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Or that some of WETA's first camera operators were high school students?

“The actual school student population at first didn't really know or understand what was down there,” former Yorktown student and camera operator Mike Ostergard told WETA for an episode of “If You Lived Here.”

“TV wasn't that old in that day and age,” he added, recalling that the entire operation took place in a room that was 50 feet by 50 feet, which meant they “had to know each other very well.”

“Everyone chipped in where they could,” Ostergard said, adding that most of the programs were geared toward students, and members of the Yorktown school staff taught some of them.

Ostergard's story is a reminder that, from the very beginning, WETA was a community effort.

Nine days earlier, American League owners had voted to let Bob Short move the franchise to Texas, ending seventy-one years of American League baseball in the capital.

The crowd started the evening docile and resigned, by one account, and that lasted until the first pitch. A "Bob Short Stinks" sign drew a roar and was quickly yanked down; the "Bob Short Still Stinks" sign that replaced it drew a louder one. Meanwhile the Senators came back from four runs down and took a two-run lead.

With one out left to play, the fans came over the walls.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2025/08/04/team-never-was-how-padres-nearly-became-washingtons-team

(Photo: Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post)

In the early 1980s there were mushrooms growing out of the floor of Union Station and rats where the travelers used to be. In February 1981 a House subcommittee held hearings at which members passed around chunks of plaster that had fallen from Daniel Burnham's ceiling.

Putting it right took master plasterers crouched on scaffolds, marble from the same Greek quarry that supplied the Parthenon, and $181 million.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2014/11/12/how-union-station-was-saved-1980s

(Photo: LOC)

The British had come through Washington a few weeks earlier and burned most of the government buildings, and the heat in the Senate chamber had been fierce enough to cook its marble into limestone. President Madison moved the Senate into Blodgett’s Hotel, a building that took up a whole block downtown and also housed the city’s first theater, a post office and the Patent Office.

Read about it here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/10/09/emergency-quarters-congress-war-1812-forces-senate-take-lofty-business-lowly-tavern

(Photo: Library of Congress)

The run at the Ambassador Theater, at 18th and Columbia Road NW, went from August 9 to 13, 1967. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had just come off a badly matched stint opening for the Monkees and were scrambling for work, and one of the five shows was a free afternoon festival for local kids.

A teenaged Nils Lofgren, years away from joining the E Street Band, was in the crowd on the last night, and he has never really stopped talking about it.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/11/04/jimi-hendrix-dc

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Resting on the river bottom about a mile offshore from Piney Point, Maryland, partially obscured by silt, is the U-1105, a one-of-its-kind German U-boat known in its day as “Black Panther” that stalked Allied ships in the final days of the war.

It never hunted anything in American waters. What put it in the Potomac was what came after the war, when the former Allies competed for advanced German technology and the U.S. Navy spent years sinking and raising the thing to see what it could take.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2026/07/31/u-1105-black-panther-how-nazi-submarine-ended-potomac-river

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Kennedy had come to Washington in 1946 as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman congressman and did what young arrivals here have always done, which is move into a group house. His was on 31st Street NW, shared with his sister and an aide who paid him two dollars a month in rent, and by every account it was a disaster.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/11/11/young-jfk-georgetown

(Photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Over the next few weeks WETA will be publishing short videos from a new series, "The Capital." A project of the Institute of Politics, Policy & History (IPPH), "The Capital" is Washington, D.C.'s origin story.

Episode 1: The new nation was almost torn apart with dozens of potential venues considered for the capital. Ultimately, the nation's first political deal is made at a dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and cooked by James Hemings, who was born into slavery but became America's first French-trained chef. But what, exactly, was the deal?

More episodes are available here: https://wetaplus.org/show/the-capital/

Getting it built took thirteen years, two presidents who did not live to see it finished, and one very strange evening at the D.C. National Guard Armory.

Read the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/11/28/how-kennedy-center-was-created

(Photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Twenty-five years ago this month, four hijacked planes killed nearly three thousand people in New York, in a Pennsylvania field, and here at home. One hundred eighty-four of them died at the Pentagon, across the river in Arlington.

The collection includes "Frontline: The Man Who Knew," "Man in Red Bandana," "9/11 Inside the Pentagon," and "Generation 9/11," among others.

