On Page 13 of today's Sun Magazine, the person pictured is not "Miss Annie" Bellinger but "Miss Minnie" Piper, a bridge tender in Oldtown, Allegany County. Above is a photo of "Miss Annie" Bellinger.
L On Page 8 of the Magazine, Leon Summers' name is misspelled.
The Sun regrets the errors.
Inspired by Charles Kuralt's "On the Road" series for CBS News, a young newspaper reporter found his niche in the late 1960s. John Sherwood decided he'd champion ways of life that have been forgotten or overlooked. He'd make the old-fashioned and the eccentric his beat. He'd keep track as families passed down folkways and trades and while changing technologies threatened to make their livelihoods and pastimes obsolete.
By 1990, two of the many newspapers he had worked for had ceased publication. In the third decade of his career, the writer began to wonder whether his own way of life -- and that of others -- might be vanishing. And whether it might soon be too late to find the last laborers at work in disappearing crafts and dying trades.
His focus sharpened, he began traveling down Maryland back roads and alleys. He found more than 60 people who fit the profile of "stubborn survivors -- living time capsules, anachronisms, twilight zones."
"I was not interested in Colonial Williamsburg-style re-creations and restorations," he tells us in the preface to "Maryland's Vanishing Lives," his newly published book, excerpts of which begin on this page. Rather, the book profiles families and individuals who resolutely have hung on to the past. "Often, the traits I found most admirable in these persons were their blunt honesty; their stubborn independence and resistance to change; devotion to work, duty, family and tradition; and a complete disregard of public opinion," he says.
Their passing will mark the end of a way of life, he adds.
"Slow down and look around before it all goes away."
John Smith's Barbershop
John Smith's Barbershop opened in Lonaconing in 1870 and has been at its current location for 106 years, in a little shoe box of a building set on stilts over George's Creek.
It is the only barbershop left in this economically depressed Allegany County town. And Burton Smith, 69, is the last Smith to be barbering in a family that goes back five generations to Scotland.
"I received my master barber's license when I was 10 years old," he says, "but I started working here as a lather and sweep-up boy when I was 4, when my grandfather, John Smith, and my father, John 'Judd' Smith and three barbering uncles were all here. Remember, this was a busy town with a population of 10,000. There were seven other barbershops! Now there's just me."
Some customers have been coming here for 75 years for the same style haircuts: short on top, short on the sides, short around the back.
"I don't do razor cuts or blow-dry styling," he says. For the sideburns, Mr. Smith hones his straight edge with a stone, then takes off the edge by stropping it on a leather and canvas strap.
"Used to be that when you got a haircut you got a shave, too, and even a shoeshine," he adds. "I still use hot lather and a straight razor for trim, but I haven't had a request for a shave in years and just don't do it anymore. We had 300 individual shaving mugs here at one time!" Although it's quiet now, in its day John Smith's Barbershop must have been quite a lively place.
"I like to keep the place as original looking as possible and I never throw away anything," Mr. Smith says. His handsomely ornate, solid oak counter frame -- purchased from the J. J. Ryan Barbershop Supply Co. in Baltimore in the late 1870s -- has three round, built-in, beveled mirrors and a marble counter. Within easy reach is a small sprinkling jug of Witch Hazel brand hair tonic, and a snubby, worn horsehair brush for talcum dusting.
Mr. Smith has an early commercial hair dryer, but he just shows it as part of his "working barbershop museum." Ask him to blow-dry your hair and, likely as not, he'll pretend to clobber you with it, explaining: "I don't go for that weird stuff."
Finding a caboose in Maryland is easy, even though they have all but vanished from the tail ends of freight trains. Just check out a railroad museum or ask a rail fan for the locations of these outmoded cars that have been converted to shops and getaway vacation cabins. Finding a working caboose, however, is something else again, especially a cupola caboose (as opposed to the more modern bay-window caboose).
"You're looking for a working cupola caboose?" asked Robert J. Comer, Curtis Bay terminal trainmaster. "They're long gone, but we might have one bay-window caboose still working. We've replaced cabooses with computerized 'end-of-train,' EOT, devices. Nah, we don't have any more cupola cabo . . . "
Mr. Comer stopped in midsentence.
"Wait a minute! I don't believe it! A cupola caboose is going by my window right now. I didn't even know we had one working."
