Barb Mikulski called me the walking tour lady, though how I crossed her radar was a puzzle to me, at least for a while. I stood a few feet from her Monday morning and dissolved in tears as she told of choosing to raise hell instead of raising money for another run for the U.S. Senate ("Hail Baltimore's happy warrior," March 2). I got hell from my doctor's secretary for ditching a check-up appointment at 9:45 a.m. in Towson when I wanted to be in Fell's Point with Barb at 11 a.m. I chose Barb.
It was a morning full of sleet and ice-covered roads, and I figured on that excuse to cover me, but the temperature rose and I could have left the city to drive to the doctor's office before he left at noon, but I could not let go of Fell's Point. I walked around to the water's edge and marveled at boats stuck in the ice of this dreadful winter. I walked past the old coffee warehouse, now an upscale residence for people who have lately discovered the charms of these streets, and who talk as though it all began when they got here.
I was born around the corner on Broadway in the 1930s and began in the 1980s to lead walks through Fell's Point. Senator Barb lived on Ann Street then, although I did not know her exact address so I did some research. I became a street person, figuring that one day I'd spot her, and it worked. She was carrying two plastic grocery bags and I saw her go into her house. Bingo!
I now had another piece of data to add to all I already knew and used it on some, though not all, of my walking tours. An hour into the walk, I could gauge whether this piece of data would interest the group. I made a slip one day and regretted it. I told the driver of a trolley car which house was Barb's and after that, he pointed it out to the tourists on his bus. Barb figured that it was me and one day she told me so. She has a memory like an elephant. I was at Ikaros restaurant in Greektown with my tour group when she came in for lunch with her office staff to celebrate a birthday. She took over my group and began giving a speech. The waitresses stood aside until one gentleman in the back of the room announced that he wanted his coffee and he came for lunch, not a Barb talk. That was the day she told me about the bus tours past her house. Not vindictive, just to let me know that she knew.
Memories of Barb Mikulski continue. I was walking past her row house one warm day when the front door was wide open and a lady on a ladder on the pavement was cleaning the front window. I could not resist peeking in and looked at a huge portrait of John F. Kennedy over the fireplace. The cleaning lady was right to shoo me away. There are no steps between the pavement and doorway and living room of that old house on Ann, a few steps from the library or what used to be a branch of the Pratt. In the 1980s, the garden behind the library was a stop on my walking tour of the neighborhood and from that garden, we could see a bit of Barb's house.
After she was mugged and after her mother died, there was little holding her in Fell's Point and she received an excellent offer to buy a condo uptown. I went to her talk at the Pratt on Cathedral a few years ago and at the reception, she remembered me. So when the sudden report came that Senator Mikulski was making an announcement in Fell's Point, I just had to be there. The trucks outside the hotel and the wires leading into the lobby led down a hotel corridor. I asked if this was where the senator would be. The men said the room was full and I said, I am small and take up little room. I squeezed into a standing spot upfront, a few feet from the podium. Looking around the room, I saw five empty chairs and a cute toddler who miraculously never made a peep during the quarter-hour while we waited for the senator.
As I left the hotel and walked up Fell Street, several reporters were poised prettily, talking while their cameras rolled. I walked up to the market, bought a Polish lunch and went home.
Zippy Larson, Baltimore