East Coast Trip: Onward to DC

9 September 1985

This was our day to drive from NYC to Washington DC.  We’d left our schedule flexible so that we could stop along the way if something or someplace caught our attention.  As it turns out, we didn’t dawdle much because the weather was pretty miserable and it drizzled most of the way down.  Still, we somehow managed to stretch the four-hour drive a bit, arriving in the nation’s capital early in the afternoon.  With the help of our AAA city map, we had no trouble finding Yenö’s apartment.

Yenö Vegh, a Hungarian friend of Mui’s father, had graciously invited us to stay with him when he heard that we would be in DC for a day or two.  We’d been given to understand that he was quite well off and that he had suitable guest accommodations in his Massachusetts Avenue apartment, located in the heart of “Embassy Row.”

Dear Yenö — he lived in a two-bedroom apartment, one of which he had converted into a den with a cot tucked into one corner.  The guest bedroom was, in fact, his own bedroom.  After a battle of wills — on Mui’s part, for us to check into a hotel; on Yenö’s part, for us to stay with him — we gave in.  Out of consideration for Yenö, however, we decided to cut our stay short so he wouldn’t have to sleep on the narrow, uncomfortable cot for more than a couple of nights.

Yenö’s apartment was like nothing else we’d seen before.  Every square inch of floor space was filled with knee-high stacks of magazines, newspapers, and books.  We felt like we were in a maze, stepping carefully as we walked around the apartment so as not to send one of the stacks tumbling for surely the rest would follow like dominoes.  Shelves and bookcases were filled to overflowing with written material in Hungarian and English … and perhaps a few other languages as well.  He later told us that he liked to while the days away by reading articles and clipping those that he felt were important.  It didn’t matter that some of them had been written 5, 10, or even 15 years ago.  He had an astonishing collection of memorabilia and we spent many hours later that night talking about them.