The Real Muck

Celebrating African-American art

2011-11-03T23:13:00.005-04:00

Troy Staton, at right, looks at a some of the works in gallery show opening at Stevenson University. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Barber’s love of art

leads to gallery show

Troy Staton Collection at Stevenson Univ.

is part of the Black Male Identity Project

Charlie Edwards has been a friend of Troy Staton since their childhood days in Baltimore’s historically black Cherry Hill section, and recalls him at age 14 -- cutting hair on the porch.

Three decades later, Troy is still cutting hair. But there’s a lot more to him than meets the eye at first glance.

Thursday evening, Stevenson University in the city’s nearly rural northwestern suburb celebrated another side of his life with the opening of a gallery show, “Black Male identity: Selections from the Troy Staton Collection.”

For years, Troy has been collecting the work of African-American artists and displaying it in his own gallery – the walls of the New Beginnings Unisex Barbershop on a corner across the street from Baltimore’s Hollins Market.

He’s a community activist, gives jobs to neighborhood kids, sponsors picnics, and subtly educates his customers about art. Children have visited art museums for the first time because of Troy Staton’s influence.

His latest barbershop show – scheduled to end by this weekend – is titled “Black Male identity: A Different Lens,” featuring perspectives through the work of five photographers, Andre Chung, Carl Clark, David Allen Harris, Robert Houston and Ken Royster. The compelling images show a universality of dreams, struggles and joys that transcends racial identity.

The Stevenson University show, featuring the work of more than a dozen terrific artists, continues through Jan. 6. I’ve seen some of them before, on the walls at New Beginnings. But this is the first formal gallery show for Troy’s collection. And Thursday night, he was beaming with joy at the experience amid a crowd of friends, family, and the university community.

He recalled the first time he began using the shop’s walls to bring art to the community, and feeling that “this is really something.” But seeing the artwork – representing about half of his collection – on the well-lit bright walls of a spacious university gallery was “incredible,” he said.

Both exhibitions are part of a series of area events in the Black Male Identity Project. Details can be found at its Web site, http://morethan28days.com.

Movie review: The Way

2011-10-14T01:09:00.003-04:00

Estevez & Dad

take a hike

worth seeing

What can you say about a movie that pretty much plods along – and you’re sorry that its journey ends so soon.

“The Way” – produced, directed and written for the screen by Emilio Estevez, and starring his father Martin Sheen – is a wonderfully intelligent tale of a fictional father rediscovering a lost son and finding himself in a pilgrimage on foot of some 500 miles across the Pyrenees.

Sheen portrays Tom, a California ophthalmologist who had been unable to dissuade his 40-year-old son and lone child Daniel from a life of wandering the world. Then, interrupting a golf outing with a trio of medical pals, Tom receives a call from a French police official with news that Daniel had died in a mountain storm.

Tom cancels his appointments and travels to the town of St. Jean Pied de Port, intending to retrieve his son’s body. But when he learns that his son had died early in a pilgrimage known as Camino de Santiago – the Way of St. James – Tom decides on a whim to complete the journey himself, using his son’s gear and taking his ashes to place along the route.

Tom’s encounters on The Way add traveling companions, each with an avowed mission. But really, like Tom, they all are in need of discovering themselves. The cast includes Emilio Estevez as the son, mostly appearing to his father apparitionally.

Filmed along the actual route of the historic religious pilgrimage, from the French border town to the Cathedral de Santiago in Spain, “The Way” is a visual delight at every turn, and a reminder of the need to turn off the main road now and then and experience life more spontaneously.

There is no sex, no nudity, no violence, no car chase. The fastest moment is a foot chase.

So rate this film PG-35.

Alas, no one under 35 is likely to love it as much as I did.

(Author’s note: I have a 40-year-old child, but am not at all religious.)

Economic patriotism

2011-09-08T16:38:00.006-04:00

Outsourcing America

is not very helpful

in solving problem

Corporations can create jobs, but often choose a different path... or country

It was July 4^th weekend, and my landline phone and internet service were out cold, resulting in a cell phone call to Comcast for help.

My call was answered – by a guy in Costa Rica.

That he was unable to resolve or walk us through the steps needed to fix the problem was annoying.

But the more I thought about it, the more disgusted I became... with Corporate America.

On a weekend for celebrating patriotism, my call to Corporate America for help was answered in Costa Rica.

Predictable? Sure. That’s the way, ah-ha, they like it. Why pay workers in the USA when it’s cheaper to pay them in Costa Rica. Or India. Or the Philippines.

It’s a lust to maximize corporate profit, even at the cost of damaging the American economy.

I’m talking to you, Comcast – a company with pockets so deep, you bought NBC Universal (once upon a time the National Broadcasting Corporation) for a mere $13.8 billion, and can’t afford to pay Americans to answer the phone on a holiday weekend.

I’m sure it’s just a few jobs... at Comcast, and whatever other favorite American company you want to name. They all do it – farm out jobs. Outsource. Save money. It adds up, company by company. It’s so ubiquitous that we laugh at it, thanks to a TV show called Outsourced. It’s all about the fun and frolic at an American company’s office of outsourced phone-answerers in India. And it’s on, can you guess the network? (Insert chimes tones... dong, DONG, dong...) NBC.

I’ll concede that Comcast fuels plenty of jobs across America. In fact, my second attempt to get help the next day was answered by a man in Texas, and finally a very smart and efficient young woman came to my house that Wednesday and fixed the problem. Whatever caused my Comcast shutdown (the guy in Texas thought it had been a mistaken discontinuation of service by the company), getting the modem back up required a specific sequence of unplug and replug actions that had not been precisely given by either help desk.

It took four days to get a human being to come from Comcast and fix the phone and internet shutdown.

It’s taking Corporate America a lot longer to address a far larger problem: The gradual economic meltdown and its toll of growing unemployment.

Politicians piss and moan and do nothing about who is responsible. Republicans continually slap Obama for failed economic policies. Obama slaps back, saying Congress won’t pass his proposed actions.

“Spend, spend, spend, tax, tax, tax – that’s all the Democrats want,” the GOP insists.

Democrats concede on trimming some spending but insist on a solution that also raises taxes on the rich, the segment of America that has benefited from levies far lower than existed since the 1960s and widened the nation’s economic gap between the haves and the truly poor.

It’s a scandal, say some Republicans pointing out Census data, that all those poor folks have refrigerators and cell phones. You want to tax the rich to help them? They balk at giving an inch on tax increases, even sign a pledge to reject any tax increase.

Meanwhile, sitting on the sidelines is Corporate America. Big companies are getting bigger (while eliminating jobs), and banks bailed out by economically struggling government are getting bigger (and holding onto their/our money).

It seems like a crazy death spiral. Somewhere, there’s a tipping point, where Unemployed America can no longer afford the products of Corporate America, and they all crash together in an economic disaster of our collective making.

Who needs to step up? Everybody.

It’s time for a little patriotism:

American companies, come on down – phase out the jobs you created beyond the nation’s borders to cut back on employment within. It seemed smart when you did it. It seems unpatriotic now.

Democrats, come on down. There is unnecessary spending out there, no doubt. Find it. But don’t necessarily eliminate all of it. Redirect it to economic solutions.

Republicans, come on down. The rich need to give back. There’s no point to vast wealth when the great nation that makes it possible goes asunder.

Tea Party? I hate to say this, but so many of your issues distract from a solution – you need to shut up. Or maybe Middle America will wake up and see what you’re doing to it, folks closer to the financial abyss than they realize who will never see a tax increase for the rich but surely suffer the consequences of becoming poor.

We need to reward economic patriotism, and punish the alternative. We need to see folks in the halls of government point fingers at companies that gave away American jobs and fail to reverse course and bring them home.

Label them unpatriotic. For the most egregious, label them traitors.

And for companies that publicly reveal every job sent abroad, and publicly take steps to bring those jobs back: they get the tax breaks. So do the companies that invest in America and its job market.

Eventually, perhaps, we’ll all reach the other side, go shopping and buy something that wasn’t made in China.

I’d love to read about economic patriotism in my local newspaper, The Baltimore Sun, but often it arrives soaking wet or not at all. I call to complain, and reach a customer satisfaction desk in the Philippines.

Have a favorite corporate outsourcing tale, or one about a company that brought jobs back? Post it here, and share this blog with your friends.

Shake, shake, quake!

2011-08-23T18:59:00.004-04:00

Mid-Atlantic earthquake

scores a Richter 5.8,

but may prove stronger

as oddly fun memory

'It's Obama's fault'

I can scratch this one off my bucket list: Earthquake.

A real earthquake – not those piddly 2.2-Richter giggles that used to make big news in suburban Howard County, Maryland. We’re talking shake-the-house-for-20-seconds quake, and sharing the visceral thrill with, reportedly, folks from Georgia to Ontario and as far west as Detroit and Chicago.

I did feel the earth move, once – in Tokyo four years ago, while visiting friends whose rented home seemed to rest on quake-prone ground. Tokyo jiggles and shakes a lot, and with it the back of the house with the children’s bedroom vibrated. The kids preferred sleeping with their parents up front in seeming safety, so Bonnie and I won the children’s room where I could sense ever so slightly the movement below ground.

It was hardly an earthquake, not the kind that hits Japan every now and then and really causes havoc – most recently this year’s 9.0 shocker that churned up a tsunami disaster and nuclear power nightmare and claimed close to 20,000 lives.

Bonnie attributed the subtle subterranean movement to her unsettled feeling on her first trip to Japan in the late 1990s. We’ve been back there together twice. And every time we hear the words Japan and earthquake on the news, we double-check where the latest one hit and make sure to check in with our friends spread across its islands.

A few weeks before Japan’s mega-quake, we closely followed earthquake news from another of our international stops in recent years – Christchurch, New Zealand.

It was strange seeing on TV the ruins of buildings we had driven past on our visit there in 2006, and wondering how the folks we had stayed with – a couple who ran a bed-and-breakfast in their home, and another couple we’d met in a sports bar – had fared.

According to the compendium of disasters readily found at Wikipedia, the Christchurch quake claimed 181 lives. Recently, we heard news of a rebuilding proposal for the city that would take a decade and some $2 billion to accomplish. It includes more open space, and height restrictions for new development – and likely would create a safer city in the event of future quakes.

New Zealand, like Japan, is part of the quake-prone Pacific Rim of Fire. They expect quakes and shakes, and no surprise when a volcano burps in neighboring Indonesia.

But here in America’s seemingly rock-steady mid-Atlantic, earthquakes – real earthquakes – make big news, and today’s 5.8-rater not surprisingly shifted TV news away from its third-day focus on the downfall of Libya’s dictator.

Even so, I’ve heard of no deaths being reported despite the large geographic area feeling the shock from some 3.7 miles beneath a rural Virginia region southwest of Washington, D.C. – and some 125 miles from our home between Baltimore and Annapolis.

Despite sporadic damage -- in Baltimore it was bricks falling off rowhouses, a wall collapsing on an old industrial building, and stone or cement ornamentation falling off a high church steeple -- the quake seemed mostly a matter for after-the-fact laughter and for earthquake virgins an odd, unforgettable experience.

“It’s Obama’s fault,” Tara Baldwin posted on Facebook, which was hopping with humor.

Tara, a longtime friend of our younger daughter, also offered: “Pasadena, MD, not CA.”

The jokes and fun were all over my friends’ Facebook posts – several quickly linking to a video of Carol King singing, “I Feel the Earth Move.”

Maria Stainer and family were shopping at a Walmart. “Truth be told,” she posted, “when stuff started to fall, I thought for a moment, ‘Should I get us in a crash position?’ And then I thought, ‘Run!’ The run option won out. I'm a little bummed, too. Bras were on sale for $7.”

“Harford County EMS robocall informed me several hours late that ‘A’ earthquake visited us today. Thank God it was not a greater grammatical challenge,” wrote my photographer friend Edwin Remsberg. “I have to wonder if anyone in county government could figure out how to pronounce ‘tsunami.’

“Amazing how chatty and nice everybody was from about 2:00 until 2:20 this afternoon,” posted Baltimore humorist pal Dave Belz, who added later:

“Things that will need re-doing in Baltimore because of today's quake: sutures in the ERs; edging by housepainters; pizza slices; eyeliner; tattoos; haircuts; putts...”

For its pure simplicity and joy, there was veteran news pal Steve Auerweck’s succinct: “WHEE!!!”

The quake hit about 1:51 p.m.

I was on the couch, and felt a little dizzy – wondering if it was my second aftershock from a morning dose of anesthesia for an endoscopic exam. I got up and found it was not me shaking. It was the house. It jiggled and creaked and rumbled like a giant truck was going past. And the shake was like the shockwave felt when a stately oak tree was taken down – the trunk grounding with a boom! Except the house kept on shaking, for close to 20 long seconds.

Neighbors emerged, and converged to share the moment.

Our heads were shaking, too – in amazement.

In the neighboring back yard, water in the round, above-ground swimming pool rippled in concentric circles.

A few minutes later, I felt another vibration, perhaps a tiny aftershock, and looked outside. The water pattern had switched to little waves.

Bonnie was driving home from the store when it hit. She said the station wagon felt like it had a flat tire “and then it just stopped.”

She had no idea there had been an earthquake.

That’s a shame.

It is so much nicer, after all, when you feel the earth move together.

Movie Review: Super 8

2011-06-09T01:15:00.008-04:00

Elle Fanning and Joel Courtney, working on a film within the film in a scene from 'Super 8' -- which opens June 10.

Spielberg

produces

a new E.T.

Awesome homage

to horror, SF films...

even some of his own

What will you be doing this summer? Chances are, you will be seeing the movie “Super 8” – a Steven Spielberg production whose young characters embark on their summer vacation set on making their own movie.

Not hard to guess, from the teaser ads that have begun airing on television, things go horribly haywire, and a tad less than two hours later you’ll have been exposed to Spielberg spins and homage on a wide range of science fiction, horror and coming-of-age flicks, and even his own classics “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial.”

And it works, almost totally.

Almost? Well, take a cast dominated by a bunch of barely-teens and some of it is bound to be a bit over the top. But hey, they’re kids, and I’ll even forgive director J.J. Abrams for the one with the tendency toward projectile vomiting in particularly frightful moments.

The plot opens with the aftermath of a funeral for the mother of young Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), crushed in a tragic steel mill accident – which only interrupts the planning of his boy pals on putting together a Super 8 zombie movie.

A TV newscast gives away the time frame, with the 1979 near-disaster at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant. But nukes, otherwise, have nothing on this unfolding tale.

Here, in the fictional small town of Lillian, Ohio, the boys – with a winsome, slightly more mature Alice (Elle Fanning) surprising them by agreeing to play a role – head out late at night to shoot a scene at the local rail station. Their little drama, in which Alice stuns the boys with her acting ability, is overtaken by a much larger event as an Air Force secret cargo train smashes into a pickup truck driven onto the tracks by their school’s science teacher, and derails and explodes.

The camera, dropped as they flee in terror, keeps on recording and – this is, after all, 1979 – the film comes back from the processing lab a few days later with an image that helps unravel some of the ensuing bizarre deaths, disappearances and disruptions to the normal course of events.

There are predictable elements, like conflict between the single fathers of Joe and Alice – the former being the town’s deputy sheriff, the latter a mill worker with a drinking problem whose shift was being worked by the mother when she was killed. But a bigger conflict develops between Deputy Dad and an Air Force colonel caught up in a whole lot of Area 51, space alien autopsy stuff.

Enter the monster, stage left... right... up... down. Sort of a cross between the insect-like critter in “Alien” and a “Transformers” construct, it has the eyeball appeal of E.T. And really, he, she or it just wants to go home.

Getting it there, well, that was a lot of fun.

The stand-in for fictional Lillian, Ohio, was filming site Weirton, W. Va., which is now on my future travel itinerary. Be nice to see what’s left of the place after all those explosions, not including the lone f-bomb that, along with plenty of action, may account for the movie’s PG-13 rating.

Movie review: 'Sing Your Song'

2011-05-09T02:00:00.009-04:00

Harry Belafonte, with historian Taylor Branch, enjoy Q&A session after screening of documentary film Sing Your Song. (Photo by Alison Harbaugh, courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival)

Belafonte, movingly,

tallies life’s bananas

Documentary film on legendary performer

brings lyrical ending to Md. Film Festival

On the screen, Nelson Mandela is stepping off a plane in his first visit to the United States when he recognizes a face in the crowd on the tarmac below. He walks over and embraces the man, who recalls Mandela’s greeting: “Hey, Harry boy.”

In the front row of Baltimore’s Charles Theater Sunday night, Harry Belafonte was smiling at his own recollection – and remembering.

It was magic, courtesy of the 2011 Maryland Film Festival and Belafonte himself in bringing the stunning new documentary on his life to Baltimore as this year’s closing event. And in lining up early for the sold-out show (my wife Bonnie’s insistence), we found seats one row behind and four seats away from him.

It was difficult at times to turn my eyes toward the screen when I could see the reflection of its light in Belafonte’s right eye, the occasional smile, or look of intensity at the passing of his 84 years – from his birth in New York, abandonment by his father and being sent by his mother to be raised by relatives in Jamaica, to a life in the forefront of America’s civil and human rights movements.

I knew little of his life story, yet Belafonte has always been part of my own life. Growing up in the 1950s, his was perhaps the first real black face I can remember from television. And there he was again, up on the big theater screen – singing on the Ed Sullivan Show, and in a prime-time Revlon-sponsored special.

His music is part of this nation’s collective memory, like the “Banana Boat Song” (all right, call it “Day-O”). But what was not part of my memory was the uproar over his 1960s TV appearance with British singer Petula Clark, because she was touching his arm. Or his touring the country, including the South, in a show with the popular white dancers Marge and Gower Champion and enduring the frequent humiliations bestowed on traveling African-Americans at hotels, restaurants and restrooms.

The focus of “Sing Your Song” is far less on Belafonte the performer, as on his use of the forum provided by his celebrity to address social ills here and across the world – work he is continuing through outreach to young people today.

Interviewed after the screening by Baltimore historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Taylor Branch, Belafonte said he “grieved” for others whose celebrity led to tragic downfalls, and that having to choose between time spent with family and being away for art and activism was “not an easy road to walk.”

Sometimes, the road meant inspiring civil rights marchers in Alabama or Mississippi. Later, it was protesting war or Apartheid, or seeking ways to address famine killing uncountable thousands in Ethiopia (think the song “We Are the World”).

There are moments in which he is questioning the civil rights views of presidential candidate John F. Kennedy, trying to influence the racial awareness of Bobby Kennedy, and of helping and befriending Martin Luther King Jr. And, curiously, there was his role in Barack Obama becoming... anything. Belafonte was among a group of celebrities whose support helped fund scholarships for Kenyan students to come study in America... one of them the young Barack Obama who fathered our current president.

Not that Belafonte is expressing satisfaction these days with the younger Obama who, he said Sunday night, he hopes will find his moral center. “I am waiting for Barack Obama’s moral sense to be awakened.”

Still, Belafonte saw a parallel between the spark of hope ignited in young people by Obama’s campaign theme of “Yes, We Can,” and that of the spirit underlying the civil rights movement’s “We Shall Overcome” some two generations ago.

He prefers taking an optimistic view of the slow march of time, with a patient observation that “history moves at its own pace.... In that measure, there are ebbs and tides, highs and lows.”

“I think,” he said, “I still live in a time of hope and progress.”

Taking a few questions from the audience, Belafonte was asked whether there was anything in his life that he would change.

“Yes, I would rather have been a Rockefeller.”

After the laughter and his admission of being facetious, Belafonte had a better answer: “You cannot look at the whole journey as anything but a blessing.”

He added, “I would not change anything. Changing anything would mean I would not meet some of the people I have met.”

He saw the experiences of his life as a chain of moments of circumstance, and its course as set by his decisions responding to them. “It has been a remarkable journey, and I am so blessed that it came my way.”

The film -- produced by a team including younger daughter Gina Belafonte, and directed by Susanne Rostock – has been purchased by HBO. Film festival director Jed Dietz said the cable giant’s plans complicated efforts to bring “Sing Your Song” to Baltimore, but any problems were overcome through the local connection of historian Branch and cooperative push by Belafonte himself.

He said he had initial misgivings about the film project, “concerned that my fame would get in the way of the message.” But he was assured otherwise by his daughter – and the film that resulted is enthralling.

