In the numbers game of the 1950s, one man was on top: ‘Whitetop’ Simkins John Kelly In his book “I Came As a Shadow,” Big John Thompson mentions a numbers runner named Simpson. Was Simpson called “Whitetop”? Somehow, that comes to me. — Jesse Washington, is an evocative look at an earlier D.C. The famed Georgetown coach wrote about moving with his family from Anacostia to a brick house on W Street NW at age 10. “That’s where I learned that bricks hide poverty,” he wrote. “Back in Southeast we could tell which were the poor people’s houses because they were made of wood and would be falling apart. The house on W Street had a nice brick front and looked fine from the outside, but was so terrible inside it was condemned by the city after we moved out.”