I did that on purpose. So, I had a couple of interim jobs during that time. This was before, I think, Bob and I were really working on our practice. I thought, well, I could go back to work. I could work for Kaiser at night—or Group Health. It was Group Health then. I could work for Group Health at night in their Urgent Care. Then I could come home and sleep when Rebecca’s taking naps. What a great idea! [Laughs] It was a good idea but I quit in one week. It was horrible. And, then, I got another part time job which was much better. I worked for what’s called the Lipid Research Clinic at GW. A friend of mine from the GW Health Plan was working there. And that was a great job. That was part time, I think it was half time.
NORTON: Could you bring Rebecca to that one?
EDGE: Yeah. I didn’t actually bring Rebecca. But I could, you know, I could breast pump there and it was very friendly and fairly low—you were dealing with research participants and doing visits with them. It was pretty low key. And by that time we had hired a shared babysitting, you know, one of these shared babysitting things with somebody here on the Hill.
NORTON: Do you remember who it was that you hired and who you shared it with?
EDGE: Oh, well, I’m not sure I can remember her name, which is probably just as well. But we shared with Nina and Jim Charnley and they had a little boy. Jamie and Becca were, like, a week apart and they became very good friends.
NORTON: Charnley is C-H- …
EDGE: C-H-A-R-N-L-E-Y. And they lived on F Street in the 900 block NE, 800 or 900 block for a long time and then they ultimately moved over to A Street SE in the, I’m going to say, the 300 block but I’m not sure. So, that arrangement worked for a while but this babysitter couldn’t adjust herself to the fact that I was paying her—I was paying her full time, I mean, half of a full time load. I was paying half of her salary but I didn’t bring Rebecca for all of that time. I would drop her off, you know, a little later. I would tell her, you know, tomorrow I would like to bring her at 10:00 instead of at 8:00, or tomorrow I’ll pick her up, you know, depending on what I was doing. Because I wasn’t really that busy yet. She couldn’t handle it.
NORTON: So, was she keeping the kids at her place or …?
EDGE: No, at Nina’s house, at the Charnleys’ house.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: So, yeah, ultimately, it fell apart and we moved on to another. I guess that was when—I’m trying to remember who—we used Supertots for a while. That was a childcare setting on Stanton Park.
NORTON: Down on Stanton Park.
EDGE: And we knew Lenore very well. By then we had baby …
NORTON: Lenore Riegel?
EDGE: Riegel. Lenore Riegel. I’m still in touch with her. Lenore Riegel, whose kids are still—they really made it in the entertainment business.
NORTON: Really?
EDGE: Yeah, you know her son, Sam, was Gavroche in Les Miz when it opened here in DC And Eden was this little girl, um, [Cosette] … We’re thinking the same [Interviewer laughs]. It was on the tip of my tongue. I can see her singing. [Laughs] And, then, they got—it doesn’t matter.
NORTON: Yes. Everybody will know who we’re talking about.
EDGE: Right. And, then, they—yeah. I mean, because they were in the show I took Rebecca and Sarah—this was now, you know, late 80s—Sarah, I think, saw Les Miz when she was five. And I’m sitting there during that gaudy [sic] scene in the first act going what are my children doing here? Of course, they don’t understand it, so. Then she actually moved them. They moved up to New York City and they performed. They’re performers. A lot of the animated films you see, Sam is the voiceover. He’s the voice. He does a lot of that and he also is into production and stuff. He’s won all sorts of awards. His wife is a director and has won all sorts of awards.
NORTON: Oh, wow.
EDGE: And Eden’s an actress and is all over the place—you know, not big, big, big, big. Anyway. But by then, you know, of course, we had baby groups and we met more people and …
NORTON: When you say the baby groups, this is what? The playgroups?
EDGE: The playgroup. Like our family joined the babysitting co-op pretty soon. That was our only babysitting option. So.
NORTON: What do you remember about the babysitting co-op?
EDGE: [Laughs] Well, it was a godsend. It was well run and it was a godsend and I surely can see myself standing there in the kitchen calling around trying to get a babysitter. But it always worked. And, you know, you almost never can … Back in those days, you know, it’s hard to remember, but everything was by phone.
NORTON: It was by phone and there were no phone message machines and there were …
EDGE: No, no. You just had to call. But you always answered the phone when it rang, too.
NORTON: That’s right. Because you didn’t know who was calling. [Both laugh]
EDGE: Yeah, no. The babysitting—it was wonderful, I mean, you know, you have to be a game player. You have to be willing to share and share—I remember taking Rebecca—our neighbor two doors down, the Heitmeyers, had an older daughter, Carrie, who was, you might have known, Carrie was two or three years older. Carrie Heitmeyer. Anyway, and then they had their second daughter, Dana, like two weeks different than us. And I can remember going over to babysit Dana and—one night when they were still babies. They were still nursing. And Dana was just frantic. I could not get her to take the bottle or—I finally said, “Oh, what the heck?” And I nursed her. [Both laugh] And she went to sleep. Connie came home, I said “Connie, I have a confession to make.” She said, “She’s alive, she’s asleep. I’ll take it.” So, many, many adventures with the babysitting co-op.
NORTON: Yes, yes. You remember the little scrip.
EDGE: Ah, the little pieces of scrip and you saved them. And if you—ultimately, you could—yeah. And we did a couple of overnights, sort of semi-using the co-op. But we basically just agreed with a couple of families that we could switch and the weekend you were away was fun. And, then, you’d get to have two or three extra children when you were—another weekend. And you lived through it. So, I mean, this is all, what did we say? 1981 to ’83-84? And I went back to work. So.
NORTON: And you’d opened your practice.
EDGE: So, then, we opened the practice in about August or September of ’81. And there I was, pretending to work half time. You know what? I think it was probably even by then that we had then decided and been able to morph into sharing the babysitter of the Heitmeyers, the two doors down family that we lived next door to. And their sitter’s name was Virginia, Virginia Cruz. And she was lovely. And we started taking Rebecca over there and that was like heaven. Because that worked out really—that worked out for years. And, so, I could leave her and go to work and—so, I started working, you know. We opened the door, then we had no patients. [Laughs]
NORTON: So, how long did that last?
EDGE: Well, one thing you can do is go on the roster in the emergency room. So, the emergency room at Capitol Hill Hospital …
NORTON: Was it still Rogers [Memorial Hospital] then?
EDGE: No. It was Capitol Hill, because when I was an intern, we called it Capitol Kill Hospital at GW. Because you’d get these middle-of-the-night transfers from Capitol Hill Hospital of people who were at death’s door.
NORTON: The lawyers called it Boot Hill, but …
EDGE: [Laughs] Okay. We all had our not very sweet names.
NORTON: That’s all right. Okay.
EDGE: And, so, we got on—so, I would get these middle of the—and we admitted people there.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And, then, we had privileges at GW. So, we had privileges at GW and Capitol Hill Hospital. And, you know, I’d get middle of the night admissions and they didn’t have a house staff. So, I’d have to actually go over there at 2:00 in the morning. Not very often but, then, often enough. That was when I was glad to have a garage, because I could leave our garage, drive over to Capitol Hill Hospital, go in their garage.
NORTON: In the middle of the night.
EDGE: In the middle of the night, yeah. And, yeah, I would admit somebody and write the orders. And come home, and then get up and go to work. So, it’s a lot of work, yeah …
NORTON: So, how long …
EDGE: … even though we were half time. And pretty soon thereafter, probably a couple of years—Sarah wasn’t onboard yet—we, yeah, we only had 600 square feet when we first rented. We had a very small office—
NORTON: And just the two physicians, right?
EDGE: It was just me and Bob. And we had one employee, Pat, who ran the office. Yeah, it was just the two of us. It was very tiny. And we did make a very excellent decision which was we should have—even though it was small—we should have two separate offices. It would have been a disaster, I think, otherwise.