Belafonte noted that the documentary footage was culled from some 800 hours of film, and said he hopes that talks with HBO may lead to more exploration of that “treasure trove” for a series giving wider berth to some of the rich story lines.

He left by a back alley door, accompanied by a small group including his wife Pamela, Branch and festival director Jed Dietz – but Bonnie and I managed to talk our way through the same exit route. And it gave me a chance to ask Belafonte a question I had been pondering in the flicker from the screen and its reflection in his eye: “They say that people, in dying, see their life flash before their eyes, but what is it like to watch your life flash by for two hours on a movie screen?”

“It helps me remember,” he said.

And was he watching from a first-person point of view, or third-person as does the audience?

“I watch from many points of view,” he said.

Not least of them, judging from his remarks in the theater, was the philosophical point of view of a man who seems to have learned from and grown with every moment of his 84 years.

Pothole procession for ex-mayor

2011-04-26T22:10:00.005-04:00

Schaefer’s last ride

through his beloved city

likely a little bumpy

In the end, he moves to suburbia

William Donald Schaefer, the do-it-now Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, didn’t have to wait for a grave for a little posthumous gymnastics. He must have been rolling over in the hearse during a final ride around his beloved city.

Call it the Grand Pothole Tour of Baltimore.

Schaefer hated potholes, trash, abandoned cars – the annoyances and detritus that herald neglect and urban decay. Media folks and pols who observed Schaefer during his nearly half a century in public office wrote in recent days of his sometimes crazed demands to fix what he saw was broken.

As mayor for 15 years, Schaefer would observe problems on rides through the city and send “blue notes” to department heads pointing out what they needed to address immediately, if not sooner. By one account I read, Schaefer blue-noted an abandoned car that he wanted towed off the street – but didn’t divulge the location. Supposedly, several hundred abandoned cars were hauled away in the ensuing days.

It doesn’t take a Grand Tour to find potholes around town these days, amid a seemingly constant stream of utility and road work ripping up streets and patching the resulting wounds – rarely with an even surface.

Over the last few months, the city has spent millions of dollars repaving portions of the key arteries of Pratt and Light streets for use in early September as the course of Baltimore’s first grand prix Indy-car race.

Even the bright new concrete seems to have repaved patches now.

Maybe it was inevitably a losing battle to make the city a better place. It took a tireless leader, with a singular devotion to the job. That’s one of the attributes that made Schaefer a rarity among politicians.

Schaefer died on April 18 at a retirement community nursing facility, at 89. His health had been in a downward spiral in recent months.

Tour begins at home

After lying in state for several hours Monday at the State House in Annapolis, Schaefer was driven north to Baltimore for the Grand Tour, beginning outside the westside rowhouse where the bachelor mayor had lived with his aging mother until her death in 1983 – and long after most white neighbors had fled the area. He owned the house until 1998, retreating there at times even when he was governor and ostensibly living in Government House, Maryland’s official gubernatorial residence.

Trouble was, home – on Edgewood Street – was where his heart resided.

I caught up with Monday’s memorial motorcade at Harborplace, where in 2009 Schaefer made what was likely his last major public appearance– for the dedication of his statue near the edge of the landmark tourist destination that three decades ago became the foundation for his vision of an urban renaissance.

About 200 people, including statue sculptor Rodney Carroll, waited there for the procession’s anticipated late afternoon arrival, and then the crowd doubled in size as the gathering attracted attention and the motorcade, led by nearly two dozen police motorcycles, passed by on the way to a stop at nearby Federal Hill Park.

Minutes later, the hearse and its escort of motorcycles, limousine and SUVs bearing dignitaries turned onto the brick promenade by the statue, and was surrounded by the throng that ranged from homeless people to former Schaefer aides in city and state government.

Some eyed the flag-draped casket, or touched the back of the hearse. Others carried treasured keepsakes, one woman with a certificate of merit he had given her for government service. A former aide pulled out an old Schaefer election T-shirt from her pocketbook – a souvenir now a few sizes too small to wear.

There was spontaneous applause, and three booms of cannon fire from the topsail schooner Pride of Baltimore 2 – the city and state goodwill ship. The original Pride, championed and commissioned by Mayor Schaefer, was launched in 1977. It was lost in the Atlantic in 1986, along with four of its 12 crew members. Federal Hill overlooks its memorial.

From Harborplace, the motorcade moved along to another key Schaefer landmark – Baltimore’s National Aquarium. As mayor, he pushed for its creation – and when its scheduled completion was delayed by several weeks, Schaefer famously took a dip in its seal pool. The stunt brought Baltimore worldwide publicity.

Along the circular drive outside the aquarium, hundreds more spectators – and dozens of its employees – had gathered to cheer Schaefer. One of them held up a cut-out photo of Schaefer, in the classic image of him wearing a Victorian-style bathing suit and straw-hat boater, and holding an inflated blowup Donald Duck. The near-lifesize cut-out was marked on the back as having been displayed at the aquarium’s grand opening.

The procession continued through Little Italy and Fells Point, and ended at City Hall where Schaefer again was honored by lying in state until 9 p.m. Tuesday – and as the final hour neared, a city parking control agent was ticketing cars at expired meters nearby. Evidently, when you visit City Hall – even after 7 p.m., to pay final respects to a former mayor – you have to cough up $2 an hour at curbside.

His funeral takes place Wednesday.

Hilda who?

The memorial procession did not pass Club Hippo – a gay nightspot where, I’ve heard, Schaefer received a raucous greeting as he passed by during a parade down Charles Street years ago.

Some in the gay community felt that Schaefer, too, was gay and they wanted him out of the closet.

For many years, there’s been speculation about the sex life of Schaefer – a bachelor who steadfastly lived with mother and never married. But that’s apparently all you get on the subject: Speculation.

A political biography by former Baltimore Sun reporter C. Fraser Smith noted that, as a young man, Schaefer frequented the city’s adult entertainment district known as The Block.

There’s been talk that his most serious attraction was to Mary Arabian, who became his law partner and later the first female judge on the old city Municipal Court.

And later, there was Hilda Mae Snoops, a divorced mother of three, nurse and retired health care analyst for the federal Health Care Financing Administration. She was a longtime friend, and became something more as his close companion. She was at times described as his girlfriend. And in the absence of a First Lady of Maryland during Schaefer’s eight-year run as governor, she was given a title as the state’s “Official Hostess.”

Of course, the press referred to her privately as “Snoopy.”

Eventually, she talked Schaefer into purchasing a townhouse adjoining her home in a northeastern Anne Arundel County community.

But as for how close their relationship, who knows? Who even cares?

More importantly, in an era when scandals are all too frequent, there was none when it came to William Donald Schaefer. Whatever his style (if there was any style at all),, he was never caught in a tawdry situation – unlike so many celebrities and office-holding hypocrites, both Democrat and Republican.

Name your favorite: Democrat Eliot Spitzer, the New York governor with a peccadillo for pricy prostitutes; President Clinton and the knee-padded intern; Robert Bauman, the Republican Maryland congressman and married father of four whose closet life included a 16-year-old male prostitute; presidential candidate and marital cheater John Edwards.

The list could be, to borrow a Trumpian adjective, huge.

Schaefer, whatever the relationship, was devoted to public life, his city, and Snoops – who died in 1999.

According to his wish, Schaefer will be interred at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens next to Snoops – oddly enough, outside the city limits.

Remembering Schaefer

2011-04-18T20:51:00.009-04:00

Then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer holds tiny Lauren Schupp-Ettlin, in 1980.

(Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Two awkward encounters
with a political giant

William Donald Schaefer, dead at 89

William Donald Schaefer, who dominated Baltimore and Maryland politics for most of his nearly half a century in public life, died Monday at the age of 89 – leaving behind a city reborn, or at least reinvented, through his leadership.

He served 12 years as a city councilman, 4 as council president and 15 years as mayor before reluctantly moving on to state government with two terms as governor and two more as Maryland’s comptroller – the latter taken on out of spite for his successor, Parris N. Glendening.

There’s plenty of adjectives that could be tossed around to describe Schaefer – petulant is a good one, and annoyed another. Impatient, too.

I hardly knew Schaefer. Oddly, my father-in-law Alvin Schupp spent more time near Schaefer – when they were high school classmates at Baltimore City College. The students were seated in alphabetical lines, and Schaefer was right in front of Schupp.

I’d like to say that from my 40-year Baltimore Sun newspaper career, I had some deep personal insight, but in fact our paths crossed only twice face to face. I didn’t cover City Hall, except in working an occasional story by telephone. Even then, I can’t remember talking to him over the phone – though I’m sure I must have a few times.

One actual encounter was on the job. Mayor Schaefer was preparing to announce the restoration of police foot patrols on the city’s east side. The Sun had found out about it, and I was sent to Northwest Baltimore – where Schaefer had a scheduled appearance at the old Baltimore Hebrew College – to ask how the city would pay for the extra manpower involved.

On the sidewalk, Schaefer was pissed at the evident leak. “How do you know about that?” he demanded, adding a few choice and profane comments about the newspaper. “Only three people know about that – me, the police commissioner and Benton (Charles Benton, the city finance director).” He climbed into the back seat of his city car, while I quickly phoned Schaefer’s comments to then-city editor Gil Watson.

“You can tell him Benton blabbed his guts out,” Watson told me. But Schaefer’s car was pulling away from the curb. I ran after it, shouting, “Benton did it. Benton blabbed his guts out.” The mayor probably never heard me, but it felt good to shout.

Our other encounter came at the old Baltimore Children’s Museum, then housed in a strange castle-like mansion just north of the city line. It was the fall of 1980, at a luncheon event that I was attending, along with my wife Bonnie and our infant daughter Lauren.

Schaefer was sitting a few tables away. Bonnie had her camera. It was easy – just ask the mayor to hold Lauren for a few seconds, for a picture. It was quick, just a few awkward seconds, Lauren in his hands and the camera’s click. A strange moment – this lifelong bachelor holding our daughter, a look of surprise on his face.

Schaefer, despite 47 years in elective office, was not a man happy to hold a baby. I can't recall another such picture of him.

We’re glad we have this one.

(For more on Schaefer, check out my online op-ed at the Baltimore Business Journal, and a nice essay by my friend Michael Olesker for the Jewish Times. The Baltimore Sun Web site also has the enormous coverage that graced the Tuesday print editions.)

Spurning ‘Northern scum’

2011-04-16T17:43:00.009-04:00

Wet, but hardy reenactors march along Baltimore's Pratt Street, where the first deaths of the Civil War occurred 150 years ago. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Baltimore celebrates
its inglorious history
from the Civil War

‘Pratt Street Riot’ wrought conflict’s first deaths

Celebrating the 150th anniversary of Baltimore’s biggest and most inglorious contribution to the American Civil War, city leaders joined with several dozen costumed history reenactors Saturday to rededicate and reopen for visitors the historic President Street railroad station.

Here, soldiers from Massachusetts arrived on April 19, 1861, summoned by Abraham Lincoln to defend the nation’s capital in the wake of the confederate attack a week earlier taking control of the union’s Fort Sumter in South Carolina.

They had to change train lines in Baltimore – from the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad’s station to the venerable Baltimore and Ohio’s Camden Station just under a mile to the west. In between was a gauntlet of angry southern sympathizers whose greeting brought the city a new nickname: Mobtown.

Bottles and rocks, even stones ripped from the roadway, were thrown at the soldiers, and gunshots from both sides claimed at least 16 lives: The first deaths of a war that would rage for nearly four years and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands more. Among the four Massachusetts casualties recounted in displays at the old rail station was 17-year-old Pvt. Luther Ladd of Lowell, Mass., shot through an eye by a minnie ball.

Lincoln himself had to make the same rail transfer as he passed through Baltimore on the way to his inauguration a few weeks earlier, under the much-lampooned cover of darkness.

Baltimore of 2011 looks nothing like the rough-and-tumble city at the outbreak of the Civil War, the passage of time having seen the Great Fire of 1904 and periods of redevelopment – the latest having reclaimed the area around President Street. The rebuilt station was once largely a ruin in danger of collapse, and as a Civil War museum now is overshadowed by a 31-story Marriott hotel. Just down the street is an incongruous memorial to an ugly event in Poland during in World War II – the Katyn Forest Massacre.

Camden Station also survives, housing a pair of sports and entertainment museums and neighbor to the 1992-vintage Oriole Park at Camden Yards baseball stadium. But in keeping with the spirit of celebrating history, it has a display on Lincoln’s journey. And a bit further to the west, the B&O Railroad Museum has added pieces from the Civil War era as part of its commemoration.

The reopening of President Street Station reverses a trend that has seen the closing of several small museums in Baltimore in recent years. Key to its rescue have been more than two decades of efforts by a strong “friends” organization, and the more recent involvement of the Maryland Historical Society which has assumed a lease on the property.

Just across President Street is one of the shuttered attractions – Baltimore’s Public Works Museum, housed in an old brick sewage pumping station. Among the mysteries it addressed for visitors were how water gets from reservoirs to homes, and what happens to it after you flush the toilet.

Baltimore of 1861, then the nation’s fourth-largest city, had no such niceties.

Not that Baltimore of 2011 is without problems, including the still-unresolved question of identity: Is it, as many ask, the most southern city of the North or most northern city of the South?

At the outbreak of the Civil War, it was also a city of contradictions: It had strong southern leanings, and the nation’s largest population of free people of color. That minority population has grown over time, and become Baltimore’s majority. Amid the demographic transition, there seems to have been no issue of government or society untouched by matters of race. Housing patterns, school districting, church membership, bank loans, car insurance rates, medical care, welfare, politics – especially politics, during a gradual shift to better represent city demographics.

Baltimore’s fourth African-American mayor, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, spoke briefly and took part in a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for the Civil War museum’s new book and souvenir shop. White City Councilman James B. Kraft, whose largely southeastern district reaches to President Street, read a passage from a pre-inaugural Lincoln speech emphasizing friendship across the political divide – followed by incendiary verses from a riot-inspired poem by James Ryder Randall.

The poem, “Maryland, My Maryland,” was subsequently set to music (as in “O Tannenbaum”) and became the official state song. But the verses Kraft read are not those heard in the shortened rendition performed by the U.S. Naval Academy chorus at the annual running of the Preakness Stakes at Pimlico Race Course.

Here’s some of the offensive verses:

The despot's heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland!
Avenge the pariotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
And be the battle queen of yore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant's chain,
Maryland!
Virginia should not call in vain,
Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain-
“Sic semper!” 'tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back amain,
Arise in majesty again,
Maryland! My Maryland!

I hear the distant thunder-hum,
Maryland!
The Old Line’s bugle, fife, and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb-
Huzza! she spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! she burns! she'll come! she'll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!
(Interestingly, assassin and Maryland-born actor John Wilkes Booth shouted, “Sic semper tyrannis!” after shooting Lincoln on April 14, 1865, five days short of the riot’s fourth anniversary.)

When Councilman Kraft noted the song’s official state status, a man in the back of the crowd inside the station retorted, “Change it!”

That’s been proposed periodically. But spurning “Northern scum” remains with us Marylanders, a relic easily as offensive as the Confederate battle flag. Go figure.

Despite miserable weather of wind and heavy rain – and, as a result, the mayor announcing that a planned grand procession along Pratt Street was canceled – the battle-hardy reenactors embarked with a motorized police escort on a ceremonial march north on President Street and west along Pratt.

A handful of Confederates walked along the adjacent sidewalks, protesting the passage of the Union soldiers on southern soil, and a lone man with slight beard shouted and waved a fist. It was a far cry from the bad old days of 1861.

Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake receives a plaque from Ralph Vincent, former director of Friends of President Street Station, commemorating the contribution of Civil War-era Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad President Samuel M. Felton. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

A gift of longevity

2011-02-28T00:53:00.016-05:00

Sam sings a birthday song to sister Alice.

Centenarian Aunt Alice
marvels at every day

But she'd rather still be dancing

“Every day is a gift,” she says, arms stretched wide in embrace of her world – at one level very tiny, at another limitless in wonder.

By her measure of “every day,” Alice Ettlin Krupsaw has had a lot of gifts – roughly 37,985 as of Monday, when she celebrated yet another birthday. She is a young 104 and, according to the Maryland Department of Aging, among some 1,661 living centenarians in the state.

Her physical world for nearly a decade has been the Milford Manor nursing home on the northwestern edge of Baltimore, after the loss of a leg to a blood clot. Alice used to dance there, with a local troupe of entertainers who staged shows at nursing homes and senior centers – she was never shy about donning the fruit-basket hat and channeling her version of Carmen Miranda. She’s often said how she never imagined being the one in the wheelchair.

A widow for half a century, and childless, Alice had filled her apartment with hundreds of dolls and stuffed animals – many of them her own creations. They had names and identities, even a marriage in a Jewish wedding scene that Alice had crafted for her pretend children. And she knitted finger puppets that were donated to hospitals and orphanages in the Baltimore area and Israel, to amuse or ease the pain of real children she had never met.

She kept every thank-you letter and certificate of appreciation in scrapbooks, along with documentation of her career among the thousands of invisible federal workers in seemingly nondescript jobs. Four decades ago, she retired from a clerical position at the Social Security Administration headquarters where she was crowned “queen of the Xerox machine.” She turned her attention to caring for her elderly parents in their last years, then moved into the apartment.

Some of the scrapbooks are filled with pictures, showing family, friends, trips with late husband Lou Krupsaw out West and to Havana, in nightclubs, on horseback, with their dogs. Her parents (my paternal grandparents) appear with two other couples, all decked out in what could only be considered Eastern European finery, in a photo taken on New Year’s Eve 1948 in a Romanian restaurant in New York City. Alice would point to one of the other couples, saying, “They’re [filmmaker] Barry Levinson’s grandparents.”

Louis Ettlin, a tailor, came to America from Russia in 1904 with his wife, Ida, who had taught dancing in the old country. They had three children -- Alice in 1907, my late father Ben in 1911, and Sam in 1919.

A treasured, slightly torn snapshot shows Ida Ettlin with a pretty teenage Alice on the beach at Atlantic City where, she says, a talent scout saw her and said she could become a model.

Instead, she married young, worked hard, and imagined. While she and Lou ran a small grocery store, she started writing a novel with a pencil on butcher paper. For a very long time after Lou's death, she made dolls and paintings, wrote poetry, and danced in nursing homes. I doubt she ever smoked and, the old nightclub photos notwithstanding, I could not imagine her having a drink.

At Milford Manor, she battles with her latest hearing device, solves word-search puzzles, reads old, large-print magazines, and wonders about futures she knows she will never see.

In her earliest photos, some cars have crank-starts or running boards. She was born, after all, in 1907 – and in those days, horses and buggies were common. It was only three years after Baltimore’s central business district was consumed in the Great Fire.

Some of her early memories are included in her book, “An Even 100,” edited and published by my wife, Bonnie Schupp, for Alice’s centennial birthday in 2007. There’s also a sampling of her poetry, family photos, and pictures of some of her paintings – the work of an untrained artist every bit in the spirit of “Grandma Moses.”

In 2008, on her 101st birthday, Bonnie recorded Alice singing her favorite song, “Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think),” and posted the video on YouTube. This July, a bit of it was shown on CNN as one of reporter Josh Lev’s “viral video” picks. It only had about 2,000 hits at the time, but Lev raved about how much he liked it – and now, it has been viewed by more than 6,000 people. Alice marvels at seeing herself on a computer screen, as much as the idea that she lived to see man walk on the moon.

At 104, she repeats herself a bit, but her mind remains mostly sharp. She’s somewhat of a celebrity at Milford Manor as its oldest resident and, it goes without saying, poet laureate. Each edition of its monthly bulletin includes one of her poems.

Her “baby brother,” my uncle Sam Ettlin, flew in from Florida for the weekend to help celebrate her birthday with his son Dennis and daughter-in-law Patty, my late brother Larry’s wife Natalie (who devotes considerable time looking in on Alice), her son Greg, and Bonnie and me. On Sunday, at the party in Alice’s room, we had crabcakes and birthday cake, and Sam – a young-looking 91 – sang her a birthday song and played on his harmonica, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love.” The tune dates to 1928.

“My family comes from the Ukraine,” he says, spinning a tale about familial longevity and his great-grandfather, who is reputed to have lived to 104. “He walked outside to draw water from the well,” Sam said, “but fell and hit his head. He died soon after. If he had just stayed inside, he’d be 178.”

