Biography
Dan Rodricks has been an award-winning columnist for the Baltimore Sunsince 1979, and speaks of his adopted hometown as both its champion ...
Dixon trial just one of city's problems, but an important one
November 23, 2009
Of course, there are bigger issues, and bigger offenses against society, than the alleged theft of gift cards by the mayor of Baltimore. Monday morning, you could walk across North Calvert Street, from Courthouse East to the Mitchell Courthouse, and find an auctioneer in a suit on the broad sidewalk there and, promptly at the top of the hour, he started a sale of houses upon which a bank has foreclosed in the lingering aftermath of the subprime mess and the massive financial meltdown that pushed us into recession.
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Another idea to save the a-rabs: Broaden their appeal
November 22, 2009
As stated here previously, I support a new deal for the a-rabs of Baltimore, so that this tradition of horse- and pony-drawn street vendors continues as part of the urban food-delivery system and as a tourist delight. Others think it's a failed business model with too many problems. I asked Jim Kucher, executive director of entrepreneurship programs at the University of Baltimore, for his thoughts. (The University of Baltimore chapter of Students in Free Enterprise has elected to take on this project.)
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As Dixon trial nears end, a demand for 'equal justice'
November 19, 2009
I am sticking with my instinct: Lindbergh Carpenter Jr. could turn out to be the most effective witness for the prosecution in State v. Dixon. It wasn't so much the testimony he presented, because certainly that of the Baltimore developer Patrick Turner was the most damaging. But Lindbergh Carpenter gave the state an opportunity to remind the attentive jury in Circuit Court East of a principle engraved in the Supreme Court building in Washington and resonant in the memory of every American who paid attention in civics class: Equal Justice Under The Law.
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Mayor's defense hopes silence is golden
November 19, 2009
When he instructs the jurors in the Dixon theft case, Circuit Judge Dennis M. Sweeney will tell them not to infer anything from the defendant's silence during trial - and they certainly should not interpret it as a sign of guilt. The judge will do this, of course, because, by the time her underwhelming defense came to a rest Wednesday morning, Mayor Sheila Dixon had not uttered a single word.
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The defense rests, and Dixon is silent
November 18, 2009
When he instructs the jurors in the Dixon case, Circuit Judge Dennis M. Sweeney will likely tell them not to construe or infer anything from the defendant's silence. Mayor Sheila Dixon did not testify in her own defense against charges that she's a thief. This might have been the plan all along; having a defendant testify in any criminal case always comes with risks, and in this case they were probably big risks. But, still, the mayor of Baltimore doesn't speak? They say she took gift cards intended for needy children in her city, and she doesn't have an argument?
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The Dixon case turns into an episode of CSI-Target
November 17, 2009
The last time I visited the Baltimore courtroom where Mayor Sheila Dixon is on trial, it was for a homicide case, and a medical examiner was among the many witnesses. This time, the alleged crime is theft and, instead of a medical examiner, the state calls to the witness chair the "asset protection manager" for a major retail chain.
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Is taking some gift cards a big deal? Ask Lindbergh Carpenter — he lost his job for it
November 17, 2009
In the buildup to the trial of Mayor Sheila Dixon on theft charges, we did not hear much about Lindbergh Carpenter Jr. He was not billed as the leading man or even a star witness. He is not, as far as anyone knows, a former boyfriend of the mayor. He's not a current boyfriend, either. He's not a real estate developer. He's neither mover nor shaker.
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A-rabbers as solution to 'food deserts'
November 15, 2009
Progressive, health-conscious people up in Michigan launched an effort to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to Detroit's "food deserts" - large sections of town with plenty of liquor stores and fast-food places but few or no supermarkets or farmers' markets. A small fleet of vendor-style trucks now bring produce to people who have neither well-stocked food stores in their neighborhoods nor cars for schlepping groceries from distant markets.
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Defense message: Dixon cares
November 13, 2009
The lawyers defending Mayor Sheila Dixon in her trial on theft charges will attempt to convince the jury -- the one in the courtroom and the much bigger one out here in the rain -- that that the only pattern of behavior in the case was a pattern of caring for the poor, of generosity and charity. You wait and see. It's coming up.
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How to save a-rabs in 10 easy steps
November 12, 2009
Last week in Ocean City, professional promoters from all over the state gathered for the 29th Annual Maryland Tourism and Travel Summit, a schmoozefest and series of seminars on marketing and networking for those in one of the state's most important business sectors. (I was amused by the theme of one of the presenters: "Adding value to your product by making your product more valuable.")
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Mayor Schaefer kept it clean during dirty times
November 10, 2009
The irony is 7-foot-2 and made of bronze: A statue of William Donald Schaefer goes up along the Inner Harbor promenade just a week or so before the current mayor of Baltimore goes on trial, accused of stealing gift cards intended for the needy. What a town!
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Listening to the janitor who changed their lives
November 8, 2009
A janitor can make a difference, and Chuck Sands proved it. He died recently, and unexpectedly, and there's been such an outpouring of grief and love from Howard County - and from the students of Centennial High School, specifically - that I just had to take a moment here to tell you a little about their head custodian.
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The other side of B&D's history here
November 5, 2009
Just for the record - and just in case anyone in the audience is starting to get teary-eyed about Black & Decker or ticked off that Maryland's alleged "anti-business climate" will result in the loss of yet another good corporate citizen - I would like to add a few items that were left out of the historic "time line" published in this newspaper on Tuesday. Allow me to fill in a four-year gap in our accounting:
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Not just 'liberals' to blame for drunk-driving tragedies
November 3, 2009
During breakfast at Jimmy's in Fells Point the other day, several topics were raised in a short span of time -- children with autism, slot machines in Maryland, banks and credit cards, and the latest outrage over a serial drunken driver.
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'We want them to stop killing each other'
November 1, 2009
"It hurts me so bad, these young men killing each other," Gail Gainer, concerned and vigilant citizen of northwest Baltimore, said in this space a couple of weeks ago, after her son narrowly escaped a late-night street shooting. "What in the world is wrong with these guys? Why do they want to keep killing each other?"
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From TV anchor to advocate for stroke prevention
October 29, 2009
Mark McEwen, the affable television weatherman who had 16 years with the CBS morning show and who once was listed among the 10 most trusted people in the industry by TV Guide, was twice a contestant on "Celebrity Jeopardy." He won it both times, too - an impressive accomplishment even if Cheech Marin and Rob Schneider were among Mr. McEwen's opponents.
