Benjamin Herman, a free-lance writer and author whose stories of ordinary people and daily life in Jewish East Baltimore and industrial Dundalk entertained newspaper readers for more than 60 years, died Monday of a cardiac arrest at Sinai Hospital.
He was 84 and had lived in Towson for the past decade.
If author John O'Hara had Gibbsville, Pa., William Faulkner Oxford, Miss., and Isaac Bashevis Singer the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, then Mr. Herman's milieu was Dundalk and the East Baltimore neighborhood where his grandparents lived and whose atmosphere and tales he absorbed as a young boy.
"I have been to Europe, Russia, Africa, the Far East and South America," Mr. Herman told Contemporary Authors Online in 2001. "I enjoy traveling but always keep coming back to Dundalk, where I was born."
The son of a salesman and a homemaker, Mr. Herman was raised and lived the majority of his life at 71 Kinship Road. He was a 1944 graduate of Sparrows Point High School.
Mr. Herman — who was known as Ben Herman — explained that his interest in writing began when an eighth-grade English teacher pressed a copy of Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls" into his hands.
"It was then that I realized what words could do and I started writing," Mr. Herman explained in a 1984 piece in PENewsletter.
"I remember the summer I graduated from Sparrows Point High, the summer I thought I was Robert Benchley. I wrote a dozen humorous sketches and sent them off to the New Yorker and they sent them right back with rejection slips," he wrote.
Drafted in the Army in 1944, Mr. Herman served as a medic with occupation forces in Italy, and attained the rank of sergeant by the time of his 1946 discharge.
He then enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history in 1950.
It was during his days at Homewood that he began seriously writing and later served as editor of the Hopkins News-Letter.
In 1950, he sold his first piece to the old Sunday Sun Magazine, about a visit by a Buddhist holy man to Owen Lattimore, who was director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations at Hopkins.
Mr. Herman told The Baltimore Sun in 1996 that he never forgot the "thrill of that first $15 check" for his magazine piece.
He also wrote for the old News American.
During the 1950s, while teaching English at North Point Junior High School during the day and writing at night and on weekends, Mr. Herman racked up more than 100 bylined Sun Magazine stories on a variety of subjects.
"I'd spend long hours of research for each article, see them published on a Sunday and then blowing in the breeze down my alley on Monday," he said in the PENewsletter interview.
He yearned for something more permanent and began writing fiction based on his experiences in East Baltimore and Dundalk, while continuing to teach English literature and creative writing at Patapsco High School.
He later was an editor and writer with the state Department of Education from 1969 until retiring in 1978.
His first book, "Sunday After Sunday After Sunday," which drew heavily on his experiences in East Baltimore during the 1930s, was a collection of stories. It sold more than 2,000 copies after its 1972 publication.
"It's a delightful stroll through East Baltimore as it was 40-odd years ago. Those were the days when hucksters, the iceman and the rag man came around in horse-drawn wagons, and when the scissors grinder made his rounds on foot," wrote a Sun book reviewer.
"They are stories of the people, good and bad, smart and dumb, who made up the neighborhood; stories of the Hebrew school; the synagogue; the hospital, and Uncle Bimbo's store; of neighborhood scandals; tragedies and good times," the reviewer wrote.
Mr. Herman, who composed his fiction on yellow legal pads, wrote his first book in longhand at the "fourth table back at a McDonald's" on Dundalk Avenue. He would arrive at dawn, order a cup of coffee and start writing, he told PENewsletter.
He boasted of never writing at a desk but in public establishments such as McDonald's or a Bob's Big Boy restaurant.
Mr. Herman's second book, "How High Up Is Heaven," was published in 1974 to critical acclaim as was "The Rhapsody in Blue of Mickey Klein," which won the National Jewish Book Award in 1982.
But Dundalk continued to be a muse that he went back to again and again. The 1970s marked a return to The Baltimore Sun, where he began writing numerous articles about Dundalk's historical past.
In an essay, "The Sparrows Point Trolley," he wrote about the streetcar that connected "The Peninsula" with the outside world.
He recalled boarding the No. 26 as a 12-year-old with his father.
"Two bells from the conductor and off we went to the next stop. The Dundalk stop where more mill men piled on," he wrote. "The trolley's electric motor throbbing hard like it couldn't wait to get going. … Down the steel rails we rolled. A good breeze through the partly opened windows bringing the tar smell from the tracks."
In another essay, he evoked a Dundalk of long ago.
"When I think about Dundalk I think about the old Dundalk. Seventeen thousand people. Stucco houses. Row houses. But a tremendously charming place. Like a little English village, really. Dundalk of the Thirties," he told a Baltimore Sun reporter in a 1974 interview.
He also took umbrage at critics who liked to make fun of the Baltimore County community and its inhabitants.
"They come from people who don't know any better," he told The Evening Sun in 1985. "So, I have a smile when I hear this eternal question of Dundalk's image. I've heard people use the word 'Dundalk,' and they make an expression, ah ha, it's laugh time. It amuses me now. The reason is that I'm in on the big secret: This is a great place, finest people anywhere."
At his death, a nephew, Mark Friedman of Pikesville, said that Mr. Herman was hard at work on a book about celebrity contacts through the years with such people as Mae West, Perry Como and Harry S. Truman, and a book about his war years in Italy.
"His last book, 'Green Dust of the Milky Way,' will be published this year," Mr. Friedman said.
Last year, Mr. Herman donated his papers to the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Homewood.
In a 1979 article for The Baltimore Sun, Mr. Herman compiled a list of the last words of the famous throughout history ranging from writers, playwrights, philosophers and military men.
Contemplating his own "exit line," he wrote, "Until my time comes, I'll use Woody Allen's line: 'I'm not afraid of dying. I just don't want to be there when it happens.'"
Services will be held at 1 p.m. Friday at Sol Levinson & Bros., 8900 Reisterstown Road, Pikesville.
Surviving are a brother, Samuel Herman of Towson; a sister, Joyce Friedman of Baltimore; and several nieces and nephews.