Then: At a guess, fourth grade at School No. 59. Me, upper right.

Memory Lane 

Pupils of School No. 59

have a 'final' hoorah

Louisa May Alcott closed 50 years ago

The hallways and classrooms emptied of children half a century ago, but memories of Baltimore's Louisa May Alcott School No. 59 were alive and mostly well on Sunday as about 100 of its pupils gathered at a suburban synagogue for what was billed as their "second final reunion."

 A few of them hobbled from the infirmities of aging -- and the oldest among them, Sylvia Cohn, at 98, had more difficulty with short-term memory than in recalling the lower Park Heights neighborhood of her childhood. She told of picking cherries from a tree behind the old Pratt Library branch half a block from the school on Keyworth Avenue.

Their school -- our school -- was shut down in 1972, viewed by the city as substandard, lacking a cafeteria and air-conditioning, but remains a landmark. Used for a time for regional offices and as a warehouse, then vacant for a decade, the oversize three-story brick and stucco building dating to 1910 nonetheless was added to the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its architecture.

And for the last two decades, the restored building -- now known as Alcott Place -- has been lovingly maintained as subsidized housing for elderly residents. The principal's office is gone, replaced by an elevator shaft, and each classroom was turned into an efficiency apartment. A fourth level was added in a huge former attic space and turned into an activity and computer center with its own elevator from the third floor. 

 The school had a core group of teachers who lasted there long enough to have instructed multiple generations of the same families.

 Six years ago, days after his 94th birthday, I had the pleasure of taking the well-known Baltimore writer and storyteller Gilbert Sandler on a tour of our old neighborhood, and School 59, which we had attended 24 years apart. We both had "Miss Esther" Freilachoff in first grade. And we were given a tour of the building by a gentleman who lived there -- and showed us his apartment, in what had been my sixth-grade classroom.

In hallway on 2019 visit

 I attended the school from 1951 to June 1957, at the enrollment start of the postwar "baby boomer" era, from a neighborhood that was entirely white and largely Jewish. The reunion had demographics to match.

 The first black pupil at Louisa May Alcott arrived in September of 1957, three years after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision ostensibly ending racial segregation of public schools. That year was also the beginning of a decade of rapid racial change that swept northwesterly along the Park Heights Avenue-Reisterstown Road corridor, with "blockbusting" tactics by real estate speculators scaring white homeowners to sell at distress prices and fueling much of the "white flight" toward the suburbs of Pikesville, Randallstown and Owings Mills. 

Interestingly, the reunion program book listed relatively recent housing sale prices, street by street, in some cases noting names of the School 59 children who had formerly lived in them -- a range from around $22,000 to a few exceeding $300,000.  Conditions along neighborhood streets range from third-worldly horror to decent and improving.

On Towanda Avenue, row house ruin a few blocks from School 59.

 My own street of 1940s-vintage row homes has held up well. (Taking a recent visitor on a tour of Baltimore, we encountered a woman unloading groceries outside her row house across Royce Avenue from the one where I had been raised. She told us she had moved from D.C. in buying it last year, that the former owner had died and it had been beautifully restored for sale. According to our program book, the price was $202,000.)

 The first School 59 reunion was held in 1993, attended by more than 800 former students -- a sell-out event from which more than 200 others were turned away because of space limitations at the catering hall. Sunday's gathering was the seventh -- and billed as the "second final reunion."

 Attendance at the previous gathering in 2017 had dropped to 151, according to Bob Cohen, a reunion committee member and master of ceremonies. 

 Only a few of those attending on Sunday live in the old neighborhood's 21215 Zip Code -- known postally as "Zone 15" back in the day. Most now have suburban addresses. But some came from long distances -- as far away as California, Arizona, Colorado, Texas and, of course, Florida. 

 Bob wrote in the program book that this final reunion was planned by "new blood" -- a committee of those "younger than 80." And most likely, it was the final final. 

And now, the final reunion: Hard to believe we were all once very young, at School 59.

 

 

From my 1965 yearbook, the newspaper staff at the College Crier shows me (top left) and Chuck Milland (bottom right).

 

Remembering a friend

who tried to be a good cop

From 43 years ago: A night on duty together

 

"At nearly 4 in the morning," my story began, "the whisper of the downtown streets is broken by an alert on the police radio: '10-31 rape in progress, Mount Royal and Cathedral, 10-31.'

"Lt. Charles Ford Milland glances at the only civilian car on Calvert Street and hammers the gas pedal. The blue dome light reflects off building walls as the Central District cruiser roars with the surge of power.

"Braking at each corner, the lieutenant checks for oncoming traffic and hammers the pedal again. Two minutes at speeds of up to 50 mph to Mount Royal, and the radio blares again: 'Suspect running west toward Mount Royal.' "

The crime, an ensuing foot chase, and the arrest of the suspected rapist by a couple of patrol officers were highlights of a routine overnight shift for Milland -- and my ride-along for this story that ran on the Metro section front page of the Baltimore Sun on June 22, 1980.

Milland called me later that day, and his funny reaction to my story has been frozen in my memory for nearly 43 years: "Geez, Dave, now they'll never let me have a new patrol car."

Saturday morning, a mutual friend called to let me know that Chuck Milland had died after a year of declining health, including respiratory difficulty.

