Long-Form – Baltimore Magazine

On The Wrong Track

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:32:31 +0000

At a little past 1:30, paramedic John Waskevitz and his wife are off to do some shopping. They heard an explosion a few minutes ago, but it sounded like another artillery test at the Aberdeen Proving Ground on the other side of the river. Waskevitz notices a column of dark smoke to the north. The firehouse alarm sounds. He heads for the smoke. At the tracks he sees people removing suitcases from some of the rear cars. Waskevitz, the first emergency worker on the scene, makes his way to the wreckage through clusters of dazed survivors.

He climbs onto the mangled car perched unsteadily at the top of the wreckage. It is passenger car 21236. He looks into the smoke-filled car and sees a mass of seats broken loose. He wriggles inside through a broken window. One victim is buried under the seats. He checks for a pulse in her neck and feels none. He digs farther, snaking along on his hands and knees, on his stomach, stashing debris behind him like a mole. He comes to another victim, her neck apparently broken. She is also dead.

The images flicker in his mind, sometimes when he’s driving, sometimes when he’s trying to sleep. He finds himself aboard the train in the moments surrounding the crash. He sees the impact in slow motion, hears the roar, feels the sudden grip of steel twisting all around him.

Months after the fiery wreck of the Colonial, Dr. Roger Horn still imagines it a dozen times a day.

In a hot and crowded congressional hearing room in July, he finds space to sit cross-legged on the floor, balancing a heavy briefcase on his lap to take notes. He has testified many times since that Sunday afternoon in January when sixteen people died in the collision of the Amtrak passenger train and three Conrail locomotives near Baltimore. Now he waits his turn to take his private anguish public once again.

A big man, the mathematics professor stretches his back and shifts uncomfortably. He will not testify for hours. Across the room, a high-ranking staffer in the Federal Railroad Administration turns to an assistant. “That’s Dr. Horn,” he whispers. “His daughter was killed.”

At 7 o’clock on Sunday morning, January 4, it is clear and dry, 27 degrees and still dark outside the pretty, blue Victorian home at 13 Maple Avenue in the Overlea neighborhood of Baltimore. Denise Evans can hear her husband rustling in the hallway with 2-year-old Joshua, and she knows exactly what’s coming. “C’mon,” she hears Jerry whisper. “Let’s go get Mommy.” He picks up their son and carries him like a football into the kitchen for breakfast.

At the table they snatch bacon from each other when Denise isn’t looking and giggle at their mischief. Joshua has his father’s nose. Jerry gets up several hours before work each momingjust to be with him.

This morning father and son splash in the bathtub together before Jerry departs at 9 a.m. At the front porch the lanky, 35-year-old Amtrak engineer presses his lips on the door where he and Denise kiss each other through the Plexiglas. Joshua giggles again.

Today Jerry will operate Amtrak’s Colonial 94, scheduled to depart Washington’s Union Station at 12:30p.m., bound for Boston. He winks and gives Joshua a father’s exaggerated wave and promises to be home by 11 p.m.

On a small farm in Potomac, Maryland, 20-year-old Christy Johnson is trying to administer a shot to one of her family’s horses. The animal bucks and turns, knocking the syringe from her hands. It disappears into the straw on the barn floor.

Christy was hoping to catch a morning train so she could spend the day with her sister in New York before flying back to Stanford University in California. But she’s late, and now it looks as if she’ll catch the 12:40 at New Carrollton.

Christy’s parents, Arthur and Ann Johnson, say good-bye and go off to Georgetown Presbyterian Church. They are feeling food about their daughter, who five years ago had started to abuse drugs and had reached a low point in her life. She had gone to her parents, gotten counseling, and within a year was off drugs and helping other kids with the same problem.

Now as she approaches graduation from Stanford, she is weighing a career in psychology or health care.

On their way to church, her parents pass Rebecca Hyman, one of Christy’s closest friends from high school. Rebecca is on her way to pick up Christy and drive her to the train station. Another old friend joins them at the house and they make small talk over coffee in the kitchen.

Christy runs up to her bedroom to finish packing and Rebecca follows, trying to squeeze in a few more minutes together.

They head out the Beltway to New Carrollton, hitting 70 miles an hoµr as Christy keeps nagging: “We’re going to miss this train.”

At the station Rebecca helps Christy with her luggage and they quickly hug. “I love you,” says Christy.

In the Pennsylvania town of Shippensburg, 18-year-old TC Colley is ending a long stay with his father and stepmother. He’s going back to Baltimore, where his mother lives and where some letters from his new girlfriend await him. Then he’ll take the train up to Providence, where he’s a freshman in photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, determined to be the next Ansel Adams.

TC and his father had a heart-to-heart talk last night about growing up. It seemed that TC was testing out his latest personal style, a penchant for frankness, and his father wanted to rein him in a bit. ”Just be sweet,” added his stepmother, Susan. “Just be you.”

Tom Colley drives his son to the usual rendezvous point near York, and watches him throw his coat in the back of his mother’s car before they drive off for Baltimore.

In the wooded hills of northern Baltimore County, 16-year-old Ceres Horn is canvassing her family’s home for belongings before returning to Princeton, where she’s a freshman honors student two years younger than most of her classmates. One thing she doesn’t want to forget is the heavy wool sweater she bought for her boyfriend back at school.

Her father, Roger Horn, a Johns Hopkins University professor, is in Israel lecturing on mathematics. Ceres and the rest of the family stayed up later than usual last night as her mother, brother, and sister gathered around her bed and she described how she’s cramming sports and theater into her heavy academic schedule. Her goal is to become an astronaut, and she’s going to try for a summer job in the astrophysics department atJ ohns Hopkins.

But this is Sunday morning, January 4, time to get back to school. Ceres, her mother, and her 9-year-old brother, Howie, drive to Penn Station in downtown Baltimore, where engineer Jerry Evans is about to pull up to Track 3, Gate C, at the controls of the Amtrak Colonial. He left Washington at 12:35 p.m., a few minutes late, but has made up most of that time.

The train is one of the modern Amtrak liners bought by the federal government to keep the country’s passenger-train system alive. Since the early 1950s, trains had lost more and more riders to airliners and cars, and by the late 1960s, when it became clear that no private railroad could afford to keep them going, Congress decided to create Amtrak as a national railroad. Amtrak lost millions of dollars every year, but taxpayers kept the trains running.

The retooled rail is especially attractive to New York-bound Baltimoreans since BWI, unlike Washington National, does not have a regular schedule of frequent shuttle flights.

Today Evans’s train includes two big General Motors electric locomotives and twelve passenger cars. About four hundred passengers are already aboard. Christy Johnson has moved as far to the front of the train as she could, to passenger car 21236, which is just behind an empty cafe car and the two locomotives.

On the platform, TC Colley’s stepfather, Cal Walker, a physics professor at Johns Hopkins, recognizes Ceres Horn’s mother. They introduce the two teenagers.

TC is loaded down with luggage. His mother, Ann, notices the wide stance he has adopted since taking up karate. He’s gotten so tall and broad in the last year, and slouches as if uncomfortable with his height. He’s dressed in the dark, heavy clothes that say artiste, with a new woolen scarf from his stepmother swooping around his shoulders. He wears a silver chain around his neck and an earring she’d recently given him.

Just a couple months earlier he was standing here asking her to tell him how he’d changed. She’d told hi.m he looked much more grown up and seemed more directed.

The Colonial pulls in, bringing with it a rush of cool air and a flurry of good-byes. “I love you,” Ann tells TC. ‘I’m very proud of you, and I think you’re wonderful.”

“So do I,” says TC.

“Good. We agree on it, then.”

She puts him on the third car from the end of the train. “Try going toward the back,” she says. “It looks like there are more seats back there.” But TC walks forward, as younger people do in crowded trains, walking through seven cars until he finds one with a lot of room-passenger car 21236, the same car Ceres Horn and Christy Johnson are in. About 175 passengers board the train in Baltimore. Including twelve crew members, there are now 579 people aboard the Colonial.

At 1:15 p.m., an Amtrak conductor barks over the radio to Jerry Evans, “Ninety-three, Jerry ninety-four, okay to proceed.”

“Okay,” says Evans, “ninety-four on the move.”

Susan Horn and young Howie are already out of the station when she remembers to mail Ceres’s letter to Johns Hopkins astrophysics professor Arthur Davidsen. She walks back and drops it into a mailbox.

“I’m very excited about the prospect of working for the Center for Astrophysical Sciences this summer,” Ceres has written. “It will give me a better understanding of what an astrophysicist actually does, and enable me to decide if majoring in physics at Princeton is for me.”

The Bayview freight yard on Baltimore’s east side has the old-fashioned look of most of the yards on the railroad system’s busy Northeast Corridor: rows of parallel tracks, a squat control tower, and a few cinderblock buildings and trailers painted in dull green and gray.

The buildings are plastered with safety posters, a different one each month. On the roundhouse wall there used to be a mirror etched: “Accidents only happen to the other guy. Meet the other guy.”

Today engineer Ricky Lynn Gates and brakeman Ed “Butch” Cromwell are scheduled to move three diesel locomotives 110 miles north and west for use in the Enola Yard outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Railmen love this kind of duty—they call it “light engines”—because with no freight cars to pull, the locomotives have quicker acceleration and easier handling. A run with light engines is a piece of cake that comes maybe one time out of a hundred. Gates won’t have to worry about moving a long, heavy freight train, the buffeting and bumping of boxcars and tank cars on hills and curves. Cromwell won’t have to worry about brake-hose trouble or busted couplers. Just a short scoot up to Perryville, Maryland, then west to Enola Yard. They’ll probably make it in three hours, and then ride a bus back home.

Oates’s fee for the job is $121.06 each way, Cromwell’s $96.50. Lack of seniority has meant too much furlough time for both of them, and they feel lucky to get the work. January 4 still is considered holiday time by many of their coworkers, who have taken their day off.

The two enter the terminal building for the paperwork. Gates registers and signs the safety sheet, which posts a daily safety rule. The paperwork tells him he should expect a routine delay at “Gunpow,” the first switch up the line, a half-mile south of the Gunpowder River Bridge, where the old wooden-tied freight line merges with the concrete-tied high-speed line of the Northeast Corridor. He ‘II probably have to wait there a few minutes for the passing of priority Amtrak passenger train, Jerry Evan’s train, which is one minute behind schedule.

Gates looks over the engines, checks in with trainmaster George Mince, and tells him the lead engine doesn’t have a working two-way radio. It’s a common problem, and they agree that he can use one of the shorter-range, hand-held models that brakemen using in walking the brake lines.

The trainmaster observes the two-man crew while they talk. It used to be that supervisors would just look for signs of drinking when crews check in. Today, as his drug-detection training has taught him, Mince also looks for other signs. he has been around the rails for thirty-six years, long enough to know how tough spotting a drug user can be.

At 32, Gates is a seasoned user of both alcohol and marijuana. Cromwell, 33, prefers marijuana, and sometimes other drugs. Gates is discreet about the illegal stuff, but some of his friends know about it. Most of them figure he knows how to stay in control on the job.

The alcohol problem did become a public matter late one night in December. A cop caught him waving down the road in his car. Gates couldn’t recite the alphabet, and he foolishly presented his open wallet with a $20 bill and $5 bill over his driver’s license, but the cop wouldn’t go for it. The details would emerge in a country courtroom some three months later, by which time there would be intense interest in the habits of Ricky Lynn Gates.

But today Mince doesn’t notice anything unusual about the crew. They look fit and ready to run four hundred tons of diesel locomotives the 110 miles up to Enola, and he sends them on their way.

The national rail system is in the best physical condition is has been in the last twenty-five years. The equipment is the best ever . . . But if eight-thousand-ton trains are entrusted to impaired crew members, disaster will not be avoided. -Secretary of Transportation Elizabeth Dole, in a 1984 Senate hearing.

The railroad industry has waged war with alcohol for more than a century, and even today something of the traditional image of American’s trailblazing railroaders persists: hard-working and hard-drinking, rough loud, grimy.

A few visits to the workplaces and homes of today’s railmen dispel much of that image. Trailblazing has been supplanted by mortgages, tuition, and car payments. But many railroaders still drink on the job, and some use drugs as well.

Until twenty-one months ago, there was no federal law saying they couldn’t.

Every freight and passenger line in the country prohibits crew members from using alcohol or drugs or being impaired on the job. Rule G, as it’s known industrywide, has been around since 1897. The railroads designed Rule G to weed the abusers out of the working ranks, and violators traditionally have been fired.

But Rule G doesn’t work. That was made clear in a 1979 Department of Transportation study of234,000 railroad workers. It found that 23 percent of operating employees, including engineers and conductors, were problem drinkers, and that 5 percent of all employees came to work very drunk or got very drunk while on duty at least once during the yearlong study.

With little faith left in Rule G, the industry has been trying other ways to get substance abusers out of safety-sensitive positions. Some railroads and unions have formed Rule G bypass agreements that offer treatment as an alternative to termination. It can be voluntary, or workers can be referred to an evaluation-and-rehabilitation program by a ”prevention team” -two or more coworkers-or by a union official. Those who complete treatment can return to duty.

Although the railroad unions have historically underplayed the extent of drug problems among workers, it is the unions who now are pushing hardest for such “peer prevention” programs. While concerned about safety, they also would like to head off increased federal involvement. The unions and the railroads have long claimed they can police themselves against drugs and alcohol.

The Federal Railroad Administration, part of the Department of Transportation, is responsible for rail safety. Between 1975 and 1984, it investigated forty-eight accidents it says were caused by drug or alcohol impairment, accidents that caused thirty-seven deaths and $35 million in property damage. The accidents included three head-on collisions, a derailment at 68 miles per I hour on a 25-miles-per-hour curve, and the wreck of a one-hundred-car freight train carrying hazardous materials that forced the evacuation of a Louisiana town. In that wreck, both the engineer and the head brakeman were drunk and asleep.