NORTON: Each doctor had the …
EDGE: Each doctor had their own place with their own desk, because I’m kind of a neat person and he’s kind of a papers are everywhere person.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: We would have driven each other nuts. And we also knew another guy named Peter Bosch, who we’d known through the GW Health Plan. He was a couple of years behind us and he was practicing in an office out in Maryland, close-in Maryland. And he and Bob started talking about Peter practicing with us. Long story short, he did join us. And he came and not that long after he kind of sat us down and said, “You know, guys, you guys are working just about enough to cover expenses. But, if you want money, you’re going to have to work harder.” [Laughs]
NORTON: This is Peter telling you and Bob this.
EDGE: Right. He was right. He was right. He was very right that we were sort of living in this dreamland.
NORTON: What did he mean by work harder? I mean, just more hours?
EDGE: Well, I mean, more hours. Yeah. See more patients, more hours. So, we beefed it up a bit and started to …
NORTON: Was your, I mean, was your patient clientele or whatever you call them picking up over the time?
EDGE: Oh, yeah. The patient clientele was gradually picking up. Some people from the health plan found me through word of mouth. There was no way I could easily advertise about it. I didn’t have an exclusion clause or anything like that. So. But, yeah, there’s a handful of people that found me. And we did get people through the emergency room at Capitol Hill Hospital. But, as you might imagine, most of those people did not have good insurance. They were mostly Medicaid or Medicare/Medicaid. But they were still nice people and couldn’t, you know—but they didn’t pay as much. And gradually we started getting Hill staffers and people who lived on the Hill and friends that we knew and people started coming in. And, then, a couple of years later we added the fourth doctor while we were—and we ended up taking over more space and renovating so we had room for four doctors. So.
NORTON: But it was the same place over there.
EDGE: Same place into the 90s. Yeah. And, then, Neal and I had number two in ’84, 1984.
NORTON: And that’s Sarah, right?
EDGE: That was Sarah. Came along after some discussion. [Laughs] My going “I think we ought to have another kid.” Neal going “Really?” Many couples had that discussion.
NORTON: Yes.
EDGE: And, wouldn’t you know, the second kid is the one that’s most like Neal. [Interviewer laughs] And, so, you know, we had Sarah. I took three months off again. Came back to work. We were still in the same space then.
NORTON: Who was your fourth doctor?
EDGE: Oh, Dawn Reed-Jones.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And she was with us for a long time. And I don’t know if she came in before or after. I think she came in after Sarah, but, yeah. So, we had four doctors. And we were all working actually pretty hard. But not full, full time. I still had the great value of working on the Hill and working in a private practice like that and not being so full time you were packed from eight in the morning until six in the evening with patients. Is that you could make a quick trip home if you had to. You could drop a kid off at something. I mean, that was one of the great values the whole time I worked, was being on the Hill. You could do something, you could flex a little bit, but …
NORTON: Let me ask you. This is something that has always made me curious.
EDGE: What?
NORTON: Was it an issue being a female doctor back when you started in private practice?
EDGE: No.
NORTON: Did you mostly have women patients? Did you have men patients?
EDGE: Probably 60 or 70 percent women and the other men. Never—you know, I’m sure there was some self-selection. In my residency and internship, I had a couple of moments where a male patient didn’t want to see me. I certainly had some outright sexist moments with some of the attendings, the big guys.
NORTON: I was just curious because I remember. You were the first person I went to, and I thought this is sort of unusual, you know. [Laughs]
EDGE: I had been thinking about going into surgery instead of medicine in medical school for a while. And, then, I just said I can’t do this. Going on hospital rounds where you go see every patient on your service in the morning was just abysmal with the house staff because, really, besides the little bit of medicine they talked about, all they talked about was which nurse they were going to lay next. And I just thought I’m not willing to put up with this.
NORTON: Yeah. Understood.
EDGE: So, but by the time I was an attending myself that wasn’t a problem anymore.
NORTON: All right. But, then, you ended up moving over to what it was at one point …
EDGE: So, yeah, finally over to our bigger office. So, we had Sarah and, then, we tromped along. And, then, I just think it’s around 1990—we’ll go back to the music later. It’s a separate thing, I guess. We were approached by Medstar about joining their new initiative buying up private practices and running them for us. Oh, that was actually wild because I think we also already brought—well, were we working with Dan yet? No, I guess we weren’t working with Dan yet.
NORTON: This would be Dan Waterman.
EDGE: Dan Waterman. Dan had, by this point, moved into 600 Pennsylvania Avenue instead of over on C Street at Stanton Park. So. But we all knew Dan and, you know, were in communication. And, so, we ended up—you know, I really can’t remember whether Dan was with us or not when we made that move. But we decided, you know, after a long discussion and, then, we had to figure out how to value the practice and all that, we sold our practice to Medstar and they took over all the administrative and financial stuff. We all of a sudden had a base salary that we could actually count on. I mean, that was a big deal. And, you know, with a bonus and [based on?] productivity in some fancy formula. And, we had generated similar sort of formulas for the partnership and it was always a bit of an issue. Oh, but you missed the fire. We missed the fires. We were still at 218, so this was in the 80s. We had a fire—Sarah was born so it was somewhere between ’85 and ’90. One night there was a phone call that the office was on fire. There was a window at the back that went into the alley between Seventh and Eighth that had been boarded over. It had had an air conditioner and the landlord had boarded it over. And the trash can caught on fire and the fire went in. It was mostly smoke damage in the office. So, we had to race over there at three in the morning. It was in the spring and, you know, they got everything out but you couldn’t use the place. The place was gutted in terms of smoke and water damage.
NORTON: So, what did you all do?
EDGE: So, we—John Cohen. Do you know John Cohen, the orthopedic doctor?
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Was on the Hill for decades. Had just opened up his practice and he had opened his practice up here at Ninth and A/Mass Ave.
NORTON: Northeast.
EDGE: Northeast, yeah.
NORTON: Right, right. Right around the corner …
EDGE: Right where I live now. And he had bought the house and had renovated the ground floor and the basement into an office. And he had literally just moved in and literally started the practice. So, he wasn’t that busy. And he offered us the basement floor to operate our practice for three months while we renovated. It was great good fortune. And, yeah, we came up with a rent. We moved all of our medical records from the office to our basement at 218 E Street NE. No, to the garage. We couldn’t put them in the house because they smelled so bad.
NORTON: This is your personal garage, the one behind the house.
EDGE: My personal garage by my house on E Street NE. And, then, we had all the records in the garage. And, then, every night I would have to come home with a list of what patients we were seeing the next day. We had to pull the charts and I had to carry the charts back up here—I usually walked—back up here for the day. And, then, you know, I would try to take them home so we never had too many of these charts. We didn’t lose any records. Maybe we lost one chart. But we basically …
NORTON: In the fire.
EDGE: … we didn’t lose financial records and we didn’t lose written records. But we had some wet records. I had some wet things sitting around the basement of our house. Which we had redone, so it was now livable. So, that was a pretty big hit.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: That was a pretty big hit. Yeah. I can remember standing in that little courtyard right—you went down that alley and then there was that little court—I can remember standing there. It was a Friday afternoon after it had been Thursday night. It was Friday afternoon, you know, none of us …
NORTON: The fire was Thursday night.
EDGE: Yeah. But none of us had had any sleep really.
NORTON: Right.
EDGE: And I’m standing there talking to a [patient]—you know, we rerouted the phones somehow. And I was standing there somehow talking to a patient who was saying, “But you have to see me. I just have to …” I’m going, “You don’t get it. I can’t see you.” [Laughs] People were just like—but it all worked out. And John was amazing and …
NORTON: John Cohen.
EDGE: John Cohen. And, then, we were able to move back in for some time. Yeah.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And we renovated the whole place. I think just back to what it was.
NORTON: So, how long were you there after the fire?
EDGE: Oh, a few years, a few years. I’m getting a little fuzzy on the dates.
