In 1961, 10-year-old Wayne K. Curry, along with seven other Cheverly boys, was kicked off the local Boys Club baseball team because he was black.
Thirty-three years later, the white, agricultural and segregated Prince George's County of Mr. Curry's youth has a majority black population. And Mr. Curry, 43, is its county executive, the first African-American to hold the post.
He takes office at what he calls "a pivotal time" for the county.
"We're the only example in the history of America of a major jurisdiction that's gone from being virtually all white to majority black where income and education have gone up and not down," said Mr. Curry, seated in his fifth floor wood-paneled office in Upper Marlboro.
"I think we're going to wind up being what I call the jewel in the crown of the American post-civil rights era," he said.
Mr. Curry, who lives in Mitchellville with his wife, Sheila, and their infant son, Julian, enters his four-year term filled with promise and accompanied by much goodwill.
He also faces daunting challenges, beginning with a $107 million deficit he'll have to make up in the 1996 fiscal year budget. He also must address rising crime in the communities inside the Capital Beltway. Shopping centers, entertainment complexes and fine restaurants must be lured into the county. And there are campaign promises to fulfill, such as increasing school spending and hiring 200 police officers.
With the goodwill comes pressure to perform.
"It puts a lot of expectation on a person who symbolizes the coming of age of the black middle class in Prince George's County," said Daniel D. Nataf, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County political scientist.
While acknowledging the significance of his election as Maryland's first African-American county executive, Mr. Curry said he doesn't want to be pigeonholed.
"I recognize my job is not just to make history. It's to make sense," he said. "That's why I left the practice of law. That's why I sacrificed my privacy. That's why I took a pay cut.
"That's why this was worth doing," he said. "Not because I wanted to let the region know I'm a black guy. I've known that all my life."
Mr. Curry appears upbeat even in the midst of announcing a hiring freeze to cut costs.
Nearly every other large political subdivision with an African-American majority is urban and struggling against a massive flight of capital, he said. Not so in Prince George's.
"We've been the beneficiaries of massive investment," he said. "We've got something to work with here."
Mr. Curry not only symbolizes much of the change that has come to Prince George's County, he was in the middle of it.
The second child in a family of five boys and a girl, he was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. But before he was 1, the family moved to Cheverly, a community of tree-lined streets and two-story brick houses with neatly trimmed yards.
His parents, Eugene and Juliette Curry, got their first taste of life in Prince George's when they learned they couldn't buy a house in the center of town because they were black. Instead, they settled in what was called South Cheverly, in the town's 4th Ward.
"It was quite literally on the other side of the tracks -- the train tracks -- from the balance of the town," said Mr. Curry, who remembers the neighborhood as "a nice, tight-knit community" where any adult could admonish a misbehaving child.
"It was a wonderful place to grow up. It's a wonderful place to go back to," he said. "You go home, the people embrace you, they're proud of your achievement. They, in many respects, see it as the fulfillment not of my work, but of their work."
William M. Eley Jr., who lives around the corner from the Curry house and was Mr. Curry's baseball and football coach, said that during the fall campaign for county executive, nearly every house had a Wayne Curry lawn sign in front.
"Everyone likes to claim a piece of Wayne," said Mr. Eley. "We are Wayne's parents, everyone in the neighborhood."
Mr. Curry's father, who died last December, was an imposing figure inhis life. A football lineman in his college days, Eugene Curry was known all his life as "Bull Curry." He was a taskmaster and disciplinarian who taught his son the value of hard work.
"He used to have a razor strap he hung on the door that could translate everything he wanted us to know into a language we could understand," Mr. Curry recalled.
As challenges to county segregation began in the 1950s and 1960s, the Currys found themselves in the middle of the fight. Mrs. Curry campaigned for fair housing.
When Wayne was in the fourth grade, the Currys transferred him and his older brother, Daryl, from an all-black school to predominantly white Cheverly-Tuxedo Elementary School in town. Only one other black child was enrolled at the time.
"We wanted them to have the best that was available to them," Mrs. Curry said. "It didn't make sense. I lived in the town. The school's in the town."
Then came the time that Wayne and Daryl were kicked off the Cheverly Boys Club's baseball team.
"They were OK as long as they played on the fields around here," Mrs. Curry said. "But when they got ready to go to Bowie, somebody had a problem with these black boys being in the Boys Club."