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Mark Farley Grant isn't crazy, but this system is
October 27, 2009
I am trying to get a grip on a certain surreality in Maryland criminal justice: If you can prove you were wrongly convicted of murder, you still need to get a psychiatric evaluation before we -- the state -- consider releasing you from prison. Let me run that by you again: If you can prove that you are innocent, you must also prove you're not nuts before we let you go.
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Arundel Mills slots plan state's best bet
October 25, 2009
When asked by a reporter why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton, the legendary stickup man, supposedly said, "Because that's where the money is." Similarly, there's a reason why David Cordish, the successful developer, wants to put a $1 billion slots casino and entertainment complex at Arundel Mills: That's where the people are. About 14 million of them visit the mall there in a good year.
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Irony in Catholic outreach to Anglicans
October 22, 2009
The Vatican's just-announced effort to recruit unhappy Anglicans away from a church that has embraced female priests and elected an openly gay bishop provides the Catholic Church with a way to deal with its shortage of priests - without allowing Catholic women to be ordained and without ending the celibacy rule.
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Rush's rants come back to bite him
October 18, 2009
I doubt anyone remembers this because it was 16 years ago and just one of many offensive utterances that have spilled out of millions of radios from sea to shining sea, all across the fruited plain, for at least two decades. I remember it well, because it was the last time I listened to Rush Limbaugh for more than five seconds.
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A military that recruits can believe in
October 15, 2009
Experts say the U.S. military's recent recruitment success is due to the recession - young men and women, lacking job opportunities during a period of relatively high unemployment, have volunteered for duty in record numbers despite the nation being at war.
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Why do they keep killing each other? Baltimore's most enduring question
October 13, 2009
I saw what looked like a drug transaction on a fairly busy corner of downtown Baltimore the other day. Six 20-something guys -- one white, the others black -- pulled together for a few minutes on Franklin Street and, while two of them took lookout positions, the others exchanged some items that appeared to be cash and small envelopes.
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Au revoir to more than a father-in-law
October 11, 2009
Over the years, I've asked a lot of men about their fathers-in-law: whether they get along with them, whether they play a significant role in their lives. These conversations took place over a beer, or on a fishing trip, maybe at an Orioles game. I usually had to bring the subject up; in most cases, the guys I've known wouldn't do it themselves, or there just wasn't much to say. They had married the man's daughter, and that was about it.
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Internet turns pet peeves into social movements
October 4, 2009
Finally, the American people are burning with overdraft anger and starting a revolt against outrageous credit card interest rates, and it looks as though their elected leaders in Washington and the state capitols might actually do something about these parasitic practices by the bailed-out banks.
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Should've helped then; not too late now
October 1, 2009
We walked away from the funeral in Brooklyn Park on that overcast Saturday, still stunned and numb and unable to speak. I had been asked to deliver the eulogy for our friend, and it was the hardest thing I've ever tried to do in public. The funeral home was intimate and crowded; my friend's wife and their four children were sitting right by the casket, and one of them, the littlest one, was inconsolable. The child's crying made reading the eulogy almost impossible.
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A hopeful moment in a troubled life
September 27, 2009
Donald Rice, the intruder killed with a samurai sword in Oakenshawe just days after completing his most recent hitch in the Baltimore County Detention Center, was a longtime criminal who once aspired to be an attorney. He was 49 years old, with 29 career convictions, the first one 30 years ago. But that first one, he claimed, was a wrong one based on perjured testimony; it derailed his ambitions to practice law and set him on course to constantly break it.
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How long will Grant wait for justice?
September 23, 2009
His friends, relatives and fellow inmates have been calling Mark Farley Grant by his middle name for years. When he wrote to me last month from Hagerstown, he signed off that way. Monday morning, when I met him in the noisy visiting room of the old state prison there, I called him Farley, too.
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Business is booming — at the job fair
September 20, 2009
An hour before Thursday morning's job fair at the Baltimore Convention Center, the line to get in was already long, so two women just north of middle age - "mature workers" - pulled a couple of soft chairs away from a coffee table so they could sit during the wait.
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Memo to nonprofits: Illegal is illegal
September 16, 2009
ACORN just got punk'd! Or maybe I should say pimp'd! As a result, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now can no longer collect federal funding. The Senate voted 83-7 to cut off Housing and Urban Development grants after two part-time ACORN workers in Baltimore - don't you just love it when our town makes national headlines? - were videotaped gleefully giving tax advice to a couple posing as a hooker and her pimp.
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A peace path is needed on York Road corridor
September 13, 2009
Heber Brown III, a young pastor from the York Road corridor, could not get to his mother's house on Radnor Road on Thursday night because, at 8:45, Radnor Road became a crime scene. Three men had been shot there, and by 9:15 police officers and detectives with flashlights were all over the place. So Mr. Brown, in a T-shirt and jeans, stood with me on York Road, behind the long streams of yellow police tape slung between street lamps.
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Why not speed cameras on the interstate?
September 9, 2009
Nobody asked me, but ...
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Hard work, pride gave us 'Bob Miller's bridge'
September 6, 2009
My father made iron things - tooth gears and turnbuckles, flanges and valves - thousands of cast-iron parts for machines and manufacturing systems in dozens of factories during the height of post-World War II industrial production.
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Stunt may launch new career for Cardin
September 2, 2009
Do you think maybe we could move on from the Jon Cardin marriage proposal "scandal" now? (I mean, as soon as this column ends?) Please, let's find something else to be outraged about - lies about the proposed health care overhaul, speed cameras, the cost of cable service, unnecessary prostate surgery.
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Two lives from the streets: only one escapes
August 30, 2009
The young men who sell heroin in Baltimore have two ways of getting off the street: prison or homicide. The police arrest them or a rival shoots them, whichever comes first. There's a third way out - choice. Those who live long enough, and who survive prison, sometimes make a choice to go straight and get off the corners for good.
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Vineyard vacation sends wrong signal
August 26, 2009
Barack Obama has been in office seven months, and he's off to Martha's Vineyard? Some 70 millions Americans voted for President Obama, and I bet 60 million of them condemned his predecessor for taking too much down time at his ranch in Texas. George W. Bush set a record for presidential vacationing; he was the laziest commander-in-chief ever.
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How can state leaders still cling to death penalty?
February 22, 2009
The death penalty in the hands of politicians: Few things seem as twisted and as troubling as the matter of state-sponsored executions authorized by men and women with large nameplates pinned to their lapels. While in the ideal they might be devoted to public service and to representative democracy, what most of them seek, first and foremost, is name recognition and re-election. And in a nation as violent as ours, re-election has required being tough on crime, and being tough on crime has required support of capital punishment.
