Retro Baltimore

The Pullman porter, whose gentle manner, endless smile, and willingness to please, was once one of America’s most recognized and ubiquitous figures when it came to the traveling public, but behind that welcoming demeanor lay years of racial prejudice, pain, suffering and indifference.

More than 100 years ago, Baltimore health officials went door to door vaccinating city residents for smallpox. Those who refused to get “scraped,” or inoculated, could face fines, or even jail time.

Fifty years ago next month, sports teams from New York and Baltimore met yet again -- this time, the Bullets vs. the New York Knicks in the best-of-seven Eastern Conference finals.

They couldn’t silence Billie Holiday’s voice, a voice that took her from an Upper Fells Point alley to New York City concert halls and into the annals of history as a performer and civil rights icon.

The path that would eventually take Brown to Broadway and acclaim, began at the old Frederick Douglass High School on Dolphin Street, where she was a student of the legendary music teacher W. Llewellyn Wilson, who also had instructed Cab Calloway.

As a conductor of the Underground Railroad, Marylander Harriet Tubman based her operations in St. Catharines, a Canadian town in the province of Ontario just 15 miles from the U.S. border.

Her name was Toots and she was queen of the ball. The bowling ball, that is. For parts of three decades, Elizabeth “Toots” Barger reigned over Baltimore’s duckpin world in the heyday of the sport.

Baltimore missed out on a snow event Tuesday, but that does not mean that a small amount of white precipitation can’t bring the region to its knees.

The venerable North Howard Street theatrical costumer A.T. Jones & Sons Inc. that has kept Baltimoreans and environs dressed as ghouls, ghosts and in other guises for more than 150 years, now faces an uncertain future since the death of its owner, George F. Goebel, 88, who was also a well-known magician and illusionist, earlier this month.

The building at 130 S. Central Ave. sits at a cross section of neighborhoods, a reminder of the now-extinct cable car system that once moved Baltimoreans around the city.

The Clippers were gritty hockey club laced with characters.

The market has changed several times, but none was as rapid and dramatic as the one that leveled it in the early morning hours of March 25, 1949.