Feb. 2026

Alert readers (ARs) might be surprised to learn that I have something in common with Joshua Harris the billionaire who owns the Washington Commanders, Philadelphia 76ers, and New Jersey Devils. Harris just paid $28 million - a record in Washington, DC for a house where I once rented an apartment for $190 per month.

Actually, I split the rent for a furnished apartment, including utilities, with two roommates during my senior year at Georgetown. The address was 1212 34th Street, conveniently located near Old Mac’s, at the corner of 34th & M. A small glass of draft beer cost ten cents on weekday afternoons with the purchase of one dollar’s worth of food. One of our favorite items on the menu was the cheeseburger platter, which cost $1.05 - enough to qualify for ten cent beers.

ARs may recall from previous columns that I credit my Georgetown education for helping hone my interest in beer. Old Mac’s was an important classroom.

My roommates and I moved out in 1970. Two years later Halcyon House, which included our apartment, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Joshua Harris does not plan to make Halcyon House or any other location in Washington his primary residence. Nor does he intend to live in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, where he also owns sports teams. Rather, he and his wife will continue maintain their primary residence on North Bay Road in Miami. As most ARs probably know, Florida does not impose an income tax on its residents.

In addition to living in Halcyon House without becoming residents of the District of Columbia, Harris and I have something else in common. Both of us are descended from undocumented immigrants, as are tens of millions of other Americans.

It wasn’t until 1924, when President Coolidge signed The National Origins Act, that immigrants to the United States were required to have visas, thereby introducing the concept of “having papers” into American immigration policy. Because Harris’s grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, they were undocumented when they arrived... but not illegal.

Seventy years earlier, in 1854, my great grandfather August was one of eight Schlaflys who arrived in New Orleans without papers. They were among the 588 passengers on The Roger Stewart, which had sailed from Le Havre, France. Eight of these passengers, including August’s younger brother Adolph, died in transit.

Where I lived in college.

The Roger Stewart had been built in 1852 and was named for a slave-owning cotton merchant in Mobile, Alabama. Its main uses were transporting cotton from the American South to Europe; and bringing European immigrants to America. A mortality rate of over one percent among passengers, like that on the Schlaflys’ voyage, was not unusual.

Six years after the Schlaflys arrived in New Orleans the ship sank off Cape Hatteras with a cargo of cotton headed to Liverpool. Seventeen crew members, some of them black, were among the fatalities.

In the meantime, Johann Schlafly, the father of August and Adolph, had caught cholera in New Orleans. He died in Highland, IL leaving his widow Helena with six children and pregnant with a seventh.

Although the Schlaflys were not in the United States illegally, they still faced hostility from nativist bigots, many of them affiliated with the Know-Nothing Party of President Millard Fillmore. As a foreign-born Catholic young August was not permitted in the public school in Carlyle, IL. He often credited a Jewish neighbor, whose son was also barred from school, with tutoring him and giving him the only formal education he ever had.

It was during Prohibition that Coolidge signed The National Origins Act, making some people, like all alcoholic beverages, now illegal. By this time August Schlafly had lived the American dream and achieved a level of upward mobility that would not have been possible in his native Switzerland.

Some Ku Klux Klansmen, resentful of the success of this Catholic immigrant, burned a cross in front of one of his businesses. It’s safe to say these same Klansmen would also have been hostile to Joshua Harris’s Jewish grandparents.

Two years after the National Origins Act went into effect, on February 7, 1926, Carter Woodson launched Negro History Week. He chose the month of February because it included the birthdays of two men of great significance in Black History: Abraham Lincoln (the 12th) and Frederick Douglass (the 14th).

The centennial of what is now Black History Month is an excellent occasion to celebrate with Schlafly Beer. In doing so ARs may want to note a factoid of which most are probably not aware. During the Civil War, the basement of Halcyon House was connected to a tunnel from the Potomac River and was part of the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves.

Little did I know at the time that my student apartment was part of such an important chapter in Black History.