Spurning ‘Northern scum’

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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.