I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly, so I repeated the question. “How old are your kids?” “Six,” he said, this time with a grin between sheepish and sly. We were in a group discussion with other inmates and staff at the D.C. Correctional Treatment Facility near the D.C. Jail, so I let the matter drop. When the session ended, we spoke again privately, and that’s when the fog lifted.
Washington, D.C
Opinion | As youth crime persists, one question looms large (continued)
He explained that six years earlier, at age 16, he had fathered three children in the District. “They were born one month apart,” he said. I told him he belonged in jail. He laughed and agreed he had left behind a mess.
These were the opening paragraphs of a column I wrote nearly 30 years ago about children in trouble and the city’s besieged child welfare system. I had visited the correctional facility to meet separately with male and female offenders. I learned that many had children, some living with relatives or friends, some in the city’s foster care system. One inmate didn’t seem to know where her children were.
The week of my column, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan placed the city’s child welfare system under general receivership. He said the system was in a crisis so severe that he had no choice: Children were being neglected, abused, abandoned.
I don’t know what became of the 22-year-old inmate with three children. Those kids must now be about 36. Their father told me he never had a father to give him encouragement and support. What of his own children?
Last week’s column featured a long list of youths arrested in crimes committed during the first half of April. It asked, “What about the fathers?” The same question can be asked about the fathers of children in today’s child welfare system, children out in the streets — not in jail but also not in school.
Let me revisit another old column to tell you about a different kind of father. Mine.
By today’s standards of success, my father might have been labeled a failure. He was a high school dropout, worked as a laborer, often two jobs at a time. Later in life, he landed work inside a government office building and retired as a senior clerk.
My father never gave me, my brother or my sister an allowance. There were no such things as family vacations. We were the last family in the neighborhood to get a television. We never owned a car. And my father didn’t have the kind of jobs that let him take time off to attend a kid’s drill competition or football game.
But failure? No. Isaiah King was a living example of what responsible fatherhood is all about.
His life refuted the notion that wealth, education and social status have anything to do with the irreplaceable condition for being a good father, which is simply being there. Apart from brief visits to out-of-town family and a few medical stays, my father spent nearly every night at home with Amelia, his wife of 53 years, and their three children.
To some people passing him on the street, my father might have been dismissed as a working-class Black man of little consequence. Goodness knows, he swallowed more than his share of insults and slights growing up in this racially segregated city. And we kids — familiar with being banned from schools, stores, theaters, restaurants, and pools and amusement parks — knew all too well that White people’s animus toward and disdain for men, women and children of a darker hue were as pervasive as the D.C. air we breathed.
For us, the most cherished part of the Washington landscape was Isaiah King’s home. Simply because he was there.
To be sure, my mother held the reins — and had the brains — in the household. After taking in washing and ironing at home and doing menial domestic work in far Northwest D.C. and suburban Maryland to help send three children to college, she went on to collect undergraduate and graduate degrees herself and retired as a D.C. public school teacher.
My mother was the sparkplug. But my father supplied the horsepower.
Except for the time our kitchen stove was converted from coal to natural gas, no electrician, plumber or carpenter entered our home. Daddy fixed everything. He painted; we held the ladder. He did the electrical work; we kept candles handy. So what if the light switch read “nO” instead of “On” when Daddy got finished? It worked, didn’t it?
I learned from him — and have tried to teach my sons so they will in turn teach my grandsons — that a real man doesn’t leave it to others to take care of his children. A real man respects and cherishes strong women. And while his boxing lessons never improved my win-loss record on the playground, he taught me to never run away from a fight.
There were other priceless gifts.
Like the morning that self-taught man took his three grade-school youngsters to Washington Circle, pointed us east down K Street and told us to “just follow your nose.” Fifteen blocks later, we arrived at the Central Public Library and the world of books.
Like the first letter he wrote to me, pulling me up short after my marriage in 1961, and reminding me of a husband’s responsibilities.
Like the moment when I let on how hurt I was to lose a coveted banking position to a politically connected, fair-haired boy, and how he set aside his own pain and thoughts of impending death to snap me out of my self-absorption with the words of a loving father, “Son, keep your chin up.”
Today we see too many kids in jail. Kids in graves. Kids broken in body and mind.
Think of the story of that young inmate 30 years ago. Of my story.
How did we get to where we are? Where do we go from here?
The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool is set to be drained again after Donald Trump said on Monday – without providing proof – that five people were arrested for vandalism and five more are under investigation in connection to the algae blooms and peeling paint that appeared weeks after his ill-fated $14m renovation attempt.
“It’s not a lot of damage, but we’ll probably have to let the water out and refix it. They went in there with a knife,” Trump told reporters, describing what he first said was a 290- to 300ft slit in the paint but then later amended to a 350ft slit. He also said someone had put fertilizer into the water, which caused the algae to grow.