Something more than self-policing seemed necessary.

Beginning in 1983, a group of FRA staffers under Administrator John Riley, a Reagan appointee, spent about three years writing a set of regulations they hoped would control the use of alcohol and drugs I in the industry. FRA regulations have the force of law.

For the first time, railroad operating employees would be prohibited by federal law from alcohol or drug use or ·impairment while on duty. Preemployment urine tests would be mandatory. Railroad companies would be required to conduct, and crews to submit to, toxicological testing after certain types of accidents.

Accident reports from the railroads, which the FRA depends on for most of its data, would include inquiries into the possible involvement of drugs and alcohol, even when no such involvement was obvious. Railroads would be required to establish voluntary drug-referral policies and Rule G bypass agreements.

Finally, railroads would have the right to require any operating employee to submit to breath and urine tests on the basis of” reasonable cause,” even when no accident had occurred. The unions fought that provision in court and lost.

In the context of the old railroad industry, the FRA’ s new set of rules seemed drastic when they went into effect early in 1986.

For engineer Ricky Gates, they didn’t make much difference.

Gates pulls his engines up to the signal-testing bay to check out the cab’s safety devices. From the engineer’s seat on the right side of the cab, he looks at the in-cab signal rack mounted on the window to his upper left.

The vertical signal looks like a downsized traffic light with four aspects, all a light shade of amber, with patterns of dots telling the engineer when to go, when to slow, when to prepare to stop, when to stop. It is activated electronically by switchers who sit in trackside towers along the route. It duplicates the larger, remote-controlled signals mounted over the tracks or on the wayside. Engineers bet their lives on them.

Some engineers will tell you that they’ve seen a signal mess up before, but that it usually “fails down”-tells them to go slower than they should, rather than faster. Signals telling them to go when they should stop- “false proceeds” -are rare. There have been nineteen of them in the Northeast Corridor in the last four years, none causing an accident.

A signal bulb in Gates’s cab is missing. It’s part of the signal telling him to slow down and prepare to stop. He doesn’t fix it. Engineers who linger too long over the little things are not popular in a business where time is closely linked with money.

Gates checks the alertor whistle, mounted on the floor behind his controlling console. It looks something like a flute and sounds like a shrill pennywhistle. It screeches loudly every time the train passes any signal that doesn’t say “go,” just to keep the crew paying attention.

Most engineers hate the whistle. Not only does it hurt their ears, it’s also insulting. They know it’s a safety device, but it makes them feel like lab rats and its presence questions their professionalism. Some engineers gag the whistles with a few inches of duct tape, but more often it’s taped by a brakeman, riding overnight in the cab of a second or third locomotive and trying to catch a few winks on a gently rocking freight train.

Gates tests his alertor whistle and hears nothing-or, at most, a faint hiss. He didn’t put the tape there. It is probably from an earlier trip. Gates has a reputation as a stickler for the rules, and normally he removes the tape.

But today Gates and Cromwell are in a holiday mood. Corridor traffic is low. They’re running light engines. Cromwell has along his personal radio. They might be able to listen to the San Francisco 49ers-New York Giants playoff game.

And one of them is packing a couple of marijuana joints.

At 1:13 p.m. the engineer and his brakeman get the go-ahead from the Bayview tower to proceed, and at 1:16 they pull out of the yard.

To keep a freight train moving, an engineer is supposed to keep his left foot on the dead man’s pedal, a simple, floor-mounted safety device that has been around for along time. If the engineer becomes incapacitated and his foot leaves the pedal, the train stops.

Many engineers consider the dead man pedal a nuisance. It’s uncomfortable to keep your foot- on the same spot, sometimes for more than twelve hours at a stretch. You get leg cramps. You can’t get up from your seat, even to use the cab bathroom, without stopping the train.

The dead man’s pedal is probably the most commonly disabled safety device o na freight train, and any engineer will tell you it’s the easiest thing to do. All he has to do put a wrench on top of it.

Rick Gates’ s engine has a disabled dead man’s pedal, the throttle is set for acceleration, and no one has to steer a freight train For the time being this train doesn’t need him anymore.

Gates and Cromwell are not a regular team: the crews are always rotating. But they’ve spent enough time together to know they have something in common. They both like to get high.

And so they light up a joint.

They make some small talk. Cromwell is soft-spoken, when he speaks at all. Some of his past crew mates say it’s possible to spend twelve hours in the cab with him and new exchange a word. Off duty, he’s alway available for a pickup softball game, and he wields a pretty good bat. Most people who know him like him.

Gates is a rock music lover and a Star Trek fan who is more outgoing. He’s been running the rails for fourteen years, and in a job that is often boring, conversation helps keep him alert. He smokes four packs of cigarettes a day. He sometimes bring home-cooked meals to work to share with his crewmate on a job.

Mixing a demanding work schedule with a growing affection for alcohol didn’t help his marriage, and he and his wife, Mary, split up a few years ago. She kept custody of their wo daughters.

After the separation, Gates moved into a apartment in Essex and threw himself railroading. It seemed to define everything about him. He plunged into the rules and regulations, scoring high marks on his proficiency tests. He scored 100 percent on his last one.

Gates is proud of this knowledge and chides other engineers when they do something that’s not by the book. He cites the rulebook from memory.

He has been disciplined by Conrail for insubordination, and sometimes he plays his harmonica over the nighttime radio waves, which is definitely not allowed by the rules. Driving his car, he has racked up nineteen citations in fifteen years—mostly for speeding and twice has had his driver’s license revoked.

But his record on the rails is good, and of most of his colleagues are happy to have him as a crew mate. The consensus among those who know him in the railroad fraternity is that Gates is a railman with the right stuff.

But early on the afternoon of January 4, at the controls of Conrail train ENS-121, Lynn Gates is not altogether in character.

A marijuana high is different from the effects of alcohol or other drugs. It can distort one’s sense of time—a half-hour can feel like five minutes, or five minutes can feel like an hour.

In the past ear, Gates has taken a train through the Gunpow switch ninety-nine times, usually from Bayview. As with any familiar routine, he has developed a certain feeling, an internal clock, that tells him how much time he should elapse from step to step. Gates is used to moving long, heavy freights trains that can take ten miles to get up to speed. He is used to a fifteen- or twenty-minute lull between Bayview and Gunpow “distant signal,” two miles before the switch at the interlocking of the freight and passenger tracks.

But today Gates is running light engines, and he has fooled with the delicate workings of that internal clock.

Once out of Bayview, his three-engine train picks up speed much more quickly than the seasoned engineer is accustomed to. Twenty-four steel wheels race along the rails, clacking from joint to joint. The big engines whine as they suck up diesel fuel and the scenery rushes by. Conrail train ENS-121 hits 60 miles an hour less than a mile out of the yard, tens of thousands of feet sooner than would a train weighed down by freight.

Fifteen miles to the north, Edgewood Tower switching operator Richard Hafer is expecting the Conrail. But first he’s expecting a crowded Amtrak passenger train, streaking along at more than 100 miles an hour.

The dispatchers keep the radio chatter going: “Got a hot move coming for ya,” says John Akins at Perryville.

“Aaah, what are ya gonna wake me up this time of day for?” Hafer responds. ”It’s almost quittin’ time.”

“Fifteen will be coming three, eighty-one will be on four and, oh, I think we’ll double barrel them.”

”And let the engines sit at Gunpow?”

“Sure.”

“All right,” says Hafer, “we can handle that.”

Jerry Evans puts his love for his work into a poem in 1981:

I ride my magic carpet
On ribbons made of steel
And my heart keeps pace
To the tapping of the wheels
Over mountains and through valleys I glide on shiny rail
As the boxcars float behind me
Like the wind through a stallion ‘s tail
I am the mind, my hands are the nerves
As I pilot my carpet by the sea and around curves
The power is addictive.feelings immense But now my ride is over
Mommy, can I have ten more cents?

At 1:23 p.m. on January 4, Evans has just crossed the Baltimore city line. He lets the Amtrak train’s speed build to about 120 miles an hour. It’s supposed to be capped off at 105, because the Colonial today includes one of the older Heritage passenger cars, built in 1953 and not designed for the Northeast Corridor’s highest speeds. Amtrak’s express Metroliners, the fastest passenger trains in the country, routinely operate at 125 miles per hour. But the Colonial is not a Metro liner.

[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Like nearly all Amtrak engineers, Evans used to work for Conrail, where the trains are slower, noisier, dirtier. Freight engineers are out of the public eye, they don’t haul human cargo, and they admit to being more casual about their work.

Some engineers stay away from passenger trains, because they can’t stand the man· date for high speed. Not Jerry Evans: He likes to go fast, just like any other engineer drawn to the high-speed Amtrak engines. To Evans, speed means control. In his auto, he’s earned eleven speeding tickets since 1969, though nothing alcohol-related, no reckless driving. Just speeding.

Evans and his colleagues are proud of their work and consider themselves no less professional than airline pilots. Their rail· road competes successfully for passengers with the airlines in the Northeast, claiming a 32-percent market share of the commuter traffic between Washington and New York. more than any one airline. But to maintain that share, speed is of the essence.

At the controls of the Colonial, Evans presses on. He didn’t have to work today. but took the extra duty for the $140 that will go to fixing up the house in Overlea. He’s missing the christening of his best friend’s little girl today and doesn’t feel good about that. But Denise will stand in for him at church.

Inside car 21236, the passengers have settled in comfortably. They have plenty of leg room and head room, open luggage racks overhead, no seat belts, a smooth ride, and the confidence that they’re using what they’ve been told is one of America’s safest ways to travel.

Conductor Donald Keasey comes through the car.

He takes a $29.50 ticket from a 16-year-old girl who wants to be an astronaut, an ambition that became unsettling to her mother after the space shuttle Challenger exploded.

Ceres Horn arrived home after classes at McDonogh school that day, Susan Horn’s eyes fixed on hers and the two rushed into a illg. “Precious,” her mother said, “I don’t want you to become an astronaut. I just couldn’t live with you coming into that kind of danger.”

But Ceres pulled away. “Mommy,” she said, “!can’t think of a better way to get to Coo than to be blown up to him.”

The conductor steadies himself from seat to seat as the train races on. He comes to Christy Johnson, who has unfinished business in California, where she’s helping a Palo Alto probation officer counsel a teenage drug abuser. Christy hands Kesey her I ticket.

He comes to TC Colley, who left a note the door of a dormitory buddy in Province—”I’m coming back. Are you?”—and who put down $58 for a train ticket that says he’II keep his pledge. Amtrak’s Colonial 94 rounds the sweeping curve that will bring into view the Gunpow switch, telling the crewmen to go even slower and to get ready to stop. They fly past it.

Moments later, at 1:29 p.m., Gates spots the “home” signal up ahead, 350 feet from the main line. Even through his oil-smeared windshield, the bleak winter sunlight paling the signal’s amber dots, he can make out what it says: Stop. That means the switch is closed, and that means something is probably coming on the other track—the high-speech passenger track.

The experienced engineer in Gates snaps to. Now fifteen hundred feet from where track meets track, he wants only to stop.

The throttle is cut and the emergency brakes are slammed on. The three engines jerk as the wheels lock and slide along the rails, squealing and spewing sparks. Gates and Cromwell are suddenly at war with more than three quarters of a million pounds of black and blue metal going 60 miles an hour.

The engines go through the closed switch, throwing it open and breaking into the main line. Gates and Cromwell find themselves sitting on the high-speed track, with part of their rearmost engine straddling the switch behind them.

Gates is breathing hard.

He and Cromwell know they’ re in a bad situation. They can’t turn right, can’t turn left. If something is coming behind them, they probably can’t outrun it. They might be able to back up, to go back over the switch, and the engineer throws the engine into reverse.

Cromwell looks back down the main-line track. He sees the powerful headlight of a train as it rounds the curve. He shouts over the din of the diesel engine:

“There’s something coming! Jump!”

Cromwell sprints away.

Alone in the cab of Colonial 94, Jerry Evans is doing what engineers normally do when the visibility is clear-focusing on the horizon, as far ahead as he can see, where the rails meet the sky. High-speed trains need a lot of room to stop.

The horror stories of veteran engineers spill out in taverns close by the railroad yards: kids who stand with their bicycles on the tracks until they can get the engineer to blow the horn; older kids who suspend manhole covers from overhead passes just to see what happens; teenagers in a car waving beer cans and pulling away a few seconds before the train comes by; one too many drivers trying to beat the train at a crossing. Engine–makers have given the cabs bulletproof windows, across which birds sometimes explode like balloons filled with red paint.

At night the engineers see a locomotive headlight in the distance and they’re not always sure it’s not on their own track. They can feel their hearts beating.

Despite the dangers, engineers don’t often get hurt. But rail men still talk about how the companies cut back on maintenance and safety employees, and the more conscientious worry about the drunks and druggies too. There has been a general feeling for some time now that the rent is well past due.

As for Jerry Evans, he’s a heavily invested family man, and he takes no chances. He lost his mother last fall, and it made him think about the fragility of his own life on the job. He wrote out a will and discussed his feelings with Denise in November. At first she didn’t want to hear about it, but Jerry said it was best to be safe, to worry about herself more than him in the event of an accident. “I wouldn’t know it,” he said. “It would happen that fast.”

Then he told her, ”If anything ever happens to me out there, don’t settle.”

In the cab of Colonial 94, Evans scans ahead as the Gunpow switch comes into sight around the curve.

A patch of Conrail blue occupies the place fifteen hundred feet ahead where his train is going.

He throws the Colonial into emergency at I :30 p.m. The braking will last fourteen seconds.

The passengers in car 21236 lurch slightly. Conductor Keasey has just finished collecting tickets in the first three cars and thinks to himself, “I wonder what Jerry’s doing up there.”

