An unfair dealer monopoly on repairs

July 8, 2009

Typical American consumers - and that's most of us - probably make these assumptions about new cars: They're all "computerized," meaning beyond the realm of repair by those of us who once had an interest or instinct for working on them, and we're all stuck with costly service at the dealerships from which we purchased them. We might have a beloved mechanic at a local garage who can do the work for less, but we probably won't go to him for repairs until the car is out of warranty. Even then, our beloved mechanic might not be able to perform the job because he doesn't have the top-secret codes that allow him to communicate with the car's computer system and shut off that annoying "check engine" light.

Recent columns

• Forced into closet by nation they serve

  July 5, 2009

  Wednesday in Annapolis, the United States Naval Academy welcomed the most racially and ethnically diverse class in its history: 14 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African-American - and perhaps 2 percent to 3 percent homosexual. I added that last part. No one knows how many plebes are gay or lesbian, but studies have placed the percentage of homosexual men and women serving this nation's military in that range, with some 65,000 said to be on active duty. It's a fairly safe assumption that a small percentage of plebes will have to keep their sexuality a secret if they want to graduate from the academy and, after that, fulfill their obligations to the country.

• For Catonsville record store owner, vinyl still thrills

  July 1, 2009

  The first customer tapped on the glass door of his vinyl record store an hour before Gary Gebler opened for business. "Do you have any Michael Jackson?" the customer asked, and Mr. Gebler showed him to the wooden bin containing the stack of original Thriller albums. It was, of course, the day after Mr. Jackson's death, and it didn't take long for Mr. Gebler's Trax on Wax in Catonsville to sell out of anything bearing the King of Pop's name. Bad disappeared, and so did the last of Mr. Gebler's "We Are The World" stock.

• A life unraveled in thrall to celebrity

  June 28, 2009

  Despite Michael Jackson's efforts to ensure it would not happen, many Americans tuned out long ago. A lot of us stopped watching some time in the 1990s. It's not only that he became too strange and freaky, and even creepy; it's that he became tragic. And if there's one thing we can't bear to watch, it's the transformation of greatness - in this case, that of an extravagantly talented American superstar - into tragedy.

• Michael Jackson: A self-inflicted tragedy

  June 26, 2009

  Despite Michael Jackson's efforts to ensure it would not happen, many Americans tuned out long ago. A lot of us stopped watching some time in the 1990s. It's not only that he became too strange and freaky, and even creepy; it's that he became tragic. And if there's one thing we can't bear to watch, it's the transformation of the great -- in this case, an extravagantly talented, American superstar -- into tragedy.

• Justice reform not an O'Malley priority

  June 24, 2009

  According to The Washington Post, Gov. Martin O'Malley is about to issue his first pardons since taking office in January 2007, and there are no convicted killers on the short list of those who will catch a break from the Democratic governor. In fact, Mr. O'Malley's mercy extends only to seven people, and they were convicted years ago of petty theft and disorderly conduct.

• Hope flows from Pine Creek Gorge

  June 21, 2009

  Bernie Fowler, the 85-year-old former Maryland state senator from Calvert County, held his annual wade-in last Sunday, a ritual in the Patuxent River that draws politicians and the press to his side as he crusades for cleaner, clearer water in the Chesapeake Bay. Once upon a time, Mr. Fowler would not lose sight of his feet until he'd waded into more than 50 inches of water. Last Sunday off Broomes Island, with the majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives and the governor of Maryland joining him, Mr. Fowler marked the disappearance of his white tennis shoes at only 25.5 inches.

• Mayo Shattuck's puzzling persistence

  June 3, 2009

  There goes that O'Malley guy again, playing to populist outrage about our gas-and-electric bills and the fat cats at Constellation Energy. Martin O'Malley worked this issue to become governor in 2006; now he's running for re-election with it, and who can blame him? It's not like he has to say much to get the crowd riled up. There's plenty of genuine populist anger these days - and it's aimed at corporate America instead of the usual target, American government.

• Building and filling prisons must stop

  May 31, 2009

  Democrats in the U.S. Senate surrendered to Republican demagoguery on closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and denied the Obama administration the funds to shut it down. The vote was 90-6. Maryland's senators were among those who voted with the majority. "We have to make sure that streets and neighborhoods don't think that they're going to be the repository of Guantanamo prisoners," said Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski, sound-biting like one of the Republicans who raised the possibility of terrorists being moved to the U.S. and set free or escaping.

• The simple joy of unorganized sports

  May 27, 2009

  I find it interesting, amusing and a little sad that what Greg Dunn today describes as "magic" we once would have described as routine, common, everyday - a way of life, really. I'm talking baseball and what happens on the rare occasions when kids get together, pretty much on their own, and start a game. This happened last week in Baltimore, and these days that's something worth writing home about.

• A win for common sense, local food

  May 24, 2009

  By the time you read this, Bobby Prigel, the only organic dairy farmer in Baltimore County, should have a few thousand more bucks to help catch up on his legal bills.

