Thayer Avenue Setting for New Work of Fiction Set in WW II

Last year New York author Cheryl A. Pula contacted me inquiring about an appropriate street in Silver SPring for the protagonist of her planned book, "The Ragged Irregulars:  The Eighth Air Force Series, Book Two." to live on.

Her character, Kelly Davenport, is an 18-year old bombardier with the 8th Air Force, the base's resident genius (IQ 189), and a Princeton graduate with a major in nuclear physics. The character is based on a real WW II veteran that the author interviewed.

Ms. Pula needed a WW II-era middle class neighborhood within walking distance of Montgomery Blair High School, from where Davenport graduated. She chose Silver Spring because she always liked the name of the town.  "My brother taught at Catholic University in D.C. for a while. My niece and her family are from Lanham, but just recently moved to Columbia, MD, so I am familiar with the modern day city, but I imagine it has changed immensely since WW II," Pula told me last year.

While Silver Spring's Central Business District has certainly changed over the past sixty plus years, I suggested that an excellent location for her character to live would be on Thayer Avenue in the Silver Spring Park, a neighborhood that physically has seen very few changes to its building stock.

Plated in 1904, it is still a tree-filled neighborhood sprinkled with bungalows and four squares and is within easy walking distance of MBHS. Oh, and the fact that I live in one of those bungalows...on Thayer Avenue.

I received a copy of the book yesterday in the mail and was tickled to see chapter one titled "Friday, 11 September 1936 Michael Davenport Residence, Thayer Avenue, Silver Spring, Maryland." As far as I'm concerned, the Davenports lived in my house!  

From the Archives I

The Silver Spring Historical Society recently acquired this cigarette lighter, which probably sat on an engineer's desk at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory during the 1950s or 60s.  The APL, as it was known, was located at 8621 Georgia Avenue from 1942 to 1976 when it was closed down.

According to Phillip R. Hays, PhD LT USNR-R, the AN/SPS-30 referred to on the lighter's plaque was a shipboard air search radar that had the ability to
determine altitude of a target as well as bearing and range.  This type of radar was often called a "3D" radar.


Such radar installations consisted of an antenna and pedestal, the transmitting and receiving equipment, and a control unit.  The control unit was something like a radio tuner for your home entertainment system.  It allowed the operator to adjust the operating characteristics of the radar set.


APL was most famously known for the development of the Proximity VT (Variable Time) Fuse, credited by military leaders as second in importance to the atomic bomb in ending WWII.  APL management must have had a penchant for making souvenirs for their employees after they completed a contract.  A souvenir VT fuse (it looks like a small missle) is owned by the Laurel Historical Society and Museum.

The vaguely art deco APL (shown here in a 1946 postcard) was razed sometime in the 1980s.  If anyone knows the exact year, please let me know.  For the past three decades the footprint of the structure has been used as a parking lot located next door to the Lee Building at the corner of Georgia Avenue and Colesville Road.  This would have been a great building on Georgia Avenue's streetscape had it managed to survive, instead of the gapping hole we have long had to live with.