Reporters who visited the pool on Sunday could see no evidence of such damage, the Washington Post reported.
The newspaper also interviewed three-time Olympic cyclist David Hearn, who said he had been arrested by US park police on a misdemeanor charge after stopping by the refurbished pool and, out of curiosity, touching one of the pieces of peeling paint liner.
Trump has sought to turn the monument “American flag blue” in time for the for the country’s 250th birthday, which included painting the bottom of the pool a dark shade of navy officially called “Old Glory Blue”.
He awarded a no-bid contract to a company he said had previously done work on swimming pools at one of his golf clubs, and within days of the completion of the work, the water started to appear green from algae plaguing the standing water and the coating of paint applied during the renovation also started to detach.
On Monday, Trump was adamant it was not the pool company to blame for the algae blooms and peeling paint, but “vandals”. When pushed to provide evidence of his claims, he told reporters to call the Department of the Interior and the National Park Service. Neither agency responded immediately to a request for comment, nor did the US park police.
When asked how alleged vandals were able to get so close to one of Washington DC’s most historically symbolic attractions, where there is a heavy police presence, Trump responded that “we didn’t have a lot” of police then.
“Who would think that somebody would go into a pool and take a knife and start cutting it?” he asked.
It’s unclear when the pool will be drained, but a spokesperson with the DC Water Authority said the agency has issued the national parks service a temporary permit to discharge water into a sewer that flows into a local treatment facility. The permit was issued 16 June and expires 2 July, the spokesperson said.
Trump had earlier posted on social media that “there is a 10-year prison sentence for the destruction, or even the attempted destruction, of such things – Which will be fully enforced!”
Destruction of federal property can carry a maximum prison sentence of 10 years.
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan delivers the keynote address at the IMF Statistical Forum/Statistics for Policy Making in Washington, D.C., on Nov. 18, 2014. Greenspan died on Monday at age 100.
Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images
Sign up for the Planet Money newsletter. The world is confusing. Economics can help.
Alan Greenspan, who steered the Federal Reserve for nearly two decades, through some of the longest economic booms in U.S. history, has died. Greenspan died Monday at his home in Washington. He was 100.
Greenspan was the rare celebrity among central bankers, lionized for his economic stewardship in the 1990s. At a time when it seemed every barbershop had a television tuned to the stock market channel, ordinary Americans hung on the Fed chairman’s every word.
His reputation was tarnished, however, by the global financial crisis which struck a decade later.
Greenspan liked to write speeches in the bathtub, but it was his listeners who were sometimes left feeling underwater by the unfamiliar dialect known as “Fedspeak.”
Greenspan later acknowledged that he would deliberately garble his syntax to avoid saying anything that might move financial markets.
A notorious exception came in 1996, when Greenspan seemed to suggest that stock prices might be getting ahead of themselves.
“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset prices,” he asked during a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
The warning that exuberant investors might not be quite rational sent temporary shivers through global stock markets. But Greenspan’s own stock continued to climb.
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Fed Chair Alan Greenspan testifies before the Joint Economic Committee in Congress in Washington, D.C., on June 17, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan dabbled in jazz
He was married to NBC news anchor Andrea Mitchell, who anounced his death in a statement, and the two made a somewhat unlikely power couple. Comedian Jay Leno once joked during a White House Correspondents Association dinner that Mitchell, not then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, was married to “the most powerful man in the world.”
Greenspan was a talented jazz musician who studied clarinet and saxophone at Juilliard. But it was economics that made him a rock star and a symbol of the widely-shared prosperity at the end of the 20th century.
A master of monetary policy, Greenspan led the central bank under four different presidents, beginning in 1987.
Much of his tenure was marked by falling unemployment. Traditionally, central bankers respond to low unemployment by raising interest rates to ward off inflation. But Greenspan broke with that tradition and kept borrowing costs low.
“He was willing to watch and wait as the unemployment rate drifted lower and lower and lower and lower, and we still had no inflation,” recalled Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who served under Greenspan on the Fed’s governing board.
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan and his wife television journalist Andrea Mitchell attend a reception with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., on April 29, 2012.
Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan oversaw an economic boom
Greenspan’s gamble with low rates paid off, and the economy kept booming for a decade, although critics argue his easy-money policies also helped inflate the dot-com bubble and later fueled the subprime mortgage meltdown.
In addition to low interest rates, Greenspan pursued a light touch on regulation, refusing to use the Fed’s powers to crack down on risky lending. His libertarian philosophy was shaped in part by the novelist Ayn Rand.
Greenspan had been a member of Rand’s inner circle, contributing chapters to her book, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. When Greenspan joined the Ford administration as an economic adviser, Rand attended his swearing-in ceremony.