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A new low for corporate greed
February 1, 2009
Super Bowl Sunday fun: Try saying these words out loud, in the incredulous voice of former NFL coach Jim Mora in that Coors beer commercial:
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Report may put final nail in death penalty
December 16, 2008
In the report from the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, the people of this state and their elected representatives have all the evidence needed to abolish the death penalty, once and for all, in the next session of the General Assembly.
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Handmade signs signal persistent hope
November 5, 2008
Thirty-two years of elections in Maryland and I've never seen so many handmade signs. Someone told me weeks ago that you couldn't get your hands on an official, campaign-issued Obama sign anywhere; they ran out of them in Baltimore, which might explain all the hand-painted signs I saw yesterday. They were on the eastside and the westside. I saw one on North Avenue, one on Druid Hill Avenue, one on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.
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Slots aren't the answer to what ails the tracks
October 28, 2008
Here's what the people who run Laurel Park are willing to do to get you and me, betting customers, through the gates between now and the end of the year: half-price beers every time a randomly selected jockey wins a race on a Friday; a "special surprise" if one of us grabs the lucky rubber ducky out of the Laurel Lucky Duck Pond between 11 a.m. and noon Nov. 8; free apple or pumpkin pie to the first 5,500 fans on Thanksgiving Day; "Live Pasta Station" every Thursday in the Terrace Dining Room; free ice scraper to the first 4,000 fans Dec. 13.
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Here's one way to call the slots tossup
October 7, 2008
The last poll I saw on slots showed about 54 percent of Marylanders still supporting a state constitutional amendment allowing the gambling machines. That support was not as large as it appeared to be eight or nine months ago, which fits a theory I have: The closer we get to Election Day, the more people will think about this, and the more they think about it, the more of a tossup the outcome. It all comes down to which of the following attitudes prevail.
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The little boy who no longer lives here
August 26, 2008
I won't be reading this column today; it was hard enough just to write it. This is the father-notes-little-boy-growing-up column that I fought off a dozen times. Nick's high school graduation was in June. I attended, of course, and found myself too melancholy - and too much in denial - to write about it in public. Saturday was take-the-first-child-to-college day. I resisted, with full self-consciousness, taking up this space and your time with my little bit of miserable joy - what my Portuguese ancestors called saudade, the mixture of feelings one experiences at the landmark events of life. But it didn't work, so you'll just have to bear with me.
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City's awash in arena visions
August 3, 2008
I need to ask the people who've been writing letters to the editor expressing nostalgic affection for the 1st Mariner Arena - and horror at the prospect of that outdated box being torn down and replaced - the following question: When was the last time you were there? When the Beatles played, or was it Herman's Hermits?
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Let's go green with arena
July 27, 2008
Here's how Baltimore gets the world's attention, attracts an NBA or NHL franchise, pulls in a major corporate sponsor, establishes another tourist destination a couple of blocks from Camden Yards, helps foster a new sector of jobs in Maryland and reduces long-term operating costs of its new downtown arena: with pizza made from tomatoes grown on the premises.
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Integrity an early McKay hallmark
June 8, 2008
Back at the dawn of Baltimore television, when the Sunpapers owned the first station here, a 25-year-old Evening Sun reporter named Jim McManus agreed to work in front of the camera for $65 a week. It was 1947. The station, WMAR-TV, had to fill hours upon hours with original programming. So its crews did remote telecasts, running from the races at Pimlico to supermarket openings to professional wrestling matches at the old Baltimore Coliseum.
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In face of violence, looking within
February 7, 2008
Parents and teenagers are walking around this week awed by the violence that destroyed the Browning family in Cockeysville - one of those events that are so shocking we all look at each other and wait for someone to make some sense of it. But there is no sense to it, and the explanation might never come.
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Out of tragedy, a team
May 13, 2007
His surviving teammates and lacrosse coach created a memorial to Christopher Clarke on the wall of the basement locker room at Patterson High School. They took the gloves, blue helmet, lacrosse stick and blue-and-white No. 24 jersey out of his locker and fastened them to the bulletin board near the door that leads to the steps to the playing field.
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Cultivating their future
May 11, 2006
They renamed the old, scary Maryland Penitentiary a few years ago and changed its purpose. It's now called the Metropolitan Transition Center, a place where inmates go when they are in the last couple of years of prison time. Given its purpose and potential, it's probably one of the most important institutions in Baltimore - a crossroads where men who once caused so much trouble in their home communities either beat the devil or re-up.
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Trying to embrace St. Francis' message
April 30, 2006
Even though ex-offender threw away a second chance, don't throw in the towel on all
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Get out by phone call or get out by bullet
April 24, 2006
Icompare the names in reports of killings in Baltimore with the names of men who called The Sun during the last 10 months to ask for help in finding jobs that might get them out of dealing drugs or other potentially deadly crimes. So far, I know only of one man who came in from the street for help, returned to his old lifestyle and ended up dead because of it.
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The lesson for Easter: Life can be renewed
April 16, 2006
There are young men out there - teenage boys from Baltimore to Columbia, from Aberdeen to Annapolis - who will be making decisions this spring. Some will have to decide where to go to college in the fall, or which lacrosse team to play with this summer, or which girl to ask to a prom. Some will have to decide whether to continue to be a stickup boy or a young thug who sells heroin.
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City officer strives to help break the cycle
April 10, 2006
Alittle more attention must be paid: Keith Harrison, The Sun's Police Officer of the Year for excellence in community service, has been deeply engaged in the effort to get drug dealers and drug addicts out of that miserable game. We kind of missed the story the other day when we reported on Harrison's selection from among dozens of nominees across Maryland. He's done more than "set up an office where citizens can talk privately to officers about their lives." Like street-corner missionaries, Harrison and his colleagues from the Baltimore Police Department's Get Out of the Game unit have been encouraging hard-core drug offenders to change their lives. Their work isn't about arrests; it's about breaking the dreariest of cycles in this drug-infested city.
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Dealing, gangs, jail, release -- now what?
March 26, 2006
I can't use Chico's full name because he thinks he'll be killed for talking to a newspaper columnist. It's a small big town, Baltimore. Everybody knows everybody, or everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, and particularly in the miserable drug life - guys selling dope, or guys sticking up guys selling dope - it's all this kill-or-be-killed stuff among homie familiaritas in sales territories that have become even more compact under O'Malley-era police pressure.
