Helen Bentley and friends celebrate her 90th

Not many parties end with back-to-back singing of “Happy Birthday” and “God Bless America", but those were the main sentiments Sunday afternoon for one of the Baltimore area’s most celebrated public figures – Helen Delich Bentley.

Helen Bentley (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

And in a “roast” leading up to the songs, many of Maryland’s top politicians and business leaders gave voice to their love for (and yes, even fear of) the 90-year-old former newspaper reporter,  Federal Maritime Commission chairman and five-term congresswoman.

Hundreds of invited guests from all aspects of her life -- including relatives, extended family, even her dentist – heard testimony from the likes of congressional leaders and former governors on the influence Helen had both on them and the city and state. The turnout filled the main hall of the waterfront Baltimore Museum of Industry, which was decorated with photos showing scenes from her life, including her husband, antique dealer Bill Bentley, who died a decade ago.

Matter not that she is a Republican. No less a liberal Democrat than the Baltimore area’s  Elijah Cummings, among the most senior African Americans in congress, called her “my dear sister” who “helped me to dream bigger dreams.”

It was Helen, Cummings said, who first told him he was being named chairman of the House subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Affairs and, more bluntly, to “take it.” This notwithstanding his tendency to get seasick “even on small boats” and that “I can’t swim.” A day later, Nancy Pelosi delivered the offer, with the admonition that  “I want you to keep it a secret,” he said.

Nothing affecting the Port of Baltimore could be kept secret from Helen Bentley, who began reporting on maritime affairs at The Baltimore Sun soon after her hiring in 1945 and held the title of maritime editor when newly-inaugurated President Richard Nixon changed the course of her life with an appointment to head the maritime commission in 1969.

I intersected with Helen during the last year and a half of her newspaper days, mostly as an editorial assistant  and young reporter taking dictation over the phone and through a static-faulted dictation recording device to which she radioed or phoned in some of her stories from distant assignments – interspersed with salty language when that primitive technology seemed to be uncooperative.  Legend has it that she could out-cuss the most-hardened longshoremen.

As a longtime denizen of the city desk, including nearly a quarter-century as a rewriteman and my final six years as night metro editor, I had the bad habit of answering phones on the first ring, and knew many of the regular callers simply by voice – Helen among them.

I rarely saw her, and that she even remembered who I was over the years was flattering. But she seemed to remember people of all sorts, among them The Sun’s longtime telephone operator, the late Betty Cramer who, after leaving the newspaper because of multiple sclerosis, received Christmas baskets every year, and other help, from the congresswoman.

The printed invitation to her party was headed by its honorary co-chairs, former Maryland Governors Marvin Mandel, a Democrat, and Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., a Republican who, before his lone four-year term in that job, had succeeded Helen in her House of Representatives seat. It was Ehrlich who prompted the renaming of what is now the Helen Delich Bentley Port of Baltimore, as part of its 300^th anniversary celebration in 2006.

 Mandel, now 93, spoke briefly of Helen and some of the notable guests as “the people who made this the great state it is.”

“I thought this was a memorial service, and then I saw her,” joked Ehrlich, looking around at what he called “a room full of people who both love her and fear her.”  He also told of Helen’s influence on his life – and his dating habits. He said she disapproved of some of his girlfriends, but eventually found one she deemed right, and how he’d bring her over to visit with Helen on a date. It was an odd threesome, but Helen would put him to work moving heavy things around her house while she sat and talked to the young lawyer friend, Kendel, who would eventually become his wife and, during his term as governor, Maryland’s “first lady.”

The state’s senior U.S. senator, Barbara Mikulski, recalled a time early in her political career when Helen Bentley was pushing for the deepening  of Baltimore’s harbor to accommodate larger ships and disposing of the dredge spoil at tiny Hart and Miller Islands off Baltimore County. Mikulski, with concerns that included fear of possible toxic contaminants, was initially an opponent but said that Helen played a big role in changing her mind.

The project was eventually approved, including a share of federal money. The port channel was deepened, and the enlarged islands eventually became a popular recreation area for boaters.

Former U.S. Sen. Paul Sarbanes noted that Baltimore, in large measure because of Helen’s continued efforts, now is one of just two ports in the nation that can receive the super-size container ships that soon will be accommodated by a deepened and enlarged Panama Canal passageway.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer included Helen as among the four former Republican members of congress present who had identified themselves as members of the Maryland delegation – “not as Republican members of the Maryland delegation” – in a lament that “we’re at a time where we have real polarization, confrontation and gridlock in the Congress of the United States.”

Hoyer also alluded to Helen’s championship of American manufacturing, and how as a congresswoman (and no stranger to a sledgehammer) she staged public bashings of Japanese-made electronics and even an automobile outside the Capitol building. “I have here a letter from the Japanese ambassador that, because we have a mixed crowd here, I won’t read,” Hoyer joked. (There were children in the crowd.)

Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger said even in running against Helen for her old seat when it was vacated by Ehrlich, “we always agreed to fight it out fairly and squarely.”

“Helen and I had 11 debates. After it was over, we shook hands.... She is an adviser to me in the House.”

But it was Cummings, the black Democrat, whose remarks about Helen “as a mentor of mine” were the most emotional and, likely to some, unexpected.

At his request, Cummings said, Helen became a board member of the Baltimore Maritime Industries Academy Foundation, and for seven years has attended its monthly meetings and visited its public high school program that has introduced many teenagers – in particular, the congressman noted, African American children -- to maritime skills and the world of the port.

“The kids love her, and she loves them,” he said, finishing up his remarks by telling her, “I will go to my grave appreciating the impact you’ve had on my life.”

Helen had the last word. A little stooped from the effects of aging, and thus a few inches shorter than she used to be, Helen stood on a low, carpeted riser behind the podium and told about why she wanted to have the huge “birthday bash.”

As the daughter of Serbian immigrant parents and growing up in Ruth, Nevada, she could not recall having had a  birthday party. “You were given a kiss and a piece of cake.”

She added:  “I decided I wanted to see all of this while I was still above ground.”

The invitation specified no gifts, but listed her favorite causes for contributions, among them the museum, the state goodwill vessel Pride of Baltimore, the Maritime Industries Academy Foundation, animal-protection groups, the Bentley scholarship fund at the University of Baltimore, and the one we chose, Wounded Warriors.

Election 2010: A Frank Farewell

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.