The blue and gray caboose he saw still bears the sleeping cat Chessie System insignia and is the last one working out of Baltimore. An old Western Maryland end-of-train car, it was built in 1936 and looks every bit of it.
It rolled into the Curtis Bay "Sea Wall" yards one day out of Hanover, Pa., working the 60-mile Hanover turn-around route to Baltimore. It was still needed, because the freight train to which it was attached makes many stops and back-ups as it moves cars in and out of industrial plants.
Ten years ago there were 12,500 working cabooses in the United States, but the numbers have been drastically reduced and they are no longer being repaired after major breakdowns. Baltimore conductor Leon Sommers, who was assigned to cabooses with a flagman (a position now vanished), will on future routes join the engineer and head brakeman in the cab of the locomotive, where the EOT device attached to the end car will be monitored.
"The caboose may look like a cute and charming little cabin on wheels, but I'm here to tell you that living in one was a hobo life," says Mr. Sommers, 51, who is in his 33rd year as a railroader. "They were iceboxes in winter, ovens in summer, shook your teeth loose with their rough boxcar rides, and were absolutely filthy. We called them 'crummies.' "
Dating to the 1850s, cabooses served as rolling observation towers, from which the crews could watch the train ahead and signal to the engineer to stop if something was wrong. They were equipped with balconies, porches and a deck and were the trainmen's living room, dining room, bedroom, kitchen, den, office, workshop, equipment storage room, toilet and home away from home.
As the 25-ton anachronism creeps out of the Curtis Bay Yards toward Westport and beyond, Mr. Sommers stands at the brake wheel and waves a farewell with his short-cuffed work gloves. Hanging on a frame nearby is a 25-pound striped box with an automatic, microelectronic monitor and a red lamp, waiting to replace Western Maryland caboose number 901803, to signal the end of the line for the end of the freight train caboose in Baltimore.
Most Maryland sail lofts are not sail lofts in the truest sense -- an atticlike space with a wide, open hardwood floor where sails are laid out, pinned down without the aid of electronic equipment and sewn. The modern operation still requires floor space, but often it is on a ground floor and sails are designed by computers and cut from synthetic fabrics by lasers.
At Downes Curtis Sailmakers, however, the designing, cutting, assembly and sewing (with an old Singer machine) are still done solely by hand in a loft on the second floor of the old Oxford School where brothers Downes, 81, and Albert, 76, sat many years ago as students.
The loft has been here nearly 50 years and the school existed many years before that. Strangers to this lovely old Eastern Shore yachting town on the Tred Avon River have a problem finding the sail loft because there is no sign on this unmarked, unnumbered Tilghman Street building.
"We both started cutting sails as teen-agers for an old English sailmaker, David Pritchett, who died in 1936," says Downes. "We cut canvas sails for log canoes and oyster-dredging boats, you know, skipjacks and bugeyes. If they didn't get sails from us, they got them from Mr. Brown in Deal Island. Mr. Brown is gone."
The Curtis brothers used to make sails of Egyptian cotton for the pleasure-seeking yachties who frequented Ralph Wiley's famous boatyard in Oxford.
"We still have bolts of that cotton, should someone want sails of that material," says Albert. "But no one does anymore. We went from canvas to cotton to nylon to Dacron. We still do a lot of canvas work, but only for covers, not sails."
The loft, up a creaky stairway, measures 20 feet by 35 feet. The hardwood floor is rough, unfinished and punctured by a million pinholes. Peeling walls are left unpainted and are plastered with notes, pictures and calendars. Fabric, equipment, supplies and sailmaking tools from the early 20th century hang from hooks and are scattered about on tables.
Long wooden tables lie empty, in wait for strips of canvas or Dacron, where Downes or Albert will feed the material while the other sews it. There are no family members to succeed them in the business.
"You can't find no one who wants to take the time anymore to learn how to do it right," says Downes. "This ain't like making a dress, you know." Not long ago, coal trucks roaming the streets of Baltimore making home deliveries were a familiar wintertime sight, as were ice trucks servicing the same homes in summertime. Refrigerators made the ice man a thing of the past, and modernized home heating furnaces burning oil and natural gas or using heat pumps have replaced most coal-fired furnaces.