Harold Bergin, a chef from New York headed home after the holidays, look.s up from a magazine story about how to make risotto. He’s got his Walkman radio on and can’t hear the pair of skis rattling in one of the racks overhead. His wife, Kyra, continues reading her New York magazine.

In the locomotive, Jerry Evans is going through the moments that his wife will later be unable to shut out of her mind. She will wish that she could somehow have held him, to soothe the inescapable terror.

Evans does not jump from the cab; it probably wouldn’t matter if he did. The physical pain is gone in milliseconds. The poet with the boyish passion for trains will be eulogized as ”the best darn engineer.”

Northeast Corridor radio traffic, 1:31 p.m., January 4:

“Just talkin’ about somebody in emergency here. Just a minute.”

“Ya hear that, Power Director?”

“1 SL, 2SL Perryville?”

“Yeah, what is it?”

“Transmission.”

“We just lost power.”

“He lost the transmission line.”

“Oh, shit.”

“What happened?”

“Those engines went through the signal at Gunpow. They said that and, ah, 94 got into them. We need ambulances at Gunpow. Right here at the interlocking, evidently.”

“He hit ’em.”

“He sure did.”

A fireball mushrooms at the point of impact. Harold Bergin is thrown forward and sees a bright orange light filling his window. He shouts to Kyra: “Hold on!”
The Colonial has slammed into the side of the rearmost Conrail engine straddling the switch and the main track. The lead Amtrak engine disintegrates and the Conrail locomotive explodes into countless pieces, the largest a chunk of scorched metal the size of a motorcycle. Thousands of gallons of diesel fuel are ignited.

Almost a quarter mile south of the switch, the Colonial’s rear cars continue forward, shoving the forward cars off the track in a zigzag chain reaction. For ten seconds the entire crumpling mass slides forward along the tracks.

Cromwell is running for his life, cringing under a canopy of shrapnel flying all around him. One piece fractures his lower leg and drops him to the ground. He gets up and keeps running.

The empty cafe car behind the Amtrak engines is heaved on its side and slams to the ground, scraping along the rails. The next car, 21236, also flips sideways. Bergin watches the ground passing by the window as thunder envelops everything, muffling the screams. Seats break free and tumble everywhere. Luggage and people fly. Bergin is hurled forward more than ten feet into the aisle, stopping when his head hits a seatback.

The front of the car corkscrews, its thin aluminum skin ripping into huge, jagged blades. It cracks and buckles as the mass of burning wreckage slows and finally stops.

The first thing Bergin can’t figure out is why he can’t hear screaming and crying. He doesn’t know that half the people who have shared his car are dying and others are unconscious.

“Harold?” It’s his wife calling.

“Kyra?”

They can’t see each other because of the gathering black smoke of the diesel fuel and the twisted heap of luggage and chairs. He has lost his glasses, and she has blood dripping into her eyes.

”Find your way out,” says Harold. ‘T find my way out. Just get out.”

Kyra gets out through a window a drops shoeless to the cold, sharp gravel. She takes in the scene, how the network of overhead wires is tangled around the wreck—a huge, battered insect in a broken web.

Harold is in one end of the car and doesn’t see many signs of life. He climbs back and forth, desperately looking for an escape. His only route is partially blocked by a man who is pinned to the floor, alive and conscious. Harold has an injured left shoulder and cannot free him. The thought of just climbing over the man and leaving him is sickening, but there’s no other way to go. Harold apologizes as he clambers over the man to safety.

The Bergins try to get their bearings. Other passengers already are milling around, some moving purposelessly in shock. As the Bergins huddle together and the cold air tightens the blood on their faces, they look across a drainage ditch to see the gathering people of Chase looking back at them—each side staring in stunned disbelief, two groups of people jerked from the routine of a Sunday afternoon.

Some of the Chase residents are crying. Finally one woman shouts, ”Does anybody want to use my telephone to call their families?”

Reality comes to Rick Gates in pieces, an escalating image of catastrophe that his mind tries its best to deny. At first he clings to the hope that no one was killed. He’s worried about Butch, because he didn’t see where he went. He has no idea what happened to the Amtrak engineer—who he would later learn was someone he’d passed many hours with when they both worked for Conrail.

As the black smoke billows from the heart of the wreckage, Gates runs back the largely intact Conrail lead engine, which was pushed nine hundred feet up tracks and away from the wreck. He keys the portable radio and shouts “Emergency emergency, emergency!” He shouts it repeatedly but can’t seem to raise an answer from any of the area towers.

He grabs a fire extinguisher and runs back to where some of the cars have piled onto the back of an Amtrak engine, which is crushed into the trackbed with one car elbowed over it, and there Rick Gates is confronted with his first casualty. A man pinned between the engine and the top car moving his head and moaning as the fire creeps toward him. Gates chips away at flames with the fire extinguisher as emergency workers show up. The man is spared from the flames, but will die a few hours later.

Gates races back and forth around t wreckage. People who know him begin arriving, members of railroading’s extend family who happen to live nearby. Former Conrail engineer Pat Kelly finds him pumping the radio for help. Gates gives him the radio and Kelly asks what happened.

“I blew a red,” says Gates. “I got through a switch and I couldn’t get back.”

Gates goes looking for Butch, who by now is calling his girlfriend, who also lives nearby. Cromwell tells her he’s okay and adds, “I think I’m going to lose my job.”

A Conrail conductor and his wife walk to the scene at about 1:45, the wife thinking to herself, “This can’t be real. Whoever did the special effects in this movie is going win an Oscar.” As George and Harriett Telljohn come upon their friend Rick Gates, he is pacing around frantically in his oversize brown leather flight jacket, holding on to the receding hope that no one has died.

The Telljohns assume that Gates has also just arrived. “Rick, what are you doing here?” asks George, who will remain Gates’s close friend right through the worst of what is to come. “How’d you get here so fast?”

“l was the engineer,” says Gates. Butch was with me. Go find Butch.” Telljohn goes looking for Cromwell. Harriett Telljohn and Gates remain talking as rescue workers walk by with a stretcher bearing a lifeless human form beneath a white sheet. It passes two feet from the engineer, who shudders. He then overhears a fireman’s orders to another rescue worker. “There’s another one over there in the bushes. Go get it.”

“Oh my God,” says Gates, falling into Harriett’s arms and sobbing.

He hears cries for help and comes upon a woman in her 30s, trapped between the end of the car and a seat that has her pinned to the floor. He tries to free the seat but it’s pressured in. In moments he will be joined by the first two police officers on the scene. They finally will free the woman after about an hour, when the accident scene has grown into an enormous and complex emergency operation.

A total of 507 fire fighters with 135 pieces of equipment have responded; 509 county police, 185 state police, and sixty Amtrak police; two hundred Red Cross workers and hundreds of other volunteers and medical personnel. And 619 residents of Chase who get involved will later participate in a survey by county police. During the next few hours, the rescue forces set up command posts, aid stations, and staging areas for transporting the injured.

The first ambulances to arrive are raided by panic-stricken survivors who loot them of tape, gauze, first-aid kits, anything they can reach. In all, 175 passengers will be listed as injured in the crash.

This is not the first transportation disaster to visit the Chase peninsula. Some of the locals remember when a Capital Airline prop plane carrying thirty-one people exploded in a storm in 1959 with no survivors. But it’s different when there are so many walking wounded, and the people of Chase are responding in a hundred ways. Two boys are the first of more than thirty local volunteers who go into the cars and carry out the injured. Two paramedics cannot stop crying. Seventeen-year-old Michael Booker is unnerved by the limp body of an infant in his arms. He later will learn that the child survived.

Neighbors bring out blankets and first-aid supplies. One man works his backyard garden hose on a spreading brush fire. A few young men place lawn chairs on the roof of a nearby garage and eat dinner while they watch.

Still others whose houses are clustered along the tracks bring survivors inside, offering blankets, coffee, telephones. Their homes are transformed into communications centers, first-aid centers, bases for reporters and photographers. Some houses are thoroughly trashed: bloodstained floors, carpets thick with mud. The county will later solicit requests for reimbursement.

On the other side of car 21236 from where Waskevitz still is working, rescue and trauma workers are struggling to save three people trapped in the compacted maze of steel. At least two other people are trapped and still alive there.

Dr. Ameen Ramzy of University Hospital’s Shock Trauma Unit is accustomed to seeing seriously injured people hanging at the edge of their mortality, and he has brought many of them back. He worked in a Beirut war zone a few years ago. But nothing has prepared him for the daylong succession of disappointment he is about to through. Of the fifteen passengers of Colonial who are killed, thirteen are aboard car 21236.

The trapped victims are really trapped The powerful “jaws of life” rescue device is like hand pliers against the train’s heavy steel. If the doctor can get some of the victims intubated with fluids, he can prolong their chances for life. But some of them are nearly impossible to reach.

Essex paramedic Kathy Smith is tending to a 7-year-old boy and his grandmother who are trapped together in one end of the top car. Adam Moore—a budding young model from New Jersey with a face that some photographers fawn over—is pinned on one side by a buckled seatback, and on yet another by one wall of the car.

“Let me out of here,” Adam pleads with the paramedic. “Why don’t you help me?”

“Hush, baby,” says 52-year-old Peggy Moore weakly, “They’re trying to help.”

“I want to go home,” says Adam.

“We’re going to have you out,” the paramedic assures him. “It won’t be too much longer and you’II be headed home.”

“Do I have to go by train?” he asks. Just then a stream of cold fire-suppression foam pours into the car from firefighters working on the outside. It forms a pool around Adam, and the paramedic can’t protect him from it. Now Smith has to worry about hypothermia.

She urges doctors in the Shock Trauma “Go” team to consider amputating the grandmother’s legs as a last-ditch effort to save both victims.

The doctors aren’t so sure it’ll work. Smith gets frustrated as the Moores grow weaker with the passing minutes. She turns to another paramedic, “What are they waiting for?”

As doctors hook up IV lines and firefighters struggle with seemingly immovable steel, both the 7-year-old and his grandmother drift in and out of consciousness before finally slipping away-within minutes of each other.

When a ‘Go’ team doctor pronounces Adam dead, one paramedic stares up at him and says, “Doc, are you sure?”

Nearby, one woman is extricated alive and flown to the trauma unit, where her legs are amputated. She lingers for eight days before dying.

Outside the top car, a doctor is stopped by a man with a slight injury to his face. He says he would like to leave the scene, but would the doctor mind certifying his injury? ‘I’m sure my lawyer will be mad at me later if I don’t get one now,” he says.

The National Guard erects a large canvas tent—a morgue.

By nightfall, County Police Chief Cornelius Behan turns to Major Robert Oatman and says, ”Keep in mind that this could turn into a criminal investigation.” Oatman seals off the area around the Conrail engines up the track. But by this time a number of people, including Rick Gates, have been in and out of the cab. The cab is now clean. Gates’s and Cromwell’s belongings are soon returned to them unexamined by police.

A cleaned-out cab will later add fuel to rumors that the Conrail operators were watching the playoff game on a portable television on the job, and that someone later threw the set into the nearby river. But county police skin divers will search the riverbed without success.

As rescue efforts continue, federal investigators clamber through the wreckage. Some of what they find leads them back to the cab of the Conrail locomotive at hundreds of feet up the track, and some what they find will lead them far beyond.

Susan Horn hears of the wreck over the car radio on her way home from Penn Station and immediately starts talking with God: “Please don’t let that be her train.” Her 9-year-old boy remains unwaveringly optimistic. “Mommy,” says Howie. “I know she’s all right.”

At home, they guard the telephone and monitor the television. Early in the evening, Susan calls her husband in Haifa, Israel—”Roger, it’s bad news. There’s been a train crash with Cere’s train. It’s been hours and we haven’t heard a word. We have to assume that at best she’s been very seriously hurt.” Roger Horn is given an immediate “compassionate case” seat by El Al on at flight to New York. He will spend the thirteen-hour flight trying to assume the best, his stomach twisted into a knot.

The Horns hear nothing until after dawn, when a family friend goes to the temporary morgue at the crash site and finds Cere’s body.

Susan, Corinne, and Howard huddle together for strength on Monday. Roger calls from Kennedy Airport in New York that evening. He tells them, “I love you. There’s a lot of love in our family and it will get us all through this.” In Potomac, Arthur and Ann Johnson spend the early hours calling for information, the looming silence giving them no comfort.

They call their daughter who Joy in New York, who reminds them of Christy’s recent paramedical training. “She’s probably just treating people at the scene.” By 4:30 a.m. Monday, they have joined other relatives of Colonial passengers at a Holiday Inn about twenty miles south of the wreck. All they are told is “stand by.”

Ann Johnson is reading the Psalms in her Bible-the 23rd, the 51st, the 88th, “O Lord, I call for help by day; I cry out in the light before thee.”—and she hears them as if at a funeral. An Episcopal minister approaches them at midmorning, accompanied by a couple of police detectives, a Red Cross worker, and an Amtrak claims agent. Gently they confirm the worst. One of them thinks to warn the Johnsons of the cluster of media people waiting in the lobby. Arthur turns away and says, “Somebody find me a back door.”

In Pennsylvania, Tom and Susan Colley have kept vigil throughout the night, anxious about using the phone for fear they’d block their son’s incoming call. They’ve been through this routine before. A year ago, TC was in an Amtrak train that hit a truck south of Chicago. Lots of cars were knocked off the track, but nobody was seriously hurt. That’s always comforted them about taking the train rather than flying: so many fewer passengers would have survived an airplane crash.

At the time, Red Cross got TC to a phone to call his parents in the middle of the night. And as time went on, whatever trauma he had experienced was transformed into a remembered adventure. So the Colleys figure TC might just be unimpressed with such familiar territory and maybe has caught one of the buses provided by Amtrak.

Then an incoming phone call puts an end to that hope, and Tom Colley finds himself notifying other relatives that the sole heir to the family name has been undone.