Storytelling seems to run in the family.

Monday afternoon, on her actual birthday, there was another party – this one a surprise proposed by her younger, down-the-hall friend Ethel Vanger, staged by Milford Manor activities organizers, and attended by nearly a dozen residents parked side-by-side around a long table in their wheelchairs.

No such thing as too many parties when you’re 104, when you’re happy (as much as circumstance might allow), and you know it. And when they sang the birthday song, Alice joyously clapped her hands.

"Thank you, thank you!" she cried out. "I'll never forget this day."

A trip to Parking Court

2011-01-03T11:56:00.003-05:00

Exhibit A, the fogged-up parking meter (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

A well-known judge
and a biased ‘jury’
bring acquittal

In Parking Court, pretty much everybody is guilty. And therein lies the entertainment – the appeals of folks who feel unjustly victimized by tickets and sometimes costly fines for the likes of meter violations, cars partially blocking crosswalks, trucks left curbside in residential neighborhoods.

I am one of them today, bringing before the District Court of Maryland in Baltimore my reasoning why a $32 ticket for a meter violation on Key Highway ought to be dismissed.

The judge is a little late, the session having been scheduled for 9 a.m. – but that’s understandable. It’s a long drive from Annapolis, where she lives in the governor’s mansion. Presiding today is District Judge and Maryland First Lady Catherine Curran O’Malley.

If there is any awed recognition in the packed courtroom as ‘Katie” O’Malley walks through the door from the judge’s chamber at 9:15 a.m., it’s not obvious. “All rise,” the bailiff intones, and the judge immediately waves them back down on the two lines of wooden benches.

She is smiling and, I might add, looks very good in black.

Parking Court is the most low-key of all judicial forums in Maryland, almost like the old days when lower courts were housed in police stations. The court building here is on the city’s south side, and named for the late John R. Hargrove – a jurist I had on a few occasions written about in my years as a newspaper reporter.

The rules of the game are fairly simple – particularly since the front bench reserved for city parking ticket agents is the only one that is empty. Anyone who requested the presence of the ticket-issuing agent or police officer is going to win acquittal by default. And those who did not request the officer’s presence but wish to plead not guilty may have to make that request now, posing the inconvenient prospect of another trip to court.

On the other hand, Judge O’Malley says, you may plead “guilty with explanation” in the hope that she will substantially reduce the amount of a fine or court costs. With a few exceptions, that’s the way the cases play out.

There was, however, the guy who was ticketed for parking his city government car too close to a courthouse. He explains that his job is bringing folks like shooting victims to court, and that’s where he’s often parked in the line of his official duty -- without being ticketed.

Her Honor is impressed, smiles, and gestures to the crowd – asking whether the people think he should be found not guilty. The ersatz jury, perhaps a little biased, is unanimous for acquittal.

A few more cases... the guy with the big commercial truck, facing a fine of some $502, explains how he’s on the road a lot but stops when he can to spend some time with his wife, who has breast cancer. He wins a reduction to $50 plus the modest court costs. Crosswalk fine, reduced. Half a dozen names are called, all missing – “failure to appear” noted on the paperwork.

Then it’s my turn.

“Ettlin Michael David,” the judge says, “Michael David, David Michael.”

“David Michael Ettlin, your honor,” I smile, and then – skipping over the formality of entering a plea – outline the facts, how I had parked after sunset at a meter along Key Highway, four or five blocks east of the American Visionary Art Museum, to attend the Oct. 8 opening party for its annual exhibition, and that the meter’s hours of operation could not be read in the dark. But I put in a few quarters anyway, just to be safe, to at least cover it past 9 p.m. – and returned a little later than that to find a ticket under the wiper blade.

Inspecting the meter in daylight, I testified, I found it to be in effect 24 hours a day – and yet, the meters in the same block across the street were in operation only until 10 p.m. nightly. In fact, parking meters around Baltimore are widely varied in their times of operation and it becomes a guessing game when you can’t read the information housed under fogged and scratched meter covers like the one where I got the ticket.

As evidence, I offered three 8-by-10 color photos, showing the meter in daylight, with its fogged plastic cover, and the still-leafy tree whose branches interfered with the streetlight above it.

“What do you think?” Her Honor asked the jury of my ticketed peers.

“Not guilty.”

“Thank you, your honor,” I nodded.

She hadn’t seemed to have recognized me, or wife Bonnie in the second row, though we had posed for a photograph with Judge O’Malley and her husband, Gov. Martin O’Malley, a few weeks ago – along with hundreds of other visitors -- during the mansion’s annual holiday open house.

Perhaps wisely, I didn’t bring up in my testimony what I saw as arbitrary parking enforcement by the city. About three weeks after the Visionary party, we attended another affair there -- her husband’s election night Democratic victory party. Walking many blocks back down Key Highway, we saw lots of cars at expired parking meters, and not one had been ticketed.

Election 2010: A Frank Farewell

2010-11-05T23:01:00.001-04:00

Not much room
for a moderate
in 2010 America

I mourn the political passing of Frank Kratovil -- not so much for who he was, a conservative Democrat pandering as best he could to a Republican-leaning Maryland congressional district, but for the loss of his party's seat in the House of Representatives.

Not that it was unexpected. His election in 2008 was a fluke brought on by the first political earthquake tremors of the GOP's rightward swerve, as the respected moderate incumbent Republican Wayne Gilchrest lost in the primary to the extremely conservative state Sen. Andy Harris.

Hard feelings? In the general election, Gilchrest, a former high school teacher, crossed party lines and endorsed Democrat Kratovil to succeed him in the First District -- which covers Maryland's entire and largely rural Eastern Shore, but is overwhelmed in population by a largely affluent strip of Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Harford counties on the western side of the Chesapeake Bay.

Kratovil, a county prosecutor from the eastern side, won by a margin of less than 1 percent, and evidently not on the coattails of Barack Obama -- the district favored by a much wider margin the GOP presidential ticket of John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Two years later, the Gilchrest Effect seems to have faded. According to the unofficial election night tally, Harris took nearly 55 percent of the votes -- 146,272 to 111,237 -- in making Kratovil a one-term congressman.

It was one of the most expensive congressional races in the nation, as Democratic supporters put up millions of dollars in an attempt to save Kratovil's seat -- and Republican supporters similarly fueled Harris' campaign.

Harris, an anesthesiologist whose right-wing views set him apart even from others in the state legislature's minority party, among other things opposes gay rights and abortion, wants to roll back the Democrat-pushed health care reforms, and wants to make sure tax rates for rich folks remain low.

His television ads were subtly ugly -- the one that seemed to air most frequently even had a racist feel to it. Three figures shrouded in darkness, but one with distinctive-looking ears seems obvious... and as the scene slowly brightens, we see it is Obama, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Kratovil.

Kratovil voted with Pelosi, voted for Pelosi, voted with Obama, the ads hammered, despite Kratovil's reputation as a conservative Democrat and his own ads stressing a political independence that had dampened the enthusiasm of liberal Democrats for him.

Overall, voter registration in this congressional district is almost even divided between the two major parties... a few more Democrats, but just a few. This in a state that is solidly Democratic, by a 2-1 margin, and one of the most liberal in the United States. Yet the district has usually leaned toward Republicans.

So party affiliation is not the key determinant here. And it makes you wonder why Kratovil could suffer so major a swing from his narrow win in 2008 to so great a loss two years later.

The outcome leaves Maryland's entire Eastern Shore without its own congressman. The area, whose nine counties include some with the lowest per-capita income in Maryland, can look forward to representation by a defender of the rich from the other side of the water.

The poorest county in Maryland, Somerset, voted only narrowly for Kratovil (3,436-3,265). And the Democrat's home county, the much more affluent Queen Anne's, easily preferred Harris (9,410-8,537).

So what were the voters thinking? Is it an Obama thing -- two years down the road, they flip-flop back to the right -- or a money thing? Is it the rich wanting to keep on getting richer while the poor get poorer? Is it simply a matter of who came out to vote on election day? Was it the vanishing of the Gilchrest Effect?

Is it the magic of the boiling Tea Kettle, and the ability of Republican strategists to brand the enemy... voted for Pelosi, voted with Pelosi, voted with Obama... even if, sometimes, he didn't.

There was no room for independence in 2010 America, no safe middle ground for a Democrat like Kratovil. He should have seen it coming from two years away -- having been tarred and targeted as a one-termer by opponents from the day he was narrowly elected.

In trying to tiptoe through the middle, Kratovil failed to establish a brand for himself -- much as the Obama administration wasted time in its first few months trying to work with Republicans, only to lose its post-election momentum and the potential of its once-overwhelming legislative majority.

Kratovil could have embraced being a Democrat. Instead, he hunkered down and pandered as best he could to an unforgiving political right.

In my 30 years living in Anne Arundel County, on the western side of the Chesapeake, Kratovil was the only congressional candidate to knock on my door and personally ask for my vote. That was back around October, 2007, when the Queen Anne's County state's attorney had just embarked on his congressional quest.

Without hinting at my views, I asked for his on two of what I consider liberal bellwether issues -- gay marriage and, on abortion, a woman's right to choose. His answers were as vague as he could make them.

I voted for him, without enthusiasm, because having Andy Harris as my congressman was unthinkable.

Not much has changed two years later. But this time around, the unthinkable has happened and Harris is heading to Washington.

Elsewhere, Maryland election results ran counter to the national trend. Six of its eight House seats were easily retained by liberal Democrats (one district, in Western Maryland, remains a Republican stronghold); ultra-liberal Barbara Mikulski overwhelmingly won a fourth term in the U.S. Senate, declared the victor even as the earliest returns showed unknown GOP opponent Eric Wargotz leading by 1,000 votes; and Democratic Gov. Martin O'Malley won an even bigger victory than polls had predicted in a rematch against Republican former Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr.

O'Malley is already being talked about as a rising star in the Democratic pantheon.

Kratovil, meanwhile, is packing up his stuff and looking for a new job.

Maryland's Obama?

Among the keynote speakers at Gov. Martin O'Malley's re-election party Tuesday night, at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, was his African-American lieutenant governor, Anthony G. Brown -- a man of charm and eloquence, but apparently a little lacking in his geographic acumen when it comes to Maryland.

Brown, almost 49, told of his pleasure at traveling across the state over the past four years as lieutenant governor, from the mountains of Western Maryland to the sandy shores of Wicomico County.

Trouble is, Wicomico is a little lacking in sandy shores. It's Worcester, one county to the east, that includes Maryland's ocean beaches. And you could see a few people in the crowd below the stage turning to each other, open-mouthed, at the gaffe.

Brown proudly introduced his parents -- his Swiss-immigrant mother and Jamaican-immigrant father -- and embraced his daughter and son, who seem close in age to the children of President Obama. A colonel in the Army Reserves, he is the highest-ranking elected official to have served on active duty in Iraq.

There's a strong chance, some observers believe, that O'Malley could resign to take another job -- on the national stage in the Obama administration, or as successor to Barbara Mikulski should she not complete her next term. In January, she will become the longest-serving female member of the U.S. Senate.

And Anthony Brown would become governor.

If not then, he could run for the job in 2014 -- but he likely won't be the only state official looking to move into the governor's mansion.

Among the other elected Democrats crowding on stage at the O'Malley celebration was another 2014 possible, Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler, who was unopposed for reelection. "Doug'' Gansler, 48, seems to style himself much like the late Bobby Kennedy, who was U.S. attorney general in his brother John's administration.

Look for both of them to make as much noise as possible the next two years, jockeying for position.

Rallying for Sanity

2010-10-31T00:50:00.005-04:00

All the crowd's a stage at Sanity rally. (Photo by David Ettlin)

View from the crowd

at Stewart/Colbert rally

'Moderation in Defense of Liberty is No Vice'

We traveled by train to Washington Saturday for the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

You might have seen us there, if you were looking down from a helicopter. We were the couple sitting on a bench near an oval of parked bicycles, close to half a mile from the stage.

But we didn’t see much of anything on stage. We were so far back, even the TV monitors and sound system set up for the nearly impenetrable crowd packing the National Mall, between Third and Seventh streets, did not reach us.

Still, it was worth every minute of a very long day, from the wait at the BWI station for our delayed, fully-booked 9:30 a.m. Amtrak train, to the mob scene at Union Station and the 5:20 p.m. return trip. At the stations and the hours between was the real celebration – people of all sorts, race, gender, religion, national origin, calling for a little sanity in a world more often depicted as out-of-control crazy and scary.

They came from across the country. We met and chatted with folks who traveled from the states of Washington, Vermont, Connecticut and New Jersey, among others, to be part of the mob of reasonable people.

Not that all of them looked that reasonable, of course. There was a gorilla in a dark business suit, carrying a briefcase; there was a young woman costumed as a multi-fear combination vampire, witch and overzealous Christian; folks with painted bodies; a guy in a Captain Crunch outfit worthy of his own cereal box; a couple of red-and-white-dressed Waldos; an Army paratrooper (with a cleverly modified umbrella) accompanied by a curvaciously dressed red hotline phone; and witches galore spoofing Delaware’s Tea Party-Republican Senate candidate.

The signs many carried were a tribute to American creativity. Here’s a few:

God Hates Idealogues.

Fear Me / I Vote

We have nothing to fear but fear itself AND BEARS

Objective Journalism is Sexy

Moderation in Defense of Liberty is No Vice

Trickledown Economics is a Golden Shower

Palin Snookie 2012

No, I’m Hitler

Right-wing extremists should be killed … but in a nice way

Ich Habe Angst

All we are saying is give thought a chance. After 8 years, NOW you’re mad?

Colbert = Wit; Beck = Half-Wit

Go With Know/ Not No

On the train back to BWI, we met an elderly sex educator from New Jersey (Sex Educators for Sanity) who told of seeing this sign: Abstinence makes the church grow fondlers.

We arrived at the Mall about 10:30 a.m., and the rally viewing area was already jammed. So we kept walking, our backs to the Capitol and toward the Washington Monument. For more than an hour, people continued to stream into the Mall, from side streets and from the direction of the monument. By the thousands they came, a mist of sandy dust from unpaved paths rising from their marching feet. It was an unending parade of costumes, signs, and humanity.

Estimating crowd size is just that -- an estimate. My best guess is that it numbered in the hundreds of thousands, maybe approaching half a million. Call it the 400,000-Hippie March. Strangers talked to strangers. People made new friends. Lovers kissed. Two men walked hand-in-hand. A costumed couple carried their three-month-old twins… future social activists, one might guess, should they follow parental example. A woman in her 50s held up a sign for legalizing pot.

After we got home, we watched the rally on television – I had recorded the live Comedy Central production on our high-def DVR system.

Highlights? Who knew that Kid Rock could pen so moving a song, performing publicly for the first time, with Sheryl Crow, his lyrics about how we may not be able to solve the world’s pressing problems, but we can care.

And after much comedy, there was Jon Stewart’s closing speech -- which had its light moments, such as acknowledging some may have come to visit the nearby Smithsonian Air and Space Museum “and just got royally screwed.” But he had some serious points to make about the reasons underlying the event

"This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or to look down our noses at the heartland or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear. They are and we do. But we live now in hard times, not end times."

Where in most of his Comedy Central “Daily Show” episodes Stewart skewers the media with sarcasm and satire, he admonished it at the rally.

“The country's 24-hour political pundit, perpetual panic conflictinator did not cause our problems. But its existence makes solving them that much harder," he said. "If we amplify everything, we hear nothing."

Ordinary folks in America work every today to solve problems, he said, contrasting that with the failures to do likewise in the Capitol behind his stage and on cable television.

“Sanity will always be and has always been in the eye of the beholder,” he concluded, looking across the sea of people stretching far back along the Mall. “To see you here today and the kind of people that you are has restored mine.”

For our little part, two people invisible in the crowd, the pleasure was ours.

His entire speech is well worth reading – or hearing. Doubtless it will be posted soon on his Web site. It’s easy enough to find in a Google search for “Jon Stewart rally speech.”

For more rally photos, visit Bonnie’s Journeys blog. (The squirrel was really there.)

Maryland politics: Does time heal?

2010-10-28T23:22:00.008-04:00

Harry Hughes, left, and Marvin Mandel shake hands at Maryland Inn gathering. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Mandel, Hughes meet

socially, and sociably,

at press group reunion

Ex-governors not exactly friends decades ago

It was, many believed, an unlikely moment: The handshake, smiles, pleasantries.

Even the sight of these two men in the same small party room seemed unlikely – and some members of the old-timers’ press corps had expressed fears weeks ago that it would not go well.

The setting was the periodic gathering of the “Vintage Press Irregulars” – folks who had covered political news in Maryland’s capital city of Annapolis, some of them for decades. Many are retired now, as are some of the politicians and state officials joining in the low-key reunions.

Thursday afternoon, the mix included as guests two former governors who, since the 1970s, have been viewed as far less than friends: Marvin Mandel and Harry Hughes.

Hughes had been Secretary of Transportation under Mandel, and resigned in 1977 citing issues of integrity and alleging interference by a politically-connected contractor in the award of work on Baltimore’s subway project.

A few months later, Mandel was convicted on charges of mail fraud and racketeering centering on secret deals involving racetrack ownership and the award of racing dates. He served some 19 months in federal prison before President Ronald Reagan commuted his sentence, and in 1987 Mandel’s conviction was overturned by a federal judge on the basis of a Supreme Court decision in another case.

Were it not for Mandel’s legal controversies, Hughes might never have become governor. He faced off with three other major contenders in the 1978 Democratic primary, including the man who had served as acting governor during Mandel’s imprisonment. An influential state senator from Baltimore, the late Harry J. “Soft Shoes” McGuirk, famously described the Hughes candidacy as “a ball lost in tall grass.”

But in a strange twist, polling by the Baltimore Sun newspapers, which had endorsed Hughes, showed that people would vote for him if they thought he had a chance of winning -- and with that, his numbers rose rapidly and the polling pretty much became self-fulfilling prophecy on election day.

The Sun’s endorsement said the election would give voters a chance to break away from past political corruption that had included criminal convictions of the previous two elected governors – Democrat Mandel and Republican Spiro T. Agnew, whose 1969 departure to become vice president had paved the way for Mandel’s appointment and subsequent election to two full terms. (Agnew pleaded no contest to tax evasion in 1973, and resigned the vice-presidency.)

So that’s pretty much the background.

Mandel, the Baltimore native who rose to become speaker of the House of Delegates and by political happenstance and acumen, Maryland’s only Jewish governor. Hughes, a native of the state’s Eastern Shore and former legislator who upset what was portrayed as a rotten political applecart in succeeding him.

Thursday, when we arrived at the historic Maryland Inn meeting site within view of the State House dome, Hughes was sitting in the bar chatting with a few friends. Mandel arrived and sat in the party room across the hall, chatting with a couple of his friends. For about an hour, they were both in the party room, as close as 10 feet from each other and engaging in separate chats.

My wife, photographer Bonnie Schupp, was taking pictures of them and others, and wondering how and if the two governors might be brought together at least for a photo so she could pack away the Nikon D700 and flash weighing heavily on her sore wrist. I stood next to Hughes, looking for an opportunity, a break in his conversation… and there was a pause, just long enough, for me to ask: “Mr. Hughes, could you take just a minute for a picture of two governors together?”

He smiled, walked a few steps over to Mandel’s side and offered a hello. Then they shook hands, talked briefly, as Bonnie fired away. Click, flash, click, flash….

Joining the conversation, I learned about something else they had in common – besides politics and having been Maryland’s 56th and 57th governors, respectively. They had both played baseball as young men – Mandel in college, Hughes, as I had already known, in the Class D minor league. Both were pitchers. Both ended up going to law school. (According to the Web site baseball-reference.com, Hughes appeared in 16 games in 1949 with his local Federalsburg team, and had an 0-4 record and 5.54 earned run average; he hit .227 with 5 singles in 22 at-bats. Law school clearly was the right choice.)

And they’re both following the World Series when not working.

Mandel, 90, who won back his law license after the criminal case was overturned, remains engaged in his law practice.

Hughes, 84, chairs a state commission bringing together agricultural and environmental interests to improve the health of the Chesapeake Bay.

Last week, heading home from a weekend near Ocean City, we rode across a bridge named for him along Route 404 at the Choptank River, an important Bay tributary through farming country.