NORTON: And was the move sort of connected with going with the Medstar or …?
EDGE: Oh, the move to 660 Pennsylvania Avenue, to the new digs, was definitely connected with Medstar. Yes.
NORTON: Now, I have a question. Because I remember, I may be wrong, but I remember initially it was 666 …
EDGE: Yes, it was.
NORTON: … Pennsylvania Avenue, and I know there’s a problem with that.
EDGE: Yes, yes. And the landlord—yeah. They changed it. It wasn’t us that changed it.
NORTON: Okay. Just so we’re …
EDGE: They changed the whole building. Yeah, yeah. That was funny.
NORTON: It’s the Satanic numbers, just so we …
EDGE: The Satanic number and people said we really shouldn’t do that. So. [Interviewer laughs] Do you want more water? Are you okay?
NORTON: Yeah. Let’s do a pause here for a second.
[recorder paused]
We’re back on the record, having refreshed our waters.
EDGE: Right. So, yeah, so, we sold to Medstar and the first thing that really happened was that they moved us into 660 Pennsylvania, choosing the basement because of the lower rent. And I would not advise doing that but it actually worked out well. There’s just no sunlight all day. And we had about half of the basement area when we first moved in. We didn’t have the whole space. And I think it was just, in fact, I’m sure it was me and—I know we had Dan when we moved down there. What I cannot remember …
NORTON: Dan Waterman.
EDGE: Dan Waterman. I can’t remember whether Dan Waterman came onboard with us before we moved in or he just joined us when we moved down there, or shortly thereafter. I kind of think it was then or shortly thereafter. So, we had a bigger office with a real waiting room and, you know, a big waiting room and more staff. And Medstar ran us and we were able to chug along. And that was in the early 90s. And shortly thereafter, I mean, the other big thing was that in—now maybe it was closer to 2000. Oh, no. This was closer to 2000 that we actually moved in.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And, then, closer, not terribly long after that, Peter Bosch became very interested and good at medical records. Early [electronic] medical records, digital medical records.
NORTON: Digitizing them.
EDGE: Digitizing records and doing online medical record keeping. And the Hospital Center was interested in doing that and we were the trial practice for converting to an electronic medical record. And that was, I’m saying early 2000s but maybe it was even later than that. 2005, 2010. Well, no, it wasn’t, because I stopped working there in 2011. So, it was probably the early 2000s. That was painful.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: It was really painful because it really turns out that there’s nobody that can enter the medical record better than the doctor. And you could hire people to enter problem lists and medications but they even got those wrong. And I spent hours and hours and hours entering data to make it work. But, you know, gradually over time, you didn’t have to have the written chart as well as the—you know, for a couple of years you had to have the written record in front of you as well as the online record because the online record didn’t have everything that went back 15 years.
NORTON: Far enough, right.
EDGE: Yeah. And, so, that was a really big event and that was in the days before we had—we barely had faxes, but we certainly weren’t scanning anything yet. And there was no communication between electronic records. So, the x-ray report that might come to you over fax did not electronically automatically go into your record yet. So, there was a lot of, you know, staff having to put stuff in. Or what you would do is a chest x-ray report would come and then you would go in and say, in a field, write “Chest x-ray negative” and know that the paper was somewhere else that you could go to. So, that was a lot of the—
NORTON: Well, I gather that the entire medical profession was going through at least a lot of that.
EDGE: Oh, yeah. Well, we were one of the first. So, yeah. It was—the entire—yeah, we don’t go to an office hardly anymore that isn’t electronic. So.
NORTON: Right.
EDGE: So, that was the other big thing. And, then, we grew and we partly, definitely, because of Medstar, we hired more doctors and went up to—I think, ultimately, we were seven doctors, instead of four. And we trolloped along.
NORTON: Why’d you leave?
EDGE: Why did I leave? Uhhh. Well …
NORTON: Well, that’s all right. I mean I …
EDGE: No, no, no. I’m trying to think how much can I—I guess I can legally say anything I want at this point.
NORTON: I don’t know. [Both laugh] I’m not going to give you any advice.
EDGE: Oh, no. I’m not asking for advice. So we’re trolloping along ,and I’m burned out. You know that I was the kind of doctor that always spent too much time with their patients. And I liked to talk to them …
NORTON: The patients appreciated it, by the way.
EDGE: Well, I know. And I enjoyed it. I mean you know, that’s what I enjoyed about medicine. That’s why I went into internal medicine is I liked talking to patients. I liked knowing what was going on. I liked following their problems visit to visit. And not just saying goodbye and never seeing them again. I hated with a passion emergency room work and ICU [Intensive Care Unit] work. I could do it. It wasn’t the problem. I hated it. It made me anxious. I realized retrospectively that when I was a resident I would have anxiety attacks going into my emergency room rotation nights. Because I hated not knowing what was going to walk through the door and, you know, having to deal with this horrible crisis and, then, they were gone. You never knew what happened to them. You know, I just didn’t like it.
You know, you never know what’s going to walk through your door in your own practice, but, in truth, it’s really rare that somebody comes in in extremis. It does happen, but, you know. And I could not do what I know many of my colleagues would do. It was things like spend 15 minutes with a patient in a routine follow up visit and, then, as you walk out the door, the patient says, “Oh, yeah, doc. Well, what do you think I should do about this pressure in my chest?” And I could not go, “Oh, well. Make another appointment.” Or, you know, “You know, doc, I’d really like to talk to you about my abusive husband.” [Laughs] This is real. People save up what they really want to talk to you about until the very end of your discussion.
And, so, I was definitely not the—Peter was very skilled at taking wonderful care of patients and moving a lot faster than me. So, I was burned out and frankly I didn’t make very much money. I made more money than the average Joe out there on the street. I’m not really super complaining but I didn’t make neurosurgeon dollars. [Laughs] And I didn’t make, if you look at the average that internists make, I never made that. I was always below average. And I was just really burned out and I’d gotten, you know, just more and more, how long can I do this? And I was in theory going to practice medicine until I was about 70, but there was this retirement vehicle that we had. A cash balance account that we had early on through Medstar.
NORTON: This is the practice had this plan.
EDGE: The plan that all of us participated in through—and the world had decided to phase them out. So, they stopped offering it to new employees somewhere in the early 2000s. Well, I have a math genius sitting here in my house, Neal Mann, my husband. And, when this happened, he looked at the numbers and he came to me and he said, “You know, you’re losing about $1,200 every month by continuing to work.” Being a bit of a skeptic and, you know, I said [mutters quietly]. He, eventually, over some months, convinced me to—so, this was probably about 2010, ’09 or ’10. So, I went and I talked to my partners, and they didn’t really want to have anything to do with it. They didn’t really believe him but they also didn’t want to rattle the waters. So, finally, Neal and I went to National Capital Bank and talked to one of the Diddens. I said, Neal, I’ve got to —I said, “I believe you, but nobody else is going to believe you. And let’s go talk to somebody with authority about these things.” So, we went and talked to one of the Diddens. And he looked at the whole situation. He looked at me and he said, “I don’t understand why you haven’t retired yet.” [Laughs] So, then, I tried to talk to Medstar and, you know, I basically said this is unfair. What can you do to rectify this to make it equal? Maybe not completely equal but, you know, more palatable. Nothing. And, like I said, my partners just didn’t want to—Dan was about to retire anyway and I remember Dan retired a couple of years before I left the practice. So. And Peter was successful and doing well with, you know. He didn’t … So.
NORTON: He didn’t what? I’m sorry, I can’t …
EDGE: He didn’t want to deal with it. He didn’t want to, you know, muddy the waters. And we were the only three that were affected. Bob Berenson had left the practice already to go do health care policy. So, you know, we talked about it for a long time and, then, came up. And I did talk to Medstar in great depth that I would—it’s apparently this cash—no, I think it was cash balance retirement plan. Anyway, you could [retire]—
NORTON: It was cash what?
