To most of the world, "Capitol Hill" means the U.S. Congress. This book is about the personal side of the Hill, where for five generations a family of music makers and undertakers, homemakers and home breakers, shared a small neighborhood with the white-domed Capitol of the United States. Washington writer Mary Z. Gray, born in 1919, brings vividly back to life the community she saw and heard from her childhood home at 301 East Capitol. Streetcars run again; newsboys reappear, shouting headlines on street corners. Tom the huckster hawks his wares from a horse-drawn wagon, as a lamplighter at dusk leaves pools of light along a dark street. And a mystery that had haunted the writer's family for over 50 years is solved. "Cul de Sac" cartoonist Richard Thompson calls Gray "one of the funniest raconteurs I know." A writer all of her adult life, she got her first by-line in the Washington Post in 1940. Since then, she has been published frequently in The Post, as well as The New York Times and many other U.S. and Canadian papers. She also worked as a reporter/editor for Broadcasting Magazine in the 1940s and as a White House speechwriter during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Her book "Ah Bewilderness! Muddling Through Life With Mary Z. Gray" (Atheneum) was published in 1984.