Flashback Monday: Palindrome Provides Prescient Present-Day Prediction, No Pickled Peppers

For this week's flashback, our favorite correspondent, The Peasant from Less Sought After South Reston, borrowed the keys to the earth-toned Wayback Machine and set the controls for December 6, 1964, where he came across the minutes from a meeting of the Palindrome Corporation, the early Reston land-holding company that sounds "like one of those sinister organizations for world domination in a James Bond film," as he puts it. Maybe, except that nefarious criminal enterprises rarely type up meeting minutes in perfect outline form.

Still, this treasure trove of bullet points gives us a snapshot, as though sealed in amber mauve, of the excitement of Reston's earliest planning stages. We can almost smell the heady fumes coming from the mimeograph machine and the smoke wafting around the Don Drapers huddled in a meeting room somewhere.

And as you'll see, no detail was too small for Palindrome to consider:

Um, didn't they have refrigerators back then?

Then there's this:

Of course, this was before "web logs" were available to handle the job.

Reston's focus on art began early:

Who knew that incoming companies all got their very own Sun Boat or Wooden Horse? As the Peasant asked, "Wonder what the Macaroni Grill received?"

There was also a bunch of stuff about getting nursery schools off the ground for the future contingent of Reston breeders parents. Apparently, there was much hand-wringing about the respective nursery-school plans of the "Methodists" and "Catholics." The Peasant concludes:

Hey, it's the 30 Year War (or was it the 100 Year War?) all over again!

Amid all the minutiae of a status update meeting, this one bullet point struck us as prescient:

Some 30 years beyond 1980, that dynamic is still very much at play. We're still about 10,000 people short of that original goal, but not for much longer, the end.