Did time melt away their differences?

Probably not. But at least they were polite.

Election 2010: A view from the crowd

2010-10-22T03:03:00.004-04:00

Bill Clinton, speaking Thursday evening at a big-donors affair in the Baltimore Museum of Industry. (photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Clinton, O’Malley rally
features speeches
by the ‘gazillions’

In my four decades of daily journalism, I cannot recall a bigger turnout at a political rally – of politicians.

Four of Maryland’s eight members in the House of Representatives, both U.S. senators, Baltimore’s mayor, two suburban county executives (and a county councilman running for the top job), and the state’s comptroller, attorney general and governor.

Did I leave out anyone?

Oh, Bill Clinton. After these 13 folks had their turns, shortish and longish, at the microphone, the 42nd president of the United States was the keynote speaker.

Democrats all, they had assembled atop Baltimore’s historic Federal Hill park Thursday afternoon for a rally to turn out the vote on Nov. 2 – or sooner, since Maryland’s “early voting” opens today, Friday Oct. 22.

Most of the speakers are on the general election ballot, but they gathered under the banner slogan of “Move Maryland Forward” and the umbrella campaign of incumbent Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is facing a nasty challenge from the Republican he ousted from the job four years ago, Robert Ehrlich. (O’Malley and Ehrlich don’t like each other very much.)

About a thousand people, mostly supporters, turned out for the public rally – perhaps fewer than one might expect to see Clinton up close on a picture-perfect autumn afternoon, partly sunny, temperatures in the 60s, and a breeze strong enough to keep a giant Star-Spangled Banner (estimate, 16 by 24 feet) rippling and fully extended.

A few impressions from my notebook:

* Maryland Comptroller Peter Franchot declaring that Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski “will stand up against the forces that are running this country.” (Whoops! The Democrats are in power right now, Pete – and the popular Mikulski is among the most senior in the Upper Chamber. Must have been post-traumatric stress from when the Republicans, or at least King George the Younger, were running the ship of state over the edge.)

* State Attorney General Doug Gansler (unopposed for reelection), looking much like a clone of the slain Sen. Robert F. Kennedy -- onetime U.S. attorney general. (Maybe it was the hair.)

* The brief but strident remarks of freshman Rep. Donna Edwards, a community and peace activist who two years ago ousted a longtime Democratic incumbent to represent her suburban Washington district. Young, lean, pretty – and, largely unknown in Baltimore, wise enough to know there was a long line of speakers behind her. (My favorite line was her admonition, “You can’t vote often, but you can vote early!”)

* Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, a former Baltimore County executive seeking his fifth term on Capitol Hill, who movingly recalled serving as a Democratic National Convention delegate with his now-late father. I like father-son stories. (Dutch looks a bit slimmer, but still has a huge neck – not much different than when he served as Sergeant-at-Arms for my 1963 high school graduating class at Baltimore City College. He’s a big guy.)

* Speaking of father-son stories, Rep. John Sarbanes looks a lot like his father, former Sen. Paul Sarbanes, but sounds more exciting as a speaker. (“We started a great journey two years ago with our new president,” the younger Sarbanes declared.)

I could go on, but better to cut to my favorite of the day -- Rep. Elijah Cummings, the latest to hold title to what has been a historically black district since the election of the late Parren J. Mitchell as Maryland’s first African-American congressman in 1970.

“Look around you,” Cummings told the crowd. “This is a diverse group of folks. Diversity is not our problem. Diversity is our promise!”

Cummings spoke of his roots, one of seven children born to a couple who moved to Baltimore from South Carolina and settled on nearby West Cross Street – which I note is within a mile of the speakers’ platform and the scenic backdrop of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor skyline.

They came here, Cummings said, to have good schools for their future children and for his father to get a “union job” – not “work in the fields of Manning, S.C., for 15 cents a day.”

“Think about what I said – Daddy got a job. If you don’t have a job, it’s hard to take care of your family.”

He digressed from the family tale, saying, “We need to understand where we have come from so we can understand what we have achieved.” And that the Bush administration had not only put the country into a ditch, but one lined with quicksand.

Then it was back to family.

“No. 2, Daddy got some healthcare for his family – seven of us, that’s a lot of kids.”

So, Cummings said, his vote in Congress for healthcare was his most important. “I had one prayer, ‘Lord, don’t let me die before I vote for healthcare.”

“There are too many people dying because they cannot get healthcare,” Cummings continued. “We cannot let the Republicans take us back. There are too many people depending on us.”

Next up for Cummings, No. 3, was education, which he said, with growing evangelical fervor, “can transform a person, a family, a neighborhood – can transform generations.”

Cummings said he has concerns about the threat of Osama bin Laden and terrorism, but, “The greatest threat to our national security is the failure to educate every one of our children.”

Behind me, throughout, stood one of society’s failures – an African-American woman shouting out, louder than rally organizers felt comfortable with, a mantra of agreement with every declaration, but mostly fixated on numbers… whenever budget deficits, big banks, or Wall Street run amok were mentioned.

“Gazillions!” she’d holler out. “Gazillions!”

As the crowd waited nearly half an hour between the opening speeches and the arrival of the top entourage of Mikulski, O’Malley and Clinton, the woman sang out at the very top of her lungs with every rousing musical number piped over the sound system. Gospel, hip-hop, pop… she knew them all. And she was loud.

People were edging away from her, but I turned around trying to be friendly.

“I agree with a lot of what you were saying,” I told her, referring to her occasional shout-outs toward the speakers’ platform. “Do you vote?”

No. Not even registered. “They just put in whoever they want,” she said of the political system, adding that her son got “put away” for 27 years for drug dealing.

She just wanted to see Bill Clinton. She said she loved Clinton. He was the best. Then she gave me a big, smoky hug.

Somehow, it was just a big disconnect in her head between voting, participating, and adoring Clinton – who, along with Governor O’Malley and Senator Mikulski, seemed to notice with slight discomfort her intermittent shouts of “Oh yeah!” and “Trillions! Gazillions! Gazillions!”

Clinton spoke at length of Maryland being a leader in the national recovery from the recession, but mentions of numbers in any statistics he’d mention only seemed to incite another shout from the Gazillions Lady.

On safer ground, he offered parallels between television coverage of sports -- how the facts of what went on in baseball or football games are the basis of subsequent commentary by analysts, unlike commentary on matters of national importance.

“How much of this stuff you see on TV has anything to do with facts?” Clinton declared.

So one might presume he prefers Fox Sports over Fox News.

Clinton also spoke of the need for young people to be energized and participate in the election less than two weeks away.

“You are tomorrow’s America, and you need to show up on Nov. 2!”

Minutes later, Clinton, O’Malley & Co. were being whisked away in a motorcade to the Baltimore Museum of Industry for a big-donor affair – and where my wife, Bonnie Schupp, had been waiting for two hours as a volunteer to take photos for use by the museum.

I took a few pictures with my not-smart phone of Clinton speaking amid the crowd of office-holders on Federal Hill, but he’s just a tiny white hair-dot on the platform from my vantage point some 120 feet away.

Bonnie got a little closer at the museum with her Nikon D-700, and that’s one of her pictures up at the top. She even managed to get a glass of wine.

Movie Reviews: ‘Easy A’ and ‘Secretariat’

2010-09-09T01:11:00.005-04:00

Teen sex flick
proves all talk
… and lots of laughs

Meanwhile, Disney goes to the races

Took in a Maryland Film Festival members’ screening last night of “Easy A” – a sort-of high school sex comedy.

When wife Bonnie alerted me to the emailed invitation and told me the title, I figured the “A” was for “Ass.”

But it could be “Adultery,” or simply a grade – like the one I would give this genuinely funny movie, except I’d have to call it “Easy A-Plus.”

The plot features the consequences of 10th-grader Olive (Emma Stone) Penderghast’s lavatory admission, under badgering duress by her best friend (I think they’re called BFF’s these days), to having had first-time sex with a community college guy. Except the guy didn’t exist, the weekend tryst never happened, and the false confession is overheard by a couple of not-friend catty gals.

Inevitably, the news spreads instantly in the communications-heavy teen world of cell phones, iPhones, email and old-fashioned whispers – and adorable extra-virgin Olive, who has never gotten into any kind of trouble, much less notoriety, in her upscale, small-town California world, gets caught up in a comic firestorm of controversy.

For a cute, smart kid who seems to have reached 10th grade almost unnoticed, the attention proves a little puzzling and pleasurable at first, but it grows uncomfortably large after Olive agrees to a favor for a homosexual friend – pretending, in a locked bedroom at a huge party, to have sex with him so the guys tormenting him will think he’s normal.

The complications deepen, even turn a bit sinister, as Olive begins taking gift-card payoffs from other gay guys so they can claim to have had sex with her, or at least to having reached second base. Meanwhile, the Christian student prayer circle takes on the cause of getting Olive cast out of the school – and she takes to wearing a bold cut-out fabric scarlet ‘A’ to accessorize her intentionally-slutty outfits.

And yes, her English class is pretending to read Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” (They don’t even bother with the ‘Cliff Notes’ version when there’s the Demi Moore flick rendition available.)

Amazingly, there’s not a lick of real sex – but just enough profanity to keep “Easy A” almost real, except for the broadly stereotypical characters, Olive’s too-perfect-to-be-true parents and little black adopted brother, and the fact that all these high school teens look a tad too old for the roles.

But they were so good.

The screening audience was almost entirely old enough to be Olive’s parents or grandparents. And they laughed, a lot.

I suspect teens will, too.

This is going to be a smash hit – and, I predict, it will rank up there with “Ferris Bueller” and “Clueless” as iconic teen cinema. It opens nationwide Sept. 17.

Check out the Web site at: http://www.letsnotandsaywedid.com/

Horse tale

While I’m on the subject of movies without sex acts, Disney has a good one opening next month: “Secretariat.”

Based on the William Nack book, “Secretariat: The Making of a Champion,” the film focuses on the real-life tale of Colorado housewife Penny Chenery Tweedy, who takes charge of her dying father’s financially troubled Virginia horse farm and the fortunes of its prized colt – a son of Bold Ruler.

“Secretariat” in 1973 became the first winner in a quarter-century of thoroughbred racing’s Triple Crown, and while leaving out a bit of the Chenery/Tweedy story, Disney’s version of the tale is dramatically interesting (Diane Lane being intensely believable as Chenery) and visually enthralling.

I did not notice the uttering of a single profanity, which seems more than odd given the race track conflicts, and the lone bedroom scene features a hospital bed and the dying father. But then again, the story is so focused on Penny and her horse – it works, magically.

Given that I prefer riding elephants, I’m a sucker for a horse story. After all, I grew up reading every “Black Stallion” novel the local library had to offer. “Secretariat” visually made me feel I was up there in the saddle. The races are riveting.

But the best little moment comes quietly, as the great horse matches stride for stride with Sham in the Belmont Stakes, then opens up a widening lead… five lengths, six lengths, seven lengths, the announcer calls to the pounding hoofbeats around the dirt track.

Then silence, a view from ground-level at the turn into the stretch, and you know what’s coming. You wait, fists clenched like a tight grip on leather reins, and then the horse appears above you, running… pounding... flying… one hoof at a time hitting the dirt… then every hoof in the air… and Secretariat wins the race by 31 lengths.

Backing Lane in the cast are John Malkovich as colorful trainer Lucien Laurin; never-heard-of-before-actor Otto Thorwarth as jockey Ron Turcotte; and the eerily familiar Nelsan Ellis as the devoted -- and rather two-dimensionally-depicted African-American groom Eddie Sweat. (Ellis is featured more flamboyantly in the HBO series “True Blood” as the gay cook and occasional drug dealer Lafayette, in scripts that take better advantage of his acting ability.)

My Dinner With Marvin

2010-05-14T02:05:00.007-04:00

Better late than never,
longtime news reporter
meets long-ago governor

At 90, Marvin Mandel seems sharp as a... rifle

In a newspaper career largely consisting of telephone journalism from the city desk, I interviewed and wrote about countless public officials but rarely met them face to face. I knew people more by voice than appearance – prosecutors, mayors, legislators, civic leaders, even an occasional governor.

But Marvin Mandel, the Jewish kid from East Baltimore who became Maryland’s most powerful politician as head of the state Democratic Party, speaker of the House of Delegates and then governor, was not one of them.

Doubtless I wrote many routine state government stories in the early 1970s quoting statements issued by the governor’s office, and worked on a few of the tales as his second elected term in office became mired in controversy – including a secret romance, sensational divorce, and eventual imprisonment on federal mail fraud and racketeering charges.

But meeting him? Well, that finally happened – Thursday evening, over dinner in Annapolis with a few his media friends at the historic Treaty of Paris Restaurant after a reunion of former state house reporters to which we had both been invited.

He’s 90 now, still practicing law, but the great accomplishments as well as the crazy stuff that for many overshadowed them are all deep in the past.

His memories are rich, however, and over dinner vividly and entertainingly told.

The history is also rather entertaining:

Mandel, if you don’t know it, was chosen as governor by the General Assembly to succeed Republican Spiro T. Agnew when the latter was inaugurated as Richard Nixon’s vice president in January 1969. He won elections to keep the job in 1970 and 1974, when, amid his reelection campaign, Mandel announced he was divorcing his wife of 32 years to marry the much younger woman he loved.

His wife, whose nickname was “Bootsie,” pretty much booted him out of the governor’s mansion and Mandel moved into the Annapolis Hilton. The money ostensibly loaned to Mandel to settle his divorce became part of the pattern of favors federal prosecutors wove into the complicated corruption case that eventually ended his political career. He served 19 months in prison before President Ronald Reagan commuted his sentence, and a federal judge later overturned the conviction on grounds that the federal statutes had been too broadly applied.

So here, directly across the table from me, sits this slight, mostly bald guy with a hearing aid in his right ear, whose anecdotes flowed in and out of a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation, stuff like:

-- Imploring perennial candidate George P. Mahoney, who won the Democratic nomination for governor in 1966, to abandon his powerful, but racially-divisive, campaign slogan of “Your home is your castle: Protect it.” Mandel said he was chairman of the Maryland Democratic Party at the time, and warned Mahoney that the slogan could cost him support. The slogan was banished, but two days before the general election, Mandel said, it was back – and in revulsion, many Democrats turned away and helped vote Agnew into office.

(Agnew’s eventual criticism of black leaders for failing to stem the 1968 King assassination rioting in Baltimore brought him to Nixon’s attention. Agnew attained historical infamy in 1973, resigning the vice presidency as part of a no-contest plea to tax evasion stemming from bribes he took as an elected official in Maryland.)

Mahoney, by the way, never won political office despite many attempts.

But the kind of rhetoric his slogan encouraged, at a time of swift demographic change in Baltimore neighborhoods, lived on in Maryland in other voices, including the 1972 presidential primary won by Alabama’s segregationist Gov. George C. Wallace a day after he was shot and paralyzed by would-be assassin Arthur Herman Bremer on the Laurel Shopping Center parking lot.

-- Mandel said he was notified by phone minutes after the shooting, and immediately called R Adams Cowley, founder of the pioneering Maryland Shock Trauma Center, to assure that Wallace was taken to the best available hospital in the area. (Two days later, Wallace was photographed in his bed at Holy Cross Hospital outside Washington, holding up a newspaper headlined with his election victory.)

Cowley’s Shock Trauma facility was developed and expanded with the support of Mandel and, along with a major reorganization of state government, was among his lasting accomplishments as governor.

Ground had just been broken earlier Thursday on a $160 million, nine-story expansion of the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in downtown Baltimore, and I wondered aloud about my longstanding feeling that many of its patients are unnecessarily brought there with far lesser injuries than it was established to handle.

Mandel said he had encountered opposition to establishing the trauma center from only one group – the state medical society, which saw it as making emergency care increasingly expensive. (It also posed a threat to the emergency business of other area hospitals.)

“Do you want to make that decision?” the former governor asked me, on the issue of where to take an accident victim – as he said he had also told the opposing doctors. “What if it’s your wife, or your daughter, who needs treatment?”

Indeed, Shock Trauma is the best. But as a reporter and editor, I’ve observed a lot of patients being released the day after being flown there by helicopter.

Still, Mandel makes a compelling point. Who can make with any certainty the decision on taking a bleeding patient on an ambulance trip to the nearest hospital or calling in the helicopter for the flight to Baltimore or other designated trauma centers now part of a coordinated statewide emergency medicine network.

-- Mandel discussed his trip to prison – no, not the federal one, but the Maryland Penitentiary in Baltimore in 1972 to negotiate with inmates holding correctional officers hostage. According to news accounts (my memory bank is only so big), it was his second prison negotiation in a matter of days, following an uprising at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.

Inmates were holding a prison captain in a tower, Mandel recalled, and he asked what they wanted to accomplish. He was told they were already serving life terms, and had nothing to lose if they killed the man. The issues were poor conditions, bad food, predictable inmate complains.

Mandel said he assured the inmates that if they killed the man, he would call a special session of the General Assembly and win speedy passage of a law calling for them to be put to death.

“Can he do that?” one of the convicts said.

Years later, Mandel said, he was attending a public event when a young man approached and thanked him for saving the life of the prison officer – his father.

There was no discussion of Mandel’s own trip to prison, in Florida, the corruption case or the divorce hoo-hah – save for a mention one of our dining companions made of Baltimore attorney Arnold Weiner.

“He was my lawyer,” Mandel responded, smiling.

And I noted, adding to the very small talk, the long career of Weiner’s daughter Deborah as a TV news anchor in the city.

-- Mandel had a lot to say about gambling, and trips to Las Vegas, and explained his strategy: Taking $1,000 to gamble and, if it’s gone, to spend the rest of the trip in activities like relaxing poolside at the hotel. He mentioned one trip with late buddy Irv Kovens, a businessman friend (some say ‘crony’) who was among the group of alleged co-conspirators convicted with Mandel in the case that included supposed political maneuvering to add racing dates for a horse track secretly owned by the governor’s friends.

Mandel said he was $5,000 ahead on the Vegas trip, and handed the money to Kovens with instructions to give it back “when we’re on the plane.”

On another trip, he introduced to a casino manager he knew a man purporting to have devised a way to beat the games – and the manager, not all that impressed at such systems, offered that the only way to end up way ahead is to win big early and walk away from the table. Those who stay on invariably end up losers.

In Maryland, slot machine gambling -- once legal in only a few counties and then outlawed – is legal again under state legislation, but a couple of battles are raging over where the slots parlors will be located and who wins the potentially lucrative prize of operating them.

But while Maryland sat on the sidelines with its legislative fights on passing a law and the ensuing battles for a share of the action, the neighboring states of West Virginia, Delaware and Pennsylvania have joined Atlantic City, N.J., in the Middle Atlantic region’s expansion of government-licensed slots and other forms of gambling – beyond the innumerable state and multi-state lotteries that years ago largely put the illegal numbers game to rest.

Mandel said in the days when slot machines were legal in Southern Maryland, a study was done on where the customers came from – by examining automobile license plates on the parking lots. Close to three-quarters of the patrons came from other states, Mandel said.

The question that raises is where the patrons will come from for Maryland’s slot machines, some 15,000 of them, which Mandel said are projected to make $400 a day each. His view: With legal gambling available in neighboring states, it will be more like $200, and the cash-starved local and state governments’ share of the profits will amount to far less than they expect.

-- On Army service in Europe during World War II, teaching soldiers “how to kill” in preparation for the North African campaign, and how his departure was briefly deferred so he could take and pass the Maryland bar exam. “If I had waited until I came back, I would not have passed it,” he said.

As his discharge from the service neared, Mandel said, he dismantled his Army rifle and shipped the parts home – reassembling it on his return.

“I still have it, I keep it in a closet,” Mandel said. “I took it out last week, and it still works.”

Something to keep in mind for any burglars in his neighborhood near Annapolis, the state capital.

He still lives in the eight-room house he shared with the woman he truly loved, second wife Jeanne Blackistone Dorsey Mandel, who died in 2001 after a long fight against degenerative amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease.

“I only use two rooms,” said Mandel, “the bedroom and the TV room.”

At night, he reads until falling asleep.

May the dreams be as rich as the stories.

More on the media

Just over a year after the Baltimore Sun Massacre in which a third of the newsroom staff was fired without notice, the Writers Guild of America, East announced this week the launch of the Web site “Telling Our Stories: The Days of the Baltimore Sun.”