The Prince George's County Boys Clubs were affiliated with the county schools. Wayne's father was a teacher and later a vice principal in the system. To avoid getting him fired, a suit was filed in Juliette Curry's name. Their sons eventually won the right to play.
Being on the integration forefront may have been difficult for her sons, Mrs. Curry said, but it prepared them for life.
"He and his brother were kind of stuck out front," she said. "As VTC they grew older, it was an asset, because they could survive in any environment."
As Mr. Curry progressed in school, his precociousness attracted the attention of his teachers. Carolyn Huff, his art teacher at Bladensburg Junior High School -- whom Mr. Curry mentions as an early mentor -- remembers a boy who loved painting murals and working in clay.
"He'd be working along on his clay and something would pop in his mind and he would share it with us," recalled Ms. Huff, who is retired and living in Dunkirk. "As his teacher, I just couldn't get mad at him. But his mind was just always at the ready."
Mr. Curry 's only electoral defeat came in junior high when he lost a bid for class office under questionable circumstances.
"He felt he had won. I felt he had won. . . . It really broke his heart," Ms. Huff said. "Maybe losing that one made him work even harder."
He went on to Bladensburg High School, where again he was one of a handful of black students. He was a cheerleader and was elected senior class vice president. At Western Maryland College, he obtained a degree in psychology in 1972.
For a time he worked at a day care center, then tooled around the country for nine months in his red Volkswagen Beetle. His introduction to the political world came in 1975 when, through the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, he landed a job in the office of Winfield M. Kelly Jr., then Prince George's County executive. He was 24.
The young Mr. Curry made quite an impression when he showed up for work the first day dressed in jeans, a flowered shirt and moccasins.
"He came walking through the door with corn rows and lugging a gallon jug of distilled water," Mr. Kelly said. "He was on some sort of water diet. I kept asking, 'Where did this guy come from?' "
Mr. Curry was assigned to reply to constituent complaints, focusing on problems between the black community and the Police Department.
"Our Police Department had a fairly pervasive reputation for brutality and that sort of thing," Mr. Curry said. "There was very serious friction between the Police Department and black residents."
He proved his mettle and Mr. Kelly made him his trouble-shooter. eventually became one of the county executive's five top appointees.
Mr. Curry said working in Upper Marlboro opened his eyes "like saucers" to the county's political culture. He started going to law school at night at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and working for Mr. Kelly during the day. Mr. Kelly sensed his ambition.
"He's wanted to be county executive from the first day," he said. "Somewhere along the line he told me, 'I'll have your job someday.' "
Mr. Kelly lost his bid for re-election in 1978, and Mr. Curry lost his job.
He finished law school and worked for a real estate company before establishing his own law firm with Russ Shipley. They later merged with another firm and became Meyers, Billingsly, Shipley, Curry, Rodbell and Rosenbaum.
One of his most important clients was the Dimensions Health Corp., which runs Prince George's County's hospitals. He was also the attorney for the family of Len Bias, the University of Maryland basketball star who died of a cocaine overdose in 1986.
Although he had never run for political office before the county executive's race, Mr. Curry had served as president of the county Chamber of Commerce and was a member of the county's charter review commission and redistricting committee.
When Parris N. Glendening decided to run for governor, Mr. Curry saw his chance. During the campaign, an often-heard comment by Mr. Curry's opponents was that he was too pro-business and too cozy with developers. Some, however, say that background works to his advantage.
"One of the things that caught me was he sounds like a businessman, and I like it," said Bernie McCain, a talk show host at WOL Radio in Washington, D.C.
"I get a little tired of politicians who might have an idea" but can't bring it to realization.
Nor is Mr. Curry a stranger to the halls of power in Prince George's. Though he won Mr. Glendening's endorsement, he was not endorsed by what many consider the political machine. That endorsement went to one of his opponents in the Democratic primary, state Sen. Bea Tignor.
"There is something [Mr. Curry] refers to as the Upper Marlboro culture, and he understands the culture very well," said Annapolis Alderman Carl O. Snowden. "The comfort level with Wayne is higher than is normally the case and that is good for him."
"He's an absolute insider," said Judy Robinson, an anti-tax activist and president of the Prince George's County Civic Federation, who frequently clashed with Mr. Glendening.
"So when he campaigned as an outsider, I always thought it was rather funny," she said. Still, she is keeping an open mind.
"I think Wayne Curry has moved in the right direction; he has started to cut," Ms. Robinson said.