EDGE: Balance retirement plan.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Anyway, you could retire, wait 90 days so you start collecting your monthly dividend, and, then you could go back to work part time with the same employer. It was perfectly legal, by the IRS and, you know … And, so, I talked to Medstar. I said, “Okay, this is what I’d like to do. I’d like to retire officially and basically take a three-month sabbatical, and I will come back and work half time.” And they said “Okay. Let’s do it.” And, so, I did it, as you know. I said to everybody, “I’ll be back in three months, not to worry.” And I said, “And, then, I’ll work part time.”
Well, at this point I had already officially stopped taking new patients to let my practice—and I had cut my hours back a little bit. And I finally realized that I was having seasonal dysphoria from being in the basement and dark and, you know, so I was at least three days a week not going in until 9:00. Making more of a point of going out in the middle of the day and that worked very well. So, I told all my patients I’d be back. They had my appointment book open for three months later. Yeah, I had patients booked. I left in April and I was coming back in June or something. And two weeks before I was supposed to come back, I got an email from Medstar telling me that they had just happened to have shown it to their lawyers, who told them that they couldn’t do it. [Laughs] And they gave me an offer I couldn’t refuse. No, I’m being sarcastic. I shouldn’t do that online.
NORTON: No, please. This is all going to be transcribed remember. [Both laugh]
EDGE: That’s what I thought about before I said it, but the truth is the truth. So, in the same email they said, however, if you would like to come back full time, we’d be happy to take you. Now, I will not repeat the words that I said at that time.
NORTON: That’s all right.
EDGE: [Laughs] That was a biggie.
NORTON: But you declined that.
EDGE: I did decline that. I told them, yes, rather vehemently. I never talked to anybody. It was all on email.
NORTON: Oh, man.
EDGE: Yeah, yeah. And, of course, then my access to records had been totally cut off the minute I left in April of 2011. And, you know, I never got it back. So, I had no access to anybody. And, oh, you know, we were going on a trip or something and I came back. Yeah, I thought about it for a while. Of course, there was also a noncompete clause in my retirement thing. And, so, I thought about what I wanted to do and I decided I didn’t really want to open up another practice anyway, so it didn’t matter. And I batted around working for GW as an internist part time, and they would have been happy to have me because I went and talked to them. And I thought, well, you know, I’ve been doing volunteer work at So Others Might Eat in their clinic for years. All through my practice I ran over about once a month and spent an afternoon …
NORTON: So, that was the whole time you were …
EDGE: The whole time …
NORTON: … private.
EDGE: Yeah. I mean …
NORTON: In private practice.
EDGE: Basically, the whole time I was at … And I thought let me go talk to them. And it worked out. I mean they actually had a position and I ended up working half time for So Others Might Eat in their medical clinic. Not for free. They did pay me a little bit. But, you know, it wasn’t entirely for free out of the goodness of my heart. So, I worked there for four years half time and it was wonderful. It was really, really great. It was something I’d been meaning to do. I’d often said that you don’t have to join the Peace Corps to give health care to people who don’t have it.
NORTON: So, this would have been about from, like, 2011 …
EDGE: That was 2012, probably by then. Yeah, like, late 2011 to 2016.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: For about four years.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: But, then, I got burned out again. I mean, you know, I was planning to do that until I was 70 and I ended up quitting when I was 67. Because, though it started out that I could spend as much time with my patients as I wanted to. They didn’t care and, you know, blah blah blah. And the board started saying, oh, this clinic isn’t … And I was one of essentially two doctors. And they kept wanting to make the clinic to make money. Well, this is not the kind of clinic that can make money. [Laughs] You know, all of their patients are Medicare/Medicaid. You have to be indigent to get your foot in the door, just for starts. And all of them have problem lists a mile long. They’re on ten to twenty medicines. They’ve got psychiatric illness. You have them bring their medicines and line them up for you. I made them bring their medicines every time. And you’d line them up and, then, there’d be two of this medicine and two of this medicine and you’d go, “Do you take one out of each bottle every day?” “Oh, yes, doctor. I’m very good about taking all my medicines.” And you’d go, “Okay. So, you’re taking double doses of these medicines.” They’d go see a cardiologist or, you know, and nobody else would sort of put it all together. It took a lot of time to see these patients. So. Anyway, I finally decided—and Neal—we decided that it was time to quit, and we could make it if I quit and all that kind of stuff. So. I quit in 2016. I gave them six months’ notice.
NORTON: What have you been doing since?
EDGE: What have I been doing? Playing music.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: So, we have to go back to music.
NORTON: Well, yeah, no. We’ve got to go back to a lot of stuff.
EDGE: Playing music, dealing with my grandkids, and …
NORTON: Okay. Now, I know, let’s see, we’ve talked about the babysitting co-op. Other sort of, you know, Capitol Hill community activities that you were involved in? We can maybe segue into music.
EDGE: Segue into music. Capitol Hill Montessori School, both my girls went to Capitol Hill Montessori School from like 2 ? to—Becca went through Capitol Hill Montessori School until first grade. Then she went to Peabody and then she went to Watkins until the middle of third before we transferred her to Capitol Hill Day School. And Sarah went to Montessori from 2 ? to, actually, through first grade. Because by then they were at Watkins. And, so, we got pretty involved in Capitol Hill Montessori School. We weren’t on the board but ran their silent auction a couple of years.
NORTON: Well, no, but the silent auctions. You know, they were a thing back then.
EDGE: They were big back then, and now, you know. They were all by hand, of course. And you had to run around.
NORTON: You had to go talk people into donating whatever, the service.
EDGE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I did that for two or three years. And I also remember doing a lot of bake sales and making brownies and standing in the kitchen late at night on the phone with Nancy Boyce, who was also at the Montessori School and talking about that. So, we were pretty involved. And, then, we started getting involved at CHAW [Capitol Hill Arts Workshop], which, actually, will segue us right back into the music because …
NORTON: So, how did you get involved at CHAW?
EDGE: Well, of course, I got involved at CHAW with the kids.
NORTON: Right.
EDGE: Becca started taking classes there—gymnastics, I think, is what she started.
NORTON: With Steve Johnson?
EDGE: With Steve Johnson. And Sarah started taking classes there. And, ultimately, they both took piano there with Cora Lee [Khambatta]. And, so, sometime around 1990, maybe ’88, I came through the door of CHAW to drop Sarah off for a class with Steve, most likely, and there was a sign on the door. That the rehearsal for Oliver! was at such and such a time. And Sally [Crowell] somehow was standing right inside the door. And I said to Sally, “Well, Sally, what do you do for an orchestra?” I had not played my bass since college at this point. I had it but I had not played it. And Sally, smart woman that she was, said to me, “And what instrument do you play?” [Laughs]
NORTON: That sounds like Sally.
EDGE: Yep. That’s the kind of person to be. A lot of good things have happened to me because of that kind of approach. And she, you know, basically said, well, you know, rehearsal is at such and such a time. Why don’t you come? And I did, you know. It hit the right, shall we say, chord. And I went home and the bass actually worked, which was probably a real miracle. I can’t remember whether I actually did anything but I went in and to play, even though I had not played in a good 20 years. It’s kind of like riding a bike to play the basics. And playing a musical is, you know, pretty thunk-a-thunk. And it was not a totally critical group or audience, so [Laughs] …And were you in Oliver!? I can’t—yep.
NORTON: Yes, I was.
EDGE: Yes, yes, yes. So, and it was a lot of fun. So, then, all of a sudden there I am. I’m playing all the CHAW musicals.
NORTON: So, which ones did you play. Do you remember?
EDGE: Oliver! and King and I and South Pacific and …
NORTON: Did you do Annie?
EDGE: … Annie.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: Yes. Annie was, I think, the only one where Becca was actually onstage. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like being onstage.
NORTON: But Sally was determined to get just about every kid on Capitol Hill in those shows.
