On days like this, the immortal George "Hunky" Sauerhoff, of )) Pigtown and all other points his blithe spirit chooses to take him, carries the misty stuff of history inside his head.
"Fifty-three years, huh?" he says.
He's sitting here at Carl's Little House, the restaurant-bar at Ostend and Hamburg, with his beard all white and his Orioles cap tight over his eyes and his windbreaker with the zipper pulled up to his neck and, come to think of it, he's got the math right on the nose: It's 53 years since that Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, when America was snatched into World War II with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The moment still carries all sorts of emotional weight. The ones like Hunky were too young to enlist, but not too young to remember. He had a father named Elmer who became a part of the country's folklore, a guy who'd served in the Army Reserve back in World War I when he was just 16 and lied about his age, and then heard the news about the Japanese attack a quarter-century later and signed up all over again.
He gave up a job with the post office and signed up with the Seabees. At age 41.
With a wife at home.
And 10 children.
"Yeah," says Hunky, looking over some old photographs, "Pop worked hard all his life. It's all he did was hard work, hard drinking, making babies and fighting wars. I figure I can brag about him. I got bragging rights on all the people I loved."
He makes a couple of unsuccessful stabs at a hot turkey sandwich and gravy, but memories keep getting in the way of an appetite.
"We were living on McHenry Street, off Fremont Avenue. . . . We had five of us in one bed, with feet battles going on every night. Mom was 29 when she had 10 kids. It's a good thing Dad went into the service, or she might have had 30.
"You know, Dad's buddies overseas used to say that, with his pay and the allotment he got for all the kids, he made more money than any admiral. Yeah, we were living real good during the war. We could get coffee cake. We had soda, man, we had anything we wanted."
Hunky's laughing as he says it, but he's a little bit choked, too. He's 62 now, one of the legendary street characters of West Baltimore, original founder of the Loyal Sons of Pigtown, a guy with his adrenalin still turned all the way up.
But people reach an age of reflection, and the anniversaries like Pearl Harbor bring back yesterdays. Hunky was 9. He recalls his father saying goodbye as he left for the South Pacific. The dialogue sounds like something off a recruiting poster, except it actually happened.
"Pop, why are you going over?" Hunky asked.
"Son," Elmer Covell Sauerhoff replied, "they're trying to take our country. We have to fight."
His departure brought unexpected visitors to the house: Mayor Howard Jackson, with a photographer at his side to take a picture of the entire Sauerhoff family gathered around the kitchen table. The photo ran in newspapers all over the country.
To a nation trying to rally itself into a titanic struggle, it was a nice piece of inspiration, though there was some backlash. Half a century later, Hunky remembers a letter arriving one day, with a Chicago postmark, and his mother innocently asking, "Who do we know out there?"
The letter had a Nazi insignia on it. There was a picture of 10 little pigs, with the names of all the Sauerhoff children.
" 'Hitler's little pigs,' it said," Hunky recalls. "It said, 'We're going to kill every one of you.' The FBI guarded our house for a week, but then Pop sent a letter home and chased them off. He said his family wasn't scared of nobody."
He holds up a couple of old photographs now: his father during the war, in his Seabee uniform; and another, of his father and Hunky's brother Buddy, with their arms draped around the old heavyweight champ, Jack Dempsey, on an afternoon at Monmouth Park Racetrack.
Elmer Sauerhoff worked there, but not for long. He shipped out again during the Korean War and took part in the Inchon landing. By then, Hunky had his own service record. When he tried to compare notes with his father, Elmer Sauerhoff shrugged. "Dad just said to me, 'Inchon? Wasn't much to it,' " he recalls.
His father died in 1988. He was 88 and clinging to his final days when asked if he wanted to leave the Veterans Administration Hospital and go home.
"Nope," he said, gazing at other vets, "I'm dying here with my boys."
Hunky remembers soldiers filing through the funeral home, some of them limping, most of them old, all of them stopping to salute his father.
"One of the proudest days of my life," Hunky says. Anniversaries like this bring it all back: Pearl Harbor, and Korea and Vietnam.
"Oh, yeah, Vietnam," says Hunky. "Pop went down to the Marine recruiting station and volunteered to go. He was in his 70s. The Marine sergeant took him out and got him a shot and a beer. Then he shook his hand and took him home."