In the coming months, he will spend many hours in the photographic darkroom he shared with TC, printing his son’s previously unprinted photos, dwelling on the unfulfilled promise of a remarkable talent.

Gates and Cromwell soon reestablish contact. Aware of the mounting search for guilty parties, they decide to lie. The first rumors from the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board hint at switcher error. But these pass as investigators talk with people who talked with Gates just after the crash, one of whom quotes him as saying, “It’s pretty obvious what happened. I got through a red and couldn’t get back.”

At 1 p.m. on Wednesday, as workers continue to clear debris from the site of the wreck, Gates is sitting in a lawyer’s office in Baltimore, surrounded by lawyers, federal investigators, and a few union men.

He is telling them what happened after Bayview: …from there we continued north, received clear indication on the home signal at North Point, a clear signal on the home signal at River. . . We received a clear signal on the 836 signal at Bengies, and then at the 816 signal. At that time, Mr. Cromwell was fixing his lunch, and cutting open some water bottles, so that we could put our Cokes into. And I saw the ‘approach limited’ signal flashing—had to get right close to see it, but it was flashing. And upon going under it I called the ‘approach medium’ signal to Mr. Cromwell. He turned around, and I don’t know whether he saw it or not, but he saw the ‘approach medium’ in the cab. I acknowledged as we went under it and started slow down a little bit. Mr. Cromwell and myself were talking, and as he fixed his lunch we were basically complaining about the engines. And after that—I don’t remember how close I was to the stop signal, but as soon as I saw it I immediately dumped the air, plugged the engines by putting reverse in reverse and pulling back on the throttle again. I grabbed the portable radio and started yelling the emergency. And after that we—that’s when the accident happened.

They ask him about the alert or whistle. “I acknowledged it so fast it didn’t have a chance to go off,” he says. They ask him if was on drugs the day of the crash. He tells them no. They ask if he is a user of alcohol or drugs. After an interruption from his lawyer, he tells them, “Upon advice of my counsel, I will not answer that.”

Then it’s the brakeman’s turn. Cromwell says he helped Gates monitor a steady succession of clear signals on the way to Gunpow, when he took a break to prepare a sandwich and some drinks. He says he never heard an alert or whistle, and that he wasn’t looking when the train approached home signal at Gunpow: The next thing I remember is I was still in process of getting my sandwich-—everything all set after we went by the Chase signal—it’s the 816—and I don’t know how long after that, but I heard the engine jump. The engines jumped. I didn’t know if Rick did it, or if it was some kind of failure or deraling or what. So I looked out the fireman’s side windows, and I seen the headlight in back of me. I didn’t know if the light was stopped, moving, or you know, what it was doing. . . .

After the crash, an ambulance took him to Johns Hopkins Hospital for his broken leg, and later Sunday he gave blood and urine specimens. He goes on to say that he hadn’t used drugs that day.

Two federal drug labs, however, will say that he had-both marijuana and PCP, a particularly powerful drug sold as an animal tranquilizer.

Evidence of marijuana use also was found in blood and urine samples taken from Gates the evening of the crash.

Gates’s and Cromwell’s statements are the last they will make publicly before a shroud of silence descends over their actions in the cab.

Both hide from the press. Gates resorts to waiting in the laundry room of his apartment building until the TV cameramen have left his door. He spends days and sleepless nights alternating between guilt and denial. One night in February his friend George Telljohn finds him sitting on his couch with a pile of mail, mostly hate mail, on the coffee table. Gates hands one letter to Telljohn, not lifting his gaze from the floor. A snapshot of Ceres Horn flutters to the table. The letter reads:

Dear Mr. Gates,

You don ‘t even know me, but your life has had such a significant impact upon mine. I am Corinne Horn, sister of Ceres Horn, victim of the Amtrak crash.

I don’t know if you read the newspaper articles on my sister, but if you did, you would know that she was a 16-year-old freshman at Princeton who was ranked second in her senior class, and graduated Magna Cum Laude from McDonogh School. . .

She was absolutely the best person, besides my parents, to ever set foot on this earth . … Reese was my better half. When I was flirting, she was studying or doing something constructive. Reese was going to bean astronaut, her childhood fantasy. And then you shot her down.

Mr. Gates, I bet you never dreamed of the consequences when you started puffing away on January 4, 1987. What could possibly have possessed you to smoke it on the job? I would understand if it was in the privacy of your own home, but not on the job.

I used to hate you/or killing the only person who ever fully understood me, who could identify with me. But not any more. Now I only pity you, because you will have to live every day/or the rest of your life with the knowledge that you took sixteen lives, sixteen beautiful lives . … I truly pity you, Mr. Gates, and hope that you are strong enough to face the days ahead, because I know I wouldn’t be.

Please write back to me. You owe me at least that much.

Telljohn asks Gates if he’II write back. Gates says his lawyers won’t let him. He soon goes to a psychiatric hospital for drug and alcohol treatment. He attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. He preaches about the perils of substance abuse to his friends, some of whom find his self-accusation unsettling.

“If Rick’s an alcoholic,” says one of his drinking buddies from the yard, “then I’m an alcoholic. And I’m not an alcoholic.”

While maintaining his claim that bad signals and equipment are to blame for the accident, Gates also tells at least one friend of his growing desire to become a substance abuse counselor. Some crash victims’ families, virtually all of whom would like to see stiff retribution, think that would be a very good idea. Already, however, the credibility of Gates and Cromwell—the two key witnesses to the crash—is diminishing. The evidence of their drug use and word of the taped whistle come to light. The Conrail engine’s speed recorder shows that it hadn’t slowed to the 40 miles an hour required by the signal that Gates had acknowledged seeing. A reenactment shows that if Gates had obeyed that signal, he would have been able to stop in time.

In the last 10 years, the American railway labor force has been reduced almost by half. Some in the rank and file blame this for fostering an attitude of rebellion against company policies and for reinforcing the traditional spirit of ‘us versus them.”

Amtrak’s worst crash is not the first to be used as ammunition by the bitterly feuding factions of the rail industry. The tragedy briefly held the promise of uniting them in common cause, but that promise is lost in a round of familiar accusations.

As the Federal Railroad Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board begin closing in on a conclusion of human error, some union men continue backing up Gates’ s story. “I don’t have any reason not to believe him,” says United Transportation Union representative Bill Packer in June. By July, Packer stops responding to inquiries.

After the discovery of the taped whistle in Gates’s cab, FRA Administrator John Riley announces a dragnet of the five major rail-yards on the Northeast Corridor. Despite the advance notice, federal inspectors discover six locomotives with identically taped whistles just two weeks after the crash. Later they will find seventy more across the country. Riley calls each one an accident waiting to happen. The unions ask where the FRA inspectors were before the accident.

“I think all of us heard stories at one time or another about engineers disabling whistles,” says Riley from his office on the eighth floor of the Department of Transpormion building in Washington. “But we didn’t know how big of a deal it was until Chase.The perception was that you couldn’t ever catch it, because it was so easy to cover up. You not only have to find somebody who is reckless, you also have to find somebody who is stupid.” When inspectors found a cab without a working whistle, he says, “We weren’t cailing them ‘tampering,’ they showed up ‘inoperative whistle’—just like any other mechanical defect.”

Amtrak president Graham Claytor points that the federal government is not responsible for the detailed inspection and maintenance of privately owned locomotives. “The [Conrail] management are the ones supposed to have caught that,” he says, “not the FRA.”

Labor leaders call Riley a front man for railroad companies and tell him to stay off their turf and to levy heavier fines on management violations. They say most safety problems stem from management’s squeezing every dime: deferring maintenance, pushing schedules, overloading freight cars. Riley calls railroad workers honest and hard-working but calls their union leaders “featherbedders.” In any case, he says, “I’ve offended everybody—which is as it should be.”

Riley wants the FR to have the same authority over railroad engineers—who are required to be licensed—as the Federal Aviation Administration has over airline pilots. He has no enforcement power over individual railroad employees. It is against federal law for an engineer to be drunk, but even if Riley personally found one with a six-pack in the cab of an engine, he couldn’t fire or fine them. Meanwhile, the credibility of the railroads’ new self-policing and drug-amnesty programs is called into question.

From almost every sector of the industry comes a call for mandatory random drug testing. But the unions insist that such testing is not constitutional. Proponents say that train operators should be held to a higher standard than others, and that only drug abusers have anything to fear. Labor counters that management could use the tests to harass employees. Proponents say computer-generated random selection would prevent that. But union officials respond to their constituencies by trying to shout down random testing at hearing after hearing.

In public they lash out at the companies and the regulators before more gently censuring some of their own, even as a few privately admit that nothing else has prevented on-the-job drug abuse, and that their own credibility is harmed. Riley accuses the unions of sacrificing safety by using the random drug testing issue as a bargaining chip. “They could help us a lot on safety,” he says, “but the price of cooperation is always ‘alcohol and drug’. lt ain’t gonna happen.”

In the months after the crash, many of the railmen’s taverns on the Northeast Corridor note a substantial drop in business. Predictions are that it will bounce back. In March a Conrail freight train overruns a “stop” signal just before a track junction near Philadelphia, with an Amtrak Colonial following behind. Automatic signals warn the Amtrak engineer, and he is able to stop his train well before the switch. The Conrail engineer is drug-tested and found to have marijuana metabolites in his blood at five times the level found in Rick Gates’s . In September a Conrail brakeman in the Bayview Yard—one place where it’d seem self-policing would be working well—faces his fourth charge of driving while impaired by alcohol. He has twenty-six prior traffic I convictions and six license suspensions or revocations. His drinking habit is no secret in the yard. He is still working on the railroad. Amtrak comes out in support of random drug testing, but Conrail opposes it, saying that its program of “reasonable cause” testing is good enough.

Several months after the crash, legal maneuvers leave Rick Gates more isolated than ever. He and Cromwell have been forced to resign their jobs, and Conrail stops paying for their legal defense.

Baltimore County state’s attorneys find a statute that would allow an engineer to be charged with manslaughter if the state can prove gross negligence. They subpoena Ed Cromwell, the brakeman who has become invisible even to the extended family of railroading.

In a meeting, they convince Cromwell and his lawyer that under state law any man in the cab can be indicted and convicted of manslaughter.

The defense attorney and his client decide to make a deal if state and federal prosecutors promise immunity from prosecution, in writing. The deal is made. Cromwell will testify in secret before a grand jury, and he will tell of the marijuana, missed signals, the cover story—everything.

The manslaughter indictment of Rick Gates arrives on May 4. The accused appears in public for the first time since the crash wearing mirrored sunglasses as his lawyer denies charges that his client killed sixteen people with a runaway train. Gates is in court for preliminary motions twice during the summer, each time sitting stiffly, with a thousand-yard stare, as his team of public defenders whisper among themselves. rarely turning to their client.

Roger Horn is there, wrestling with his feelings of pity for the accused and bitterness over the loss of the daughter he called his “best friend.” Susan Horn stays home, declaring her sympathy for Gates and Cromwell but adding that part of their punishment should be to have to live with a victim’s family for a week.

In considered moments, some of the victims’ families say that they know the crew never meant to harm anyone, and that they certainly must be suffering, too.

Railmen at the Bayview Yard take up a collection for Gates, in part to help him his child-support payments. Thirteen friends have pitched in to make his $5,000 bail. There is no serious discussion of helping Cromwell. They know he is working with the state.

Gates shows no anger toward the brakeman. He asks a friend how Butch is doing.

“Why should you care about Butch?”

“I pray for him every day,” says Gates, startling the friend, who thought he was an agnostic.
“Even though he supplied the drugs and then worked for the state so he could get off scot-free?”

”All the more reason to pray for him,” says Gates.

Stated in its most basic form, the cause of the accident was the failure of Amtrak No. 94 to stop before striking Conrail ENS-121. —Conrail’s “proposed probable cause.”submitted to the NTSB.

At the congressional rail-safety hearinq on that hot Thursday in July, Tom Luken, chairman of a House transportation sub-committee, is grilling the FRA’s John Riley about the industry’s safety record. The crash of the Colonial is the biggest nightmare of Riley’s four-year stint.

Riley sips his water as he parries the Ohio Democrat’s pointed questioning. He produces charts and graphs of what he calls improved safety statistics.

“Now these figures are impressive,” responds Luken, “but are they possibly misleading?”

A union man cannot stifle a guffaw. Labor leaders are grouped on one side of the room, enjoying Riley’s discomfiture.

It’s said that some Conrail officials are here, too. Their company moves more freight than any other in the region, but since January 4 its public presence has been conspicuously scarce.

Amtrak’s Graham Claytor testifies that there’s no need to increase the fines for management safety violations because mere citations are insult enough. Anyway, he points out, in fining the heavily subsidized Amtrak, the federal government would be, in effect, fining itself.

All the while, Roger Horn the parent.sits on the floor in the lee of the half-wall separating the constituents from the politicians

Sometimes he asks himself, “Why am l doing this? Why is it up to the wounded citizen to do what these people are paid to do?” He thought he could protect his family from a dangerous world. Safety was a first priority. He has never allowed his children in cars driven by teenagers. The Horns held an alcohol-free party for Ceres’s senior prom. Now, he says, he feels “stripped of my manhood” by forces beyond his control.

He finds himself wanting to stand and shout, ”Gentlemen, this is not an academic exercise! These are real people and events, and it’s going to happen again!”

By 4:30 p.m., there are fewer than half a dozen spectators left in the once-jammed hearing room. It’s time for Roger Horn and Tom Colley and Arthur Johnson to testify. They gather at the witness table.

Johnson is a former administrator at the: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a veteran of congressional hearings. His daughter Christy was crushed and suffocated in the wreck of the Colonial 94. ”On several occasions I have listened in amazement and disgust to representatives of labor and other lobbying bodies as they consistently resist efforts to strengthen the law, even though their own members would be the first to benefit,” he says.

Luken then leaves, explaining that he must catch a plane back home. Now only one congressman is left in the room.