EDGE: Yeah, I mean, she did it with enthusiasm but she didn’t seek it out again. And Sarah slowly got involved. I mean, she was really young and she became the prop person in the back. I think she worked with you.
NORTON: Could be.
EDGE: In the back. Handing out props and stuff. She wasn’t big into acting—and then she became kind of techie. She was kind of techie through, you know, doing tech work in high school for theater. So, yeah, I was playing. And I guess one—we even did two a year sometimes.
NORTON: Sometimes, yeah.
EDGE: In Hine [Junior High School] auditorium.
NORTON: Hine auditorium, which is not there anymore.
EDGE: It’s not there anymore and, as you well know, it became a real family, Capitol Hill thing. And, you know, the week of production your whole family was there three or four nights during the week and you were keeping your kids up until ten or eleven o’clock because you had to be there. And, anyway, they had a part or they … [Both laugh] It’s sort of funny looking at my own kids with their kids. They would never let their kids do this. They’re so regimented. My kid’s got to go to bed on time. Well …
NORTON: Well, and it’s true. We didn’t have much choice though, did we?
EDGE: No, we didn’t but that’s because we chose to be involved with this thing.
NORTON: Right, right.
EDGE: And it was a bit crazy. But it was wonderful fun. And, so, I became quite involved in CHAW. I really didn’t do much else in music myself. And my kids did summer camps and Steve Johnson. And Becca, she got into jazz dance with Roberta.
NORTON: Okay. Roberta?
EDGE: Rothstein.
NORTON: Rothstein, right.
EDGE: I just saw Roberta the other day. At the [Capitol Hill] Village Gala Saturday night. And, where was I going with that? Well, anyway, so they were taking a bunch of classes.
NORTON: What the kids were doing. Yeah.
EDGE: Yeah, and, then, so, I ended up on the CHAW board. I was trying to figure out last night when I was on the CHAW board and I don’t exactly remember. It must have been the 90s.
NORTON: Okay. That sounds right.
EDGE: Yeah. For like two terms.
NORTON: Yeah. I think you may have been on with me overlapping a little bit or something but, in any event …
EDGE: I think it was two, maybe three terms. And, then, I moved on because I was too busy to do everything. And it was around the same, in the early 90s, that I started being on the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary board, yet another topic. I got overcommitted.
So, back to the music. So, as we were doing all this, I really started saying to myself, you know, I’d really like to play classical music again. This is fun and I like it, but, you know, there’s not enough meat in it. And, so, I actually just sort of started mumbling, you know, [in a growly voice] I’d really like to play classical music, or whatever. And, somehow, one of the conductors that conducted us, whose name I don’t remember, said, well …
NORTON: This is one of the musical conductors?
EDGE: One of the CHAW musicals. She had a friend of hers, Marty Piecuch, who was conducting the Washington Symphony Orchestra here, a volunteer orchestra in town, and she introduced me to him at intermission and he said, “Oh, we could use another bass player. That would be wonderful. Why don’t you come. We rehearse at Georgetown.” And, I’m going, well, it’s kind of like what I said with Sally, “I can’t do that. I’m too busy. I’m fulltime work. I’ve got my daughters.” And he did the same thing. He said, well, rehearsal’s at such and such a night next week. Here’s how you—come on.
NORTON: And how do you spell his name?
EDGE: Oh, Piecuch. P-I-E-
NORTON: That’s all right.
EDGE: [C-U-C-H, Martin Piecuch.] Something like that. Marty. He was legendary. And, so, but, of course the story is, I went. I went and stood at the end of the, eventually, rather large bass section in Georgetown at Georgetown University somewhere. And they were playing a symphony by a guy—you’re going to ask me to spell this—by a Polish composer named [Penderecki].
NORTON: All right. Well, I won’t …
EDGE: [P-E-N-D-E-R-E-C-K-I, Penderecki], or something like that.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Early 20th century. It was so hard, but the bass players are all nice and the guy that I stood next to as my sort of stand partner, Mike [Michael Rohrer] just kept giving me tips about do this, do that, you know. And I survived. So, I played with this orchestra for a long time. So, I started playing more and more and somewhere along the line in the 90s one of my patients, who had become a friend, was a guy in the National Symphony named Curtis Buriss, who lived on the Hill. And he and I would talk a little bit when he came in to see me about the bass. And he said, “Deb, you really need to …” He goes [mimicking his voice] “Deb, you really need to take lessons. When are you going to do it?” [Laughs]
NORTON: So, for the poor transcriber, you’re doing kind of a voice.
EDGE: I’m doing the voice of Curtis Burris, that’s … And, I don’t know. One day, when I was standing outside the office, actually, talking to him, and he did that to me and he said, “Come on. Why don’t you come over and we’ll do a lesson.” So, I agreed to sign up for lessons with him. And it was transformational.
NORTON: Really.
EDGE: Transformational. Yeah. I remember one of my first lessons [Pause during significant background  noise] A helicopter not an airplane. I think by this time I had recognized that my old plywood German bass from childhood was not very good, to say the least. And I had bought, for $5,000 or something instead of $500, a Romanian modern bass that was much better. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it good—actually, I still have it. It’s my second bass. So, I started taking lessons from him. And I remember, like, the first lesson, you know, I did—he just said “Play a scale.” Well, it’s not like I was playing anything great.
NORTON: Now, this was at his house?
EDGE: At his house over on C Street SE. Yeah, yeah. He lived on the Hill and, so, I’d traipsed over there. And standing in the living room and I played not very much and, then, he went “Eeewww. Why did you play it like that?” [Laughs]
NORTON: Which you’re also imitating his voice.
EDGE: Curtis is a wonderful and a very well renowned bass teacher in the area, but he’s not known for being overly nice and always positive. But I’m of strong character. What was transformational is that no one had ever said to me—and, then, he said to me, “You know, I don’t care if you’re playing open notes or a scale. But, whenever possible, play beautifully.” No one had ever made me think that you could play the bass beautifully before. It was not, you know—it was always you were thunk-a-thunk, you were the beat, but that you could really make music. And nobody had—or that maybe I could really make music on the bass had never been … So, it was really transformational. Not easy, but transformational. So.
NORTON: So, how long did you continue with …
EDGE: So, I took lessons from him—you know, he was willing to do every two weeks or, you know, sometimes every three weeks, you know. I quickly said, you know, we quickly agreed there was no point in having a lesson until—you had to have a lesson scheduled so you have a deadline but you’ve got to have had a chance to practice. And I couldn’t practice every day, not like his … I mean, he taught at the University of Maryland and he had graduate students and people come to him to beef themselves up before an audition type. I mean, very high end. So. Yeah, I took from him very regularly and learned a lot. He ultimately convinced me I needed [a better bass]—after my father passed away in 2002, I bought what I call a Peter Edge memorial bass. [Laughs]
NORTON: After your father’s …
EDGE: After my father. After my father’s name. I went out and bought a real bass and was able to spend more money than I would have considered otherwise. And it’s wonderful. So, yeah, I took bass lessons from Curtis until he retired and basically moved up to Chautauqua, New York. But that’s why I started going to Chautauqua, New York, in the summer, is he ran and the bass school—they have an orchestra program for a summer program at Chautauqua. C-H-A-U …
NORTON: That’s all right.
EDGE: At Chautauqua, New York, that runs the whole season, for college and graduate students who are musicians and they get instruction and they play every week. And, so, he has five to eight bass students every summer and he kept saying, you should come up and join us and, you know, you could sort of hang on. You couldn’t really join us but you could then—there’s practice studios and you could come up and just play bass for a week and go to the concerts and some of the lectures. And I kept resisting it and, you know, the kids were still in high school. I couldn’t imagine—I knew Neal and I couldn’t do it and we’d never sort of entertained that one of us would just go away for … So, we had another moment out on the street in front of the office on Seventh Street SE. [Laughs]
NORTON: This was with …
EDGE: With Curtis Burris. Yeah.
