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John B. OakesJohn B. Oakes
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We lived together in a house at 1913 S Street N.W. for a year [1938-9], but the following year several more came down, and we were also offered a marvelous large house called “Hockley,” across the Potomac owned by a family that we knew -- we knew their daughter, actually. They were Naval people [Admiral Wilkinson and Family] who were being assigned to Hawaii. This was 1939, two years before Pearl Harbor. So we took over that house, at very low rental, and expanded our group to about a dozen bachelors. It was a big house, you see, and there were about ten or twelve young bachelors, every one of whom --

[END TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE; BEGIN TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO]

Oakes:

-- This was quite an extraordinary group of young men, several of whom were clerks of Supreme Court Justices including the Chief Justice, and including Felix Frankfurter, and others. I was the only newspaper man there with no distinction whatsoever. But these guys were all whiz bang people and we had a remarkable group. And that lasted until people began to go into the war. But successors always came in. When the family who owned the house came back from Hawaii [1941], the group moved to another location. It continued on with new recruits, a bachelor house for years, even after the war.

To go back to your question: I got to know Kay Meyer when I was working on the Post. She happened to come back from Chicago to work on her father's paper, the Post, around this time, around 1938 or 1939, I guess. I was acquainted with her as a co-reporter. We were co-workers on the Post. I'd take her out occasionally. A very attractive woman. And we sure, dated, but we weren't about to get married or anything like that. I brought her out to





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