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After lure of the street, a return to honest life
March 20, 2006
On the morning of Sept. 5, 2000, Baltimore police conducted what drug dealers call "a house raid" on 43rd Street in a North Baltimore neighborhood that had been beleaguered by gang activity for several months. Police arrested four people and listed these confiscated items for a Sun reporter: 160 vials of cocaine; 19 ounces of pure heroin; 6 ounces of pure cocaine; $8,000 in cash; and a .22-caliber Intertec machine pistol with a silencer. Police placed the value of the heroin at $285,000, the cocaine at $20,000.
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Jim's story highlights enigmatic lure of drugs
March 5, 2006
Sometimes I'll sit there - in a courtroom maybe, or at a desk with a phone to my ear - or I'll stand on a Baltimore sidewalk and do what they pay me to do, which is listen to people give their arguments, tell their stories and explain themselves, and it'll hit me: I couldn't be a psychiatrist.
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Shining a light for a man in dark despair
March 3, 2006
This is for Jim, who called here the other day. I won't use the last name you left on The Sun's voice-mail system because I haven't been able to speak with you. It doesn't matter. You know who you are. There's only one person who called 410-332-6166 this week to say he was going to take his own life.
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Out of the 'wickedness' and into the kitchen
February 26, 2006
Iam regularly pleased by the number of Sun readers who ask about Harry Calloway Jr. I get it all the time. People ask how he's doing, what he's doing, whether he's staying out of trouble - and this continues several months after Calloway first emerged as a kind of poster child for second chances among drug dealers, drug addicts and all the miserable others who drained the life out of long stretches of Baltimore over long periods of time.
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Obstacles on the road to a man's redemption
February 12, 2006
Take LaFawn Weaver, for instance. Here's a young man who admits to making bad choices and getting arrested a couple of times -- back when he was a teenager, primarily -- and blowing a good job because he liked to smoke reefer. OK. So it's time to move on. He says he's made a personal declaration to try again and do it right. But so far, Weaver hasn't been able to find the legitimate job that gets him off the street for good and into America's taxpaying, mainstream work force.
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Feds are in the game, and they're serious
February 5, 2006
Guys with guns in the city of Baltimore: I got a Super Bowl Sunday gift for you. Some people pay $100 an hour to get this good stuff. You're getting it for free -- a little advice that could change your life. Here goes:
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Ex-offenders need help finding way back to life
January 22, 2006
Take a guy like Eric Brooks, for instance. He's 30 years old and he's been in trouble for - here's a shocker - dealing drugs in Baltimore. Last year, Brooks received a taxpayer-financed trip to a Maryland prison for seven months. He went to the Metropolitan Transition Center, which is the old Maryland Penitentiary, that Frankenstein castle commuters see from the Jones Falls Expressway. Based on what state officials have told me, it cost us about $14,000 to keep Eric Brooks there.
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Lend a hand or an ear to start year on right foot
January 1, 2006
Here's a suggestion for 2006: Be a mentor, be a mensch. Make a difference in the life of one man or one woman trying to stay off the drug corners and out of prison -- just by showing some interest. You could sign up for this service at an event Jan. 16 (see below), or you could phone in your support. Milton Bates did, and things have worked out pretty well so far.
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Homicide clock ticks louder as year ends
December 30, 2005
Aclock ticks in Baltimore, and I don't mean the one in Oriole Park. It's the homicide clock. It's not something you can look up and see, but something you feel and hear - part of Baltimore's biorhythm - and every year at this time, the ticks get louder, the pulse grows stronger, and anyone who still cares about this stupid waste of life gets a headache.
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Cause for ex-offenders crosses party lines
December 22, 2005
Mary Ann Saar, Maryland's public safety secretary, said it again last week at a breakfast honoring both ex-offenders who find their way into the mainstream working world and the companies that have the guts to hire them: "This is not a liberal issue. This is not a conservative issue. This is not a Republican issue. It is not a Democratic issue. This is a common-sense issue that will serve all of us."
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Our city's firms must reach out to 51st state
December 18, 2005
America's 51st state - the state of Incarceration - has a citizenship of about 2.1 million now, making it just about as populated as Nevada or Utah. Incarceration USA had just 500,000 residents in 1980; the war on drugs, more than any other factor, contributed to its striking growth - and continues to fuel its remarkable retention rate. In 2000, nearly 605,000 inmates were released back into the other 50 states. In 2003, that number reached 656,320, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Despite this, Incarceration still boasts more people than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
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Despite help, some still slip through the cracks
December 11, 2005
Just so you know, before I take you into the thorny stuff: I've heard from dozens of people - city and suburban families of longtime drug addicts - who say things are better now. Their sons, husbands, brothers, daughters, wives, girlfriends, sisters are clean, staying out of trouble and away from their old junkie friends, working and taking care of their children. There are a lot of stories like that.
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Want to save Baltimore? Start with one person
December 5, 2005
One man, one woman at a time - let's try it that way. Let's say you own a small business, or let's say you're in middle management of a medium-to-large-to-extra-large company. Maybe you're even the CEO, or the COO or the CFO. Maybe you have an MBA, belong to the GBC, work in HRD, drive a BMW, or something GMC.
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Access to drugs in jail was a death sentence
December 4, 2005
There's no question that Michael Rabuck should have been institutionalized. People and their property in the city and Baltimore County were safer with him off the street. But this drug-addicted man ended up in a maximum-security prison, the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, where other inmates were eager to give him heroin - and willing to kill him if he did not get his family to pay for it.
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Gratitude for second chances
November 24, 2005
Thanks to those who try to make life better for all of us by making life better for themselves. There are still too many homicides in Baltimore - though, at 242, not as many as the 259 last year at this time - and too many men and women addicted to heroin and cocaine. But there are people among us trying to get to a better place in their lives, away from the addictions that create the drug market that begets so much of the violence, and out of unemployment, crime and prison. We should praise and thank them for their efforts, against tough odds, because therein lies the progress of a city, a state and a nation - one man, one woman at a time.
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Knocked down, but ready to try again
November 17, 2005
And so it begins again for Harry Calloway. Once more, he restarts his life. On Monday, Calloway started classes at Sojourner-Douglass College for the second time this year, and on Nov. 30 he'll be back at the Moveable Feast culinary class.