Colley testifies in the nearly empty room. The bearded professor of theatre from Shippensburg University speaks om a calm but impassioned voice about how his 18-year-old son, TC, was burned before dying of smoke inhilation. TC was his only child, the fourth Colley to be named Thomas, the one who promised to name his own son Thomas.

Now it is Roger Horn’s turn. Traces of emotion slip into his otherwise academic delivery. Before reading a statement, he brings up the idea of “jail time for egregious negligence” on the part of railroad company executives. “That will get their attention.”

In his statement, he urges Congress to pass a tough rail-safety bill. “We have leaned to our horror,” he adds. “that neither the railroad companies nor the railroad companies nor the railroad unions will voluntarily enforce appropriate levels of operating safety, not even those railroad companies that are actually creatures of the federal government.”

The victims’ families linger in the hallway. They share their frustrations, their disgust at the day long display of self-preservation in the wake of such needless human destruction.

They’ve watched as each party used the tragedy for its own designs. The actions of the two Conrail crewmen made it the perfect case for we-told-you-so’s from company management and the FRA. Equipment problems like the lack of automatic train control and untested safety whistles served the same purpose for labor. ”Watch out,” said a labor lawyer in passing. ”There are more crashes coming.”

The families are angered by Conrail’s absence from the public process. They give Amtrak’s Claytor credit for facing the heat, even if they aren’t happy with many of his answers.

Some progress has been made. The FRA proposed phasing in ATCs on every train in the Northeast Corridor over two years. Conrail says the government should pay for ATCs on its locomotives. Amtrak agreed to install prototype luggage-restraint systems on four cars and to equip the rest of the fleet if they work. Amtrak and Conrail already had agreed to reduce freight-train presence on the high-speed rails.

Horn and the Colleys are car-pooling back north in Washington’s rush-hour traffic, wondering aloud how to assign blame.

They’ve heard about how the operators of the errant Conrail engine had used drugs; how federal inspectors had failed to monitor a growing problem of disabled safety devices; how the FRA and the NTSB had temporarily pursued, and with Amtrak’s blessings then dropped, the case for automatic train controls; and how labor continues to fight against federal licensing and random drug testing of crewmen.

Roger Horn falls silent for a time, until the traffic comes to a standstill. “There’s enough blood to go around for everybody,” he says.

Source

Susan’s Choice

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:32:18 +0000

Jim Harrison misses his wife. In his paper-strewn family room, the retired McCormick spice company bigwig widens his eyes until their cloudy blue irises swim in whites, like two eggs frying.

“I pray to God Susan comes back, but the odds of her coming back are not good,” says Harrison of his estranged wife, who vanished from his house on Friday, August 5, 1994. “It’s possible she went to Ireland.”

His face is all pathos and distance, a trans-Atlantic wrong number. Besides some of his relatives, Jim is the only person close to Susan Harrison who doesn’t say she’s dead, who doesn’t beg to learn how she was killed, who doesn’t volunteer haunting images of delicate Susan in a landfill, Susan down a well.

If you mention the common suspicion that Jim knows more about Susan’s disappearance than he’s willing to admit, you won’t cast a shadow on his broad, ruddy face. “The vast majority feel I have nothing to do with it, and they’re right,” says Harrison, curling back his lips to reveal his small, rectangular teeth. “Thousands of people have been very supportive.”

That Harrison will not name one person out of these thousands does not mean he knows where his wife is. It only means he stands alone, aloner by the day.

Monday, August 8, 1994, 4 p.m.

(Three days after Susan’s disappearance. Matt Gordon, the son of Susan’s dear friend Mary Jo Gordon, is trimming bushes at his mother’s Greenspring Valley house. Susan often stayed there after fights with Jim. Jim Harrison pulls up in a long, dark-blue sedan and sticks his head out the window.)

JIM: Is your mother at home?

MATT: No.

(Jim parks and gets out of the car. Matt notes that Jim’s face is puffy and flushed; his hands and speech seem unsteady. Matt smells alcohol on his breath.)

JIM: Do you know where I might be able to find your mother?

MATT: She’s at work.

JIM: Susan is missing.

MATT: I know. I heard.

JIM: I’m very worried. I have absolutely no idea where she might be. I thought your mother might know. Could you give me her phone numbers at home and at work?

MATT: Sure. Wait here. (Jogs inside for paper; writes down phone numbers; returns and hands them to Jim.)

JIM: Thank you. If you hear an thing, please, please let me know.

(They shake hands. Jim walks back to his car.)

What’s widely known: More than a a year ago, bright generous Ruxton mom Susan Hurley Harrison vanished. She was last seen by second husband Jim, from whom she was separated. He said Susan had been to his house several times that day, acting in turns loving and abusive—”going manic-depressive,” he called it. To Cockeysville police, this was a familiar description. It was how Jim usually explained the fights that had made the Harrisons’ home a frequent destination for their blue-and-white squad cars.

Susan had probably driven off a about 10 p.m., Jim said-he wasn’t sure, because he’d gone to bed to avoid her vitriol. Her green Saab convertible was found parked at National Airport with the key in the ignition and new gas in the tank. But no one has heard from Susan, and no body has turned up. Police searched Jim’s house, which was cleaned around the time Susan disappeared by a new maid who quit almost immediately. Bur if police found evidence of foul play. they’re not talking. Jim took a lie-detector test. Police told him he failed, but he’s sticking to his story.

Jim has cooperated with investigators and reporters. against his lawyers’ advice. But unlike Susan’s siblings who hired a private investigator and who call pol1Ce several times a week for progress reports, Jim Harrison has hired no one to look for Susan. And in the 15 months since her disappearance, he has called poke just a handful of times.

“I feel Jim holds the key to the mystery,” says Lieutenant Sam Bowerman, a specialist in criminal personality profiling. “He says it’s ridiculous for anyone to think anyone would have harmed Susan, because he loved her. But love really doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

September 1994

(About one month after Susan’s disappearance. In Jim’s family room. William Ramsey, the lead detective investigating the case, is questioning Jim.)

RAMSEY: So, Susan is down at the bottom of the stairs, screaming at you, and you just got to bed and fall asleep?

JIM: Yes, that’s right.

RAMSEY: And when you do wake up again?

JIM: About eight.

RAMSEY: Not four a.m.?

JIM: Four?

RAMSEY: A C&P lineman heard a car door slam on your property about then, heard a car start and drive off down Timonium Road, away from I-83.

JIM: How did they hear that?

RAMSEY: The lineman was up on a utility pole.

JIM: Must have been someone turning around in my driveway. People turn around there all the time.

Susan Hurley Harrison was talkative, a fragile blonde with an easy, contagious laugh. If a friend were blue, Susan would conjure a ridiculous image—a nun driving a beer truck, say—and present it for comic effect. “Now laugh!” she’d command, with just a vestige of a Boston accent. And she would laugh herself.

One of five children of a Massachusetts silver-company executive, Susan also had a creative, domestic bent. “There were always projects she was working on,” recalls brother John Hurley, eight years her junior. “When I was little, she’d let me help her lay out these big tissue-paper things she’d use to make patterns for clothes. Or she’d hold my hands up while she rolled up a ball of yarn off them.”

Susan studied art history at Manhattanville College, then found curatorial work in Boston. At 25, she married law student Tom Owsley, a Harvard chum of her older brother Bill. Joining Tom in North Carolina, Susan worked two more years, until Tom graduated and the couple moved. A year later, in 1970, her first son, Jonathan, was born.

Jon and his younger brother, Nick Owsley, entered Susan’s world at its center and stayed there. “Those kids were her life,” says Clara Arana, a friend and feliow craftswoman. “They were what kept her alive.”

As youngsters, Jon and Nick learned to expect their doting mother at every school event, every lacrosse game. Jon had to beg her to stay on the sidelines: “No matter what, never, ever run down onto the field if you think I’m hurt, I don’t care how bad it looks,” he said. “It’s not cool for a guy to have his mother run down on the field in front of everybody.”

She overwhelmed the boys with handmade gifts. “She’d make us sweaters, mittens, lamp shades, everything,” recalls Nick, now a junior at Middlebury College. “Sometimes you’d just mention something offhand, just admire it, and she’d make you one. You had to be careful what you said,” he jokes.

Susan told her boys they were her best friends, that they understood her like no one else did. The boys say she offered a steady stream of solid guidance; even in college, she was the first person they turned to for comfort. At a memorial service in June, Jon read a remembrance of Susan, written as a letter to her. Here is part: “When our teammate died my junior year, I picked you up at the airport just hours after I found out. I was completely distraught, suffering in a way I could not comprehend. ‘Oh, Jonathan,’ you said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ And you held my hand the whole way down from Burlington to Middlebury.

“And true to form, always thinking of others, you told me to make sure that his mother had a Mother’s Day card—it was only three days away—signed by the entire team, so that she would know she was not alone.”

November 22, 1994

(Almost four months after Susan’s disappearance. In a Towson courtroom, at a hearing to name Jon the guardian of Susan’s belongings. Her husband is legally the first in line for that task, but the family wants Jon to be named instead. Jim does not challenge the request, but he has nevertheless been asked to testify. Carey Deeley, the attorney for Susan’s four siblings, first husband and sons, is questioning Jim.)

DEELEY: Your wife, on July 27, 1993, checked in at the hospital to be treated for a bruise on her right forehead, down into her eye, with swelling noted to the doctor in the hospital. Her knees were scraped and sore. Her wrist had been twisted. Her right eye was almost swollen shut.

DANA WILLIAMS (JIM’S LAWYER): Objection.

DEELEY: Does that ring a bell?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

JUDGE CHRISTIAN KAHL: Overruled.

JIM HARRISON: I don’t remember that situation. DEELEY: Showing you what’s been marked for identification—

WILLIAMS: Can I see that, Mr. Deeley?

DEELEY: —as—

JIM: Black eyes? Is that what you’re going to show me?

DEELEY: Let’s see what I’m going to show, sir. (Shows two photographs of Susan with a blackened eye.) That’s your wife?

JIM: That’s Susan.

DEELEY: And those are fair and accurate representations, are they not, of what she looked like after the July, 1993 incident. Right, sir?

WILLIAMS: Objection, your honor.

JUDGE KAHL: Overruled.

HARRISON: Oh, her eye was much blacker than that. In fact, both eyes were blacker.

DEELEY: And how did her eyes come to be black like that, sir?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

DEELEY: What did you do to her on that occasion, Mr. Harrison?

WILLIAMS: Your honor, that’s two questions.

JUDGE KAHL: One at a time.

DEELEY: What happened, Mr. Harrison, in July of 1993?

WILLIAMS: Objection.

JUDGE KAHL: Overruled.

HARRISON: We had come back from the beach, from Ocean City, and she had been manic depressive on the way down, and then recovered. And when she got back to 610 West Timonium Road where we live, she went berserk again. And she ran around the house. She was smashing stuff around the house. She was yelling. She was screaming. And she was running so fast and had been drinking again.

And she ran out the door of the new sunroom that we have, and she fell on the steps as she went out. Because I saw her stagger and fall as she rushed out the door. And she banged her head, as I recall, I guess it was right here {points), really banged it. And it resulted in an artery or a vein or whatever, pouring blood, so that this particular eye, her right eye, really got black, and the left eye became sort of lightly black.

DEELEY: Do you deny, sir, the report of the emergency room of July 27, saying that you hit her in the head with your fist at that time?

HARRISON: That is an absolute lie.

James Joshua Harrison Jr. was born in 1936 at Johns Hopkins Hospital. His father, who grew up in rural Virginia, was working as a chemical engineer, and the family lived on St. Paul Street. When Jim was five, his parents bought a house on Morningside Drive in Towson and moved there with Jim and his sister, Ann.

Jim’s parents sent the boy to the Gilman School where he excelled. In his senior year, the football coach nominated the 145-pound end to be Baltimore’s unsung sports hero of the year, an honor bestowed by McCormick & Co. Jim’s connection to the school endures—in the year before Susan disappeared, he co-chaired his class’s 40th-anniversary fundraising drive, the most successful reunion drive in the school’s history.

Jim studied engineering at Cornell, taking a semester off when his grades began to suffer from too much partying. While on hiatus, he met a high-spirited Goucher student named Molly Darden. He returned to Ithaca, and a year later Molly joined him as his bride. By the time Jim graduated in 1960, their third child was on her way.

After a stint at Whiting-Turner and six years at Martin Marietta—during which earned a law degree from the University Baltimore—Jim got a job as assistant counsel at McCormick. There, he rose to general counsel, then chief financial officer treading one proven path to the president’s office. Along the way, Jim earned an M.B.A. from Loyola College, finishing first in his class.

Jim stood particularly tall at McCormick in 1980when he learned that one division had been cooking books to swell its bottom line. It was he who urged corporate brass to come clean, launch an outside investigation and re-issue profit figures for several years past. He also distinguished himself during an unwelcome takeover bid by a Swiss company in the early 1980s, and by his sale of McCormick’s vast real estate holdings to the Rouse Company in 1988.

Jim was known as a brilliant businessman. But some say he could play the fool when it served him. When plotting an acquisition, says one observer, “he’d play this ‘Oh, I’m just a poor old country boy’ shtick. The next thing you know, McCormick owns the company and he’s rocking in his chair like Grandpa.”

March 31, 1995

(Almost eight months after Susan’s disappearance. Cocktails before a dinner to open the golf season at the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club. In the member lounge, Susan’s first husband, Tom Owsley, stands in a group near the bar by the door. Enter Jim Harrison, also a member. Tom notes that Jim is red-faced and unsteady; then Tom turns his back.)

JIM: Oh, Tom, how are the boys?

(Tom says nothing.)

JIM: Jonathan has Susan’s car?

TOM: Yeah.

JIM: If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.

TOM: All we need is to find Susan’s body.

JIM: Oh, I pray to Jesus that’s not what happened.

(Tom walks away.)