“Greenspan said that Ayn Rand put the moral foundation under capitalism for him,” said Rand’s biographer, Anne Heller.
Greenspan believed bankers didn’t need heavy-handed regulation because their own self-interest would prevent them from taking undue risks. Only after risky banking helped trigger the global financial crisis in 2008 — two years after he left the Fed — would Greenspan sheepishly admit that he’d been wrong.
“I was shocked because I had going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well,” Greenspan told a congressional committee investigating the financial meltdown.
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Then-President Bill Clinton talks with then-Fed Chair Greenspan during the receiving line at the White House in Washington, D.C., on Dec. 31, 1999.
Tim Sloan/AFP via Getty Images
Greenspan long advocated for a light regulatory touch
The idea that bankers will sometimes take dangerous risks if they’re allowed to should not have come as a surprise to Greenspan, however.
Decades earlier, he’d played a bit part in the savings-and-loan crisis, which was a kind of dress rehearsal for the 2008 financial crisis.
As a private economist in the 1980s, Greenspan provided a testimonial for what he called “seasoned and expert” management at Lincoln Savings and Loan, in an effort to ward of regulation of the thrift.
Lincoln later collapsed, costing taxpayers billions. And its boss, Charles Keating, went to prison for fraud.
Economist Vincent Reinhart said it took courage for Greenspan to acknowledge, however belatedly, that self-interest is not always enough to protect taxpayers and investors from the risky behavior of bankers.
“For Alan Greenspan to say, ‘Well, maybe markets don’t always get it right,’ is a reflection on his entire career, not just his tenure at the Fed,” Reinhart said.
Ultimately, Greenspan’s will be remembered as both a maestro of monetary policy and a reluctant regulator. His legacy is shaped by the boom he fostered, and by the bust he failed to prevent.
John Ydstie contributed to this report.
Felony warning issued as arrests reported at Reflecting Pool
Federal officials are warning visitors that taking paint chips, debris or other materials from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool could lead to felony charges as crews continue cleaning up a major algae bloom that has turned the landmark’s water bright green.
WASHINGTON – Federal officials are warning visitors that taking paint chips, debris or other materials from the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool could lead to felony charges as crews continue cleaning up a major algae bloom that has turned the landmark’s water bright green.
The warning comes after authorities reported multiple arrests Saturday involving people accused of removing material from the Reflecting Pool.
Algae, paint problems plague Reflecting Pool
What we know:
While officials have not released the exact number of arrests or identified those taken into custody, law enforcement agencies said anyone caught taking paint chips or debris from the site could face serious criminal penalties.
Visitors have reported seeing blue paint chips floating in the water as cleanup crews use mobile draining machines to remove algae and restore the pool. The unusual appearance of the Reflecting Pool has attracted large crowds to the National Mall in recent days, according to previous FOX 5 D.C. reporting.
President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that work on the Reflecting Pool would begin immediately and claimed several arrests had been made in connection with what he described as deliberate sabotage of the site.
Authorities have not publicly detailed the specific charges filed in the reported arrests. However, federal officials warned that removing government property from the Reflecting Pool could result in felony charges, and prosecutors could pursue more serious offenses if evidence shows anyone intentionally contaminated the water or caused additional damage.
READ MORE: Reflecting Pool looks ‘like vomit,’ visitors say; crews continue cleaning job
“If there are more serious products that are put into the Reflecting Pool to create more algae or a bigger problem, then we’ll consider more serious charges,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro told Fox News. “But make no mistake, making D.C. beautiful is a priority and if you damage, vandalize or do anything to impact something like the Reflecting Pool, you can be prosecuted.”
What’s next:
The Reflecting Pool remains under active cleanup as officials investigate the cause of the algae bloom, according to the president.
According to federal contract data, a more extensive renovation, including potentially draining the pool again, could cost more than $14 million.
The Source: Information from FOX 5 D.C. reporting, President Donald Trump, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and other federal officials.
-
North Dakota2 minutes agoGrand Forks man appeals manslaughter conviction
-
Ohio4 minutes ago
Ohio Lottery Powerball, Pick 3 Midday winning numbers for June 22, 2026
-
Oklahoma9 minutes agoOklahoma captures third MCWS title, defeating North Carolina 13-2
-
Oregon16 minutes agoGray whale carcass washes ashore in Gearhart on Oregon coast
-
Pennsylvania19 minutes ago
From peace talks to Pennsylvania: Trump visiting Mack Truck facility
-
Rhode Island24 minutes ago
RI Lottery Powerball, Numbers Midday winning numbers for June 22, 2026
-
South-Carolina31 minutes agoWhat to know about a cold storage warehouse fire in Los Angeles
-
South Dakota35 minutes ago
SD Lottery Powerball, Lotto America winning numbers for June 22, 2026