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Savor the warmth of youth, family, summer
October 13, 2005
I need to get this out. My cousins, Vinnie and Eddie Voci, will close on the sale of Uncle Gene's cottage on Cape Cod tomorrow, and I'm pretty bummed out about the whole thing -- accepting it, but still bummed -- and I hope you won't mind the use of this space for a kind of elegy. I admit to being a baby boomer tossed into the mosh pit of middle age. Some guys drown in the melancholy. I get to write my way out of it, at least for a day or so.
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Hope and despair for those who wait
September 26, 2005
I call them "ladies in waiting," the mothers and grandmothers, sisters, wives and fiancees who, with hope and prayer and superhuman patience, keep the faith that one day their men will straighten up, emerge from the drug life or prison and come safe home. I hear from them frequently.
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Ex-dealer is no longer the man he used to be
September 25, 2005
A young, beautiful, dark-skinned woman, her hair in cornrows and her arms wrapped around her pregnancy, sits at the end of a park bench, silent and depressed, and for good reason: She's married to a 25-year-old drug dealer who suffered brain damage in a beating last spring, and he faces prison this fall. You can understand why she might want to avoid the conversation at the other end of the bench - the one between the father of her unborn child and the newspaper guy. The woman turns her back slightly and stares at the dry grass at her feet.
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Calling all those who said they needed help
September 22, 2005
You know who you are. Kenneth, Leon, William, Joseph and Walter. You know why I'm calling your names out in print today. And Arthur, Tina, Gordon, Andre, Tory and Shawn - where are you?
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After falling so far, coming back can be a long, hard climb
September 18, 2005
HERE'S WHAT happens in the big city: A 42-year-old man, who wasted half his life in jails and prisons because of heroin, announces that he's clean and wants out. No longer will he do dope or deal dope. He wants to leave the ranks of the thousands of men and women who for years helped suck the life out of vast stretches of Baltimore. "I just want to get back to working, and being productive," the man says. He sounds earnest.
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High cost of drug sentences in Maryland
September 15, 2005
I ASKED Donta Ellerbe, a 28-year-old Baltimorean who spent too much of his young life selling heroin in his hometown, what he would like to do for a living, now that he's sworn off the hustle, and this is what he said: "I'm a good people person. I think I would be good at customer service."
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Ehrlich can put money behind good intentions, expand drug treatment
September 11, 2005
BALTIMORE DRUG dealers and former dealers, drug addicts and recovering addicts didn't vote for Bob Ehrlich in 2002. Check me if I'm wrong, brothers and sisters, but many of you either have felony convictions, which means you weren't allowed to vote, or you were incarcerated at the time of the gubernatorial election. Others were just "distracted," committing crimes to feed your addictions, and therefore not engaged in that grand thing we call democracy. And even if you were, you were not inclined to vote for a Republican.
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An excavation company offers a second chance, and six ex-dealers take an important first step
September 1, 2005
LIVING DRUG-FREE, feeling part of the working world and the progress of your city, making $10 an hour for a new company owned by people who believe in second chances, knowing your relatives are glad to see you and that your neighbors might even respect you - all that beats hustling heroin for $50 a day. Any way you measure it, the lives of Thomas Willis, Ricky Smith, Sean Wright, Craig Wright, William Taylor and Melvin Richardson are better at the start of September than they were at the start of August - and so, by a small increment, is the quality of life in Baltimore.
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An FAQ for readers of previous columns
August 28, 2005
AT A MEETING of recovering drug addicts in West Baltimore the other night, there were more answers than questions, which is a good thing in group therapy - it means there's honesty in the room. Everyone seemed to feel free to recount their struggles and express their feelings, and no man put his brother on the spot with questions - until they got to me.
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Taking family's pain public takes courage, and a lot of love
August 25, 2005
DEAR NICOLE Sesker: Your stepdaddy must love you a lot. He's the police commissioner of Baltimore, and yesterday Baltimore and the world learned what you, the commissioner and some of his officers have known for a long time --- that you're a heroin addict.
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A troubled soul, another tragic ending in the 'other Baltimore'
August 21, 2005
RALPH E. "Casey" Kloetzli died in an alley behind an abandoned house on a short side street I had neither heard of nor visited in my 27 years in Baltimore. Until two weeks ago, he had lived a tormented life in the "other Baltimore," the subculture of addiction and distress that so many of us know only from a distance.
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Weary dope dealer aims to go straight into a new line of work
August 18, 2005
LISTENING to a man named Troy talk about his life as a drug dealer -- with 20 clients who buy marijuana from him on a regular basis, Troy didn't want his full name printed because of the legal ramifications -- I think to myself: This guy could have been somebody.
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O'Mayor could have a little more passion about city hotel plan
August 15, 2005
BEFORE THE Baltimore City Council votes on Mayor Martin O'Malley's proposal for the public financing of a $305 million convention center hotel, it would be nice to hear from Mayor Martin O'Malley. Exsqueeze me? Have you noticed that O'Mayor has been relatively low-key on this high-profile project?
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Updates give hope for life off the street
August 14, 2005
TWO MONTHS and two days have passed since the first profiles of men and women caught up in Baltimore's drug life -- and eager to get out of it -- appeared in this space. The contact count is up around 150 now, and today's column is an update on where the many hours of conversations with present and former dealers and addicts (or their mothers and grandmothers) have led.
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Weary mothers, grandmothers also are victims of drug trade
August 11, 2005
DRUG DEALERS: Your mothers have been calling; your grandmothers too. I speak with them almost daily. The conversations are always pleasant, but the subject is always sad, and the subject is always you - the sons and grandsons who hustle drugs on the streets of Baltimore.
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City hotel can provide a start for jobs plan
August 7, 2005
DEAR BALTIMORE City Council: Several of you are questioning the proposal to have the city finance the construction of a $305 million hotel to give the downtown convention business a boost. You're in rare form. We're not used to the City Council doing this sort of thing - challenging the mayor, demanding a better deal for taxpayers. I'm impressed.
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Prison won't heal Baltimore's blight, but helping out its victims would
July 31, 2005
BALTIMORE'S drug cancer has eaten away at people, families and whole neighborhoods for more than three decades. It has affected the entire region in some way and, considering the thousands of citizens involved in this problem, seems intractable, a lost cause.
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Taking a leap off the street, into a job hunt
July 28, 2005
DOZENS OF Baltimoreans have contacted The Sun during the past six weeks to express a desire to end their roles in one of the city's most serious problems - the drug trade that supplies thousands of city and suburban residents with heroin and cocaine, ruins families and neighborhoods, and fuels the violence that keeps Baltimore high on the homicide charts.