It contains memoirs written by those who were so rudely sent packing, some of them bitter accounts but others remembering the good times.

The announcement states:

Telling Our Stories is the culmination of a fellowship program funded by the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation and implemented with the collaboration of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. The Foundation’s mission is to perpetuate the art and craft of storytelling.

The fellowship program gives the laid-off Sun employees an opportunity to process their difficult experiences through creative work, asking them simply “to tell a story arising out of their personal experiences during their time at The Baltimore Sun.”

Some recall the pain of being fired; others recollect the challenges, joys, and spirit of newspaper work. Participating fellows include reporters, editors, critics, copy editors, photographers, designers, advertising salespeople and market researchers. In addition to the essays, poems, photos and videos featured on the site, former Sun employees also designed the website and edited the submissions.

“I think the important thing about this site is that it puts real people behind the numbers. It will let the readers of Baltimore know what they’ve lost,” said Steve Auerweck, a 24-year Sun employee who first worked as an editor on the business desk and then as a manager of newsroom technology. Auerweck contributed the piece on “Newsroom Humor” in addition to designing and building the site.

“The Baltimore Sun fellowship embodies the Foundation’s mission – to perpetuate the art and craft of storytelling. By publishing their personal stories on this site, the fellows’ voices can now be heard loud and clear by people not only in Baltimore but around the world. As writers, we understand the power of words. We’re happy this fellowship program and new website are helping these fellows harness the power of words to get through this difficult time,” said Tom Fontana, president of the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation.

The Baltimore Sun Fellowship was established in 2009 and funded by an anonymous grant to the Writers Guild of America, East Foundation. The Foundation partnered with the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild to establish the program and recruit the fellows. The collaboration included a mentoring session held in the late fall between the fellows and Foundation members, including Fontana, Barry Levinson, David Simon, WGAE President Michael Winship, Julie Martin, David Bianculli, and WGAE Foundation Executive Director Marsha Manns.

“Collectively, the fellows’ imaginative retelling of their days at The Baltimore Sun brings perspective to a difficult human experience and helps define and preserve a significant moment in American cultural history,” said Manns.

Fellows participating in the program also include: Paul Bendel-Simso, Chiquita Bolden-Heath, Danielle Bradley, Phyllis Brill, Tyeesha Dixon, Doug Donovan, Deborah Lakowicz-Dramby, Ray Frager, Patrick Gutierrez, Beth Hughes, Fe Fung Hung, Doug Kapustin, Chiaki Kawajiri, Jiho Kim, Fay Lande, Linda L. Linley, Monica Lopossay, Elizabeth Malby, John E. McIntyre, Sandra Nash, Rashod D. Ollison, Ebony Page-Harvey, Alan Perry, Gene Russell, Denise Sanders, Norine Schiller, Franz Schneiderman, Matt Tustison, Charles H. Weiss, Linda White, and Teresa Wilson.

Maryland Film Festival weekend

2010-05-09T15:06:00.010-04:00

Line forms for Friday films. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Indie film 'Night Catches Us'

examines 1970s racial divide

from an urban Ground Zero

'Wire' stars cast in familiar roles

Maryland Film Festival director Jed Dietz introduced it as a story no one else was telling, but he might just as well have called “Night Catches Us” the essence of what his annual celebration of filmmaking is all about.

The story by writer-director Tanya Hamilton examines a tense period in urban race relations from the perspective of an extended African-American household caught in the epicenter of violence in the aftermath of the Black Panthers movement in urban America – with killings of Panther members by police, and vice-versa.

It was not an easy project to bring to the screen, having taken a decade from the time Hamilton began writing it. Likely taking the least time was the actual shooting last year. “We had 18 days and a very tiny budget,” she told the audience after a screening at this weekend’s 2010 festival.

And it may prove difficult to reach the big biracial audience that “Night Catches Us” deserves when the film has its national release – which could come this fall. Hamilton announced to applause that her film has been purchased by Magnolia Pictures and could be in theaters by November.

A generation younger than the characters and situations she depicts, Hamilton nonetheless captured the tearing social fabric of a time just past the Black Power movement’s heyday and before black voices began having a major impact on political power. Interestingly, the vocal backdrop for the opening scene is Jimmy Carter in a 1976 presidential campaign speech, about returning power to the people.

The setting is Philadelphia, but could just as well have been Baltimore, Detroit or any number of cities with large but marginalized black populations.

A police raid crashing into the home of the central characters after the killing of a white officer had the feel of the real-life raids in Baltimore in the 1964 manhunt for the black Veney brothers for the killing of a policeman after a liquor store robbery, and the suspicion and hatreds between black and white fit the backdrop of the 1970 tensions here when police and politicians worried about an incident – any incident – sparking a rerun of the 1968 King assassination rioting.

Fear is never a good basis for communication.

The Maryland Film Festival gave a helping hand to director Hamilton, with early financial support through a 2006 Maryland Filmmakers Fellowship grant. Her movie also was shown to an audience of festival members as a work in progress, for feedback before final editing.

Hamilton relied on friends and favors in assembling a top-notch cast, which includes Anthony Mackie (seen most recently in “The Hurt Locker” and “Notorious”), Kerry Washington (who portrayed the wives of Ray Charles and Idi Amin in “Ray” and “The Last King of Scotland,” respectively); and two stars from the Baltimore-filmed HBO series “The Wire” – Wendell Pierce and Jamie Hector.

Hector, who gave menace to the character of ruthless drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield in “The Wire,” is cast as a young black gangster. Here’s hoping he doesn’t get typecast – I’d love to see him in other kinds of roles.

Pierce… well, as in “The Wire,” he’s a police detective. But at least we’re seeing him now in his native New Orleans as a struggling, and hustling, musician in David Simon’s new HBO series, "Treme."

He also attended and fielded questions from the crowd at the weekend screenings of “Night Catches Us,” and was effusive in his praise for Hamilton – noting the shooting of many of the scenes in just one or two takes, without a videographer’s assistance. “She had a vision of what she wanted,” Pierce said.

Hamilton said she drew in part on the 1969 Chicago police killing of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in molding her story, and the film includes – seamlessly – related historical footage.

She said the tight shooting schedule frayed some nerves, as the light of day would give way to evening fireflies. Asked if that concern about losing the light was an underlying factor in naming the film, Hamilton said the title really was derived from a saying in her native Jamaica that she often heard from her grandmother: “Don’t let the night catch you.”

Darkness is a powerful metaphor for this very powerful film. And its depiction of a stark racial division in America is a reminder in a time of other, equally difficult divides in society today.

Other films we caught

Lacking the stamina to handle three intensive days of films from 11 in the morning to late at night, we opted this year to resist the temptation of all-access passes and instead took advantage of the festival membership first-day, 11-to-6, all-you-can-watch open house at the multi-screen Charles Theatre north of Baltimore's rail station.

We started with a packaged group of seven dramatic shorts, some of which we won’t regret never seeing again. But an Israeli tale, “On the Road to Tel Aviv,” was totally compelling. Its conflict, in the wake of a bus bombing, is born of fear as passengers balk at staying aboard a mini-bus out of suspicion that a woman in Arab garb is a terrorist.

The program included a guest appearance by young Australian filmmaker Patrick Maxwell, who fielded questions about his short, “Mrs. Wright,” a mid-life married woman who encounters, longs for, and ultimately backs away from having a relationship with a younger grocery store clerk. (Aha! A cougar in Sydney!)

After a quick lunch in the festival’s Tent Village across the street from the Charles, we caught two feature-length films, the comic road trip “Bass Ackwards” and the bizarre and unsettling, darkly comic subtitled, Greek-made “Dogtooth.”

The former was directed by and stars young filmmaker Linas Phillips, who also co-wrote the script, and he chatted with his festival audience about the year of work involved – first from shooting much of the cross-country journey, then three days based in a city of convenience, Minneapolis, when actor-friend Jim Fletcher had the time for some quickly-produced scenes that became key to the story.

Another star is the vehicle itself – a VW microbus that, at some time in its past, had its middle removed and the two ends welded together. Phillips said it was found and purchased through eBay, and is now sitting on his parents’ driveway in Massachusetts if anyone wants to make an offer for the tiny four-seater.

“Dogtooth” is the tale of a family of five, in which the wife, man-boy son and two naïve daughters grow up sheltered from the world on a private, fenced estate, their lives directed by a sometimes-dictatorial businessman father. He brings in a woman security guard from his industrial plant to provide sex for the son, but she also brings on calamity in exchanging gifts – including some video movies – for sex in seducing one of the daughters. The result is, in a word, disturbing.

(For another view from the festival, check out the Journeys blog by my wife Bonnie Schupp.)

On other topics

Remembering a baseball legend

I could not let the passing last week of longtime Detroit Tigers baseball broadcaster Ernie Harwell slip by without a mention.

I met the man once, briefly, nearly a decade ago at a patio lunch outside the Tigers’ spring training stadium in Lakeland, Fla. Harwell was kind enough to let me join him, giving me an opportunity to explain how his was the first baseball voice I could remember – from his 1954 broadcast work in Baltimore in the debut season of the modern-era Orioles.

Harwell was genuinely appreciative that close to half a century later, I could still remember and thank him for his Oriole radio broadcasts from a time when I was all of eight years old.

“We didn’t win a lot of games,” he recalled in that famous voice, smiling and pausing for a micro-second. “But we sure had a lot of fun.”

A nutcracker, sweetie!

Just in time for the occasion, I found the perfect Mother's Day gift for wife Bonnie: A dead man’s nutcracker.

I was driving home from the supermarket Saturday afternoon when I noticed a small sign at an intersection near our home: “Estate Sale.”

I drove down the long road toward some of the area’s finer waterfront homes, and it took about 15 minutes to track down the right driveway – almost at 3 p.m., as the sale was ending.

It was the home of a local business leader and electrical engineer who had died a month and a half ago from Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He was 64 – just a few months older than me – and judging from some of the oddities left after the picking-over by an earlier throng of buyers, had the kind of sense of humor I appreciate.

So I bought a couple of crazy gizmos, like a battery-powered device that scrambles an egg inside its shell, and a Rube Goldbergish egg cracker. His niece told me he had ordered them from a catalog shortly before his death, and never had a chance to see them in action.

Then there was the nutcracker: A long, hand-carved wooden figure of a nude woman, with a small depression high between the thighs where the nut is placed between the spreading legs. Then you squeeze them together and – crack!

It’s so twisted.

But the real gift is laughter.

Milestones: 40 years down the road

2010-05-04T15:43:00.013-04:00

Kent State anniversary

brings back memories

of other front-page news

The anniversary had skipped my mind, but an NPR interview reminded me: Forty years ago this week, my first front-page byline appeared in The Baltimore Sun.

The NPR story had nothing to do with mine, except that its subject – the Kent State University massacre – made the front pages of Tuesday May 5, 1970, historic. Newspapers ran the photo of runaway 14-year-old Mary Ann Vecchio crying out in anguish over the body of Jeffrey Miller, one of 13 students shot by National Guard soldiers during an anti-war demonstration. Miller was one of the four who died.

Disturbances in the college town of Kent, Ohio, had prompted its mayor to declare a state of emergency and ask the governor to send in the Guard troops to restore order. The campus demonstration was one of many across the nation – including the University of Maryland – in response to an invasion of Cambodia ordered by the Nixon administration in what was perceived as an escalation of the Vietnam war.

My story was the result of a similar mindset in Baltimore, except that the issue was policing and race relations.

About the time of the noon-hour gunfire in Ohio, I was arriving at the city desk as a young reporter and being handed an assignment: A priest’s complaint about the refusal of the city police to respond to a call for help from his rectory a few nights earlier. A man had knocked on the door that Saturday night, seeking help because he was being “terrorized” by a band of teenagers.

The priest called the police, but after more than an hour no officer had arrived. He asked a fellow priest, the Rev. Richard Lawrence, who had experience in police-community relations, to check on the situation, and the latter priest told me how he called the Chief of Patrol’s office and was informed the department would not respond to the rectory because it was in “a gray area” with a “racial problem” and police were “afraid that the car would be hit with rocks or bottles or overturned.”

The church on Old York Road was around the corner from a house on Cator Avenue that was reportedly the headquarters of a group called Making a Nation – and one of half a dozen addresses that police had linked to black militant organizations. Police Commissioner Donald D. Pomerleau had issued an order that no patrol officer respond to those addresses without the presence of a supervisor, but the directive was misinterpreted to mean no response to the wider “sensitive” or “gray” areas around them.

Just a week earlier, city police had arrested a dozen members of the militant Black Panthers in connection with a killing, and the day I was working on the “gray areas” story, Commissioner Pomerleau was testifying at a court hearing in opposition to a civil libertarian motion seeking to dissolve a judge’s order that had banned the distribution of infammatory Panther literature.

Baltimore was just two years beyond the rioting that followed the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Pomerleau, asked in court whether the arrests had the potential to spark comparable civil disorder, replied, “I say no,” according to a story by a Sun colleague appearing elsewhere in the same edition as my front-pager.

My story was the front-page lead, with a two-column headline at the top right. It was adjacent to the image of Mary Ann Vecchio that won then-student photographer John Filo a Pulitzer Prize and added fuel to the growing antiwar movement.

The Kent State account topped the middle of the front page, and under it was the story on the emergency declaration by Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel that sent Guardsmen to the College Park campus. A downpage photo showed state troopers using tear gas to disperse demonstrators there.

Hardly anyone remembers my slightly overplayed story, which was clearly less important than the Kent State tragedy or troopers firing tear gas at Maryland student protesters who had blocked U.S. 1 in College Park for much of the day. (The war and race relations came together nine days later at Mississippi’s Jackson State, where city and state police gunfire on student protesters left two dead and 12 wounded.)

Forty years ago, Baltimore was a tense city just beginning to find its way in race relations and America was caught up in dissention over the Vietnam war. Much of the response on both fronts, as reflected in the front-page stories of May 5, 1970, seem in hindsight to have stemmed from fear.

Today, strangely, race still colors all too many aspects of life in Baltimore – including education, housing, health care, justice, politics.

And America is mired in yet another increasingly unpopular war.

There was a demonstration, of sorts, at College Park this year that brought a police response -- to quell the boistrous celebration after Maryland beat Duke University in a basketball game.

Prince George's County police were accused of brutality in the beatings of two students that night.

In retrospect, isn't that strange?

Movie Review: ‘Exit Through The Gift Shop’

2010-04-30T00:34:00.006-04:00

Indie film takes on
fly-by-night world
of the street artist

So ask yourself:

What is art anyway?

In the world of graffiti, when does vandalism become art?
For that matter, what is art?

These difficult questions are among the unanswerables explored with considerable irreverence in “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” an indie movie opening today in Baltimore and over the next few weeks at a modest number of theaters across the country – and which deserves more than it likely will get.

From its reported acclaim in a Sundance premiere to its almost underground marketing scheme, “Gift Shop” should be getting lots of buzz in coming weeks and much will be made of the questions it raises – even whether its documentary story line is true or invented, a mockumentary.

The story lines are a bit muddled, starting out with Los Angeles fashion entrepreneur and Frenchman Thierry Guetta’s fascination with video – and how he seemed to record every mundane act of urban living within his family and neighborhood.

Eventually, through a street artist cousin known as Space Invader, Guetta expands to recording the fly-by-night world of graffiti artists. A growing connection with the likes of street artist Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic Obama poster) brings an introduction to the mysterious and reclusive British artist Banksy, and Guetta becomes a co-conspirator in taping him at work.

As his own fame leads to big money in the art world, Banksy asks to see the movie he believes Guetta is creating – and then is shocked, incredulous, at the mess of it all.

And so the tale turns around, as Banksy encourages Guetta to put down the video camera and try his hand at art – and the undisciplined filmmaker himself again becomes the focus of the tale as an untrained artist who at least knows how to think big. Very big. Very bad. Well, some of it, anyway.

Because what is art really is defined by what people believe it to be.

Like art, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Guetta calls his resulting show “Life is Beautiful” – and whether or not you think it is art, he’s got that absolutely right.

The film was screened on the eve of its Baltimore opening for an invited audience including Maryland Film Festival members, with an appearance by locally-raised film agent Bart Walker, a partner in Cinetic Media and part of a group formed to market “Exit.” He said they are relying on the audiences of such preview screenings to spread the buzz.

Here’s mine: It’s a hoot and a half. Check it out. But go easy on the spray paint – not everyone has the talent.

Help for Haiti

2010-01-14T23:44:00.004-05:00

Obama pledges $100 million;
a million Americans
could easily match it

I’ve got a cup of tea, some bread just out of the oven, a roof overhead, and a high-def, wide-screen TV which for hours has given me a window on the tragedy of a nation with virtually none of the above – just destruction and death.

I noticed on the CNN news-crawler at the bottom of the horrible scenes from Haiti that President Obama just pledged $100 million for emergency assistance.

The amount – well, it’s good start.

But I bet folks all cozy, like me, can add at least that much to the cause of helping a poor, besieged neighbor in the wake of an earthquake that is clearly among the worst natural disasters in recorded history.

Raising the money would be a snap – just a million Americans, donating at least $100 each, would match Obama’s $100 million. You can find a list at www.cnn.com of organizations engaged in relief efforts in Haiti, and pick one or more to receive your contribution – or find another from any of the many listings compiled by the print and broadcast media.

I chose the American Red Cross (http://www.redcross.org) , Catholic Relief Services (http://www.crs.org), IMA World Health (http://www.imaworldhealth.org), and Doctors Without Borders (http://doctorswithoutborders.org).

Now, if just another 999,999 folks could join in this little effort – well, we’ll all be contributing members of an enormous organization: Humanity.

There’s no membership card, but gifts to most if not all of the relief organizations are tax-deductible. And when you figure out how much your tax savings amounts to, use that money for another gift later.

Remembering Mark Owings

2010-01-08T18:38:00.010-05:00

Touching

send-off

for SF fan

I attended the memorial service today for my friend Mark Owings, a fellow founding member of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. His wife Jul noted that he died amid his collection of some 15,000 books -- appropriately enough, sitting in a chair with a volume he was reading in his lap. "He died with his boots on," she told friends attending the brief service at St. Luke's Lutheran Church, a short walk from their home in Baltimore's Hampden neighborhood.

Mark, who had a long white beard, had been scheduled to reprise his role as Father Time for Hampden's annual New Year's Eve ball drop, but died on Dec. 30 -- barely a month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

David Chalker -- the elder of two sons of another club co-founder, the late Jack Chalker -- kindly snapped the photo above with his iPhone: The box containing Mark's ashes, topped by his wizard's hat.

Not in the photo, but high above on the wall behind the altar, was a large painting of Jesus -- described by one of the science fiction friends in attendance as "another master of space and time."

I'm not particularly religious -- OK, I'm not religious, period -- but the wizard hat, the juxtaposition and the comment were wonderful. I'd rather smile than cry at a funeral.

Bon voyage.

What about (Socialist) Bob

2010-01-07T00:30:00.002-05:00

Baltimore leftist
would have enjoyed
his last turnout

Baltimore’s best-known socialist attracted what may have been his largest crowd Wednesday afternoon, but wasn’t around to enjoy it.

A. Robert Kaufman, a far-leftist who had been tilting at societal windmills for more than half a century, died on Christmas Day after more than three years of declining health – a result of being stabbed by a deranged boarder in a building he owned in a rough westside neighborhood. He was 78.

More than 100 people from varied walks of life offered condolences to Bob’s elderly sister – his sole survivor – and heard tributes from former newspaper columnist Mike Olesker, from influential African-American minister Marion Bascom, from a printing company entrepreneur who for many years had Bob as frequent customer, and even from a young man who described himself as a revolutionary socialist inspired by Bob’s example.

I probably met Bob no more than twice, but talked to him regularly over the course of nearly four decades on the city desk of The Baltimore Sun. He called frequently, hoping to talk to editors. I was the guy usually answering the phone. It was a curious relationship. I’d hear what he had to say, and send a brief message off to whatever editor he wanted to reach (but who had no time or inclination to chat with Bob). Usually just a sentence, kind of a tweet, about this demonstration, that hearing, his latest filing for elective office.

There was hardly a public office that Bob didn’t run for – mayor, council, congress, president. The point was never about winning. It was about the forum that comes with candidacy, the chance to espouse his views that in the short run of a campaign or a decade were largely ignored or brought him mostly derision.