Chuck and I had been friends since the early 1960s -- first as students at Pimlico Junior High School, then at Baltimore Junior College where, oddly enough, he became my first editor when I joined the features staff of the College Crier newspaper.

Our lives diverged sharply in the ensuing years, as I  lucked into a career at the newspaper and Chuck, after briefly teaching at an eastside elementary school, joined the city police force in 1970 and a decade later added a law degree to his resume. But he was also a good writer, and attained some notoriety for an essay published in Gallery magazine (a Playboy imitator) titled, "Why Cops Hate You."

The essay came to the attention of a popular Baltimore radio talk show personality, the late Allan Prell, who invited Chuck to talk about it on his "Lunch With Uncle Allie" show. Chuck pointed out that the article was intended to explain what many cops on the street think, and why they get annoyed with the public. It was not a reflection of police department policy or his own view, he said -- but top police officials were not amused.

For a time, Chuck was moved from his shift commander role in the Central District covering downtown Baltimore to the communications division overseeing dispatchers at police headquarters. Eventually, though, he was back on the street as a shift commander in the Northern District.

In junior high, we were casual friends and classmates, and it was just by chance and curiosity that I walked into the college newspaper office and found him back in my life... my first editor. On the rare occasions when our paths crossed at the nexus of reporter and cop, we would smile at our newspaper link. And it helped explain why Chuck was helpful to reporters at crime scenes or occasionally as an unnamed source for information -- at least with reporters he came to trust.

His police career came crashing down in 1998 after a couple of domestic disputes with his girlfriend -- a former addict he was trying to keep off drugs -- resulted in his arrest. His girlfriend had called police, and Chuck fled for several days before surrendering on a domestic assault charge. But soon after his arrest, she retracted her complaint that he had hit her and said she was too drunk to remember what had happened.

The case nonetheless drew the ire of the police chief, and his days with a badge came to a sad ending.  But at least he had a backup career as a lawyer.

"I love this job," Chuck told me during our night together in 1980. "I had more fun being a patrolman. I don't have as much fun now," he added, referring to the paperwork that came with the brass lieutenant's badge, "but the fun is more intense."

That night remains my best memory of Chuck Milland, him walking through the bars and back rooms of strip clubs on "The Block" -- the downtown adult entertainment section -- to assure a semblance of order in the minutes before the 2 a.m. closing time that sends "revelers, drunks, prostitutes, and even an assortment of just-nice-folks onto the sidewalks."

"He walks along East Baltimore Street," I wrote, "checking on the welfare of women in a massage parlor where, he acknowledges, something else obviously goes on in the back rooms. 'Sure they're whores,' he says, 'but whores get robbed, too.'

"On the street, the lieutenant offers to meet one of the Block 'girls' at the station to talk about her problems. She had been there the night before, drugged or intoxicated, claiming there was a 'contract out' on her life.

"Around the corner, at Fayette Street and Guilford Avenue, the first action of the night begins with the arrest of a female impersonator known as 'Bubba.'

"Lieutenant Milland assigned a special detail to arrest a few of the growing number of female impersonators soliciting for prostitution, to give them something to worry about. The charge is loitering for the purpose of prostitution.

"Bubba, 6 feet tall, about 190 pounds with legs like a linebacker, has been waving one of them at passing traffic through a slinky black dress slit to the thigh. He, or she, is the first of three to be locked up for the night."

The night continues with Chuck checking on staffing at assigned spots -- businesses where trash cans have been thrown through store windows, a clothing store that had been an occasional smash-and-grab target,  the lone patrolman watching over a bustling construction site for the future Charles Center subway station.

"On the district's western fringes, the cruiser crunches through a coal-black alley paved in broken bottles. A giant pile of debris and garbage narrows the passageway, and an overfed cat ignores a few scampering rats and the approaching police vehicle.

"A little past 4, on North Avenue, a disco closes for the night and the scene on The Block is repeated. Lieutenant Milland parks the cruiser and watches an old wino waving his arms like a bird and staggering on the sidewalk.

" 'He's going to get mugged,' the lieutenant says."

My story came a few days before the firing of a white city police detective named Stephen McCown for his shooting of a black 17-year-old he thought was holding and about to rob a pizza shop. The young victim, Ja-Wan McGee, who had been holding a cigarette lighter, was left paralyzed from his wounds.

The view from inside the Central District police station, I wrote, was that the police commissioner was bowing to racial pressure and firing a good cop.

But it was hardly the first and or last such incident in Baltimore, or nationally -- and only in recent years, particularly with the proliferation of security and cell phone cameras, has the violent intersection of race and police brutality or mistakes come into clear focus.

Chuck Milland was always on the side of his cops, and outspoken -- such as suggesting publicly that the Constitution be suspended for 30 days, giving police free rein to address growing urban crime.

At the station roll call that began our night, Milland discussed policing with his shift of officers. "The silent majority out there have a lot of respect for you guys," he said. "You don't run into it because of the nature if the people you deal with."

He added that 'it takes just a fraction of a second to be blown away," while worrying about whether to draw a gun and fire it. "There's an old saying, 'Better to be judged by one than carried by six.' "

"You got to use good sense and act in good faith. That's really all I have to say."

With Chuck Milland's death at our mutual age of 77, I am left wondering about how his life and world view would have turned out had he, like me, gone into journalism -- or after his first decade in uniform tried his hand at fiction to voice his views on policing.

Considering the roads not taken can be maddening.

 

 

 

 

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