Although the ice man no longer maketh home deliveries, at least one coal man in Baltimore still does. Clyde K. Adams, 72, says he has the city's last independent coal business. It has operated under his ownership since 1946.
"When I started in this business just after World War II, I bet there were about a hundred or more independents and full-size coal companies in the city. Now there's just me still making home deliveries."
During the winter, Mr. Adams is usually busy in his Gold Street coal yard helping his son, Corey, 21, and other men fill dozens of old, square canvas bags with hard anthracite Pennsylvania coal. Mr. Adams carefully keeps count of the 80-pound bags as they are piled three deep on a beat-up truck.
"We deliver throughout the metropolitan area," says Mr. Adams. "Most of our customers have small wood-burning coal stoves and fireplace inserts to cut down on the expense of heating."
The 1979 truck rumbles out of the Gold Street yard, turns left on Pennsylvania Avenue, and heads toward West Baltimore to make a delivery. Mr. Adams says he has fewer than 25 customers in the city and metropolitan area who still heat their homes with these outdated furnaces.
The coal truck arrives at its destination and double-parks in the wrong lane, facing oncoming traffic, in front of 2525 W. Baltimore St., where Henry Bundy, 70, is waiting inside an open basement window. Corey Adams carries 13 heavy bags, one by one, from the truck to the open window and dumps them into a coal stall where Mr. Bundy waits with a rake. Beyond him is the coal furnace that has been heating this house for more than 50 years.
"It gives me something to do," says Mr. Bundy, a retired Army sergeant who has lived here for 35 years. "I like it. I stoke and bank the fire every night at 11 o'clock and feed it again at 6 the next morning. It ain't failed me yet."
There is no bridge quite like the Weems Creek swing bridge in Annapolis and no bridge-tender quite like "Miss Annie" Bellinger.
Only three Maryland bridges open for boat traffic by swinging a ** section of the bridge to the side rather than by raising it. This 100-foot-long span connects the shorelines at Ridgley Avenue. Viewed from the nearby Rowe Boulevard overpass, the Weems Creek bridge, nestled snugly in a sylvan glade, appears to be out of another era.
Ms. Bellinger's concealed tender's cabin is the only one in the state tucked under the bridge rather than on top of it.
"I'm here from the end of May until the end of October, from dawn to dusk, seven days a week," says Ms. Bellinger, 71, whose plywood deck adjoining the bridge-tender's cabin under the roadway is furnished with a few old chairs and folding cushions. This great-grandmother has been on the job here for 11 years.
"Before I came, the roadway had wooden planks and the bridge had to be cranked open by hand," she says. "Now we're automated and all I have to do is climb up to the roadway, walk out to the middle of the bridge, unlock a control box and press one button to lower the road gates and another button to open the bridge."
She serves about 30 boats that dock up the creek and springs to action at the blast of a boat horn. During a busy day she may open the bridge 25 times, taking about 10 minutes for each opening.
"Some motorists don't like it," she says, "but most take advantage of the break, get out of their cars and watch and ask me questions. I call myself the Troll because I 'live' under the bridge. Some think this is actually my home." The neighborhood building and loan association was a highly visible, fortresslike stalwart for decades until larger banks began gobbling them up. Some old mom-and-pops are still out there, although their number is diminishing.
Locust Point's old Hull Street Building and Loan, now federally chartered and FDIC-insured as Hull Federal Savings Bank, even survived the Depression. The state's smallest bank -- with assets in early 1993 of just $5.5 million, it has been a sound financial
institution in its working-class rowhouse neighborhood since opening in 1911.
This may be the only bank in the nation open, more or less for banker's hours, nearly every day of the year, even though the Feds flinch at this idea. But that's the way it has gone at 1248 Hull St., at least for the past several years. Wilbur Baumann, financial secretary and member of the board of directors, likes to do some things in his own stubbornly unique way, which means being open informally more than any other bank.
From 1911 to 1989, this small storefront bank opened only on Tuesday evenings, because this was the most convenient time for its neighborhood customers. But after small banks were federally chartered in 1989, they were required to open five days a week from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. The Hull Street institution, however, has steadfastly retained its Tuesday night hours, purely out of tradition, says Mr. Baumann, a Locust Point bachelor who was born in the neighborhood and still lives there. He has worked here on Tuesday evenings for 44 years.