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Drug dealers offered an exit to get out of game
July 24, 2005
LEONARD HAMM, the Baltimore police commissioner, could be standing on a street corner watching his officers make a drug arrest, or he might be attending a community event, walking into a barber shop, or just sitting on the front steps of his house. It could happen any time, and often does. Someone recognizes Hamm, walks up to him and says: "Commissioner, I got to get out of the game."
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If you stay in the drug life, you are choosing your death
July 21, 2005
DEAR BALTIMORE drug dealers: It's like this. You either want to live a long, relatively happy life or die young and horribly (or, if you're lucky, maybe middle-aged and horribly). You either want to have a home, family and friends (maybe even DirecTV), or go back to prison.
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Effort's goal is to make solid citizens of criminals
July 17, 2005
TOMI HIERS, who serves in the Ehrlich administration with a half-mile title - executive assistant to the deputy secretary for operations, Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services - believes the Republican governor of Maryland means to do what no Democrat in recent memory was able to do: turn criminals into productive citizens, give a guy a second chance. The administration wants to stop wasting taxpayer money - $24,000 per year per inmate - on a revolving door. "We are trying to change the culture of corrections," Hiers says.
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A longtime addict wants out; he needs helping hand
July 7, 2005
HERE'S DARRYL Logan. Here's a 45-year-old lifelong Baltimorean, a graduate of one of its venerable independent schools - and a longtime drug addict. He seems like a bright guy. He's certainly a congenial conversationalist. And he's one of our estimated 40,000 heroin users.
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Here's a choice: Burn out or really start cooking
July 3, 2005
DEAR BALTIMORE drug dealers: Tired of your loser life? Tired of being used to spread the poison in your hometown? Tired of living with your mother because, despite what people think, you can't afford a place of your own? Tired of the prospect of going to jail again, or ending up with a bullet in your head?
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Passing on hard-learned lessons on Father's Day
June 19, 2005
THIS IS Berson Tyner's first Father's Day as a free man in 10 years. For most of the past decade -- and for several of the years before that -- he was a prisoner in the Maryland correctional system. If he saw his three sons on Father's Day, it was probably in a guarded visiting room, in Hagerstown or Jessup.
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Former drug abuser finds a chance to regain happiness lost to addiction
June 16, 2005
UPON HEARING her story, a consoling preacher might have been tempted to give Towanda Reaves that old, hopeful proverb about doors -- when one closes, another one opens. We found out yesterday that the door Reaves thought had been closed to her forever is still open a crack. It's hard to see from about five years away, but there's definitely a small opening.
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Program envisions a chain of mentors pulling kids from street life
June 13, 2005
STEVEN "Take Back The City" Mitchell is certainly dedicated to the cause, and he's always trying to get other men - black, white, Asian, Republican or Democrat, city or suburban - to join him in taking on one of the most persistent and daunting challenges in our midst. He's all about saving Baltimore kids from drugs, thugs and violence.
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Why they sell poison, and why many can't stop
June 12, 2005
FOUR MEN - one in his 40s and tired of going to jail, one who just barely escaped the bullets that killed his best friend, one under pressure from police and family to change careers, another who left the streets six years ago to work toward a middle-class life - all agree: Many who sell drugs in Baltimore will never stop, unless arrested or killed, but many more would prefer another way to make a living. If there were more decent jobs and more employers willing to give a felon a second chance, there might be fewer dealers competing for corners and this city might be a less deadly place.
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Dealers, deal if you must -- but please, stop the killing
June 9, 2005
DEAR Baltimore drug dealers: I promise this will be the most ridiculous thing you've ever heard. Here goes: How about taking the summer off to see what it might be like around here without all the shooting and killing? Serious. How about a cease-fire? A little break could save lives, maybe even your own.
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Act of forgiveness sets example for the world
April 3, 2005
BY THE TIME he came to Camden Yards in Baltimore on that sun-splashed autumn Sunday in 1995, Pope John Paul II had for more than a decade been encased in glass when he traveled among crowds. The "popemobile" circled the baseball field and turned along the warning track, and for a few memorable seconds, as a reporter free to roam in the grass of left field, I had my audience with the Vicar of Christ. He looked right at me - I swear, right into my eyes - and gave the papal blessing from behind bulletproof glass.
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Exploiting the tragedy of Terri Schiavo
March 24, 2005
MAYBE YOU know the feeling - that you're about to see or hear something that's really someone else's private business, and it makes you embarrassed and uncomfortable. You're a sucker for human drama in all forms, but you'd rather not be caught gawking.
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A grieving mother brings this war home
November 18, 2004
I TOLD MARTINA Burger, who was very accommodating and who gave me more of her time than I ever expected, that I would not debate the war in Iraq with the grieving mother of a Marine who was killed there.
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Once again, young guns shatter hope
May 9, 2004
SOMETIMES, SOME days, you wish you could just reach right in and rewire the brains of fools - like the fat one who apparently drove up to Randallstown High School Friday afternoon and decided to open fire on a crowd of kids after a charity basketball game. What do you suppose was the gunman's story this time? Had he been dissed by someone in the crowd? Did someone owe him money? Or was he just upset about the Krispy Kreme plant closing?
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Ehrlich, O'Malley sparring over schools may be Round 1
March 11, 2004
WAS THAT a risky thanks-but-no-thanks Martin O'Mayor sent to Bobby Governor the other night, or the first shot in the 2006 gubernatorial campaign? Is this precious? Do we live in interesting times? Is this shaping up to be a battle of political frat boys, or what?
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Given failed war on drugs, Lewis charges no surprise
March 4, 2004
ALITTLE news for the many Jamal Lewis fans -- of whom I am one -- who think the Baltimore Ravens' great running back is a victim of an overzealous federal prosecutor reaching too far to make a case out of the word "Yeah," uttered during a cellular telephone call four years ago: We're still at war.
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Ehrlich realizes we all have a stake in the city's schools
February 26, 2004
MORE HIGH-FIVES to Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. of Arbutus for his leadership in Baltimore's school crisis. Last week, the governor pledged a $42 million loan to help the school system pay its bills, and this week, with the deficit numbers looking even worse, Ehrlich came closer to advocating a complete state takeover of the system, declaring himself its new guardian with these words: "I have 90,000 children in Baltimore City schools."