NORTON: With Curtis. Okay.
EDGE: Him going [mimicking his voice] “Deb, if you don’t do it this summer, you’re never going to do it.” And I kept going, I can’t do it. It was like May. I said I can’t decide to take a week off in July this close to … you know, I’ve got to reschedule patients if I do that. You know. But I did it. One of the best weeks in my entire life. I went up there, lived in this little room in this dilapidated hotel, with a wash stand and a shared bathroom, where the owner, this elderly man, thought the way to make the bathroom smell good is he cut washcloths into quarters and soaked them in Pine-Sol and had them hanging on the bathtub so the whole room smelled.
NORTON: Of Pine-Sol.
EDGE: It meant that you went and took your shower and you were out of there real fast. But I just did nothing but music. I would get up in the morning and go somewhere for breakfast and go up to where the practice rooms [were] and I would practice for two or three hours. I’d come home and have lunch and I’d practice. And maybe I’d go to a lecture, maybe I wasn’t. There were concerts every day in the afternoon and the evening. You know, I just consumed music the whole—I ate microwavable meals. I mean, it—I cried when I left. I couldn’t believe it.
NORTON: You were there a whole week.
EDGE: I was there a whole week. And then Saturday came and I had to drive home. I cried on the way out of there. And we’ve been back every summer. I got Neal to go the next summer with me. I think it was the next summer we—I guess the kids were gone by then. So. And, now, I don’t even play that much necessarily when I go up because things have sort of morphed and it’s a little harder to be … And I’ve gotten older. I don’t …
NORTON: Be hard to be what?
EDGE: Hard to be a bass student there. And the first couple of years or three years, they totally embraced me and I got some very good friends from that time. It’s gotten a little harder to sort of get in. And there’s a new person running the program. But it’s been great and I usually take my bass up and play and practice there, but … So, Curtis was—and once he retired, then I started taking lessons from another bass person in the National Symphony, who also lived on the Hill. Why am I blanking on his name? [On page 51, she remembers it was William ‘Bill’ Vaughan.] And that lasted for five years or so and, then, he retired and moved away. And, so, now I’ve been taking lessons with another guy who lives in DC, out in Northwest, named Jeff Koczela. And it’s been great. We’ve managed to continue taking lessons through COVID and by Zoom. We came up with that I will practice and then I record what I’m playing through the lesson. I send him the recordings and our lesson time is mostly him talking back to me about my recordings, about what to do differently and stuff. And just a little bit of playing, because playing over Zoom is so awful.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: The tone is so awful. So, then, during the 90s or early 2000s, that’s where I do have a piece of paper upstairs. Do you want me to go get it? With dates. Okay. I started playing with other orchestras. My teacher, I can’t remember which one it was, said that they had talked to—I’m really blanking on names. I’m sorry.
NORTON: Well, one of the things and I might as well tell you this now, is that this will be transcribed and then you can, you know, fill in some of this stuff. It can be …
EDGE: Oh, okay.
NORTON: So, it’s not critical.
EDGE: [Sylvia Alimena] was the French hornist in the National Symphony and she was running the Friday Morning Music Club orchestra and that she was looking for bass players and he would like to recommend me. And, you know, would I like to do it [in 2002]? And I said yeah. You know, well, this crazy lady. So, all of a sudden, I was playing in two orchestras. I was playing in the Washington Symphony with Marty Piecuch and I was playing with her. But this [FMMC] was a much better orchestra.
NORTON: And what was it called?
EDGE: The Friday Morning Music Club orchestra. The Friday Morning Music Club was founded 150, yeah, I think it’s 150 years ago now, as a club for women to get together to play music with each other, mostly pianists. And they would get together in each other’s homes and—you know, back then that’s what women did—and play music for each other. Well, segue. It’s now an organization [of] over several hundred people, all in the instrument, voice, piano. They give concerts every week in various [venues]—at Dumbarton Oaks, in churches, nursing homes. Concerts. There’s a chorale which I play in. There’s an orchestra, which is now called Avanti.
NORTON: It’s called Avanti?
EDGE: Avanti. They changed the name of the actual orchestra. So, there’s an orchestra, there’s a chorale, there’s a lot of piano stuff, there’s a lot of—it’s a very, very big music movement in the city. So, I started to play with them. Met a lot of new, nice people and, all the while, working away. [Laughs]
NORTON: You’re still working as a physician, yes.
EDGE: Yeah And, then, in the early 2000s somebody convinced me that I would like to play in the McLean [Virginia] orchestra. So, for a while, I was also playing in the McLean, for several years.
NORTON: You had to go all the way out there?
EDGE: Yeah. Well, Friday Morning Music Club rehearsed in pretty far Northwest too. None of this was on the Hill. Yeah, I would drive out to—I think I did McLean something like 2008 to 2012. And that was also another very, very good orchestra. And there was some …
NORTON: The McLean orchestra was.
EDGE: Yeah, yeah.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Some conductor changes that happened. The woman [Sylvia Alimena] conducting the Friday Morning Music Club orchestra actually stopped there and went to McLean for a while and, then, somebody—you know, a lot of stuff and politics, of course. And, so, then, around 2002, the Atlas Theater, Vicky Gau, who is the music director and artistic director of Capital City Symphony, which at that point was the Georgetown Symphony and rehearsing and performing in Georgetown in 2000 …
NORTON: So, that was the one you started out with, yes. Or got—
EDGE: Well, no, no. It was a different orchestra.
NORTON: Oh, different Georgetown. Okay.
EDGE: It was a different orchestra. It was not under this other guy.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And she got invited by the other people that were looking at this big empty space of the Atlas Theater and she came into this empty space and saw the vision and the Capital City Symphony became one of the founding partners of the Atlas Theater. And in, I think, it’s in 2002 they—or maybe 2000—they moved into the Atlas Theater, and I started playing with them in [2006]. So.
NORTON: And still playing with them.
EDGE: Still playing with them. Maybe it was 2000. That’s the numbers I have upstairs. Yeah. So, I started playing with them and that was like a dream come true. I talked at CHAW off and on about we need to get an orchestra going here on Capitol Hill. It’s not easy to get an orchestra going. You know, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had an orchestra. So, to suddenly have a real symphony orchestra right here on Capitol Hill was pretty amazing. It still is! And, so, yeah, I started playing with them and I still play with them. And we’ve gotten better and better and better and better. We are really good now. I can say that with confidence. And we were not really good back in [2006] …
NORTON: At the beginning, yes.
EDGE: …, 2006, 2007. You know. Well, we now have people, we have more people that want to play, more excellent people that want to play than we have space for. So. Even in some of the string sections. So. Yeah, it’s been really great. And, then, I joined the Capital City Symphony board in ’16, I think is right. So, I’ve been on the board for quite a while now.
NORTON: Okay. This is the board of the …
EDGE: The Capital City Symphony board.
NORTON: Capital Symphony.
EDGE: So, I’ve been on their board for quite a while. Which is good. It’s really interesting and—when I joined it, it was very much a working board. We now have an executive director and it’s a little bit less of a working board. So. And I’ve continued to take lessons and, then, I, fifteen years ago, met this friend, through my teacher, who was a pianist who had never played with anybody and wanted to play music with somebody else. And we started playing together and we still get together every week or two and play. We’ve played so much different literature. You know, we work on a piece.
NORTON: Who’s your pianist?
EDGE: Her name is Barbara Diskin, D-I-S-K-I-N. She does not live on the Hill but she’s done a lot on the Hill. She knows a lot of people on the Hill. And, uh, this is driving me nuts. I’ve got to look up his—I can’t believe I can’t remember his name.
NORTON: All right. I’m going to go off—I’m going to pause.