When Jim met Susan in 1976, both were married. Susan had her two sons with Tom. Jim had six children with Molly, plus a five-bedroom house in Lutherville and the inside track to the helm of an international corporation.

In the following years, the couples socialized at conferences of corporate executives (Owsley is a vice a president at Crown Petroleum), and then the Owsleys moved from Reston, Virginia, to the Greenspring Valley in 1982, the Harrisons were ready to welcome them to Baltimore.

By then, Susan’s school-aged sons didn’t need her constant attention, and the domestic applications of her art training—needle-point seat covers for the dining set, hand-painted lampshades for herself and friends, a home-sewn down jacket for Tom—stopped seeing like the makings of an adult’s whole life. In the same position, some of Susan’s contemporaries struck out on their own; others stayed married but started careers. Susan just for restless.

In stepped good-time Jim, admiring Susan’s face and heart, playing to what many say was a lifelong lack of self-confidence. “He showered her with attention,” recalls Tom Owsley. “He knew how to put on the big push.” They started an affair in June of 1983.

The fall of 1984, the two couples saw a play together. Sitting around the Owsleys’ dining room table afterwards, Jim and Susan revealed their relationship to Molly and Tom. “All hell broke loose,” recalls Molly Harrison. That October, Jim and Susan left their families and moved in together.

The first person who called 911 about Susan and Jim’s troubles was probably Tom. He recalls trying to help Susan during early strife, and once again even drove her to the police station. In October of 1986, Susan called Tom at work, despondent, saying she had take a lot of pills. Paramedics arrived at the Lutherville house she shared with Jim, but Susan was gone. Jim told paramedics they’d had a fight and said she might be at Tom’s house. An ambulance found her there, but she refused treatment, so they called Jim to come get her.

In December, 1988, Jim and Susan married. By that time, she already had suffered a broken arm—she said at the time she’d fallen off a bike, but years later told her family that Jim had broken it. She had also called police numerous times, claiming Jim punched her in the eye, Jim punched her in the mouth, Jim threw water on her, Jim raped her. He routinely denied the charges; she usually dropped them. Shortly before their wedding, Jim was acquitted of two counts of battery against Susan. After their wedding, this pattern of injuries and calls for help continued.

In October, 1989, as part of a McCormick sponsorship, Jim and Susan played host to two teenage girls from the perky traveling stage show “Up With People.” Susan left the company’s welcome-to-Baltimore dinner early. When Jim and the girls arrived home later, Susan immediately began berating him, accusing him of sleeping with both of the girls—at least, that’s what one of the girls told police she had said. The visitors’ luggage was emptied and their clothes strewn about the house. For some time afterwards, Susan was unwelcome at McCormick company functions.

“She was horrible,” says Molly Harrison. “She misbehaved constantly. Her family is completely blind to it.”

According to Molly, Susan’s portrayal in the local press has been misleadingly gentle. “We’ve been calling her ‘Saint Susan’ since the Towson Times story came out [in May, 1995],” she says. “It’s the joke of the city.” Molly says she has seen Susan “go off manic” many times, running off into a thunderstorm once after Jim.

Molly also says that after Susan and Jim fought, Susan would call Molly and her children each “30 times,” looking for him. Sometimes she’d ask for Jim, sometimes she’d just pause and hang up. Molly says phone company records prove the hang-ups came from Susan. (Jim says he does not remember Susan ever using the phone in this way.)

“She stalked us,” Molly says. “Every time the Owsleys say they wish Jim had never met Susan, I say it five times. Frankly, I don’t wish anybody dead, but I hope I never see her again.”

Wednesday, July 12, 1995, 1:30 p.m.

(Almost a year after Susan’s disappearance. Owings Mills District Court. Jim has been charged with drunk and disorderly conduct in Garrison. Later today, Jim will request and receive a postponement. Jim, his lawyer, and his two grown daughters, Betsy and Wendy, are waiting among the blond wood pews in Courtroom No. 1. There to watch the proceedings: Carey Deeley, the lawyer for Susan’s siblings and sons; detective William Ram-sey; lieutenant Sam Bowerman; a reporter.)

BETSY: Dad, I had a dream that Susan was found alive and well in Missouri—

JIM: Missouri?

WENDY: —and that her boyfriend’s left her and she can’t decide whether to come back. (Laughs.)

JIM: (His eyes widen.) I pray to God you’re right. Uh, that God is talking to you in your dream.

In late 1991, Jim learned he had been passed over for the job of McCormick CEO. Ironically, Harrison was beaten out for president by a man who had joined McCormick as head of a California spice company that Harrison had been instrumental in acquiring. Says Harrison in the third person, an idiosyncracy: “A lot of people, including Jim, figured that Jim was going to be the successor to the McCormick [company]. But Bailey [Thomas] and Gene Blattman became very close friends. And Gene Blattman, who was a fine guy, beat me out.”

After news of the promotion broke, Harrison took “early retirement” and stopped going to work, two years before his pension kicked in.

Jim began spending days at home, and the couple calls to the police became more frequent. Often, both had been drinking. Each claimed the other was the attacker, though Susan is the only one whose bones were ever broken. (Jim once showed police a yellowing bruise, saying Susan had just caused it. But Susan said a doctor had caused it days before, and the doctor confirmed this.) Susan began telling friends and family about these confrontations, but would later soften her words. Had Jim yelled at her? She’d provoked him. Had he shoved her? She’d exaggerated the injury. Besides, he had been ever so sweet to her since.

“When she would first call me, she would be extremely distressed and disoriented,” recalls sister Molly Moran, who lives in Georgia. “Then later, she got defensive, blamed it on herself, glossed over the whole thing. I didn’t know what to believe.”

Susan saw several counselors during her marriage to Jim. One Boston doctor—a cardiologist, the family points out—diagnosed manic-depressive illness, and a local doctor prescribed lithium for it. But her family says the psychiatrist Susan was seeing when she disappeared had rejected this diagnosis. Susan was anxious and confused and filled with rage against Jim, they claim, but she was not bipolar. The psychiatrist they name declines to comment, however, citing confidentiality rules.

Jim and Susan each claimed the other had problems with alcohol, and they went to Alcoholics Anonymous together for a time in the early 1990s. Susan’s family says Susan did not have an alcohol problem, but that Jim does. Jim denies he has an alcohol problem, but says Susan did. For Christmas. 1987, one of Jim’s relatives gave him an Alcoholics Anonymous manual. The inscription had nothing to do with Susan.

The summer before she disappeared—the summer of the black eye—Susan got a 10-day court order to keep Jim away from the house. She asked a judge to extend the order to 180 days, but the judge refused to do so, because Susan had accepted a ride from Jim while the order was in force. If Susan went willingly with Jim, the judge ruled, the government could not keep him away. The order lapsed, and Jim came home. To celebrate their reconciliation, the couple bought a $47,000 racehorse. Susan picked her out, so they named her “Susan’s Choice,” a strangely melancholy echo of a book Susan loved—Sophie’s Choice—about the choice between two children’s lives. The main character, bone, Sophie, lives and dies with Nathan, a charmer with an irrational, abusive temper. The most memorable line from the movie is hers: “The truth? I don’t even know what is the truth, after all these lies I have told.” In spring of 1995, Susan’s Choice broke her back in a Florida stable and was put to death.)

Why did Susan stay with Jim? For one thing, she was used to living well—she flew Jon to college in the McCormick jet; she had a closetful of evening gowns. In her divorce over from Tom, she had foregone alimony, and it had been many years since she had worked. And there was Jim, a $4-million man, ready to take care of her. When they weren’t fighting, he was extremely attentive. On the 27th of every month for years—in memory of the date when they started their affair—Jim sent Susan a gooey card.

Besides, after his retirement, Susan felt sorry for Jim. Calling from home to the friend who had sheltered her after one blowup, Susan explained her return: “This morning, he got up, put on a tie, he put on a jacket. And where did he go? To the post office.”

Monday, July 17, 1995, 9:15 a.m.

The picture-window lobby of the Ocean City District Court. Jim has been charged with drunk and disorderly conduct in a hotel parking lot. His lawyer has just arranged for the trial to be rescheduled at the circuit court in Snow Hill, so Jim can have a jury. The attorney and Jim’s daughter Betsy, also a lawyer, are conferring earl by the entrance. Lawyer Carey Deeley and a reporter are sitting outside the courtroom, on a long wooden bench. Jim walks over to Deeley, the man who had questioned him for two hours at November’s guardianship hearing.

JIM: (Kindly, pulling a small notebook from his jacket pocket. What’s your name?

DEELEY: Carey Deeley.

JIM: (Writes this down.) And who do you represent?

DEELEY: I’m with Venable, Baetjer and Howard.

JIM: (Writes this down.) You were at the other one, weren’t you?

DEELEY: Mr. Harrison, I really can’t speak to you.

JIM’S ATTORNEY: Jim, come here, please.

JIM: (To the reporter, brightly.) How are you?

THE REPORTER: Just fine. What’s up?

BETSY: Come on, Dad.

(Detective William Ramsey rounds a corner from the district attorney’s office.)

RAMSEY: Hi, Jim.

JIM’S ATTORNEY: Jim, why are you hanging around with those people? Those people are not on your side.

In the fall of 1993, Nick left for college, and Susan consulted a divorce lawyer. She also began planning a business to produce the hand-painted lamp shades she’d been making for friends for years.

The Harrisons’ calls to the police that fall include accusations that each had attacked the other; had destroyed things in the house; had stolen belongings; had trapped the other by parking behind them in the driveway.

Finally, on December 29, Susan called police from Mary Jo Gordon’s house. She had planned to meet Gordon for dinner the previous evening, but told police that Jim had held her captive in their house most of the night. She said he had punched her and shoved her into the Christmas tree. Each said the other had tried to run them down in the car, and police found tire tracks on the lawn. This was it, Susan told friends. She rented a carriage house in Ruxton and took everything from the house she could take, including the washer, the dryer, both stereos and all the drapes.

Susan served Jim with a request for support, enumerating the injuries she’d received during their relationship. She blamed Jim for them; Jim denied responsibility.

But before long, Susan and Jim were dating again. “Theirs was a really destructive relationship, but addictive, you know?” Gordon says. “It was just a matter of time before they would make contact, and then the whole thing would start all over again.” Shortly after Susan moved out, Jim helped her negotiate a lease for studio space at the Mill Centre in Hampden, next to Clara Arana’s art-jewelry studio.

Jim says that when Susan disappeared, she was on the verge of moving back into his house. He points to his dining room curtains, which Susan had re-hung, as proof. But a Realtor the couple consulted after their separation says it was he who suggested re-hanging the drapes, to make the house more marketable. Her family says she returned them reluctantly, so the house would sell and she could get her halfshare of its value. And she could get away from Jim.

But no one disputes that a week before she vanished—July 25 to 27—Susan and Jim took a holiday together in Ocean City.

“It was like she was in two worlds,” says one good friend. “She wanted to be her own person, but even when they were separated, she was still wearing her big diamond ring.”

Sunday, July 30, 1995, 7:30 p.m.

Dinner in the enclosed porch at the Turf Inn in Timonium. Along one wall of the narrow room, windows display cars streaming down York Road. On the opposite wall hang china masks of movie stars: Bogie, Joan Crawford, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe. Jim Harrison is having dinner with a reporter.)

THE REPORTER: Have you ever known anyone else who was manic-depressive?

JIM: There was somebody at Cornell, but I don’t remember who.

THE REPORTER: So, apart from Susan, you’ve never known anyone who had manic-depressive illness, never seen the symptoms?

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: Do you realize that the symptoms you describe as Susan’s “going manic-depressive” aren’t generally considered symptoms of manic-depressive illness?

JIM: Not symptoms? (Pauses.) It was embarrassing.

THE REPORTER: How so?

JIM: She would call the police, the police would come, and nothing happened.

THE REPORTER: Nothing happened, but she would have a broken arm, broken ribs, black eyes—

JIM: The black-eye thing was ridiculous. She fell and bumped her head. It had nothing to do with me. She’d gone berserk, started running around. Then she fell.

THE REPORTER: Did you ever think something besides manic-depressive illness made her do these things?

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: According to psychiatrists—

JIM: Psychiatrists?

THE REPORTER: I called a few experts, and they said that manic-depressive illness involves moods that come and stay a while; you take it in and out of the room with you. Most said that what you describe—this sudden, very limited rage, directed at one person isn’t classically a symptom of manic-depressive illness, let alone the only symptom. It could be borderline personality, maybe, or just someone who feels violated.

JIM: (Pauses. Picks at his cuticle.) When she wasn’t manic-depressive, she was great.

On Sunday, July 31, 1994, Susan called police. She said Jim had come to her house at 12:30 in the morning and asked her to dinner. When she declined, she said, he twisted her fingers until he injured them. She told police she would press charges.

Jim also called police that day, to complain that while he was out playing golf, someone had let herself into the house and cut up his summer clothes with scissors. He suspected Susan—and in fact, an embarrassed Susan confessed to a relative that out of anger, she had done this. Jim also said he was missing a wallet containing $4,000 in cash—a wallet that he now says is still missing.

During a phone call that evening, son Nick gave Susan a familiar ultimatum: Choose Jim or choose your sons. We want no part of him. Characteristically, Susan waffled, Nick says. It’s not as easy as that, she told him. There are financial considerations.

On Monday, August 1, Nick says, Susan called back. “I’ve made my decision,” Susan told him. “I want to be with you and Jon.” The two talked eagerly about their plans to visit her brothers in Boston that weekend.

On Wednesday, August 3, Susan called Clara Arana. “I want to take you to lunch Monday, when I get back from Boston,” she said. “I have something to tell you.” Replied Arana: “I hope it’s the news I’ve been waiting for”—that Susan’s vacillation had ended. “You’re going to like it,” Susan replied. “But I want to tell you in person.”