There is nothing very modern about the bank, except for its computers. A long, open counter installed in 1950 faces six plain chairs and a bench separated by a small table with a cooler stored underneath and a small refrigerator stocked with soda pop. There is no air conditioning, but two wooden-bladed ceiling fans and a floor fan circulate summer air. Telephones were not installed until 1989, when the Feds said it was required. A church calendar hangs on a nail. A plastic bowl holds free Tootsie Rolls. Waltz music emerges from a tape deck perched on a ledge near the old pressed tin ceiling.
"If I didn't have this bank, I'd go nuts," says Mr. Baumann, who also gives piano lessons and does tax returns on the side. "I love this little bank and working with numbers. I respect and honor its tradition and history, and I love and honor the people we serve. It's just a heck of a lot of fun!"
There are, of course, many churches in Maryland that partially depend upon candlelight to cast a hushed spell of solemnity over religious services. But few churches rely solely on candlepower for light as well as for spiritual enhancement, as does this little stone chapel nestled in a dark and peaceful valley a few miles west of Emmitsburg.
Built in 1857, this one-room country chapel by the side of the road has never been invaded by the shock of electricity or the rumblings of indoor plumbing and central heating. And, because of the chapel's updated bylaws, visitors will never experience the harshness of artificial lighting or the indoor comforts of flush toilets, central heat and air conditioning.
The drive to the isolated chapel, along mountainous, dirt-and-gravel Eyler's Valley Flint Road, is through a dark and sometimes menacing woods. Only auto headlights guide the way until the friendly patch of flickering light is spotted. The chapel in the dell, with a stream meandering through its back yard and an old cemetery waiting patiently on a nearby hillside, is a beacon of welcome as well as a spiritual ray of hope.
"I had heard about this then-abandoned church in Eyler's Valley in the summer of 1969 and thought I'd drive over and take a look at it," says Kenneth Hamrick, 54, a minister with the nearby Thurmont United Methodist Church. "I expected to find a building in shambles, but it wasn't in bad shape. It seemed that it was closed in the 1920s, again in the 1940s and then sort of abandoned. Since it was once affiliated with the Methodist church in Thurmont, I volunteered to hold a trial daytime service there. We had 19 people show up at that first service in September of 1969, and that went on until we switched to Sunday evening services in March of 1971."
Soon 85 people were arriving. This past Christmas season, a series of evening services drew more than 2,000 people.
"Everything defies reason here," observes Mr. Hamrick. "Reopening an abandoned church on a lonely dirt road in the middle of the mountains? And packing them in every Sunday evening, even drawing people from out of state? Somehow, I like to think that there is a higher power at work here than candlepower."
The famed Maryland beaten biscuit (that's beaten, as in whacked with a club) has undergone a culinary change of near-metamorphic proportions, a change too awful to contemplate. It isn't being beaten! Modernists have taken to using hand-cranked meat grinders or, worse, electric machinery to "beat" the biscuit dough.
This mixing is not beating and simply will not do, say traditionalists Roby and Elma Cornelius of Rock Hall, who insist on beating their biscuit dough with the kind of stout, 33-inch, 32-ounce baseball bats used by sluggers.
"People have different ideas of what this product should taste like. My idea of a proper Maryland beaten biscuit is not a rock-colored doughball hard as a rock," says Mrs. Cornelius, 75, who learned the art of beating biscuits from her mother, who learned it from her mother.
Says 82-year-old Mr. Cornelius, "When I grew up on the Upper Eastern Shore hereabout, all the children grew up beating biscuit dough with the blunt end of an ax. We always thought that was what made them taste so unique, but who knows?"
The Corneliuses turn out about 15 dozen beaten biscuits a week, which sell out fast from their kitchen door at about $2 a dozen, mostly to their neighbors. "We aren't into commercial production and distribution or I suppose we, too, would have to put aside our bat and get a machine to 'beat' our dough," Mrs. Cornelius says.
They take turns swatting the dough for a total of 30 minutes on a maple butcher-block table.
"I never figured out the mystery of beaten biscuits," Mr. Cornelius says, raising the bat and giving the dough a hefty series of whacks. "I don't know if it's beating air into the dough, or beating air out of the dough. You can hear the air blisters snapping when you do it, I know that. Here, Elma, it's your turn."