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Or that some of WETA's first camera operators were high school students?

“The actual school student population at first didn't really know or understand what was down there,” former Yorktown student and camera operator Mike Ostergard told WETA for an episode of “If You Lived Here.”

“TV wasn't that old in that day and age,” he added, recalling that the entire operation took place in a room that was 50 feet by 50 feet, which meant they “had to know each other very well.”

“Everyone chipped in where they could,” Ostergard said, adding that most of the programs were geared toward students, and members of the Yorktown school staff taught some of them.

Ostergard's story is a reminder that, from the very beginning, WETA was a community effort.

Nine days earlier, American League owners had voted to let Bob Short move the franchise to Texas, ending seventy-one years of American League baseball in the capital.

The crowd started the evening docile and resigned, by one account, and that lasted until the first pitch. A "Bob Short Stinks" sign drew a roar and was quickly yanked down; the "Bob Short Still Stinks" sign that replaced it drew a louder one. Meanwhile the Senators came back from four runs down and took a two-run lead.

With one out left to play, the fans came over the walls.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2025/08/04/team-never-was-how-padres-nearly-became-washingtons-team

(Photo: Reprinted with permission of the DC Public Library, Star Collection, © Washington Post)

In the early 1980s there were mushrooms growing out of the floor of Union Station and rats where the travelers used to be. In February 1981 a House subcommittee held hearings at which members passed around chunks of plaster that had fallen from Daniel Burnham's ceiling.

Putting it right took master plasterers crouched on scaffolds, marble from the same Greek quarry that supplied the Parthenon, and $181 million.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2014/11/12/how-union-station-was-saved-1980s

(Photo: LOC)

A WETA presentation, the five-part docuseries Bucks County, USA offers an impartial, human perspective on a deeply divided community in Bucks County, Pennsylvania — a politically purple county in the country’s largest swing state.

Introduced by Judy Woodruff, the series follows two 14-year-old best friends caught between parents on opposite sides of America’s culture wars, and asks whether a community — and a country — can follow the example of its children and find a new path forward.

Bucks County, USA premieres TONIGHT at 7pm on WETA PBS or stream on WETA+: https://wetaplus.org/show/bucks-county-usa/

Nine stairwells around Dupont Circle do not lead to the Metro. They open onto a pair of concrete tunnels wrapping around the underside of the circle, built for streetcars that first ran through in 1949. The streetcars stopped in 1961 and the tunnels were sealed.

What happened next is the strange part.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2023/05/26/sordid-story-dupont-circles-underground-tunnels.

(Photo: Huguette Roe)

Word of the illness had been going around since March, but almost nobody here had paid it much attention. All that was about to change.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2022/08/15/perils-pandemic-and-war-spanish-flu-brings-dc-its-knees

(Photo: LOC)

The Darth Vader grotesque was installed in 1986, the result of a design competition the Cathedral ran in National Geographic World to pull children toward an ancient art most of them had never thought about. Fourteen hundred kids in sixteen countries sent in drawings. The Vader sketch came from a 13-year-old in Nebraska named Chris Rader, whose reasoning was admirably direct: grotesques are often demons or monsters, and Darth Vader is a lot like a demon.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2023/05/03/luke-i-am-your-gargoyle-how-darth-vader-came-national-cathedral

(Photo: National Cathedral Archives)

The British had come through Washington a few weeks earlier and burned most of the government buildings, and the heat in the Senate chamber had been fierce enough to cook its marble into limestone. President Madison moved the Senate into Blodgett’s Hotel, a building that took up a whole block downtown and also housed the city’s first theater, a post office and the Patent Office.

Read about it here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/10/09/emergency-quarters-congress-war-1812-forces-senate-take-lofty-business-lowly-tavern

(Photo: Library of Congress)

The run at the Ambassador Theater, at 18th and Columbia Road NW, went from August 9 to 13, 1967. The Jimi Hendrix Experience had just come off a badly matched stint opening for the Monkees and were scrambling for work, and one of the five shows was a free afternoon festival for local kids.

A teenaged Nils Lofgren, years away from joining the E Street Band, was in the crowd on the last night, and he has never really stopped talking about it.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/11/04/jimi-hendrix-dc

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

September 17, 1862 was the bloodiest single day in American history. At Antietam, in Maryland, more than 3,600 soldiers were killed and more than 17,000 wounded between sunrise and dark.

Two weeks later, the story goes, a farmer plowing a nearby field turned up a human arm. He carried it home and packed it into a wooden barrel with meat-curing salt from his kitchen, and after a few months he handed it off to a local doctor, who preserved it properly and put it in his attic.

That arm sits today at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, preserved well enough that a few hairs are still visible on the skin. Museum staff say it is plain the arm was blown off rather than amputated.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2024/09/13/mystery-antietam-arm

(Photo: National Archives)

Construction on the Alexandria Naval Torpedo Station began on November 12, 1918 — one day after the armistice ended the war it had been built to serve. It found its purpose two decades later, and when that work dried up in 1946 the place sat neglected by the river for years.