• Out of jail and into the work force

  May 20, 2009

  The phone keeps ringing at my desk in the newsroom and, five times out of 10, the person on the other end of the line is an ex-offender looking for a job. Men and women with criminal records keep calling here (410-332-6166), saying they've just been released from prison - or that they were released a year ago - and still can't find work. Too many companies aren't hiring, they say, and the ones that are hiring won't take a chance on them.

• Asking 'someone else's son' to fight

  May 17, 2009

  Your attention, please: On Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives voted, 368-60, to give President Barack Obama another $96.7 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All but one Maryland representative voted for the package, with Donna Edwards of the 4th District joining 50 other Democrats in opposing the president's request. One other thing: Another 21,000 U.S. troops are headed to Afghanistan this year, by order of the new president.

• 'PoliWood' takes on democracy, 2008-style

  May 12, 2009

  In his new "film essay," PoliWood, Barry Levinson uses his keen powers of cultural and political observation and his sense of humor to lead us into a cinematic stream of consciousness, nodding to Michael Moore and Marshall McLuhan on his way through the Democratic and Republican conventions of 2008.

• Newspapers have a future — one nickel at a time

  May 10, 2009

  Everywhere I go, people ask me about the future of my newspaper, this newspaper, your newspaper. Readers who remember a thick, advertising-rich Baltimore Sun with multiple sections, staffed by dozens of reporters, sportswriters, photographers, cartoonists and editors, look at a much leaner newspaper, note the bankruptcy filing of its parent company, and ask if we can survive.

• Old man's trials are glimpse of future

  May 5, 2009

  From what I can tell, in just the few minutes I've spent watching her at work, the physical therapist is everything you'd want in one - patient and positive, even cheerful, experienced at working with the old and infirm, empathetic but not a push-over. The PT wants something out of her patient today, and she's determined to get at least some of it.

• Healing arts

  May 3, 2009

  On the Monday after that horrible winter weekend last year, when everyone was still in shock about the Browning family - a mother and father shot to death by their teenage son, two boys shot to death by their older brother - Jonathan Sindler, the band director at Cockeysville Middle School, saw a hand go up among his students. The shootings had claimed two from his percussion section - Greg, 14, and Ben, 11 - and the boys and girls who had played with the Browning brothers wanted to do something.

• Make naps a mandatory workplace option

  April 28, 2009

  So where are we on Larry Summers, the president's top economic adviser, falling asleep at that White House meeting last week? We found it embarrassing? We understood, even envied the man?

• Gun guys won, but not on facts

  April 26, 2009

  Gun enthusiasts feel a need to keep arguing for their right to bear as many firearms as possible when, as noted in this column recently, the battle is over, with the all-guns-at-all-costs crowd victorious. Their achievement is an estimated 280 million firearms in a nation of about 307 million people, a stunning ratio that guarantees continued gun violence well beyond the bloody spring we're having this year.

• On guns, we lost an opportunity

  April 21, 2009

  Don't be absurd," a reader of this column, E. Bruce Volensky of Alabama, wrote recently when I suggested in an e-mail exchange that he and other all-guns-at-all-costs advocates seem unfazed by the mass killings that have marked another American spring. "Those of us that support Second Amendment RIGHTS hate gun deaths, perhaps more than you, for it gives you what you seem to think is ammunition (no pun intended) for your cause."

• So connected, so out of touch

  April 19, 2009

  I stood one morning waiting for the No. 8 bus, at Northern Parkway and York Road in Baltimore, and was astonished at the number of drivers who went through that big intersection while talking on cell phones, dialing them or texting with them. You can see more from the sidewalk than you can from a car, and the number of multitasking drivers crisscrossing my field of vision was even greater than I'd thought it would be.

• There's treasure in the garbage heap

  April 14, 2009

  I remember the first wave of guerrilla Dumpster divers. They wanted to feed the hungry of Baltimore, and they detested the practice of supermarkets throwing away so much food. So they raided Dumpsters on behalf of needy men, women and children who turned up at the city's soup kitchens, shelters and charitable pantries looking for food.

• Cynicism has killed the gun-control debate

  April 12, 2009

  Americans have been killing each other for a long time - thousands upon thousands of men, women and children lying in the cold, cold ground from decades of homicidal violence, the bulk of it inflicted with guns. There are street killings here, bedroom killings there - single victims scattered across the daily news. (I saw my first victim 33 years ago this month, a woman shot to death by her estranged husband as she walked across a parking lot.) And then there are the mass killings, a squall of them this spring, with 57 dead within the last month or so, in a handful of incidents from California to New York.

• 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.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• Sludge and other theories: time to think

  May 1, 2008

  A black man approached me on Guilford Avenue in Baltimore the other day and struck up a friendly, walk-and-talk conversation about Barack Obama. The conversation lasted only five minutes, and, remarkably, the stranger did most of the talking, ending with this parting shot: Don't dismiss the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's suggestion that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus to kill black people as the irrational ravings of an overwrought preacher. "I mean," the man said, "look at what Johns Hopkins did with that sludge. ... Think about it."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?

• 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?

• 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.

• 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."

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.