Woody Price · 2004 Honoree

Woody Price’s retirement is so busy that he sometimes wonders when he found time to work. As president of the Historical Society of Washington during the planning for and opening of the new City Museum and as chairman of the board of the Friends of the National Arboretum, he has attended almost as many meetings as he used to as a lobbyist for CSX, the largest railroad east of the Mississippi.

After growing up in Manhattan, attending Harvard College (where he studied 17th and 18th century English and American history and literature, and “read a lot and talked a lot”) and serving in the U.S. Navy, Woody came to D.C. in the early 1960’s looking for a job in government. He found one, with the Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare. He chose Capitol Hill as the right place to live because it was close by and it was affordable. Many other jobs followed -in the Smithsonian's congressional relations office, in the office of Brock Adams, a congressman from Seattle and as a special assistant in the Department of Transportation when Adams was appointed to the Cabinet under President Carter, as well as the railroad lobbying that he did for 19 years - home, however, was always the Hill. Woody and his wife, Ann, who is also retired but worked for the Senate Education Committee for many years, are still in the house on E Street SE which he bought many years ago for $36,000 and where they raised their children. Matthew is a free lance writer in Brooklyn and Alexandra is a photographer who lives in New York. Ian, Woody's eldest son from a former marriage, lives in California where he operates a successful movie theater.

The love of history that Woody nurtured at college is still with him and led him to his happy involvement with the new City Museum. “History gives people a sense of self-respect,” he says, noting that one of the goals of the new museum is to instill that feeling in Washingtonians, to give them a sense of Washington’s identity not just as the nation’s capital but as a city of neighborhoods, of immigrants and of old timers, as the site of well known national events and lesser known but fascinating episodes, to say to people that “we have a lot to be proud of here.” The museum opened a year ago in the magnificent old Carnegie Library building at Mount Vernon Square.

Woody considers the National Arboretum "the nicest place in Washington" and his work with the Friends’ Board as a “labor of love.” The Friends are a private support group that raises money to supplement the federal funds which maintain the 446 acre oasis of trees, ponds, flowers and rolling hills in northeast Washington. Woody is proud of the effort the Friends have made to make the Arboretum more accessible (a weekend bus, the X-6, takes visitors thre from union Station). He considers it a “real escape” and visits once a week and in every season.

Despite his great enthusiasm for Washington and its history, Woody says it is European history that really fascinates him. He is undoubtedly the only winner of a Community Achievement Award to have read nearly five volumes of the multi-volume memoirs of the Due de Saint-Simon - in French!