On Thursday, August 4, Jim changed the lock on his family-room door, to keep Susan out of the house she co-owned.

On Friday, August 5, Nick and Susan decided not to drive to Boston that day, as planned. Instead, they would take an early plane on Saturday. Nick spent part of the day with Susan in Ruxton, then went to pack a bag at his father’s house and pick up Chinese takeout. Susan gave him her ATM card to get cash for the trip; she had only $5 and almost no gas. She also offered Nick her Saab to drive-if he had accepted, she would have been stuck at home, because she didn’t drive his stick-shift car-and told him she would nap until his return.

At 5 p.m., Susan called her brother John in Boston. She sounded worried, but he was running out the door, so he promised to call her back at 7:30. When he called back a half-hour early, Susan didn’t answer.

When Nick arrived back in Ruxton, Susan was gone. The door was ajar, and she had taken only her wallet and the spare car key.

Jim’s older daughter Wendy saw Susan arrive at her father’s house a little before 7 p.m. Then Wendy left. And Susan went inside.

(At the Turf Inn)

JIM: We fell in love. We couldn’t stop it. It just couldn’t stop. Thank God. Because I love her so much, and she loved me so much.

THE REPORTER: A lot of people say she was addicted to you.

JIM: It’s really neat. Life is full of so many different people. But then you meet somebody who is the person above all. We couldn’t stop it, so I had to leave my wife and six children. She left her husband and two children.

THE REPORTER: What do you make of people saying she was addicted to you?

JIM: That’s called “in love.” If you’re really deeply in love with someone, that’s addiction.

The year since Susan’s disappearance has not been a good one for Jim.

In December, his second son, Bill, fired a shotgun in his Florida apartment complex, drawing a SWAT team.

In January, his first wife, Molly, sued him for failing to make an alimony payment. She told the judge Jim cut her off because she wouldn’t let him celebrate Christmas at the house she owns with a ‘ companion. (Jim denies making this threat.} Jim paid about half of the alimony right before he received Molly’s lawsuit. When a judge ordered him to pay the rest of it, he paid.

In February, son Bill turned up in the Appalachian mountains with frostbite. Jim brought him to the hand clinic at Union Memorial Hospital, where parts of his fingers were amputated.

In March, after talking to Tom Owsley at a golfers’ reception, Jim had words with someone else at the club and was asked by the management to leave. According to a police report, he stumbled across a nearby road and got in a tangle with an officer trying to help. At the Garrison precinct, Harrison shoved an officer and “continued to sing loudly ‘F-k you’ over 45 times in succession.” His trial on these charges has been rescheduled for October 2.

In May, son Bill and a stranger died of gunshot wounds on a bus in Florida. Police say Bill fired the shots. Jim isn’t sure. “There were six people on the bus,” he says. “I wonder if something else happened. Like, they killed him and the other guy.”

In June, at an American Bar Association meeting in Ocean City, Jim’s car bumped into a parked truck on a hotel lot, and he was arrested for driving while intoxicated. The arresting officer said Jim slapped him and offered him a bribe. His jury trial has been scheduled for November 8.

(At the Turf Inn)

JIM: It’s much ado about nothing. I was patting him on the shoulder, trying to make friends.

THE REPORTER: He said you slapped him on the wrist.

JIM: I never did.

THE REPORTER: He said you offered him money to let it drop.

JIM: In Ocean City?

THE REPORTER: Yeah.

JIM: No.

THE REPORTER: Does that mean you did offer the Garrison cop money?

JIM: No, neither. I just don’t think you should be involved in that. You’re making me look like a horrible criminal. And I’m not.

Jim Harrison is forever offering people things. Admire the electric Santa by his hearth—he bought one for each of his twin granddaughters last Christmas, but the parents were content with just one and he’ll quickly ask “Want it?” He really hates being treated to dinner. “Please let me buy,” he begs endlessly.

Some, including Jim, say he’s just a generous guy who gets pleasure out of helping people. “I just love people and I love to help people, whether it’s children or whatever,” Jim says. Others, including Susan’s family, say Jim wants people to owe him. “He’s much more willing to buy someone’s friendship than be someone’s friend,” Jon Owsley charges.

When it came to Susan, Jim was generous to a fault, ladling gold jewelry onto her the way she pressed homemade sweaters on her boys. In return, Jim expected single-minded devotion. Jon Owsley says that once, during a conversation in Jim and Susan’s sunroom, Jim told him that men and women could not be platonic friends. Any man who befriended his wife had more than friendship in mind. (Jim denies ever saying this.)

Susan once told a friend about a tiff at a baseball game. While Jim went to fetch her a snack, Susan began chatting with a couple nearby. When Jim returned, he chastened her for speaking to another man. (Jim says this never happened.) Sometimes, Jim punished Susan by leaving her stranded, says a friend who periodically retrieved her from a restaurant or her country club. (This, Jim does not deny.)

(In Jim’s family room)

THE REPORTER: You’ve got a lot of people hallucinating around you, Mr. Harrison.

JIM: What do you mean?

THE REPORTER: Well, sometimes I’ve got three or four people saying something happened one way—that you said a particular thing—and you tell me you never said it.

JIM: I can’t help it if people lie.

Whether Susan is dead or alive—and whether or not Jim was involved in her disappearance—she’s clearly stranded again. And what troubles her family most is not being able to bury her. “Where is she?” wonders Tom Owsley, rolling up his brown linen napkin after dinner at home. “In a landfill? An abandoned well? Just covered over with branches?” He clicks his tongue and turns away.

“She is just someone who shouldn’t ever be in the situation she’s in right now,” says son Nick. “She should be up in Massachusetts, next to her mom and dad. Not for my sake—I’ve done enough grieving. But for her sake. Right now, there’s no stone, no way for her to be remembered.”

Police investigators say she has almost certainly been murdered by someone close to her. No random stranger need go to the trouble of hiding her body, they reason.

If that’s the case, then someone close to her knows where she lies. Someone can visit her grave. And that someone is the only person to whom Susan now belongs.

(At the Turf Inn)

THE REPORTER: Nick says that he saw you attack his mother. That one night when he was 12, he was staying at your house. Jon and Tom—

JIM: Who?

THE REPORTER: Jon and Tom Owsley were out of town. And Nick heard you arguing with Susan, so he called Jon, and Jon called his girlfriend to come by the house and get Nick.

Nick was down at the bottom of the driveway, waiting for Julie, and he saw his mother run out of the house carrying a bunch of her lamp shades, one torn and the rest unharmed. She ran to the trunk of her car with them, and you ran behind her. Before she could get the key in the trunk, you grabbed her and started shaking her violently.

When Nick yelled at you to stop it, you just stopped short, gave him a little smile, and walked back into the house. Do you remember this?

JIM: No. It didn’t happen.

THE REPORTER: Why would he say that it did?

JIM: She turned the boys against me.

THE REPORTER: Enough for him to remember things that didn’t happen?

JIM: He’d been brainwashed.

THE REPORTER: Why would she want to turn the boys against you?

JIM: When she went manic-depressive, I she’d say bad things, she’d call the police. As far as the boys are concerned, she didn’t want to be a liar. So she let them believe things.

Like his brother Nick, Cornell law student Jon Owsley is a self-possessed, good-looking Gilman School grad. Jon’s girlfriend, like Nick’s, is pretty and slight and wears a blond pageboy.

Jon is sitting in his father’s Homeland sunroom, fiddling with two stubby screwdrivers, one slotted and one Phillips-head. He’s talking about Jim Harrison. “When I was a sophomore in high school, I knew he was full of crap,” says Jon, remembering Jim’s attempts to be cordial, to act like a family. “I said, ‘Wednesday night I was picking my mom up from your house, telling you to stay the hell away from her. I’m not going to make nice with you on Sunday.”‘

Police say that Susan’s killer is better off revealing her whereabouts now. “When that person is able to admit that they’ve done something, there’s a huge sense of relief,” says Lieutenant Sam Bowerman. Besides, he reminds any guilty party who’s reading, a cooperative killer might face a lighter sentence: “Once we find the body, we won’t be interested in your side of the story.”

So if Jim Harrison knows where Susan is, and if he reveals this and ends her family’s restless search, will Jon be grateful? Will Jon feel mercy?

“I will never, never, never, ever, ever, regardless if he got ripped to pieces by wild wolves, never feel a moment of care for what happens to him,” says Jon, who is studying to become a prosecutor.

As he speaks, he slides one screwdriver absently against the other, as if he’s sharpening a knife.

(At the Turf Inn)

THE REPORTER: Most of the people I’ve talked to are really upset that they don’t know where her body is. It hurts them to think of her not getting a proper burial, not having a tombstone for people to visit. Do you ever think about that?

JIM: Oh, my God. That’s terrible. I’ve been praying so hard that she comes home. I haven’t really thought about that.

THE REPORTER: You don’t wonder where her body is?

(Jim stares at the reporter. The reporter stares back until the waitress comes.)

Editor’s Note: Since this story’s publication, Susan’s remains were found in rural Frederick County by two hikers on November 29, 1996. Her death was subsequently ruled a homicide by the state medical examiner, but Harrison was never arrested, tried, or charged. After two years of handling the case, the Maryland attorney general’s office called off the criminal investigation into her death due to ”insufficient evidence.” A wrongful death lawsuit filed by Susan’s sons against Harrison ended with a confidential settlement.

In the fall of 2007, Harrison died of pneumonia at the age of 71.

Source

How The Deal Went Down

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:32:01 +0000

On the morning of October 27, John Moag rushes from his Murray Hill home, locking the door behind him, then spinning and stepping briskly into a damp, foggy autumn morning. The sky is thick with low, threatening clouds.

Today, of all days, how could he let himself run late? He’s got only half an hour to reach Baltimore-Washington International Airport for a top-secret meeting on the deal of his career—one that might help heal a whole city’s wounds, that might bring millions in economic development to his hometown. Might. If all goes well this morning.

Reaching the forest-green Lexus in the driveway, Moag stops short, amazed to see that the car’s interior has been transformed to a bon voyage party. He peers inside at the mounds of orange and brown balloons. Little chocolate footballs are sprinkled over the seats.

Peggy must have gotten up before dawn to pull this off. Drawings by 12-year-old Lauren and 10-year-old Alex are part of the surprise. One shows a plaintive Dad on his knees before an enormous football. A prayer bubble over his head reads, “Please, give Baltimore the ball!”

His wife is one of the few people he has confided in about his negotiations with the Cleveland Browns. She’s always reacted in lowkey fashion-until now.

Moag twists a balloon between his fingers until it pops. He grabs another and pops it. Then another. Finally, Moag shoves the remaining balloons into the back seat and then slides hurriedly behind the wheel.

This is really cute and thoughtful and nice, he thinks, but I have got to get my ass to this airport.

Negotiating under cover of secrecy, Baltimore and the Browns resembled nothing so much as two jilted lovers, eyes meeting across the Appalachians.

The Baltimore Browns? As Moag sped toward BWI that morning, the concept was unthinkable to sports fans in Ohio and Maryland. Nine days later, when Governor Parris Glendening appeared at a downtown press conference waving a lease agreement that binds the NFL’s Browns to playing in Baltimore for the next 30 years, they’d learn that the unthinkable had happened. “This is a great day for the state of Maryland,” the governor exulted, promising economic gains and social benefits.

In Cleveland, it was another kind of day-one of travesty and, perhaps, betrayal. Instantly, the Browns faithful erupted, outraged at this blow to the civic ego. Even some guilt-ridden Baltimoreans joined in the chorus, remembering the emptiness they felt when the NFL Colts departed for Indianapolis in 1984.

In short order, the uproar went national. Hastily convened Congressional hearings gave politicians a chance to voice shock and dismay. A Sports Illustrated cover caricature showed Browns owner Art Model! punching a Cleveland fan depicted as, well, a dawg.

Only the parties who agreed to the deal seemed to think it made perfect sense.

By last summer-when negotiations between Baltimore and the Browns turned earnest-moving football franchises from city to city was business as usual in the NFL. The modern-day spate of moves dates to 1982, when owner Al Davis shifted his Oakland Raiders to Los Angeles. In an ensuing court fight, the NFL lost a $50-million antitrust judgment.

Jittery, the league for the most part opted to ignore the issue. It didn’t lift a finger when the Baltimore Colts (originally from Dallas) left for Indianapolis. Or when the St. Louis Cardinals (originally from Chicago) moved to Arizona. Or when the Los Angeles Rams (originally from Cleveland) moved to St. Louis. Or when irrepressible Raiders owner Davis moved his team from Los Angeles back to Oakland.

In post-Colts Baltimore, the populace lived in a state of foggy football nostalgia. The Colts Marching Band remained active. Radio airwaves still crackled with talk of Johnny Unitas and The Greatest Game Ever Played, the 1958 NFL championship.

Civic leaders toiled to win readmittance to the NFL, only to lose every round in the league’s rntb.e.’ii’ii iame. ot mu’iiic.a c.itie.’ii. ‘Ii.me and again, team owners would flirt with Baltimore, only to turn around and use the city’s charms to extort better terms from other suitors.

In Cleveland, Browns owner Art Modell felt spurned as well. The baseball Indians and basketball Cavaliers were playing in sparkling new homes, and Cleveland’s once-dingy downtown was glittering with new museums built in part with government funds. But Modell’s team was still stuck in aging Cleveland Stadium, losing money every year. Eleven years had gone by since his first discussions with Ohio officias about a new or refurbished stadium.

Later, of course, the prospect of a Browns move from Cleveland would shock the sports world. And many would question whether either Modell or Baltimore had legitimate grievances. But back in August and September, negotiating under cover of secrecy, Baltimore and the Browns resembled nothing so much as two jilted lovers, eyes meeting across the Appalachians.

Smitten with suddenly rosy prospects for the future, they fell into each other’s arms and quickly decided to elope. The new couple broke the news to their families when Glendening waved that lease agreement in the air.