NORTON: We’re now back on the record and you now remember the name of …
EDGE: The name of my second bass teacher that I started with sometime in the 90s. It was William or Bill Vaughan, V-A-U-G-H-A-N, who was a National Symphony player.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And it was he that recommended me to the Friday Morning Music Club orchestra. So, that was the connection. And Friday Morning Music Club. I bet her name will show up, too. Maybe not, because … So, that’s kind of my music story. So, I’ve been playing with Barbara. So, Bill Vaughan, my teacher, and Barbara were in the same yoga class. And she’s very extroverted, talkative, and she—"Oh, you’re in the symphony. Oh, I’d really like to play with somebody.” She actually somehow convinced him that she could come play with him. And she went to his house and he played bass and she played piano. And he quickly ascertained that this was not going to work because she was not, you know, of the same caliber. And, so, he said, “I think I have the person for you.” [Laughs]
NORTON: And that was you.
EDGE: Yeah. Well, it’s been amazing. We’re really dear friends and we play almost, like I said, almost every week. And, so, you might not know about the other musical thing on the Hill, which is the— it’s called Works in Progress. It sort of started out as being called The Piano Group. I bet it’s been going for 20 years now, that a bunch of people get together. It started out as all pianists getting together on a Sunday afternoon at 5:00 once a month and everybody would play what they’d been working on for each other. And the only rule was you had to applaud no matter how well or badly the person plays. [Laughs]
NORTON: So, where do you all meet?
EDGE: Well, it started out they were …
NORTON: Rotating houses?
EDGE: Rotating houses. Different friends started the group. I knew a couple of friends. And, then, Maygene joined the group. And, then, one day I said to Maygene, “Well, wouldn’t you like a bass and piano duet?” And she said, “Sure.” So, Barbara and I started playing for this group on Sundays, which is great because it gives you a goal. You know, why are Barbara and I playing this piece? At least we could play it for the—you know, nobody really wants to listen to a bass-piano duet that’s played well but not terrific, you know. So, we started playing with them. And, actually, what it’s morphed into is that we now always, for several years, we’ve always met at Maygene’s house because she has a baby grand piano and enough space. And we now are a bunch of pianists and a violinist and a singer and two different guitar players and me and Barbara, bass and piano, a cellist. So, it’s gotten to be a little—and probably 12 to 15 people who have participated over time. But any given month anywhere from six to ten show up. Isn’t that amazing?
NORTON: Yep.
EDGE: And, in talking to people, this is not a one off-er. There are groups like this all over the place in different—I have a cousin in San Francisco who used to participate in a group like this.
NORTON: But this one is just the Hill.
EDGE: Oh, well, it’s just DC And mostly it’s the Hill but we accept people from other localities. Maygene’s a stitch. She can go to a concert—one guy that joins us she met at a concert at the National Gallery. [Laughs] And it’s been really fun, because you can watch—we‘ve got all levels of confidence and you can watch how people have gotten better mostly.
NORTON: That’s great. All right. I’m going to …
EDGE: Take a quick break?
NORTON: Nope. I’m going to—because I think we’re going to have to wrap up here fairly soon but I want to go back to your—you probably don’t even want to talk about it, but back to your pretty good music stuff and the No So Plain Jayne Trio.
EDGE: Oh, the Not So Plain Jayne Trio. Oh, right. Yeah. Well, that was—now tax me again as to when that—that must have been in the 90s.
NORTON: Yeah. I think so.
EDGE: That was in the 90s. And I don’t even remember exactly who asked who. I’m sure Parker [Jayne] or Bruce [Robey] asked me to join them. Of course, we knew each other from doing the musicals at CHAW.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: And that was so much fun. I mean, the trio was piano and trumpet and bass and then sometimes Jeff Serfass on sax and sometimes John—he was a teenager.
NORTON: John O’Brien?
EDGE: O’Brien on drums.
NORTON: Okay.
EDGE: Yeah. And, you know, we played all this 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s music from a book. There are books put out by Reader’s Digest of this music. It’s piano music but it’s easy to play piano music, which was fine with Parker. He knows how to embellish and to make it—but it gave each of us a line to read, so we had, I think, two copies of the—we may have had two copies of each book and we just, you know—and we’d play …
NORTON: Well, what did you do?
EDGE: We’d play for receptions. We ended up playing for receptions and there was a short period of time when we were playing at the Salvadorean restaurant on the other end of [13th Street] and Lincoln Park. There was a …
NORTON: Yeah, mm-hmm. It’s in the same block as Frager’s, I think.
EDGE: It’s where Pacci’s is now.
NORTON: Yeah, okay.
EDGE: No, right here on the Hill, on Lincoln Park. Right on Lincoln Park.
NORTON: Oh, okay. Oh, right, right, right. Oh, I know exactly where it is. Right. Exactly.
EDGE: We would go over on Friday night and we would play for a couple of hours and they would feed us dinner. And this went on for quite a while. I mean, a year or year and a half. And, then, it fizzled. And, then, of course, the Jaynettes got—you know all about the Jaynettes with Linda and …
NORTON: But you didn’t play for them or did you?
EDGE: No. No, we didn’t play for them. The Jaynettes started after us and, yeah, we didn’t—we might play in the same event but we didn’t play with them. You’re right. We didn’t. No, no. So, this went on for some time and, then, we kind of fizzled. So. I think I got so busy playing classical music.
NORTON: Yeah.
EDGE: I mean, I sort of look at my last few years of practice as, you know, I’d get up in the morning at six. I’d eat breakfast. I’d sit at the computer for an hour here in the house doing my work. And, then, I would go into work and I would see patients until six or, you know, until I was done. I’d come home. I have what I call fly-by dinner, get in the car with my bass, drive half an hour to 40 minutes to a rehearsal. Get to the rehearsal. That’s the other remembrance is get to the rehearsal, get the bass out, get ready to play, and just kind of go [Interviewee makes a big exhale].
NORTON: You’re sighing. [Laughs]
EDGE: I’m here, I’m here. And, now, for the next two and a half hours I don’t have to tell anybody what to do. I have to do what she tells me what to do.
NORTON: And this would be the conductor. Yes.
EDGE: Yeah, yeah. And, then, come home and go to bed at 11:30 and get up and do it again. I often felt like I was going to fall off a cliff. So, yeah.
NORTON: Well, I’m running out of things to ask you about. Any other sort of Capitol Hill things I …
EDGE: Well, not Capitol Hill things, but the other major thing in my life has been Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
NORTON: Right. Okay. Well, let me ask you about that. How’d you get involved with that?
EDGE: So, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary is the largest privately funded conservancy for raptors probably in the world.
NORTON: And where is it?
EDGE: It’s in Pennsylvania, in Berks County. It’s about a third of the way from Allentown to Harrisburg, right off of Route 61 that goes from Schuylkill down to the Reading area. So, it’s along the Kittatinny Ridge, the mountains that run through there call the Kittatinny Ridge. And the hawks, when they migrate from the north, they fly along the Kittatinny Ridge and then ultimately turn south when they get to the Appalachians because the air currents carry them that way. And, in 1934, my grandmother, Rosalie Edge, who had become a conservationist by then and had lots of contacts through her birding in Central Park, became aware of the fact that the Pennsylvania Dutch farmers—because everybody back then thought hawks were …
NORTON: Predators?
EDGE: … predators and dangerous and should be gotten rid of—were going up to this lookout where you can see the birds very close up. Some of them—I mean, they don’t all—but enough. But they would go up there in the fall and shoot them by the thousands. Thousands! And she orchestrated getting enough money to lease the land and set up the first— [Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, founded in 1934, is the oldest and largest member-supported raptor conservation organization in the world.]
NORTON: So, they’d lease the spot where they’d go up and shoot the hawks.
EDGE: And she hired a curator who—he and his wife—he went up to the promontory called North Lookout and she stood at the start of the trail. There’s pictures of [them] standing there with a gun, you know, a rifle, and she’d tell people, well, you can’t go up there and shoot anymore. And they didn’t. They didn’t like it, but they didn’t. And it was a different era. They just didn’t.