Crazy stuff, you know – starting in the late 1940s, as a white Jewish teen-ager joining in civil rights picketing outside a whites-only downtown theater. He opposed war, opposed the death penalty, favored legalizing drugs, spoke out for universal health care and affordable car insurance, and wanted big business to share the wealth.

Sometimes it was a chance to criticize the political system when, deemed a minor candidate, he would be barred from an election debate.

He was roughed up and stuffed in a trash can back around 1960 outside Baltimore City College, by a mob of students who also tore up his socialist leaflets. I missed the ruckus, but Olesker, who was in my 10th-grade homeroom, recalled seeing the mob that day. It might have been Bob’s biggest crowd before Wednesday’s memorial, we joked.

Bob was uncompromising in his beliefs. If there was movement on his issues, it was society that did the moving – as witness the election of a black president, debate on universal health care on Capitol Hill, growing disenchantment with the latest war, city council eyeing the high cost of car insurance for Baltimore residents.

But in his last two years, living in a nursing home, Bob was pretty much a spectator badly in need of a kidney – his own kidneys having failed as a complication from the knife attack and subsequent infections. He had nearly died after the attack. More recently, he had a stroke.

Olesker, in his remarks, said Bob “could really make people uncomfortable because we were not living up to our ideals” – and neither was America.

“He was bigger than most of the religions we practice,” said Reverend Bascom. “He was a consummate humanist. He walked where most of us feared to walk.”

After the brief program, horticulturist and retired veterinarian L. Bruce Hornstein, a friend of Bob since their childhood days, observed, “He was a pacifist, and he was fearless.”

For more on Kaufman, including his obituary and photos, check out these entries at The Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.kaufman28dec28,0,4426848.story
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.vozzella31dec30,0,4271671.story

Another passing

After the Kaufman remembrance, I drove across town to attend another memorial gathering – this one for longtime friend Mark Owings, who was among the handful of founding members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. He was the most gentle, soft-spoken human being I have ever known.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, I found myself at age 16 becoming close friends in high school with future novelist Jack Chalker and traveling by Trailways bus with him and a few other fans of the genre to attend meetings of the Washington Science Fiction Association. I suggested starting a club in Baltimore, and the first official meeting took place in the tiny basement of my parents’ Royce Avenue rowhouse.

We also started holding an annual regional science fiction conference, which initially attracted a few dozen people, but grew to major proportions over the years – 1,500 or more, and filling hotels. There’s even been a couple of larger world science fiction conventions here.

While I drifted away from active membership, Jack and Mark remained involved in BSFS and collaborated on a couple of book projects that drew on Mark’s strength as a bibliographer: The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers and The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography.

Jack died nearly five years ago. Now Mark, on Dec. 30, at 64 – mere weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The last time we had our picture taken together was in 2003, at BSFS’ 40th anniversary party – held in its spacious clubhouse, a former East Baltimore Street movie theater building.

I offered this comment at the party:

“I have proof that time travel exists. There’s just two drawbacks – it only goes in one direction, and it happens too fast.”

RIP, Mark. And tell Jack I said ‘hi’.

Sprechen zie English? Road Trip Epilog

2009-11-08T22:48:00.015-05:00

Along the lane, entering Lankow.
(Photos by Bonnie J. Schupp)

A village vanishes
on an Iron Curtain
byway of history

LANKOW, Germany – This is not a dateline anyone will be seeing as Germany celebrates, and other nations remember, Monday’s 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall heralding the end of the Cold War.

More than any other physical barrier, the Berlin Wall symbolized the division between East and West – and between Russian-dominated communism and the American-dominated Free World.

John F. Kennedy delivered one of his most dramatic speeches at the nearby city hall, five months before an assassin’s bullets ended his presidency. “Ich bin ein Berliner” is the phrase most remembered from Kennedy’s speech – but in the context of subsequent events, the speech is well worth reading in its entirety at http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/berliner.htm.

Twenty-four years later, delivering one of his most memorable lines, President Ronald Reagan stood at a podium on the Western side of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and implored his Russian counterpart: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (Again, the full text can be found at http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/reagan-tear-down.htm.)

But no such speeches were made at Lankow, an 800-year-old village on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain that was deemed too close to the border by its Soviet overseers.

Our German friend Maja traces her roots to Lankow, where her family owned land for six centuries -- until 1962, when the Russians gave them a few hours to pack up their stuff and leave. In the mid-1970s, the Russians bulldozed the village. Lankow was erased.

Maja was born a few years later, and grew up in a nearby town. She was about 10 when the border itself disappeared, and Germany was reunified.

During our recent visit, I had a chance to look at some of Maja’s old family photos that tell another part of the story – particularly the photos of long-deceased family members in German military uniforms. Through two world wars, the Germans were on the wrong side of history, so the pictures seemed eerie to these American (and Jewish) eyes.

The division of Germany in 1945 was a result of those wars, and how Germans fared in subsequent years was for many determined by which side of the border they called home. West Germany received vast aid from the Free World allies and was largely rebuilt, while East Germany was owned and operated by and for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

The Russians clearly felt something was owed them by Germany, for all the death and destruction meted out by the Nazi regime. And under dictator Josef Stalin, Russia served up plenty of retribution – for example, taking over the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where thousands of its captured soldiers had been executed. Over the next few years, the Russians imprisoned Nazis, suspected Nazis, political opponents and just about anyone the Stalin regime wanted to silence.

As a victor in the war, Russia naturally wanted as much of Germany as it could get.

In rural farming villages, where life before and after the war was somewhat simple, there likely was not an enormous amount of change. Our friend Maya, recalling her early years, said she had a normal childhood – and politics was not evident as part of it. Life was about friends and family, in ample supply.

But you stayed away from the border – which included among its security measures high electric fences, barbed wire, mine fields, concrete trenches, guard dogs, lookout towers and sentry posts with armed soldiers, even a well-manicured stretch of dirt for telltale footprints of anyone daring or crazy enough to attempt a crossing.

For all the normalcy of village life, East Germany itself had become a very large prison, and during the two generations after World War II the fence around it became steadily more impenetrable – while outside this prison, West Germany was a democracy growing in prosperity.

Life was a little crazier in Berlin, where the western sectors were pretty much an island of freedom entirely landlocked by East Germany. One of our friends there, who is a member of a rowing club, recalled an acquaintance who paddled too far from the shore of the river on the border between West Berlin and Russian-controlled Potsdam and was fatally shot.

The economic disparity between the two Berlins became increasingly evident over the years – including new construction that was changing the skyline of the Western side.

In the latter years of the division, Western culture was also having an impact. A photographic history of the Reichstag, which houses the German legislature, includes a 1988 Michael Jackson concert staged outside the building on the western side of the wall. It prompted increased security on the eastern side to keep crowds away. A month later, Bruce Springsteen was allowed to perform in East Berlin and his concert attracted a crowd estimated at 160,000.

When the wall figuratively came down the night of Nov. 9, 1989, and as border checkpoints across the country soon followed suit, people from the East stepped, danced, climbed and drove across to joyous greetings from their neighbors of the West. Formal reunification took nearly a year, but the physical, economic and social rebuilding of much of East Germany – and particularly the former East Berlin – continues.

Touring remains of the wall, traveling through the modern developments and restored historical buildings of the former West Berlin and seeing new construction as well as many starkly unimproved areas in the East, were a fascinating part of a monthlong trip through Germany in September.

But I remain haunted by Lankow, a ghost town whose existence in northern Germany is remembered by a sign erected along a country lane by Maja’s uncles – and by an official memorial stone placed later in what had been the village center. There’s also a display board with a map of the village, and pictures of houses with names of the families that had lived in them. The area is now a nature preserve.
Maja, holding Stella next to the memorial stone.

We visited Lankow as an ideal place for my wife Bonnie to photograph Maja, her American husband Jeremy and their toddler daughter Stella, late one afternoon. And we walked around, exploring remnants of homesteads bulldozed by the Russians – bricks and stones from walls, a chunk of metal from an old stove, bits of broken porcelain. Down the hill, near the river, Maja tells us, there’s rusty farm equipment. But it was not a place we could easily reach without heavier clothing, boots, and maybe a weed-whacker to clear a path.

I picked a few wild apples and pears from trees that had outlived the town.

Sheep were grazing in a nearby field.

It’s a very peaceful place, this village on the wrong side of history, and worth remembering.

Mourning my brother

2009-10-22T15:14:00.004-04:00

Larry was 6½ years old when I was born, and very disappointed. He really wanted a pony. And looking back, he probably would have been much happier growing up with a big four-legged pet – after all, he got blamed for nearly everything. He was the older brother.

We could not have been more unlike. I was the sickly kid, and always had my face buried in a book – the Freddy the Pig series in early elementary years, then sports books, finally science fiction. I could toss down three novels in a summer afternoon, sitting on the front porch of our rowhouse on Northwest Baltimore’s Royce Avenue.

My brother was gifted at sports, athletic and graceful. In high school, there was JV football and basketball, varsity swimming and track. He became a Baltimore public schools physical education teacher in 1962 – assigned that fall to his high school alma mater, Baltimore City College (Class of ’57). I was there, too, entering my senior year – and blessed with a doctor’s note that kept me out of the gym. I had my nose behind a book with an extra period of study hall.

Some days he’d pick me up and drive me to school -- charging 25 cents toward the gas. (“Times were a little tough back then,” he’d later explain, smiling.)

Larry – Jerome Lawrence Ettlin -- was born in June 1939, some 2½ years before Pearl Harbor. I came along in January 1946, at the leading edge of the post-war Baby Boomer era. Some of my friends were younger brothers of some of his friends. But we siblings really didn’t get along. And he stayed as far away from me as possible – and out of the line of fire of parental blame – as we grew up.

I fondly remember the year of the cranberry-carcinogen scare, the only Thanksgiving we didn’t squabble over the cranberry sauce. He urged me to eat all of it that I wanted.

I was about 15 when he married Natalie and moved out for good.

I didn’t miss him, not then. I was just beginning to figure out who I was – and teaching myself to type with two fingers down in the concrete-floor basement, on a metal table next to the oil-burner furnace, giving birth to eventual life as a writer. Four years later, I was marrying and moving out, finding my own way through myriad mistakes and misadventures.

Our paths crossed from time to time, like the day of a supposed race riot at one of my old schools, Pimlico Junior High. He was a teacher there, and I knew some of its other faculty members from my adolescent days. TV crews surrounded the school on the heels of an incorrect broadcast news report describing the “racial” fighting that broke out in Pimlico’s cafeteria. But it was, pure and simple, a food fight – one kid hit another with a dish of food, and it just erupted. And I was covering the melee in my relatively new gig as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.

His career as a teacher lasted 30 years, and included a stint at Baltimore’s William S. Baer School for the multiply disabled. The fact that he bore a strong resemblance to comic actor Jerry Lewis – and that some colleagues knew him as “Jerry” – served my brother well, as the school year opened after the annual Labor Day weekend Jerry Lewis muscular dystrophy telethon. And he truly loved the school, since the children he worked with looked forward to being there and the attention they received every day. Life doubtless looks different, growing up in a wheelchair. And even after retirement, he kept in touch as a volunteer at Special Olympics events in the city.

I can’t recall exactly how and when my brother and I began seeing each other as adults, and the gap between our differences began shrinking.

Maybe it was the open invitation in the summer months to spend time at the suburban swim club he managed – and where our daughters were getting to know each other. I spent time there through my three marriages, lounging poolside or playing a little tennis with him and then his older son, and watching my older daughter and then my younger daughter jumping off the diving board.

Maybe it was our shared genes -- particularly the bad one that ran on the male side of our family, manifesting itself as Crohn’s disease.

Then there was sharing the loss of parents – our father 20 years ago, at 78, and our mother in 2007 at the age of 92. And we’d meet up by chance now and then, visiting the nursing home where our Aunt Alice, at 102, has lived since losing a leg to a blood clot in her mid-90s.

For all the friction growing up, the bond of family was always biding its time.

I’ve learned about family through my nearly 45 years of marriage – and often joked that you have to divide by 3 to get the average. (I have learned from experience, however – as witness the current relationship with wife Bonnie nearing a 30th anniversary.)

My brother’s one marriage lasted 48 years, and if you count courtship, their relationship spanned more than half a century. You see relationships from a distance and maybe don’t appreciate their magnitude. They had two sons, Greg and Ross, and a daughter, Carol, and now a 14-year-old grandson, Jadon, but the real measure of their relationship… well, I witnessed that in recent weeks.

My wife Bonnie and I last sat down socially with Larry and Nat August 31, at the reception after attending the graveside funeral in Baltimore’s Rosedale suburb for our uncle Joseph Mignogna. We had driven our cars a short distance from the synagogue cemetery of that part of the family, to a neighboring cemetery where our parents and grandparents and half a dozen uncles rest. My brother could not recall the spot where our maternal grandmother was buried after dying of influenza in 1919. I took him to the weathered headstone of Jennie Kaplan, and then he showed me to the resting spot of Jennie’s husband David, who died in 1945 exactly a year before my birth and accounted for my name.

On Sept. 3, Bonnie and I flew to Germany to begin a monthlong visit to friends in Europe.

Two days later, I received the first of what became nearly daily emails sent by my niece – her father… my brother, emergency surgery, a strangulated bowel, blood circulation to heart and lungs affected, more surgery, unresponsive for more than a week, organs failing.

I didn’t expect to see him again. I’d close my eyes at night, in Germany, and think back to our uncle’s funeral, and Larry and I standing together as the rabbi explained the gift we offer at the burial, in each of us taking the shovel in hand and sprinkling earth gently down atop the wooden casket adorned only with a carved Star of David.

My brother turned the shovel’s blade sideways, and the clay earth spilled out and down. Then I added my offering. “It is a service you offer, something they cannot do for themselves,” the rabbi said.

Uncle Joe was family, the husband of our mother’s baby sister, a World War II combat veteran, the father of our cousins Diane and Marc, a guy who played saxophone, loved jazz, a Catholic from Philadelphia who became a Jew after marrying our youngest aunt. Funny to think that way. Our mother’s baby sister, Zelda, she’s 85 years old. The years spin past so quickly, you want to reach out and reverse the clock and remember their little Christmas tree around Hanukkah time, the little round backyard swimming pool, Wiffle ball on the tiny patch of lawn. In the end, his last months in a nursing home, Uncle Joe would remember little if any of this – Alzheimer’s having taken away the treasures that should accrue with age.

Then I’d see us standing at our parents’ shared headstone, and placing a small stone atop it – a tradition, a sign of remembrance, that you’ve visited. The stones eventually vanish. I bring more. I pick them carefully, bringing back a few from every trip, every beautiful place I find… from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, British Columbia, Germany’s Baltic coast….

We were back home Oct. 7, and the next day arrived at Sinai Hospital to find Larry awake and alert, but still gravely ill – and machines everywhere. Dialysis. Ventilator. Feeding. Draining. Pumping. There had been a long spell, nearly two weeks into our trip, when Larry had been pretty much unconscious. And pneumonia – repeatedly. Infections – repeatedly.

He saw us, and he smiled. I told him stories about our adventures in Europe, about visiting the London foundry that cast the Liberty Bell and Big Ben, and how our friend who works there gave us a rare tour, and how we saw bells cast in the 15th century that were back in the factory for new fittings. A bronze bell can last pretty much forever, but the fittings that hold it in the steeple eventually wear out, every 150 years or so – and we touched a bell resting on the foundry floor, awaiting fittings. The bell’s still-vivid inscription had the year of its casting: 1417.

Nearly six centuries, and the bell just needs new fittings and back in the steeple it goes.

If only we held up as well, I told him. And he smiled again.

I told him about a little feature I’d read on the British Air flight home, in the Times of London, in which notable authors related their “eureka” moments of discovery that opened the way for them to write. One account was of a scientist’s explanation that we are all made of stardust from cosmic explosions.

“Recycled stardust,” I said. “We’re recycled stardust.”

He smiled, and I added: “Next time around, I do not want to come back as a frog.”

We’ve been home two weeks now, and I’ve been back to the hospital as often as possible, seen a few good days but more that were mostly bad. And at every turn, up or down, Natalie is sitting at his bedside in the intensive care unit in a sterile-blue gown, her latex-gloved hand patting his wrist, her hand in his hand. “Squeeze my hand, sweetie,” she’d whisper, and sometimes there’d be a little pressure in response – and sometimes a little stronger.

Stroking his white hair, his forehead: “Be strong. Keep on being subborn.”

“I love you,” she’d whisper.

Breathing through a tracheotomy, Larry would move his lips in a silent reply: “I love you too.”

His eyebrows were expressive. “Do you want the TV turned on?” The eyebrows reply, “Doesn’t matter.”

A nurse brings a syringe and reaches for one of the incoming tubes. The eyebrows ask, “What?”

And occasionally, the eyebrows show frustration at being helpless, at losing nearly all control of one’s life. The eyebrows are easier to read than lips.

The news from the medical team was never good. With every short upswing in being alert and communicative came deeper downswings. There was a morning one week ago when his heartbeat became erratic, and they almost lost him. And there were unanswerable questions – if his heart stops, resuscitate? Crack his chest? Use the electric paddles? Let him go?

And what about treatment – how long to fight every worsening complication? When do you, when does he, say, “Enough!” When does anyone lose the will to go on? When do you surrender? Can you surrender? Should you surrender?

Natalie sat at his bedside, fighting for every moment – and encouraging him at every turn to be strong.

“I want to go home,” he would say, and so long as there was the slightest of chances of that happening, even if it meant a year or two years of sitting at his bedside and sharing her amazing strength and love, she would not yield. “I’m taking you home. We’re going to get you home. Be stubborn. Keep fighting, Lar.”

They managed a few days ago to play an hour of poker, his hobby.

“Who won?” I asked Nat.

“He did,” she said.

“That’s good,” I smiled.

“I threw away a pair of aces. If I had a pair, I threw it away.”

She needed him to win, willed him to win.

And I tried not to cry. Two aces. A simple moment of truth, of clarity, at this small, loving sacrifice.

Natalie was beyond heroic. If there is a height of bravery, she was looking down on it… with Larry at her side.

The surgeon talked with us earlier this week, about the options: escalating treatment should more complications arise; maintaining full life support and current levels of care in hoping for a turnaround in his condition; or focusing on medication to control pain while basically de-escalating the fight.

Late Tuesday afternoon, an endoscopic examination indicated deterioration of what little remained of the intestines, but Wednesday the surgeon offered a last option – one more longshot against giving up hope – to attempt surgery that would remove the damaged section and maybe the root of the infection process. There was also the possibility he would not survive the operation.

Larry was weak, but alert – and was asked whether he wanted and would agree to the risky surgery, and told that the alternative was also very bleak. He wasn’t rushed. We waited another hour for all the pain medication to wear off, and asked if he had thought about it, if he could say whether to go ahead and try it. The reply was a weak affirmative nod to going ahead and, later, his raised thumb and forefinger formed a little circle, an “OK.”

For a few minutes, as Natalie left the room, I sat in her chair and looked into my brother’s eyes that were open just a slit.

“There’s that other operation,” I said. “How about a whole-body transplant?”

He smiled back and nodded.

With Natalie and son Greg at his side, Larry motioned that he wanted to write something, and was handed a pen – then could not control it enough to make it do his bidding on a clipboard-held sheet of paper. He pointed the pen instead to a sheet of large printed letters of the alphabet, and circled the letter J, and drew a line to the next, A. Then he pointed it to the others… D, O, N.

The anesthesiologist and a team of nurses came a few minutes past 7 p.m., and Natalie gently kissed his forehead. The entourage rolled his bed out of the room, past me at the doorway, and I could see his eyes were open. Then he was rolling down the long hallway of the hospital’s ICU wing. I saw only the white hair on the top of his head, and then he was gone.

Sprechen zie English? Road Trip Part 3

2009-10-03T17:45:00.014-04:00

A familiar slogan appears on the gate at Sachsenhausen. Below, Ernst Strnad. (Photos by Bonnie Schupp)

This place of

horror speaks

against those

who would

deny history

From Oranienburg, Germany

Among the German concentration camps of World War II, the name Sachsenhausen was unknown to me before a recent visit to the town of Oranienburg, a bit more than 20 miles northeast of Berlin.

