Mary and I flattened ourselves against the institutional green tiled wall and extended a small mirror on a metal stick around the corner. We were tracking the handsome vice principal of our junior high school. By now he was loping halfway down the hall from the cafeteria. We slipped around the corner and nonchalantly blended into the crowd to continue our surveillance.
Just as he was about to enter his office, the bell went off for fourth period. Damn! We were due in math class upstairs. Our quarry would have to wait for another day.
Both Mary and I carried purses laden with everything we needed to practice spy craft. Listening devices (small glasses we could press to a door.) Secret spy pens and bleach to make our messages disappear. Small flashlights. Magnifying glasses. Binoculars. Well, cheap opera glasses we bought at the wonderful Bruce’s Variety store in Bethesda.
We were prepared to take and find fingerprints using eyebrow powder and makeup brushes. Light sunglasses were imbued with the properties of night vision. And we had a torture device we liberated from Mary’s parent’s bar: a plain corkscrew with a wooden handle ideal for making someone talk.
Our purses weighed a ton. We were in seventh grade.
Don Adams as Maxwell Smart using his shoe
telephone. As it turns out, he was Agent 86.
Our obsession with spying was fueled by the tremendous uptick in spy shows on television: I Spy, The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Mission Impossible, and on the silly side, Get Smart. The James Bond film series with Sean Connery was already underway. We watched many of these shows obsessively, looking for ways to hone our craft.
We lurked about the school and our respective neighborhoods looking for appropriate capers. You would think that my hometown of Cabin John would offer many such opportunities, however a lot of these people weren’t folks you’d want to cross.
Tracking down bullies at school seemed promising but this didn’t pan out. Once Mary got a crush on the bully boy we were following, we had to give up the hunt altogether.
In the end, our cases were few and far between and consisted of whatever we could think up.
An ongoing goal for me was to make sure my brothers stayed out of my room. We couldn’t afford sophisticated detection equipment for this, so were reduced to pulling a strand of our hair out, slathering it with saliva, and then pressing it to the door and the door frame. If it wasn’t there when I came back, somebody had violated my personal space. In Mary’s case, she wanted to see that her little sister didn’t snoop while she was gone.
The proscenium, orchestra seating and the two balconies at RKO
Keith's movie theater.
Mary and I took the bus to the downtown movie palaces like RKO Keith’s and Lowe’s Palace for the latest James Bond or James Coburn movies. These formerly magnificent places had fallen on hard times by then, but we loved them.
We sat through the previews and gave the movie about 20 minutes to capture our attention. If not, all bets were off. RKO Keith’s had 1,850 seats and two balconies and we’d discovered there were doors into the side sections of the building on each level. Hidden passageways meandered all over the building.
Our work had begun.
Taking a careful look around in the dark with the light from the srceen flickering, we slipped through the doors into another world. Brandishing our miniature flashlights we tiptoed through the trash and the cast off chairs looking for a trail to follow. We could roam from the first to the top floors searching the detritus of an aging building hoping to find something exciting that could touch off a caper.
We didn’t.
But it was spooky. We never encountered another soul on our journey through these hidden hallways, and usually made it back to our seats with 20 minutes left in the film to spare.
Eventually, our interest in the spying game dwindled away. Mary was going boy crazy and our lack of success in solving cases grew tiresome.
But it was good while it lasted, and though I hated dumping out the tools of our trade, if was a relief to pick my purse without straining my back.
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