This story was corrected on Oct. 8, 2009. An explanation of the correction is at the end of the story.

Elizabeth Henley was just a small child when she was followed slowly home from school by a big car. Once inside her house, knocks came at the door, which was opened to reveal "classic suits," FBI agents, there to inquire about her family.

"I just remember that being a scary moment," she said. "We did get harassed."

It was the 1950s, and being the daughter of a leftist Jewish physicist at the height of the Cold War meant Henley and her brothers had been instructed not to talk much about the family, one of several that found Garrett Park a relative safe haven for leftist ideas at a time when refuge from red hysteria was difficult to find.

Mike Henley, of Kensington, doesn't like to ascribe the word "communist" to his parents' politics. His father, Alfred, founded a Marxist school in Washington, D.C. with two other Garrett Park dads. His mother was an American editor of "Soviet Life" magazine, a cultural publication put out by the Soviet embassy to foster goodwill that mostly eschewed politics if not political consequences. The associations meant the Henleys and their friends became subjects of interest in a Cold War investigation.

"During the McCarthy era, liberals, socialists and everyone left of center was tarred with the name communist," Mike Henley said. "There were communists everywhere."

Garrett Park became popular in the 1950s for a small group of "lefties" from Langley Park, who came to the area one-by-one, Mike Henley said. With them, arrived the era of McCarthyism, Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt to root out Communists before congressional panels, such as the House Un-American Activities Committee.

A family friend, the late Ray Pinkson, formerly of Garrett Park, wore a defiant red carnation when called to testify before HUAC in 1954. It was a Washington Post sensation, and his wife Ruth recalled in an essay "The Life and Times of an Elderly Red Diaper Baby" that the family became "persona non grata" after that. She was removed from her post in the Girl Scouts of America, and "For two to three weeks we found four flat tires on our car every morning," Ruth Pinkson wrote.

For his part, Alfred Henley was never called, something Mike Henley said always "ate away at" his father for making it seem like he was a "small fry." Alfred had lost numerous jobs for organizing unions in New York, and was eventually let go from the American Instrument Company in Silver Spring, where he worked in optics, because the government threatened to deny the company contracts if he remained on their payroll.

"You didn't have to be Al Capone to get nailed in those days," Mike Henley said.

Even without being asked to "name names," encounters with authority were common. One incident at the Garrett Park post office stuck with Mike Henley, when two agents stopped his mother, Lillian, and asked about her job with "Soviet Life," where she mostly edited articles submitted in rough English into readable form.

"When she told them to go to hell, they said, well, this could have an impact on David and Michael and Elizabeth," Mike Henley said. "So they were letting her know they knew our names."

Boris Kameras, 97, of Garrett Park, describes himself as a "dependable sympathizer" of the Communist Party, but never a member. He admired the party's stance on civil rights issues and proudly "smiled into the camera" of government officials photographing participants at a protest of "the martyring" of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed for espionage in 1953 for spying for the Soviets.

But it wasn't his politics that brought Kameras to Garrett Park from New York in 1959 and he speculates a different selection effect was responsible for bringing many other leftist settlers to town.

"I knew there were people who had leftist tendencies who lived here, not because you'll find people here with leftist tendencies, but because people of limited means who also want to breathe the fresh country air could afford to be here, and clustered around people that they believe are sympathetic."

It was significantly cheaper to live in Garrett Park then and Tom Guernsey, who lived in the town until 2006, agreed with Kameras' theory about affordability. Guernsey's lefty parents bought their house on Kenilworth Avenue for $4,500 in 1945. His father, George Guernsey, was a labor organizer in the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which later merged with the American Federation of Labor to become the AFL-CIO, a federation of labor unions.

Tom Guernsey once read the FBI file on his father.

"It was longer and more boring than ‘Gone With the Wind,' but it was interesting to see how they kept these files on people," Guernsey said.

His parents never talked about their politics with the kids, but people were aware. Classmates at Walter Johnson High School would say, "Guernsey, you're a communist."

A friend of his, whose father was employed by the government, was banned from playing with Guernsey because of the association with the family.

"That was kind of an eye opener," he said.

But there were great kindnesses too, he said, even among those that disagreed. Guernsey remembers one very conservative neighbor who would plow the family's driveway every time it snowed, a great help to his father George, who had polio.

"I delivered his paper years later and he was always very friendly to me," Guernsey said. "I always thought that was a good reason to put a face on your enemy kind of thing."

Mike Henley agreed, and said in spite of the incident with his mother at the post office, the facility also played a major role in the reasons Garrett Park stayed peaceful through the Cold War by encouraging face time.

"It was a small, tight-knit community," Henley said. "If you were ostracizing somebody you were ostracizing somebody you saw day in and day out. That makes it hard to do."

Henley said even town boys that would "make snide comments" would come to his defense in high school when non-Garrett Parkers would attack the family politics.

"Being from Garrett Park was more important," he said.

Correction: The date Elizabeth Henley was followed home was changed from 1959 to the 1950s to clarify that Henley was unsure about the exact year the incident occurred.