Here, architects of the Nazi regime and the prison officers and commandants who would build, open and run the better-known places like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald worked out and practiced the best ways to dehumanize and murder their victims.

Some were Jewish, but far more were prisoners of war, opponents of the regime, gypsies, intellectuals -- all undesirable to the Hitler regime that grew in power and terror several years before the German invasion of Poland and an explosion of war that would consume more than 50 million lives.

The death toll includes soldiers and civilians alike, but those who were tortured and killed in the camps -- also in the millions -- are the numbers that people looking back on this darkest of ages more often recite.

Tens of thousands were murdered at Sachsenhausen, where more than 200,000 people were imprisoned between its opening in 1936 and the war's end in 1945. They were shot or hung in groups or individually, gassed, starved, frozen, beaten.

We were met on the visitors' parking lot by Ernst Strnad, an 81-year-old Czech-born writer and translator who checks on our nationalities (Bonnie and I from the U.S., and German friends Beate and Ellen) and engages us in a little conversation in English about his late father -- a survivor whose various camp confinements as a political prisoner included Sachsenhausen.

Strnad could recall the day his father was arrested by the Nazi invaders of Czechoslovakia – a trade unionist, he had openly spoken out against the rising tide of facism and had nowhere to hide after his country fell to the Germans.

From the inner pocket of his sportjacket, Strnad plucks a thin and worn leather wallet of papers, including the text in German of President Barack Obama's speech in his June visit to Buchenwald – and Strnad’s own Who's Who in the World biography.

And he offers to guide us through the place, for a donation of 5 euros that supports publication of his books. It was a modest sum (a tad under $7.50 at the current exchange rate), given the expertise of our guide.

He begins the walking tour along a tree-shaded lane that seemed close to a quarter-mile length of a block-and-concrete wall topped with what once was electrified wires.

We stop periodically, Strnad pointing out features like the wiring and the guard tower, with each fact of his litany preceded by the words, “You must know this….”

At first I thought he assumed we already knew what he was about to tell us, but then I realized the emphasis was on the word must – the importance that we know this and that about Sachsenhausen, which was built by prisoners on the edge of Oranienburg and was a successor to a smaller concentration camp that had stood in a more visible center-of-town location from 1933 to 1934.

At the end of the lane, we reach the entrance and see the chilling words ornamentally crafted into the metal gate: ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

The approximate translation: Work makes you free.

That same message was placed later above the gateway to the better-known Auschwitz concentration camp that opened in 1940 in Poland, and where mass killings were vastly expanded – with extermination of targeted populations the object.

The gas chamber for killing and crematorium for victim disposal had already been experimented with at Sachsenhausen, where the sign on the gate was contradicted by this grim reality for many: The only way out was “through the chimney.”

Still, many prisoners left Sachsenhausen – transferred to other camps for various purposes, probably most to eventually die or be murdered in the Nazi camps.

The Roma (gypsies) and Russian prisoners of war by the thousands may have fared the worst at Sachsenhausen, where evidence remains of their deaths – gallows, a firing squad trench, even a measuring device where prisoners were told to stand for height examination and a fatal bullet was fired into the neck through a hole in a wall.

For awhile, the Nazis produced documentation aimed at showing more legitimate causes of deaths, particularly for the Roma, who were subjected to medical experimments. The supposed proof of natural causes of death was charted in autopsy reports after cursory post-mortem examinations. The autopsy room is still there.

Strnad, our guide, points out a prison building within the prison – an oddity but not a redundancy. This little prison building was run by the Gestapo, for special guests and torment. Among them was the Rev. Martin Niemöller, a religious leader whose crime against Adolf Hitler was preaching resistance to the barbarism overtaking Germany.

On the eastern side of the border, Sachsenhauser was used by the Russians for five years after the war – housing over that time an estimated 60,000 prisoners in an odd turnabout for a place where its soldiers had been systematically lined up and shot. About a fifth of the Russians’ prisoners died, mostly of malnutrition and disease, according to a history pamphlet on the concentration camp.

Of the dozens of large barracks-style buildings that housed prisoners, only two remain – despite an arson attack by neo-Nazis in an attempt to erase even them a few years after the 1989 dismantling of the wall that had divided East and West Germany.

One is now a museum, with an unexpectedly large display space under the barracks where you could spend hours looking at every bit of documentation on the killers of Sachsenhausen and their victims. We had perhaps half an hour there, and came out to find Strnad waiting for us.

There were a few more things that “you must know,” like how prisoners were used to test boots and shoes by walking around a track, carrying heavy packs until they dropped in exhaustion. Or how an occasional prisoner would be singled out at roll call for a public beating or fatal torture. Or design features like the path inside the perimeter wall that was, in essence, a death zone for anyone foolhardy enough to attempt an escape.

Sachsenhausen was, in essence, a model prison… at least for the Nazis. It became the headquarters for the entire network of an unimaginably vast killing machine.

The visit left me wondering how, seven decades after the Nazi invasion of Poland officially ignited World War II, anyone – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinijad comes to mind – could deny the horror.

Coming attractions: East meets West, and a close-up look at remains of the Iron Curtain.

Sprechen zie English?: Road Trip Interlude

2009-09-16T17:49:00.004-04:00

Down at the coal mine,
then a memorial ceremony
for a few Holocaust victims

For all the readers following this blog (hopefully lots of you!), Part 3 has been delayed a bit by how busy Bonnie and I have been since leaving Berlin -- spending three days with friends in Rosbach, then moving on to visit an iStock photographer in a little town near Dortmund. We've been doing what you'd expect -- photography. Wednesday, for example, we toured an old coal mine industrial complex, Zollvererin, that is now a tourist attraction -- and I (believe it or not) modeled for photos suggestive of dying industry.

Part 3, now partly written, will focus on a concentration camp that doesn't get as much press as the big names like Auschwitz and Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. You just can't escape the horrors that emanated from Germany seven decades ago, as bits of that history turn up everywhere -- even when you are not seeking them.

Late this afternoon, for example, returning to our host Sylvia's apartment building in suburban Frondenberg, we heard music from a small park just below. It was a dedication ceremony for an improved memorial to the few Holocaust victims of the community. There were few Jewish people in this part of town in the Nazi era, but those who were here and perished are remembered.

Soon to come -- a photo of the dedication ceremony, and then Part 3 with the truly terrible story of the place near Berlin where killing techniques were designed and practiced, and future Nazi concentration camp commandants were trained.

Although this blog has slowed a bit, Bonnie has been posting pictures and short accounts in her Journeys blog. We collaborated there as I wrote the narrative captions for nearly a dozen photos from just one rainy day's adventures. Check them out at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/09/baths-rain-hully-gully-and-wine.html

Sprechen zie English? Road Trip Part 2

2009-09-09T16:36:00.013-04:00

(Photo by a Chinese guy)

David and Bonnie join hands with tourists at East Side Gallery.

Backs against The Wall:

Close encounter of the

international kind

We visited Berlin's East Side Gallery Wednesday afternoon, and found first-hand just how topsy-turvy our world has turned in a mere 20 years.

The gallery consists of murals painted on a nearly mile-long surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall that cut through the heart of the city in a division of East and West -- nation and world -- from 1961 until its astonishing fall in November 1989 that led within months to Germany's reunification.

This section of the Wall blocked access to the eastern bank of the River Spree, a killing zone for anyone managing to cross the concrete barrier embodying the Cold War era's Iron Curtain.

Now there are gaps, one of which houses a souvenir house where tourists can pay to have an East Berlin stamp added to their passports. Another leads to a beach-style restaurant and beer garden.

We strolled slowly along the sidewalk on what once was deadly territory for those daring to attempt escape from East Berlin, and took in the more than 100 works of outdoor art. Then we stopped to watch a group of tourists posing for group pictures. They joined hands in a chain, with the wall art as a backdrop.

I offered to take the camera from one man so he could pose with the rest of his group, then Bonnie and I were invited to join in the human chain of hands, and our picture was taken in the group. We raised our linked hands together, strangers smiling together.

"Where are you all from?" I asked a seeming 40-something woman in the group, speaking slowly so she might understand my English.

"Welcome to China," she replied.

So there we were, global East meeting West at what once stood as the border of ideology -- communist and so-called free world.

You wonder how to say, in German or Chinese: "We´ve come a long way, baby!"

On the Road Again: Sprechen zie English?

2009-09-05T18:11:00.016-04:00

(Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Germans young and old

take to the streets

in anti-nuclear protest

No matter where we go, Bonnie and I seem to find adventures purely by chance -- and that seems to be the case for our latest road trip, this time in Germany.

Barely recovered from jet lag after a Thursday/Friday overnight flight to Berlin, we've been to a massive anti-nuclear demonstration Saturday afternoon at the base of the Brandenburg Gate, followed by the final night of an international fireworks competition at the historic Olympic Stadium where the black American track star Jesse Owens won gold in the face of Hitler's growing Nazi might.

A crowd clearly numbering in the tens of thousands, including a parade of theme-decorated tractors and trucks, stretched as far as the eye could see westward from the old border crossing of the Cold War era's divided Berlin. Opponents of nuclear energy included young and old, in a turnout showing free expression is robust in the German capital.

The demonstration came three weeks before national elections, and though the Green party is very much a minority, the activists were voicing strong opposition to incumbent Chancellor Angela Merkel who is viewed as pro-nuclear and a threat to delay or block Germany's planned closure of atomic energy plants by 2020.

Many of the tractors and demonstrators came from the area of Gorleben in eastern Germany, the site of a nuclear waste dump. Among the many colorful posters and banners waved and displayed, my favorite was a simple yellow sign declaring: Gorleben ist überall.

The translation, provided by our German friends and hosts Beate and Ellen: "Gorleben is everywhere."

Nearby, two seeming teenagers stood and waved large signs atop a giant trojan horse clearly symbolic of the dangers foreseen from atomic plants and nuclear waste.

Our friends told us how once a year, a train hauling nuclear travels across Germany in a trip slowed by protesters who sit on the tracks until carried away by the police.

Peaceful protest, too, is alive and well here.

Media accounts put the number of protesters in the range of 50,000, and the tractors at about 400 -- enough to produce a bit of traffic chaos. But we got there by the Underground subway -- our first journey using the local mass transit.

I stopped at a tourist information shop near the Brandenburg gate and asked if there was a map of the transit system in English.

"Why would you want one?" asked a young man working at the counter. "All the stops and signs are in German."

Duh!

But he offered a subway map with larger letters, making the German easier to read for my 2.5-magnification-assisted eyes.

After returning to our friends' apartment for dinner, we ventured out to Olympic Stadium about a mile away and stood in the occasional light drizzle and breezy chill to watch the aerial part of the fireworks show (and the glow and flashes from ground displays inside).

Some of the bursts were unlike any we've seen in Baltimore. It would have been nice if international fireworks competitions had scouts from the States to check out the latest in big bang shows.

Check back later for more of Bonnie's photos, and our continuing venture into another country where, frankly, my lack of foreign language skills makes every day a little unpredictable.

Movie review: Julie & Julia

2009-07-10T14:05:00.007-04:00

Adams, Streep
and plenty of butter

combine in recipe

for charming film

For the second time in less than a year, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams are together again on the big screen – sort of.

The movie this time around, “Julie & Julia,” combines food, relationships and writing, all of which are close to my heart (and tummy). That, along with the appealing co-stars and an overdose of charm, accounts for why I so enjoyed it during a preview screening Thursday night courtesy of the Maryland Film Festival.

You’d also think it makes for a perfect chick flick, but wife Bonnie Schupp wasn’t as enamored and gave “J&J” a pair of downer digits. Her main complaint: Insufficient conflict.

Well, we managed to disagree with each other on the ride home – but with even less actual conflict than contained in the plot. She also felt it dragged a bit.

But since this is my blog (and I do most of the cooking in our kitchen), I get an extra vote. That’s only fair.

In parallel story lines half a century apart, Streep playfully depicts the mid-life period in which Child takes her first cooking lessons and embarks with two friends on the book project that would help make her famous, while Adams takes on the role of wannabe writer Julie Powell, who at the suggestion of her husband begins blogging on a subject near to her heart: Cooking.

And it’s not just any kind of cooking, but taking on all 524 recipes in Child and friends’ famed “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” in 365 days.

Predictably, the blog gets some notice and by the end of the story, Julie seems to be on her way toward a book deal, and Julia is last seen as a copy of her own just-published book arrives in the mail. Two women – both writers and cooks -- some 50 years apart, one channeling the other.

A few quibbles: What served for conflict between Julie and her husband seemed contrived, and the setting of the last meal from the book – on a rooftop with a magical million-dollar New York view – came a little out of nowhere, given their bland 900-square-foot apartment on the floor above a working-class neighborhood pizzaria.

Streep and Adams were last paired as nuns in the harder-hitting drama “Doubt,” focusing on suspected priestly sexual abuse of a young Catholic boy. Bonnie and I also disagreed on that film – she liked it a lot, and I was ambivalent. It was hardly a chick flick.

In their new film, written for the screen and directed by Nora Ephron, Streep was amazingly believable as Julia, and Adams an appealing and alluring 30-year-old Julie. I would have been thrilled to sit down at the dinner table with either of them, but I’ll settle for the movie. It was just charming, and the world needs a little more of that these days.

Julie & Julia opens nationwide Aug. 7. I can only hope your theater offers up some French pastries instead of the usual popcorn and butter-flavored oil that doubtless would make both characters ill.

For more about the film, check out its Web site at http://www.julieandjulia.com/.

Speaking of food blogs

My old pal Cheryl Tan, who formerly wrote at The Baltimore Sun and Wall Street Journal among other accomplishments, has a deal on writing a book and been blogging on food since April, so she can’t be accused of playing copycat here.

And her blog is a terrific read. Check it out at http://www.atigerinthekitchen.com/.

It usually makes me hungry, but then some of the food she discovers also makes me cringe… and laugh at the same time.

Blogging vacation

I am amazed that dozens of people have visited The Real Muck each day, even though I’d taken a break through largely unintended summer laziness since my last posting on June 11 – on the Holocaust museum shooting.

Since then, the world has rolled on quite nicely – well, with a few newsy bumps in the road. Pop star Michael Jackson and football quarterback Steve McNair went belly-up, each in bizarre fashion, and there’s been unrest in Iran, American refocusing of war efforts back in the country where it first belonged, and my favorite baseball team lingers in last-place despite many new and promising players. At least in baseball, I look forward to next year with a little more optimism.

Among the subjects covered earlier by The Real Muck, a few need updates… like the last man out at The Baltimore Sun in the wake of the newsroom personnel massacre, and the season-ender for the Baltimore Burn women’s tackle football team.

At The Sun, talented reporter Gadi Dechter took a voluntary layoff last month, collecting a few weeks’ pay and saving a job slot for some other colleague at the downsizing Tribune Co.-owned newspaper. Dechter first made a name for himself locally at the weekly City Paper, where he reported on local media including The Sun – which then brought him aboard and gave him the beat on higher education, and subsequently the State House.

Unlike most others leaving the newspaper recently, Dechter had a new job already lined up – at Bloomberg News Service. He bid farewell in a heartfelt note telling of his fears of being inexperienced and inadequate when he joined The Sun, and thanking colleagues for giving him support and encouragement. He was, and remains, a class act – and from the day he arrived on the staff had far more talent than he gave himself credit for.

On the gridiron, the Burn ladies finished with a 5-3 record, according to Women’s Football Alliance league statistics -- a hair short of the playoffs as a divisional runner-up. The last game on the schedule didn’t happen as the New Jersey Titans bused in to Baltimore, where a pre-game rain had left a few muddy pools in an otherwise mowed-and-fit City College field, and refused to play. Oddly, the league Web site lists the game as a 6-0 win by the Titans. Go figure.

The Burn lost twice during the season to the undefeated Philadelphia Liberty Belles – the first time on a lopsided score of 43-8, but the second much closer at 13-10 after a late-game heart-breaker Burn fumble near the Belles’ goal line. The difference in the scoring showed just how much the Burn had improved over the course of the season.

The Burn Web site (http://www.baltimoreburnfootball.com/) reports that the first tryouts for the 2010 season will take place at noon on Saturday, August 8, at Herring Run Park. If you check out the Web site’s Picture Gallery, you’ll find many of the 2009 game and team photos were taken by Bonnie, whose free efforts won her the designation “team photographer.” There’s links at the site to Bonnie’s football game photos at SmugMug, where devoted Burn fans (and staffers, players and their friends and relatives) can order prints at nominal prices.

Today's fortune cookie message

You will make a profitable investment.

Daily number: 140

Holocaust memories

2009-06-11T00:04:00.014-04:00

Attack in D.C. brings to mind
another sad day at the museum

The murderous attack Wednesday at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum by a crazy octogenarian American nazi brought to mind my last journey there, at the behest of a houseguest who had been a child in Germany during World War II – and a victim of sorts.

Leo, our visitor, shared a few of his time-dimmed memories – the first of them being Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938, when Hitler’s thugs began in earnest the genocide that would claim some 6 million European Jews and untold millions of others.

Among the thousands of homes and businesses ransacked as Jews were rounded up, and thousands deported to concentration camps, was a neighborhood confectionery. Leo’s memory was of his asking his parents why the candy store had been destroyed, and not getting much of an answer.

Eventually, Leo said, his family had to move to a town in Poland.

His father – a Nazi official – had been appointed as its de-facto mayor.

Leo’s next shared memory, a little more vivid, comes from late in the war: His mother hurriedly packing the car, and big guns firing in the distance that heralded a Russian advance. His family fled back to Germany, and survived. Leo said his father was sent to some sort of re-education camp, and subsequently came home – and did not speak of his role as a Nazi before dying in the 1950s.

But Leo, as he grew up, learned what happened in the war and eventually moved to America. A retired physician in his early 70s, Leo wanted to visit the Holocaust museum to see firsthand the evidence that so much cruelty and murder had left behind – walk through a rail car that had carried the victims to death camps, see the room filled with their shoes, see the pictures of people who vanished into gas chambers and ovens and mass graves, mothers, fathers, children.

Leo wept. It was the legacy of his father: Guilt and overwhelming sorrow for horrors that had surrounded his childhood.

And I, who grew up Jewish in Northwest Baltimore, put an arm around him offering consolation.

Maybe 88-year-old James W. von Brunn is also a victim. He is, after all, afflicted with a disease all too common in the United States: Hatred. And after voicing it for years, von Brunn, a convicted felon, stepped out of his car and into the museum Wednesday carrying a rifle. In the ensuing exchange of gunfire, von Brunn was critically wounded and a security guard was killed.

Accounts of the event describe von Brunn as, among other things, a white supremacist. His victim Wednesday, Stephen T. Johns, who had worked at the museum for six years, was an African American – and, with the other guards whose quick action protected a crowd of visiting schoolchildren and tourists from injury, a hero.

The slain security guard likely was on duty the day that Leo and I took our sad walk back through time.

To see a few photos from that day, check out Bonnie's Journeys blog at http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2009/06/we-must-remember.html

Women’s tackle football

2009-06-05T00:03:00.005-04:00

Tydesha Mayo heads for a score in Burn's May 2 victory against Binghamton. (Photo by Bonnie J. Schupp)

Baltimore Burn need
a field of their own

Team playing all over the (city) map

The Baltimore Burn take the field – but not the same field – Saturday afternoon in a women’s tackle football league season that has been up and down, and all over the Baltimore map.

Trouble is, the Burn lack a regular home field as the team has bounced from high school to high school – from the luxury of artificial turf at Mergenthaler Vo-Tech’s immaculate Art Modell Field, to the rougher grass surface at Northwestern High. The June 6 game will see yet another home field, this one at Patterson High.

“We need a field we can call our own,” says co-owner and defensive tackle Debra Miller, adding that for all the cost of renting a school field, a little consistency of place would be nice.

The team played last year in Annapolis, on what Miller says was “a beautiful field.” But it was also too far away from Baltimore for the team to grow its fan base and build up sponsorships and fund-raising. Home game attendance – in the low 100’s at best this year – is clearly not bringing in enough money to pay the bills. (Tickets are $10 for regular admission, but discounted for children, seniors and folks in public safety or the military.

Complicating the Women’s Football Alliance league team’s quest for field space is the fact that it’s not the only women’s tackle football squad in town. Its May 2 game was moved to Northwestern while the Mervo field was being used that day by the Baltimore Nighthawks playing against the Detroit Demolition, both in the Independent Women’s Football League. (According to the league Web site, the Nighthawks fielded only 14 players but managed to hold off Detroit through three scoreless quarters before losing 14-0.)