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Ehrlich's gamble on the city shows glimmer of greatness
February 19, 2004
ROBERT L. Ehrlich Jr. of Arbutus is just the man to cure Maryland of its "pre-existing antagonism." No doctor can do it. O'Malley can't do it. Nor Sarbanes. Nor Mikulski. Nor Mfume. Not even Ripken. But the state's first Republican governor since Spiro T. Agnew could lead the way on regional big-think, and the sooner he realizes it the better. He has a choice - to be a statesman who unites modern Maryland across jurisdictional, economic, class and racial lines, or go down in history as "Bobby Slots."
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City should have put brakes on Fast Eddie a long time ago
December 11, 2003
THOSE WHO find themselves lost in the sordid details of the indictment of Fast Eddie Norris, and terribly lacking in knowledge of fashion, should please note: Il Bisonte is a line of leather goods from Italy, and Faconnable is a clothing line with a store in Manhattan.
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No one can tell grieving family of city Marine how to feel
March 24, 2003
THE BALTIMORE family of Staff Sgt. Kendall D. Waters-Bey, killed Thursday in a helicopter crash in southern Iraq, took some heat over the weekend - from talk radio, what else? - for suggesting that the 29-year-old Marine died in an unjust and pointless war, not in a noble cause to make the Middle East safer or to free an oppressed people.
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Referendum on slots wouldn't be a gamble
February 28, 2003
ILIKE the idea of referendum. It's a bright, blunt instrument of democracy -- people voting not on men but on ideas and laws, specific issues of significant public importance. If from time to time we present large questions on the ballot that ultimately affect the quality of life in a place -- say, the state of Maryland -- what's the harm? In fact, a great good might be served; government might better reflect the wishes of the little people.
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Take a break from shoveling and check your quiz score
February 19, 2003
IN CASE YOU missed it - and chances of that are pretty good - I promised to produce answers today to the Winter Day Quiz, presented in this space Monday as a public service to snowbound readers of The Sun.
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30 questions for all stuck at home on a winter's day
February 17, 2003
IWOULD LIKE to start off today's column by thanking all the intrepid men and women involved in the production and delivery of today's newspaper. If you can read this -- and I don't mean online through Baltimoresun.com -- hug your carrier. I would further like to thank the three guys who stopped in the middle of my street yesterday at noon to give my snow-stuck motor vehicle a push into a position out of the way of traffic and the city snowplow that will -- in my dreams -- make it down my street some day this month. Good snows make good neighbors.
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Slots number becoming game of high-low
January 27, 2003
FIRST WE heard that the racing industry wanted 18,000 slot machines in Maryland. Then the number fell to 13,500, and by the end of last week Bobby Governor reportedly was pulling back even more to find some palatable number. Pete "Cut Me In" Rawlings, the city delegate and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, was talking 10,000. By the time you read this, they might be agreeing to ask for 11 slots and a mahjong table at the Royal Farm store in Hampden.
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In sniper shootings, prison, not death, is best outcome
October 30, 2002
PERHAPS ALL the federal and local prosecutors who want to take the sniper case should have a televised drawing on Saturday night - something on the order of Mega Millions or Powerball - to see who gets to kill the guys. Until yesterday, when the feds stepped in, there seemed to be a considerable argument brewing over which county in which state should get to do the rest of us the big favor of prosecuting the sniper suspects and giving them a long dirt nap. So, settle it with a drawing.
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Fight to take back streets can't be forgotten
October 25, 2002
IDRIFT UP to Preston and Eden again, the firebombed, Formstone Dawson house, and I think it should be turned into a shrine -- a memorial to a martyred family who in the first years of the new century died in the civil crusade for a better Baltimore. We could put up a memorial to Angel Dawson, her husband and kids, and I would go for an engraving about the price of liberty being eternal vigilance, something otherwise reserved for the headstones of soldiers.
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Normal people, living amid abnormal danger
October 23, 2002
CHARLES MOOSE, the police chief in Montgomery County, thinks it was unwise for the governor of Maryland to call the sniper a coward, apparently because such public name-calling is counterproductive in the delicate "dialogue" the police are trying to establish with this killer. "The governor's training is not in the law enforcement field," Moose said. "I am convinced the governor will never do that again."
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Tragedy on E. Preston St. can't shake faith in future
October 18, 2002
BY YESTERDAY morning, word had spread through the neighborhood about the Bible, and a few people came by to see it where it lay - open and still readable, flat atop the pile of ashes and embers from the rowhouse fire that killed Angel Dawson and her five children.
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A primer on 'real Democrats' in era of blurred party lines
October 2, 2002
LET ME TELL you something," Melvin A. "Mickey" Steinberg, the former lieutenant governor, said in Glen Burnie Monday, the day he and about 20 other former Democratic officeholders endorsed a Republican for governor. "Real Democrats care about the state of Maryland."
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One last vision of a Unitas-to-Berry pass
September 18, 2002
RAYMOND BERRY was at the lectern, giving his fond eulogy for Johnny Unitas, when I looked up at the nearly 90-foot ceiling of the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen and had the strange, fleeting and irreverent vision of a football spiraling perfectly through the somber atmosphere, under the contemporary-Gothic buttresses, all the way from the back of the great place and through the main nave to the sanctuary.
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Unitas' reach extended past Md. borders
September 16, 2002
PLEASE PARDON this personal memory of Johnny Unitas, even though it does not stem from the few special times I was actually in his company here in Baltimore. While natives can attest to seeing him throw footballs at Memorial Stadium -- or buy shirts at Hamburger's -- my experience was limited to what I saw, until about 1969, on black-and-white television.
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On sad anniversary, a lesson for the kids
September 11, 2002
IWOULD LIKE to say something to the kids today, so you grown-ups will have to excuse me. All memories of the year past have me thinking of the future, and the future is where children live. So this is for them.
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Hyannis Port high society won't help Townsend's cause
August 16, 2002
KATHLEEN K. Townsend is a Kennedy and there's nothing she can do about that. But she could have skipped that $2,000-a-head Hyannis Port party last month - the $4,000-a-plate one two summers ago, with chocolate mousse boats and white-chocolate sails bearing KKT's initials, was bad enough - and maybe she could chill on the out-of-state fund raising and the cocktail parties at Uncle Teddy's house. If I were advising this woman - and who isn't these days? - I'd tell her to lay off the lobster-and-Chablis fetes because those events come with a pretty high gag factor among the Great Unwashed.
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The anger of the faithful a dire wound for the church
May 20, 2002
IGO BY WHAT I hear from my 88-year-old mother, Rose, the most ardent Catholic I know. She's disgusted with the whole thing. I don't get any of the Roman Catholic warrior stuff from her on this one. Rose is more angry than sad, and so, based on this -- the most accurate measure available to me -- I believe the church is in bigger trouble than it realizes.