NORTON: Yeah, yeah.
EDGE: And he was standing up there and decided, well, this is kind of boring. Why don’t I count the hawks. So, he got out his binoculars—he was a naturalist—and he got out his binoculars and he started counting and recording what kinds of hawks were migrating and how many, including that he saw eagles and nobody believed they existed anymore. And started publishing this. And, we now have the single largest repository of hawk migration data in the world because we’ve been counting hawks since 1934. Except for two years during World War II. They’ve been counted every fall and every spring. The biggest migration that flies by us are Broad-winged Hawks. So.
NORTON: How are the hawks doing?
EDGE: Well, it depends which species you’re talking about.
NORTON: Okay. All right.
EDGE: Some are doing well, some right now we have some concern about. But the eagle story is the big story and it’s our data that Rachel Carson used to write her book [Silent Spring, published in 1962] about the DDT problem with eagles.
NORTON: Really?
EDGE: Yep. It was our data that showed it plummet and that when you took DDT out, up it came again. And the eggs could survive. So, we do a lot of education. We do a lot of research. We’re very involved now worldwide. So, my grandmother, you know, started it. She pretty much ran it, though she had a board. And my father was then on the board. She died in ’64.
NORTON: Your grandmother died in ’64.
EDGE: My grandmother died in ’64. And he remained on the board until approximately 1992 and one fine day he called me up and said, “I’m going to retire from the board and I think you ought to join the board.” That’s my age-old story. I said, “But, Dad.”
NORTON: I can’t. I’m too busy.
EDGE: “I’m too busy.” He had a motto. He said, “If you want something done, ask a busy woman.” [Laughs] And he said, “Well, that’s too bad. I already told Minturn,” who was the chairman of the board at that time, “that you would do this.”
NORTON: Minturn?
EDGE: Minturn Wright was the chairman of the Hawk Mountain board.
NORTON: M-I-N-T-E-R-N?
EDGE: T-U-R-N.
NORTON: T-U-R-N. Okay. Wright. Okay.
EDGE: He was the chairman of the board at that time and he’s still with us. He’s still emeritus. He’s 95.
NORTON: Wow.
EDGE: And, so, of course, I did it. So I’ve been on the board ever since. They have one of these rotations where you can be on for four years and re-elected for four years. Then you have to be off for a year and then you can be re-elected. And, so, I keep going. And it’s a wonderful organization. I’ve met so many amazing people that I would have never met before in the ornithological and the financial world. I mean, we’ve got some—it’s a whole different level of organization, you know, in terms of the people it reaches. And we do such wonderful things in conservation. And, so, I’m sure that grandmother would be thrilled at where we are now because a lot of what we do is not only locally in Pennsylvania to educate people about conservation and raptors and to save them, etc., but we also do a lot of work in Central and South America and also in other parts of the world with our—which is where conservation is at right now. I mean …
NORTON: It’s worldwide.
EDGE: Because, if you’re birds, they fly north to nest and have their babies and, then, they fly south for the winter. And we have GPS [Global Positioning System] data of them flying south through Central America—they kind of funnel in to Northern Mexico—fly through Central America and many of them end up wintering in South America, in the Amazon and Peru and Colombia. Some of them even go back to the same site every year. It’s fascinating. So, if they go down there and their ecosystem has been destroyed by deforestation, they don’t live to make the return trip next year and have more babies. So, that’s why, you know, we’ve collected a lot of data on that and we’ve had our fingers in the pie in research projects in Africa and Indonesia and the Philippines. You know, a lot of it along the same lines. And a trainee program got started in the late 80s and we’ve now trained hundreds of trainees from over 75 countries. They come and spend four months at a time with us to learn conservation, raptor technique, and all that kind of stuff. So.
NORTON: Wow.
EDGE: It’s a pretty rewarding place. It’s very healthy. Not only would she be happy about the kind of work we’re doing, but, also, it’s a healthy organization. It’s doing well. It’s going to be around for a while. You just have to be in the raptor community to know about it. [Laughs]
NORTON: All right. I am starting to run out of steam.
EDGE: Okay.
NORTON: But, no. It’s up to you. Anything else that you want to talk about?
EDGE: Oh, I don’t know what else …
NORTON: Well, the only other thing, I had the Capitol Hill Village there.
EDGE: Yeah.
NORTON: But I don’t know how much you’ve done with that or …
EDGE: Well, we were founding board members …
NORTON: Right.
EDGE: … of Capitol Hill Village and—but I remember, you know, my line was I would be a founding board member if I didn’t have to go to board meetings. And that time I held my line. I said I’m working. I’ve got all these other things. I don’t have time for more board meetings. But I’ll be happy if you want to use my name. And Neal went to board meetings and he was treasurer and he worked on their software and all that way back. What’s that? Fifteen years ago now?
NORTON: Yeah, it has been. At least. Well, didn’t they just have a big anniversary or something?
EDGE: Yeah. Well, I remember we had the tenth anniversary but that was a while ago. So.
NORTON: Yes. So, it may be 20. [Capitol Hill Village was established in 2007.]
EDGE: They may be getting there. And, so, yeah. I’m semi-active in the Village. I mean, I have a lot of friends in the Village and I go to a lot of their activities. I don’t do a whole lot of volunteer work with them. And, you know, as you know, the last year and a half has been a bit of the pits. So. I guess, for the record—so, we brought up two children on the Hill. And Rebecca was the eldest. And she …
NORTON: Passed away.
EDGE: … had some really rotten issues with two different cancers and passed away at the age of 42 last fall. So, it’s not been a great year to advance other things.
NORTON: Right. Understood, understood.
EDGE: So, we’re gradually moving back up into that. But, yeah, Hawk Mountain has been a big part of our family and [it’s not?] the Hill. But we used to go to board meetings and camp for the board meetings.
NORTON: That’s fun.
EDGE: It was fun. Yeah, it was fun. Can you imagine being camping, at a site on the mountain, but getting up and having breakfast and get everybody cleaned up and then go sit down in a board meeting by eight o’clock in the morning? Aaarrh. Wouldn’t it be nice to be young again and want to do that kind of stuff?
NORTON: [Laughs] Yes.
EDGE: So, yeah, you know. Can’t imagine living anywhere else. That’s why we did this renovation was the—we renovated, you know, our house. Just finished a year ago. And this back porch and the bathroom on the first floor.
NORTON: Which for the record is very lovely.
EDGE: Thank you, thank you. And the reason, I mean, obvi[ously], we did it because the porch needed to have something done to it and we really wanted a bathroom on the first floor so we could, if we had to, stay on the first floor. And now we can. It’s been really a good move.
NORTON: That’s great. And where …
EDGE: So, we can stick around on Capitol Hill.
NORTON: Exactly, exactly. It’s a great place.
EDGE: It is. And I guess, you know, the other thing I never got around to saying is it’s been really wonderful to work and live in the same community for 40 years. And to walk to work, some of the time, and to have some of your patients—it’s quite an honor to have some of your patients be your friends, some of your friends be your patients. And some of my patients who I was sort of friendly with while I was practicing, since I left the practice, we’ve become really good friends because we felt it was more appropriate. But it’s an amazing honor. And that’s what I loved about medicine was being able to—I mean, you know, the practice, the whole process was to know people and run into them. And I guess I’m old fashioned.
NORTON: That’s all right.
EDGE: So, that was a great privilege. That part I miss. I don’t miss the things that drove me away which was the churning.
NORTON: All right. Thank you, Deb. I think unless you …
EDGE: Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you. I’m honored.
NORTON: All right. Okay.
EDGE: I can’t believe somebody wants me to prattle on about my life for two hours or whatever time—I haven’t even looked.
END OF INTERVIEW
Ruth Ann Overbeck Capitol Hill History Project
Deborah Edge, M. D., Interview, April 22, 2024

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