I'LL ALWAYS see Grace Darin the way I'd occasionally spot her. She boarded the St. Paul Street bus before dawn en route to her job here, at the old Evening Sun, where she edited newspaper copy.
She often wore a beret or floppy felt hat, sensible tan raincoat and a pair of pixie-style glasses, the kind with pointy edges. Her baby-fine soft blond hair spoke of her family roots in the Italian Alps. The great Grace died this week at 88, leaving behind a neighborhood enriched by her brilliance, wit and charm.
I first sat down with her 30 years ago in her frugally furnished East 26th Street kitchen, where she talked at length about the neighborhood, the blocks that fan out southerly and easterly from the Johns Hopkins University's Homewood campus. In a stroke of genius, followed by 10 years of real work, she lighted all the right candles. This she accomplished through The Charles Villager, a funny little paper, really a newsletter, that she cranked out in the late 1960s and the '70s when the city was beset by a bad case of nerves and plummeting self-esteem. As an activist, she won by winning hearts, first, then minds. She never got near an urban renewal plan, bulldozer or paid staff. Nor did she ever renovate, paint or replumb an old house.
"Charles Village is marked by a spirit of adventure, a search for challenge, a feeling of community, and a sense of humor. Charles Village is an urban Everest," she wrote in what she said was the last issue of The Charles Villager, which ran for at least 33 editions between 1967 and 1977.
On another occasion, she defined The Charles Villager as "a private hobby operation, not connected with any organization. Its sole purpose is to chronicle the interesting happenings in a lively, friendly city neighborhood. Send us news tips, please - a new baby, a new job, a new neighbor. We publish on an erratic schedule and distribute at random." There were no ads, no revenue. Grace paid her own bills.
Some years later, I bought a house around the corner from hers, where she lived with her sister Rita, a Pratt librarian. We'd run into each other, but not too often. Grace was an intensely private person. The sisters lived in their little rowhouse. They never owned a car. They took streetcars, then buses. They pushed a hand mower. They were passionate gardeners and Orioles fanatics.
I'm guessing here, but I'd bet that Grace also possessed the kind of spirituality that could rock the dome of heaven. As was her custom, she slipped in the door at SS. Philip and James for the earliest Mass of the day.
And, for all her writing and editing, she was the most voluble telephone chatterer I've ever encountered. A call to Grace was worth at least 90 minutes, maybe more, when you'd be treated to her brilliant, retentive mind.
She was always to me a classic city person, perhaps anonymous in a crowd, but quietly capable and so resourceful.
A small funeral party assembled on Homeland Avenue as the advance snow clouds were gathering late Wednesday morning.
Just a handful of cars called at St. Mary's Cemetery; we gathered to pay our final respects to Grace. Ever the person who was one thought ahead of the rest of us, Grace had selected her cemetery lot and had her stone set in place when her coffin came out of the hearse. Rita's grave was alongside.
I looked over toward the nearby College of Notre Dame's Victorian towers. Then I thought about Grace, our Orioles and baseball fan, being set down in the same little country cemetery as Jack Dunn, for whom Babe Ruth played and whose International League Orioles brought the same lift to our Charles Village as our mighty little Grace.