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Death penalty support looks tough but does no good
May 13, 2002
SUPPORTING the death penalty -- saying so in public -- is a way for an otherwise liberal and progressive-thinking man or woman to flash tough-on-crime bona fides. Personally, they might think capital punishment to be barbaric; they might believe in their hearts that no society that puts criminals to death can consider itself civilized. But they flash support for the ultimate penalty anyway. This has been the trend among Democrats as they've played catch-up-to-Republicans since the Reagan Revolution.
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Church is blind to damage caused by vow of celibacy
April 5, 2002
AND NOW, having read the sordid details from the police report, we regard the pathetic pastor of St. Clement I Catholic Church, caught in a lie of fear and desperation, his license to practice suspended, his whereabouts for a week known but to his attorney and, one assumes, God. All because he did that which his vows forbid him to do, and allegedly lied to a Baltimore County police officer to cover it up. Another one bites the dust, and while the development was decidedly regrettable, one assumes there were sighs of relief among Father Steven Girard's superiors that a little boy wasn't involved.
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Newfound friendship between local, N.Y. firefighters cut short
September 26, 2001
BACK ON Jan. 28, Super Bowl Sunday, the phone rang at a Baltimore County fire station, and LeRoy Edmunds picked up. This is Vinny Princiotta, the caller said. New York City Fire Department, Engine 16/Ladder 7. "We wanna make a bet on the game."
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Americans enter a test of will with new clarity
September 17, 2001
"INEVER was much for putting out a flag," I heard a woman say in the weekend sunshine, "until now." She went into the basement of her home and fetched two small ones - starchy cloth flags on sticks - and stuck them in the potted plants in front of her house.
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A plea for peace to the one God of Muslims, Christians and Jews
September 14, 2001
JUST BEFORE sunset last night in the old basilica in Baltimore, with the nation still shattered by ungodly acts of terrorism, an imam sat next to a cardinal who sat next to a rabbi, and they prayed for peace and healing in the face of terror and hate. They did the difficult thing that people expect of them - they tried to use words to restore hope in a week that tested a believer's faith in a merciful God.
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Events shake belief in a better future
September 12, 2001
We organize the tools in our garage and line up the shoes in our closets. We trim the hedge and water the lawn. We shop in malls. We jog. We walk the dog. We sip dark-roast coffee. We drive reliable cars with full tanks of gas. We go to work. We come home. We watch Monday Night Football. We read a novel. We sleep soundly. We have a pretty good life -- orderly, even routine, comfortable, plentiful. We keep going. We believe in the future.
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Firefighters deserve high-fives and another fete
July 23, 2001
NOW THAT was a cool coincidence: "Firefighter Appreciation Day 2001" at Oriole Park fell in the midst of the diehard, underground inferno that put the city's Fire Department to an extraordinary test. Too bad many of the firefighters who deserved the tribute could not attend, though they were near Camden Yards. There will have to be another honor for those who worked so hard to end the danger posed by derailed tankers of hazmats stuck in a downtown tunnel fire that burned as hot as 1,500 degrees and turned railroad steel red.
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Stream of consciousness
June 17, 2001
I can hear him now: "All that for that?" I can pretty much see him, too, in his khaki trousers and white T-shirt, over in the small clearing by the honeysuckle thicket on the little river I love. My father is watching me fish in the way I have chosen to fish in the years since his death: With a fly rod and tiny lures fashioned of feathers to look like the bugs that finicky trout eat. I can hear him now, as I stand knee-deep in the river and extend a small, delicate net for a trout that's all green, yellow and white with brown spots, about 10 inches of God's glory. I hold the trout in my hand for a moment so that my father might appreciate it. But he only laughs: "All that for that?" And when I ease the little fish back into the river, he laughs harder and disappears into the woods.
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Destructive and creative sides of man in tug of war
February 16, 2001
ADIGITAL photograph of the one they call "Crazy Frank" appeared on my computer screen at home Wednesday afternoon as I clicked through The Sun's Web site -- swollen face, large ears, deep-space eyes, arms pulled behind him for the handcuffs. My son, who is 10, looked over my shoulder.
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Bargain-basement justice not much of a deal for city
February 14, 2001
YESTERDAY, IN what used to be the basement of a department store, a prosecutor named Patricia Deros called 106 minor criminal cases - drug possession, trespassing, theft, perverted practices, rolling dice for money - in Early Disposition Court, the one the wise-guy mayor of Baltimore promoted last year, in stick-figure terms, as a remedy to the city's clogged judicial system.
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As prodigy matures, his light still burns bright
February 12, 2001
LOCAL MEMBERS of the Piano Technicians Guild, who 13 years ago logged 700 hours rebuilding that old Stieff baby grand for the shockingly talented baby pianist Jermaine Gardner - he was only 4 at the time - will be pleased to know that both are thriving. The piano fills a third of the front room of the Gardner house, off The Alameda in Northeast Baltimore, and the other night Jermaine sat behind it to play Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 18, the allegro. He performed it wonderfully. I felt lucky to have been there.
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City that needs hope has a way of killing it
February 9, 2001
PAY ATTENTION long enough - say, two weeks - and you notice that a lot of people around here tend to look at almost everything in terms of the health of the city of Baltimore. Martin O'Malley gets elected mayor, and that's good for the city. The Ravens win the Super Bowl, and that's great for the city. A gunman kills the owner of a popular and thriving Mount Vernon cafe, and that's not only an unspeakable tragedy for a family and the man's friends, it's bad for Baltimore.
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Uncommon valor yields all-too-common response
February 7, 2001
THURSDAY afternoon, Rob Bruns, who operates a brake shop in Waverly, had a flash about a doughnut -- the kind with vanilla icing he likes so much. He can usually find one, even by late afternoon, in one of the glass cases at the 7-Eleven two blocks away. It was 4:30. Bruns decided to indulge his craving.
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Archive: Old broom factory sweeps into present
April 26, 1999
NINETY-TWO years ago, August Rosenberger built a four-story brick factory at the corner of Baylis and Boston in the Canton section of Southeast Baltimore. His workers made Little Lady and Little Nugget brooms, and Rosenberger shipped them all over the country under the Atlantic-Southwestern Broom Co. banner. The broom boom at Baylis and Boston ended in 1989.
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Wounded family gets healing hand
October 9, 1995
On a day when he extolled the power of faith and family, Pope John Paul II held the hands of a man and woman who had their faith and family shattered.