As for the up-and-down part of its season, the Burn squad won its scheduled road opener through a forfeit when the Connecticut Cyclones sent word it could not field a team. A week later, the Burn’s April 25 home opener at Mervo wasn’t very pretty: A 43-6 loss to the Philadelphia Liberty Belles.

On May 2, at Northwestern, a better-prepared Burn team whipped the Binghamton Tiger Cats 36-0, and that was the score after just half a game. The Tiger Cats’ coach took the visiting team off the field early in the third quarter, complaining about the playing surface and ending the injury-marred game as a Binghamton player lay nearly immobile on the field awaiting an ambulance. (It took nearly 20 minutes after a 911 call before the first responders arrived – a Baltimore fire truck crew – followed about 10 minutes later by a city fire ambulance.)

In a road game in Pennsylvania May 9, the Burn notched a 20-16 win over the Keystone Assault, then returned north May 30 and showed how much it had improved in a road game against the Liberty Belles, losing 13-10 (a far cry from the home-opener loss of 43-8 to the same team). Miller said the Burn had three touchdowns called back on penalties. And a Burn fumble deep in Philadelphia territory late in the game sealed the loss.

Philadelphia, which has defeated Baltimore twice this season, sits in first place undefeated in five games.

The third-place Burn, officially 3-2 on the season, take on the Assault again on Saturday. Kickoff is 4 p.m. at Patterson High, 100 Kane Street.

After that, just two games remain on the regular season schedule – June 13 at Binghamton, and the home finale June 20 against the New Jersey Titans. Exactly where that game will be played – well, we’ll let you know.

The future of newspapers

If you’ve been following The Real Muck reports on the Baltimore Sun layoffs and changes shrinking the print editions while focusing increasingly online, check out this report on a related panel discussion held Tuesday with participants who included its current editor and his predecessor:

http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=2939

The account above, by Joan Jacobson, links to another by panel participant Mark Potts that elaborates somewhat on what he had to say

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/06/choices-in-charm-city-1.html

Far more entertaining is an article by Maryland Daily Record editor Tom Linthicum, who made some remarks from the floor Tuesday. Tom, a colleague in my days at The Sun, interviewed former Sun editors Bill Marimow and John Carroll, former deputy managing editor Marty Kaiser (now heading the Milwaukee newspaper) and former Sun publisher Mike Waller. Their remarks are very interesting and occasionally amusing, like this tidbit from Waller, who was my favorite among the more than half-a-dozen publishers I outlasted at the Baltimore newspaper:

“Tribune management confuses innovation with idiocy. I could wear my underwear over my trousers and Tribune would think that’s innovation. Everybody else would think I was wacko.”

http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?category=1&page=1&id=11660&type=UTTM

Daily Record reporter Liz Farmer also reported on the panel:

http://www.mddailyrecord.com/article.cfm?id=11656&type=UTTM

But what about The Real Muck? I’m still thinking about what to say. Some of what I heard leaves me at a loss for words. But I’ll be playing back my tinny digital recording of the event, because something… actually, a lot of things… bother me.

Daily fortune cookie message

All this stuff about newspapers has distracted me from a fun feature on this blog – although it has not kept me from eating too often at the Szechuan Café two miles up the road from my suburban Pasadena paradise.

But here’s tonight’s message of hope: You are never bitter, deceptive or petty.

Daily number: 647

Newspapers: Staff shuffles, angst at The Sun

2009-05-29T17:12:00.008-04:00

Bumping, new layoffs,
a reporter’s job recall keep
personnel door spinning

Five reporters volunteered to leave;
others keep eye out for new pastures

A month after Tribune Co. reapers rudely dispatched nearly a third of the news and editorial staff at The Baltimore Sun, the revolving personnel door is spinning again from the after-effects.

Several laid-off employees have exercised bumping rights under the union contract, moving back to former job classifications – at the cost of jobs or assignment transfers for less-senior staffers.

And in a newsroom seething in angst and discontent, several reporters have taken voluntary layoffs – with the happier result of saving the job of colleague Nick Madigan, and protecting others.

Two weeks and three days after departing the newsroom amid the supportive applause of his friends, Madigan is scheduled to return on Monday thanks to the latest voluntary departures -- of reporters Sara Neufeld, Rona Kobell and Rona Marech. Others leaving by choice are Stephen Kiehl and Tyeesha Dixon, both of whom are taking up the study of law. Given the rapid decline of the newspaper industry, that sounds like a mighty good career move.

Neufeld, as noted in earlier postings here and on her own baltimoresun.com education blog, decided to leave in hopes of saving Madigan’s job – Sara being young and unencumbered by family responsibilities, while Nick is the sole provider for his wife and young son and has a mortgage to pay.

Kobell's farewell note

Kobell, an environmental reporter and mother of a young daughter, was completing a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan when she made a similar decision. She posted a message about that on her former blog at the newspaper Web site. It said, in part:

This year, I wrote a screenplay. I read good books. I put more miles on my bike than I did on my car. I picked up my daughter early from school and took her out for ice cream and to the library. I went out with my husband. I cooked dinner occasionally. I traveled - to Russia and Argentina and Northern Michigan and New York. I had time - a luxury foreign to journalists and working mothers - to think about what I want. And what I want is to keep doing all of those things. The two journalists in danger of losing their jobs want to keep them; to the extent that I can make that happen, I want to do that, too.

Rona Marech was on maternity leave during the newsroom massacre. Asked about her departure, which was effective this week, she wrote in an email:

Yes, I volunteered for a lay-off…. On July 1, I'm moving to Berlin for the year with my husband and baby. Josh was awarded a fellowship and will be teaching at a university in Berlin (and is also on research leave from his job at U. of Maryland for a semester). I'm hoping to freelance and have an adventure.

In addition to Madigan, the voluntary layoffs protected the jobs of reporters James Drew and Nicole Fuller – even as multi-talented copy editor Arthur Hirsch and sports writer Childs Walker bump back to the metro news reporting staff.

Bumping back to copy desk jobs

Coming back from layoffs, according to colleagues, are copy editors Connie Knox, a longtime union officer; Mark Fleming, who worked on the newspaper’s 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Shipbreakers” series by former Sun reporters Will Englund and Gary Cohn; and Jeffrey Landaw, for years a late-edition rear guard for breaking global news whose incredible breadth of knowledge saved The Sun from innumerable errors. As The Sun moved toward importing all its national and world news from Tribune’s nonunion content production staff in Chicago, Landaw found himself working as a copy editor in the sports department – where arcane facts of the likes of eastern European history are pretty much irrelevant.

Unfortunately, their returns meant layoffs for colleagues Norine Schiller, who had been at The Sun for 11 years, and Helen Jones, who had been at the newspaper longer – but because earlier positions she held have been eliminated, according to a colleague, could count only her nine years as a copy editor for seniority purposes.

Norine said she had been anticipating her own layoff as she watched the personnel numbers game play out – and like others losing jobs, she had no ill feelings for those bumping back inside to remain employed: “I don’t begrudge the people coming back one bit.”

Unlike the initial firings and layoffs that sent some 61 employees out without notice in less than 24 hours at the end of April, the subsequent personnel moves – layoffs, bumping and the departure and apparently lone company recall, of Madigan – have seemed deferentially polite by comparison.

Schiller said she might have as much as a week of work remaining before her tenure ends. A month ago, colleagues getting axed arrived for their evening shift and found their computer access denied. Electronic pass cards that got employees into the staff garage would not open the gate as they were leaving. Carried out amid the presence of a beefed up security guard presence, the firings and layoffs were a virtual ambush utterly lacking in respect for dedicated professionals.

Morale: How low can it go?

Despite the company’s more mannerly demeanor in the latest reshuffling of personnel, morale in the newsroom has reached a new low, according to accounts from those still there.

They tell of extreme disorganization as the newsroom staffing reassignments announced in detail less than 24 hours after the mass firings and layoffs moved reporters from their focus on important beats toward Web contributions and blogging. New editors were assigned to oversee areas of coverage in which they lacked experience or knowledge, and some found themselves writing headlines and overseeing page layouts for the first time. Reporters who had worked in partnership with well-versed editors found themselves alone in decision-making on coverage, and their stories getting minimal editing before rolling on the press.

And they’ve seen the only employee protection from arbitrary dismissal – the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild – eviscerated by buyouts, layoffs and selective transfers to newly-created Web-oriented jobs outside union jurisdiction. The contract expires in 2011, and union-jurisdiction survivors of the Purge of 2009 will find what little job security remains to be on very shaky ground.

For the folks getting their jobs back, there is inevitably fear that the return to work may prove no better than a reprieve. And it makes for a strange atmosphere when many, if not most, of the employees are keeping an eye out for jobs elsewhere and the opportunity to escape an oppressive and depressing work environment.

No stranger to layoffs

For Norine Schiller, a layoff is not a new experience. But at least this one was better-timed.

Layoffs around 1979-1980 from her first two newspaper jobs, at the Catonsville edition of the Star and at the Carroll County Evening Sun, came a day before and a day after Christmas; and after marrying and moving to Connecticut, she was among nearly 50 people shown the exit at the New Haven Register in 1990 – in her birthday week, she said.

As Norine noted in a Facebook comment after receiving the news on her latest layoff Thursday:

I have had a month to expect and mentally prepare for this possibility, so I am not floored by it -- unlike all the others who were shown the door the same day. I have made some volunteering arrangements to broaden my experience a little bit. Also, the other three times I was laid off, it was in fall or right at Christmas, so ... hey, summer vacation!

Her husband, Don Schiller, also was a Sun copy editor and was one of several people who briefly held the job I left as night metro editor two years ago in the Buyout Class of 2007. Don missed a buyout opportunity by a month last September as he took an editing job on a private industry’s internal magazine. “Right now we’re pretty happy he did this,” Norine said said of her husband’s new job. They are the parents of two sons, ages 10 and 12.

Looking around for freelance writing opportunities, or a new job, Norine said that for herself and some others leaving the newsroom, “It feels like we’ve gone back 20 years in our careers.”

Arthur Hirsch, meanwhile, was looking forward after three years on the copy desk to his imminent return to “the ringside seat” he enjoyed as a reporter.

“I learned a lot; the copy desk was a very good experience,” said Hirsch, who since 2002 has been teaching nonfiction writing as an adjunct instructor at Johns Hopkins University. He added that he missed the role of being an observer of people’s lives and “being able to ask questions.”

Hirsch, bumping over from the copy desk, is expected to be moving into an open news beat he had inquired about as “a faith and values writer” – working with editor and former Sun religion and national reporter Matthew Hay Brown. “He knows more about the subject than I do. I can learn from him.”

He was relieved that in returning to the reporting ranks, thanks to the voluntary departures of Neufeld, Kobell, Marech, Kiehl and Dixon, “I will not be pushing someone else out the door.”

Timely symposium looks to future

"The End of Local News? If Communities Lose Newspapers, Who Will Fill the Void?" That’s the title for a symposium in Baltimore scheduled from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, June 2, in Westminster Hall at 519 West Fayette Street. (Not to be gloomy and doomy, but the hall is a former church built in the cemetery where Edgar Allan Poe is buried.)

Panelists include Baltimore Sun editor Monty Cook (he probably still won’t apologize for the rude manner of last month’s staff massacre); Mark Potts, former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Washington Post, co-founder of WashingtonPost.com and proponent of hyperlocal, user-generated news sites; Jayne Miller, chief investigative reporter, WBAL-TV; John J. Oliver Jr., publisher, The Afro-American newspaper; and Timothy A. Franklin, Louis A.Weil, Jr. Endowed Chair, Indiana University School of Journalism, who is Cook’s predecessor as Sun editor.
The symposium was arranged by Sandra A. Banisky, who left her job as deputy managing editor of The Sun to become the Abell Professor in Baltimore Journalism at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Details on the event, which is open to the public : http://newsdesk.umd.edu/sociss/release.cfm?ArticleID=1905

More food for thought

If you really want another peek at the future of local journalism, check out this look at Tribune’s next big thing about to have its rollout in Chicago – and likely a model for what’s to come at The Baltimore Sun. (Personal prediction: When it comes to Baltimore, The Sun’s journalistically embarrassing free tabloid ‘b’ will be quietly rolled into the Web project and then killed.)

This comes, by the way, via the blog of symposium panelist Potts:

http://recoveringjournalist.typepad.com/recovering_journalist/2009/05/the-future-is-chicagonow.html

Yet another very worthwhile read, particularly considering that its author, James Warren, is a former Chicago Tribune managing editor (and, as my not-so-shabby friend and former colleague Bill Glauber notes, a terrific journalist): http://correspondents.theatlantic.com/james_warren/2009/05/shhhh_newspaper_publishers_are_quietly_holding_a_very_very_important_conclave_today_will_you_soon_be.php.

Finally, this appears at baltimoresun.com on Saturday May 30 -- yup, I update these posts occasionally -- on the union concessions vote aimed at saving a couple of Maine newspapers. Interestingly, The Sun provided far more detail on this story than on its own recent cutbacks . But it is an interesting development in the wider story of newspaper failures: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/sns-ap-us-newspaper-sale,0,2814742.story.

That should be enough to keep you off the streets and out of trouble until Tuesday.

Newspapers: Errors to regret

2009-05-26T00:46:00.008-04:00

Fired national reporter
gets his last Sun byline
too late for the edition

David Wood moves on
with thanks for the memories

Maybe this is what happens in a newspaper world without copy editors – or without enough copy editors. Or without enough people around to talk about what’s right or wrong in a story or about a story, or how it’s played on the front page.

The case in point was on the front page of The Baltimore Sun on Monday: A Memorial Day-timed story on the growing problem of care, treatment and after-effects for war veterans physically and mentally maimed by the enemy’s almost ubiquitous weapon of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, the improvised explosive device.

The story was terrific.

The byline wasn’t. It read, “BY A BALTIMORE SUN STAFF WRITER.”

Some readers called the city desk, praising the story and wondering at the lack of a name in the byline.

Credit goes to the newspaper staffers who, after learning of the byline omission, belatedly added the name of the author atop the story on the Baltimoresun.com Web site – and a correction at the end of the story as well. Tuesday's print edition had a correction in the usual place, at the bottom of Page 2 -- but the correction had an error. It said the story had appeared on Sunday's front page when, in fact, it was in the Monday paper. But that's an easy mistake to make, seeing as how Memorial Day feels like a Sunday. Deja-vu will get you every time.

What the print edition correction lacked was the customary expression of regret for an error. It needed even more regret, though -- a public expression of regret that the author, distinguished reporter David Wood, was fired without notice nearly four weeks ago along with nearly a third of the news and editorial staff in the latest cost-cutting move ordered by The Baltimore Sun’s absentee overlords in Chicago.

And, on the Web edition, that is why even after David Wood’s byline was added, you won’t find the usual @baltsun.com behind it. He doesn’t live there anymore.

Interestingly, his biography still lives there – or still did on Monday – at Baltimoresun.com. I found it using a Google search of “David Wood reporter.” It begins this way:

David Wood, 62, has been a journalist since 1970, a staff correspondent for Time Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Newhouse News Service and The Baltimore Sun. He covers military issues, foreign affairs and combat operations, and is a Pulitzer Prize finalist for national reporting. He recently won the Headliner Award for his Iraq coverage.

Actually, Wood will turn 64 next month, so the biographical sketch is a little dated. And for a little more than a week, he’s had a new job writing for AOL’s politicsdaily.com – one of the few, if not the only, recently expelled Sun staffer to land a new gig.

The Real Muck had reported his unexpected departure from The Sun in an earlier posting on the personnel massacre and its aftermath, but the newspaper’s byline omission provided an excuse to call him for some details about his brief stint there. As night metro editor, unfortunately, I had only talked to him a few times before my voluntary buyout and retirement from The Sun two years ago.

Wood had mostly good words for The Sun, which offered him a job three years ago after he had taken a buyout from Newhouse.

“I went up to Baltimore and went into the newsroom, and it was this wonderful crazy place where people were shouting at each other about stories across the newsroom and jabbering into telephones,” Wood said. “It was a wonderfully vibrant, hard-driving place…. We were going to do great journalism.”

He added: “It was a really good place to be for a couple of years.”

Wood's hiring in July 2006 was probably the last of a national reporter by The Baltimore Sun before owner Tribune Co.’s plunge into private ownership and bankruptcy, and his coverage of the Defense Department included travel to war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He worked mostly out of the newspaper’s Washington Bureau, where a large national staff had operated in The Sun’s glory days – but at the end had just two people remaining, Wood and Paul West.

The weekend preceding the mass firings, Wood said, he had been “horribly sick” but managed to work that Monday and produce a story for the front page. The next day he was out sick again, and that Wednesday was coming back from a visit to his doctor when “my wife called and said there were all these layoffs at The Sun.”

Wood said he called Paul West about the situation, and was told that “it’s worse than you know – you were one of the ones fired. I was thinking of driving to your house and telling you.”

A tough week to imagine.

“I still haven’t called downtown [to The Sun] to talk about it,” Wood said, adding that he did get a call from former national and deputy managing editor Marcia Myers expressing her regret. (Myers was assigned to new duties and a lesser title under the subsequent newspaper staff reorganization; her husband, deputy opinion editor Larry Williams, lost his job in the cutbacks.)

Wood said he was not immediately aware that his last story to appear in The Sun was missing his byline – and had largely forgotten about the story itself. He had worked on it “for almost a year,” Wood said, and “turned in a version in March.” It was a longish story, and space in the newspaper was tight, so it was held – “and then it suddenly appeared,” Wood said of its front-page play on Monday.

‘‘Nobody from the copy desk ever called to check on anything… they just ran it, which is a little unnerving. I love copy editors calling and saying, ‘You said this, but did you mean to say this?' I love those people.”

Copy editors, he said, improve stories – and protect writers from mistakes. It’s an oversight role that has been substantially reduced at The Baltimore Sun and other newspapers across the nation.

The byline omission evidently was an innocent mistake, but particularly embarrassing for the newspaper under the circumstances of the massive staff reduction that sent more than 60 employees packing in a hurry.

Wood said he received a call Monday from newsroom veteran David Nitkin, recently promoted to the new job of “head of Maryland news” – a title shared with Dave Alexander, who had been the online deputy editor. He said Nitkin was calling from vacation, “horribly upset” at the mistake.

“He thought it was just a glitch,” Wood said. “Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. But he was just terrific to call.”

Looking back on his not-quite three years at The Sun, Wood said, “I got a good ride, a chance to travel a lot. The Sun got a lot of good stuff from me and I got a good ride from them. I was fortunate to be able to accept that kind of opportunity.”

And now he’s moved on, to a job at politicsdaily.com that Wood calls “a terrific honor and responsibility.”

“I was very lucky to get a job like that,” he said. “There’s a lot of reporters out there who I wish were working, because we need them.”

More grief to come

Crunch day at The Baltimore Sun is Wednesday – the deadline for eligible layoff victims to claim rights under the union contract to “bump” back into job classifications they formerly held, which will determine whether some of the least senior surviving newsroom employees lose their jobs.

Several reporters have volunteered for severance -- notable among them education writer Sara Neufeld, who decided to leave in order to save a colleague’s job.

Since Neufeld’s gesture, I hear at least two others have requested layoffs – Rona Marech and Rona Kobell.

The Sun might well have been the only U.S. newspaper with two reporters named Rona.

Now it’s apparently going to be Ronaless.

Kobell, a longtime friend who has a young daughter and just completed a journalism fellowship at the University of Michigan, posted her farewell at her Baltimore Sun blog and it is well worth reading at http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/news/local/bay_environment/blog.

Sadly, it seems obvious this won’t be the last farewell at the newspaper.

Another Memorial Day tale

Bonnie and I took a cruise Saturday aboard the S.S. John W. Brown, the last World War II Liberty Ship in operation -- thanks to its restoration by the Baltimore-based nonprofit Project Liberty Ship. We joined more than 400 paying passengers for the six-hour jaunt on the Patapsco River and Chesapeake Bay, including one old soldier who last sailed on the Brown on his journey to the war zone in 1943.

You can check out the story, and some of Bonnie's photos, at http://baltimorebrew.com/blog/?p=2642#more-2642.