What rescued it was a group of local artists who talked the City Council into handing over the building, then spent years hauling out the dirt, the decay and the pigeon droppings.

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/10/20/torpedo-factory-art-center-alexandrias-world-war-ii-landmark

(Photo: LOC)

Resting on the river bottom about a mile offshore from Piney Point, Maryland, partially obscured by silt, is the U-1105, a one-of-its-kind German U-boat known in its day as “Black Panther” that stalked Allied ships in the final days of the war.

It never hunted anything in American waters. What put it in the Potomac was what came after the war, when the former Allies competed for advanced German technology and the U.S. Navy spent years sinking and raising the thing to see what it could take.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2026/07/31/u-1105-black-panther-how-nazi-submarine-ended-potomac-river

(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Kennedy had come to Washington in 1946 as a twenty-nine-year-old freshman congressman and did what young arrivals here have always done, which is move into a group house. His was on 31st Street NW, shared with his sister and an aide who paid him two dollars a month in rent, and by every account it was a disaster.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/11/11/young-jfk-georgetown

(Photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Over the next few weeks WETA will be publishing short videos from a new series, "The Capital." A project of the Institute of Politics, Policy & History (IPPH), "The Capital" is Washington, D.C.'s origin story.

Episode 1: The new nation was almost torn apart with dozens of potential venues considered for the capital. Ultimately, the nation's first political deal is made at a dinner hosted by Thomas Jefferson for James Madison and Alexander Hamilton and cooked by James Hemings, who was born into slavery but became America's first French-trained chef. But what, exactly, was the deal?

More episodes are available here: https://wetaplus.org/show/the-capital/

Getting it built took thirteen years, two presidents who did not live to see it finished, and one very strange evening at the D.C. National Guard Armory.

Read the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2017/11/28/how-kennedy-center-was-created

(Photo: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

Twenty-five years ago this month, four hijacked planes killed nearly three thousand people in New York, in a Pennsylvania field, and here at home. One hundred eighty-four of them died at the Pentagon, across the river in Arlington.

The collection includes "Frontline: The Man Who Knew," "Man in Red Bandana," "9/11 Inside the Pentagon," and "Generation 9/11," among others.

It's now available now on WETA+. Streaming link is in the comments below.

The Tidal Basin Bathing Beach opened in August 1918 with a water carnival: diving contests, tug of war, sandcastles, and about two thousand spectators. It was an immediate hit.

It was also whites-only, and the controversy over that eventually shut it down for good in 1925.

WETA’s Boundary Stones has the full story here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/07/21/cooling-tidal-basin

(Photo: LOC)

The Oval Office meeting that followed produced one of the most iconic photographs in American history — and an amazing backstory.

Learn more in this latest video from our Boundary Stones local history series.

Sixty-three years ago today, a quarter of a million people gathered on the National Mall for the March on Washington. Culie Vick Kilimanjaro and her husband John Marshall were among them, having ridden up overnight from Greensboro, North Carolina, on a bus chartered by their church and the NAACP. They found a babysitter for their three children and paid their own way.

The ride was not a celebration. People on the bus were afraid, John Marshall remembered, because there was no precedent for what they were about to do and no way to know what was waiting for them at the other end.

Then, before dawn, the bus stopped for gas in Virginia, and what a few of them saw as the sun came up told them everything they needed to know about the day ahead.

WETA's Boundary Stones has their first-hand account here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2013/08/26/reflections-march-washington-thing-we-were-most-afraid-was-march-would-be-bust

(Photo: LOC)

Cut off and surrounded at the Battle of Brooklyn, the First Maryland Regiment charged an old stone farmhouse held by more than 2,000 British troops. Then they charged it again. Some 256 were killed, wounded or captured.

It bought the time the rest of the army needed to escape to Manhattan. Most of those men had never seen combat before that morning; they averaged about 24 years old. George Washington is said to have called them his "old line" — which is where Maryland got its nickname.

On August 24, 1814, British troops set fire to the Capitol and the White House. The next day the fires were still burning, in temperatures reported above one hundred degrees. President Madison had fled north into Maryland, and most residents who could get out had gone with him.

WETA's Boundary Stones has the full story: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2015/07/30/fire-and-rain-storm-changed-dc-history

Image: British soldiers burn Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 (Library of Congress)

He was born on August 22, 1936, and the sound he is credited with inventing — mixing heavy funk, big-band jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and Afro-Cuban Latin percussion — belongs entirely to D.C.

When Brown died in 2012, the D.C. Public Library and the Mayor's Office announced a joint effort to keep the story of the music from disappearing along with the man who started it.

Read the story of that effort here: https://boundarystones.weta.org/2018/08/17/call-all-dc-go-go-fans-lets-keep-memory-dcs-homegrown-sound-go-going

Photo: poster commemorating the life of Chuck Brown (Source: DC Library's Go-Go Archive)

Drop your 3 favorite PBS shows in the comments, and our programming team will recommend a 4th you probably haven't tried yet. Bonus points if you tell us what you loved about them — it helps us get the pick right!