It's now available now on WETA+. Streaming link is in the comments below.

The Tidal Basin Bathing Beach opened in August 1918 with a water carnival: diving contests, tug of war, sandcastles, and about two thousand spectators. It was an immediate hit.

It was also whites-only, and the controversy over that eventually shut it down for good in 1925.

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/07/21/cooling-tidal-basin

(Photo: LOC)

The Oval Office meeting that followed produced one of the most iconic photographs in American history — and an amazing backstory.

Learn more in this latest video from our Boundary Stones local history series.

Sixty-three years ago today, a quarter of a million people gathered on the National Mall for the March on Washington. Culie Vick Kilimanjaro and her husband John Marshall were among them, having ridden up overnight from Greensboro, North Carolina, on a bus chartered by their church and the NAACP. They found a babysitter for their three children and paid their own way.

The ride was not a celebration. People on the bus were afraid, John Marshall remembered, because there was no precedent for what they were about to do and no way to know what was waiting for them at the other end.

Then, before dawn, the bus stopped for gas in Virginia, and what a few of them saw as the sun came up told them everything they needed to know about the day ahead.

WETA's Boundary Stones has their first-hand account here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/08/26/reflections-march-washington-thing-we-were-most-afraid-was-march-would-be-bust

(Photo: LOC)

Cut off and surrounded at the Battle of Brooklyn, the First Maryland Regiment charged an old stone farmhouse held by more than 2,000 British troops. Then they charged it again. Some 256 were killed, wounded or captured.

It bought the time the rest of the army needed to escape to Manhattan. Most of those men had never seen combat before that morning; they averaged about 24 years old. George Washington is said to have called them his "old line" — which is where Maryland got its nickname.

On August 24, 1814, British troops set fire to the Capitol and the White House. The next day the fires were still burning, in temperatures reported above one hundred degrees. President Madison had fled north into Maryland, and most residents who could get out had gone with him.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/07/30/fire-and-rain-storm-changed-dc-history

Image: British soldiers burn Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 (Library of Congress)

He was born on August 22, 1936, and the sound he is credited with inventing — mixing heavy funk, big-band jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and Afro-Cuban Latin percussion — belongs entirely to D.C.

When Brown died in 2012, the D.C. Public Library and the Mayor's Office announced a joint effort to keep the story of the music from disappearing along with the man who started it.

Read the story of that effort here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/08/17/call-all-dc-go-go-fans-lets-keep-memory-dcs-homegrown-sound-go-going

Photo: poster commemorating the life of Chuck Brown (Source: DC Library's Go-Go Archive)

The festival will include special programming for America 250: It's Your Story and feature more than 80 authors from a wide range of genres. Guest authors and speakers include PBS News Hour's Geoff Bennett, Cynthia Erivo, Kate McKinnon, director Martin Scorsese, NASA's Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman and many others.

Along with author talks, there will be family-friendly activities, workshops, and interactive programs for all ages. The festival runs from 9am to 8pm, with doors opening at 8:30am. For the first time this year, free tickets are required for the festival but not the individual programs.

Learn more and register here: https://www.loc.gov/events/2026-national-book-festival/

Every president from Franklin Pierce onward stayed there or visited the Willard Hotel, and Ulysses S. Grant liked to end long days in its lobby with a brandy and a cigar. Favor-seekers figured out where to find him, and out of that came one of Washington's favorite pieces of folklore: that Grant coined the word “lobbyist” right there in the Willard lobby.

The hotel has told that story. So have major newspapers, political trade publications, and a great many tour guides. It is also wrong, and the actual origin of the word has nothing to do with Grant, the Willard, or Washington at all.

Read the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2016/06/24/lobbying-willard-hotel

(Photo: Library of Congress)

The show — a contemporary retelling of Romeo and Juliet set among rival gangs on New York's Upper West Side — had come to Washington for a three-week pre-Broadway tryout. Opening night drew what National Theatre staff called the dressiest crowd they'd seen in ages: senators, ambassadors, Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, and Mrs. Robert Kennedy among them.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story of this magical night: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2014/06/16/night-west-side-story-opened-washington

Photo: Leonard Bernstein reads playbill for West Side Story at the musical's premiere at the National Theater in Washington, D.C. (Library of Congress)