When Honora M. Freeman became the head of Baltimore Development Corp. in 1991, downtown Baltimore was abuzz with talk that she was too much a product of Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's own political organization and too little versed in the city and its business community.
She had an answer.
"Judge me on what I'm doing and how I do my job," she told a reporter at the time.
Three years later, dozens of business executives, civic leaders and development experts interviewed by The Sun say that by precisely that standard, the agency she heads is in trouble.
But in many ways, Ms. Freeman is a quintessentially American success story.
Brought up in a Philadelphia Irish Catholic family with 13 brothers and sisters, she worked her way through college and law school, earning a bachelor's degree in political science at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County in 1976, a master's in administration at the Johns Hopkins University in 1981 and a law degree at the University of Maryland at Baltimore in 1986.
While in school, she worked as an assistant to the Baltimore County administrative officer in the county executive's office from 1976 through 1987.
In 1987, she went into private legal practice at Shapiro & Olander, the law firm that is home base to Ronald Shapiro and Larry S. Gibson, two key architects of Mayor Schmoke's political career.
In 1989, she went back to public administration to become a special assistant to Mr. Schmoke, the mayor's chief liaison with the city's complex array of planning and economic development agencies.
The mayor named her to the $81,000-a-year job at BDC in 1991 after the former director, David Gillece, suddenly resigned amid widespread reports that he was having problems with Mr. Schmoke's political associates.
A soft-spoken person who gives the impression of measuring her words carefully, Ms. Freeman is known for relying extensively on her aides and playing a very limited role in negotiations with companies that come to BDC for help.
Ms. Freeman is known among her associates to have undergone surgery for colon cancer in October 1993, and to have received excruciating courses of radiation and chemotherapy from February through May.
"It tells you a lot that, once she came back from the operation, she never missed a day's work despite the months of treatments," said Robert L. Hannon, a BDC executive vice president.
"And it tells you something about character, too, that through this entire interview, until you brought up her illness, no one else mentioned it or offered any excuses about her health," he said.