In response, stunned Clevelanders and Baltimoreans asked the same question: “The Baltimore Browns? How long has this been going on?”

In a late January 1995 telephone call, newly inaugurated Governor Glendening thanks Baltimore attorney Herbert J. Belgrad for his eight years of service to the campaign to bring NFL football back to Baltimore. “But I need my own person,” the governor says. “The NFL needs to see a new face.”

Belgrad, whose term as chairman of the Maryland Stadium Authority is expiring, has already reached the same conclusion. “As much fun as this job has been,” he’d say later, “there comes a time when a person should step aside.”

Glendening senses that the football campaign is in trouble. For seven years, the MSA has extended a lucrative offer to the league and its owners: Come play in a new downtown Baltimore stadium financed by lottery revenues; we’ll make your franchise one of football’s most profitable, to the tune of nearly $30 million a year. But so far, no takers.

The biggest blow came in 1993 when the NFL awarded expansion franchises to Charlotte and Jacksonville. Some involved in Maryland’s bid reacted with outrage, hurling accusations at league executives.

Ever since, the two parties have regarded each other with mutual mistrust. One thing Glendening wants to do now is rebuild bridges with the league. Antagonism, he concludes, “doesn’t get you a team.”

Leadership is another pressing issue. After the failed expansion drive, then-Governor William Donald Schaefer asked Orioles owner Peter Angelos to step in and find Baltimore a team. So far, though, that has succeeded only in sowing confusion: NFL owners aren’t even sure anymore whom they should call to deal with Baltimore-Belgrad? Angelos? Schaefer?

Glendening wants one person in charge. But who should it be? “I want someone who’s aggressive, tenacious and can deliver,” he tells confidants. “I also want someone who doesn’t need the limelight.”

John Moag, a partner with the powerhouse Washington law firm of Patton Boggs, has his eye on the post-a fact he’s made known to mutual friends of his and the governor’s. Former Governor Harry Hughes and U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer sing Moag’s praises to Glendening.

Politically, Moag’s a perfect fit: Baltimore will be relieved if the post goes to a city native, and Maryland’s Washington suburbs will be reassured if it goes to someone with D.C. connections. In an early February phone call, Glendening formally offers Moag the position. “I hear from all kinds of people that you’re interested in this job,” he says, “but I haven’t heard it from you.”

“Well, Governor,” Moag responds, “I thought it would be a little presumptuous of me to put you on the spot like that.”

On February 9, the day Glendening announces Moag’s appointment, the clock is already ticking down on Baltimore’s NFL hopes. State legislators are threatening to revoke financing set aside for a football stadium.

In a strategy born of necessity, Glendening asks lawmakers to give him until the end of the year.

Arriving at Glendening’s office, Moag’s optimism shows when he bursts in wearing a broad smile. ”Governor,” he announces, “I think we’ve got a team.”

Ever since the team’s founding in 1946, the Browns have ranked high among Cleveland’s civic treasures. The franchise was among the first in pro sports to sign an African-American player: Marion Motley joined the Browns in their debut season, a year before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. Playing first in the All-America Football Conference and then in the NFL, the team won seven championships in its first 10 years.

In 1961, New York businessman Art Modell bought a majority interest in the team. The pricetag on the Browns was a then-record $3.925 million, including $500,000 in cash which the 35-year-old Model! scrambled to raise by hitting up banks and friends and selling some New York business interests. In Modell’s third season as owner, the Browns thumped the Baltimore Colts in the 1964 NFL championship game, winning by a score of 27-0.

In those early years, Modell established himself as a blue-collar owner, traveling by bus with the team and staying at the same hotels as players. It was a style that matched the Brooklyn native’s background: After his father’s death, the then-14-year-old Model! had gone to work at Bethlehem Steel, earning 57 cents an hour as an electrician’s helper.

Within a few years of joining the league, Model! became a force among NFL owners. In 1970, he paved the way for a merger between the American and National football leagues by agreeing to shift the Browns into what would become the American Conference. And, serving on the league’s broadcast commit tee, the onetime television entrepreneur helped develop Monday Night Football, the television hit that would help vault pro football to new heights of popularity.

On March 29, Moag opens negotiations with the Cincinati Bengals, flying into that city to visit with Mike Brown in his office. “Look,” the Bengals owner explains, “I very badly want to stay in my town. But I don’t think it’s going to work out here, so I need to be prepared.”

Moag listens intently, gauging the sincerity of Baltimore’s most amorous NFL suitor of the moment. His reply is simple: “We can do business.” But from the start Moag senses Brown’s reluctance to leave Ohio.

Detailed lease negotiations with the Bengals begin, but Moag is already looking ahead. He chooses to run his own version of football’s option play.

Meeting with Frank Bramble, chairman of First National Bank of Maryland, Moag delivers an update on the Bengals scenario. “Things are fairly serious,” he says, “but I’m still very pessimistic.” Knowing Bramble is in frequent contact with Cleveland bank investor Al Lerner, Moag is confident his words soon will find their way back to Lerner, a minority owner of the Cleveland Browns.

A lease document with the Bengals is 85 percent done when word of a planned June 14 visit to Baltimore by Mike Brown is leaked to the Cincinnati media. The resulting uproar on the banks of the Ohio River is predictable-and effective. On June 29, the Cincinnati City Council gives preliminary approval to a bond issue to finance a new stadium.

Moag is disappointed, but not surprised.

Brown was gonna take almost anything to stay there, he thinks.

Maryland’s new strategy—high secrecy, firm deadline—has failed on its first flight.

The economics of professional sports underwent dramatic transformations in the 1980s that hurt old-school owners like Art Modell who rely on football for their livelihoods. They suddenly found themselves struggling to keep pace with brash and independently wealthy competitors who ignored the bottom line and spent lavishly on player contracts and team facilities.

Modell faced another economic handicap as well. In 1974, he had taken over operations of Cleveland Stadium in a 25-year lease deal between the city and Modell’s newly formed Stadium Corporation. Over the last 22 years, Modell says, he has spent nearly $50 million operating and maintaining “that old barn.”

Built in 193 1, Cleveland Stadium once made up for its numerous shortcomings with sheer size. Even in losing seasons, the Browns regularly drew 70,000 fans.

But in the new sports economy, big attendance numbers don’t translate into profitability. Instead, the financial health of teams increasingly depends on amenities found only in new stadiums-skyboxes for corporate clients and plush club-level seating for well-heeled fans. “You cannot make it in sports today,” Modell insists,

“without what [Orioles owner Peter] Angelos has in Camden Yards.” The condition of stadiums has played a major part in every franchise move of the modern era.

In 1992, documents filed by the league in a court case over a labor dispute provided the first public indications of the Browns’ bleak financial condition. The team lost $9.1 million between 1986 and 1989, according to the documents, which also identified Modell as one of the league’s lowest-paid owners, earning $195,000 a year (which does not include earnings from the Cleveland Stadium Corporation).

“I’m a little embarrassed by this whole thing . . . I guess this shows the carpetbagger from New York City is not milking the franchise, huh?” Modell said at the time.

Any community sympathy for Modell’s financial plight was soon overwhelmed by controversial personnel moves-especially the Modella pproved release from the team of popular quarterback Bernie Kosar, an Ohio native, in

1993. The Browns have never qualified for the Super Bowl, despite several narrow misses in the ’80s. The team’s last championship came against the Colts in that game 31 years ago.

Was John Moag Jr. destined to become the dealmaker who would bring pro football back to Baltimore? When his family moved to Baltimore from Chicago in 1965, they took up residence within walking distance of Memorial Stadium, home of the Colts. On game days, young Moag guided cars loaded with fans into parking spaces in his parents’ backyard. As an upperclassman at Loyola High School, he donned the mascot costume of the Loyola Don, leading sideline cheers for the football team.

In the fall of 1972, as a freshman at Washington College in southern Maryland, Moag headed Kent County’s organization for presidential candidate George McGovern. As a senior, he was president of the school’s student body.

Diploma in hand in 1977, Moag went to work for Congressman Steny Hoyer, earning $25 a day as a driver. “We got lost a lot,” laughs Hoyer. “I gave him a lecture: ‘I want you to get me from point A to point B in the quickest possible way.”‘ That was a lesson the young Moag would take to heart.

After graduating in 1981 from the University of Baltimore School of Law, Moag returned to Hoyer’s office, this time as the congressman’s chief legislative aide. “He was extraordinary,” says Hoyer. “He’s very smart, and a very quick study. He could write a 20-page speech in 10 minutes.”

Later, Moag moved on to Patton Boggs. At age 33, he became the youngest partner in the history of the firm, and presumably the only partner who’d seen two dozen concerts by the Grateful Dead.

Now 41, Moag lives in Baltimore County with his wife, Peggy, and their two daughters. He heads the Baltimore office of Patton Boggs and supervises operations at five other branches around the country. His Maryland client list has included the likes of the Greater Baltimore Committee and the Kennedy Krieger Institute.

In his biggest success at Patton Boggs, Moag shepherded through Congress a proposal to erect a federally funded marine research center in downtown Baltimore. By 1994, when the $160 million Columbus Center rose up in the midst of the Inner Harbor, it was clear that Moag had learned how to play to win.

On the muggy, midsummer morning of July 18, Parris Glendening stands at the window of a meeting room in a suburban Virginia hotel, looking across the Potomac River into Washington, D.C., home of the NFL Redskins. This scenery prompts the governor’s strategy, as he decides to use this bit of geography to endear himself to his hosts, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue and New York Giants coowner Robert Tisch.

Over an early breakfast, Glendening tells the two men how his 15-year-old son, Raymond, a fanatic Giants fan, has forged a friendship with a Prince George’s County police officer who once played for the Giants. “For almost 10 years in a row,” Glendening adds, “Ray and I would catch the Redskins-Giants game at RFK [Stadium in Washington] and then drive up” to New Jersey to see the two teams play again at the Meadowlands.

Smiles and nods from Tagliabue and Tisch tell Glendening that he has a foot in the door. And, in a way, that’s all the governor had been looking for when he asked Mercantile Bankshares Corp. chairman H. Furlong Baldwin, a Baltimorean with NFL connections, to set up a meeting designed to smooth ill will between Maryland and the NFL.

“There is a new administration and attitude,” Glendening tells his hosts. “I want you to see me as a different governor.”

Glendening moves to the next topic on his agenda. Baltimore is the only city in the country with public funding in place for a new stadium, he reminds them, and he wants to make absolutely certain that the league understands that the city no longer intends to play the football fool. He recites Maryland’s ultimatum: “We want a team, or the money goes away.” Ideally, the governor adds, it would be an expansion team in Baltimore.

Expansion, Tagliabue tells him, is out of the question until the next century. Glendening knows what this means. The city will have to play its siren song, luring a team to Baltimore just as the Colts were lured away by Indianapolis. Glendening is confident that Tisch and Tagliabue realize what’s bound to happen.

After the meeting, the governor hopes that he’s managed to reopen lines of communication with the league establishment. A couple of days later, Mercantile’s Baldwin calls Glendening with the lowdown on how the NFL bigwigs reacted to his pitch. “Mission accomplished,” Baldwin reports.

Talks between Art Modell and Ohio’s elected officials about the Browns stadium situation date back to 1984, when Cuyahoga County proposed building a $150 million domed stadium. Modell endorsed the plan, which died when voters rejected a property-tax increase to pay for it.

Two years later, the first proposals for what would become downtown Cleveland’s Gateway sports complex included a stadium to be shared by the Browns and the Indians. At the time, Model! was quoted in the media as saying the site was too small. (In 1995, he would insist, vehemently, that the Browns were never formally asked to be part of Gateway.)

When Jacobs Field opened at Gateway in 1994, the Indians were among baseball’s best teams-as well as the toast of their hometown. One close friend of Modell’s says the Browns owner grew jealous of the Indians’ success. “His ego was nicked,” says this friend. “The last two years, all you heard about around town was the Indians. Suddenly, Modell wasn’t top cat anymore.”

Downtown Cleveland, meanwhile, continued on its crash course toward an improved image. Work was underway at Gateway on a new arena for the Cavaliers. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum was rising on the edge of Lake Erie, as was the Great Lakes Science Center. The Flats, once a grimy industrial area, was reborn as a sparkling conglomeration of nightclubs and neon.

Cleveland Stadium just kept getting older. Negotiations between Modell and Ohio politicians over stadium renovations date to 1987. At first, Modell had asked for a lease extension through 2008, vowing to pump $10 million into improvements. But the plan—which included a heavy penalty should the Browns move—never won City Council approval.

In January 1995, a task force appointed by Mayor Michael White recommended renovating Cleveland Stadium. In May, White endorsed the recommendation of a second task force that the project be financed in part with a 10 percent parking tax. But four days later, Modell announced that his negotiations with the city were over until after the 1995 football season, a moratorium that has since become infamous in Cleveland.

White pressed ahead. The City Council eventually approved a revised tax plan. A proposal to complete the financing package by extending a county-wide “sin” tax went before county commissioners, who decided to put the issue before voters in November.

In the aftermath of Modell’s decision to move his team to Baltimore, the two sides presented wildly divergent accounts of why the negotiations failed.

Modell claimed that the city and county missed numerous deadlines and couldn’t finance the plans they eventually submitted. “For six years, I have been waiting for something to happen,” he complained. “I’m out of options.” At a time when public investments were showered on the Indians, the Cavaliers and the two lakefront museums, he fumed, “I’m trying to get my lavatories to work.”

Elected officials, though, felt that the only option the city and county failed to offer Modell was the choice between grass and artificial turf. They contended that Modell never issued deadlines in the first place. In 1995, they said, he failed to warn them that time was running out. “This has all been a put-up and a charade,” Mayor White charged, “designed to ensure his deceptive negotiations” with Maryland would go forward.

(In November, after the deal was announced, Cleveland pressed its case in the Ohio courts, winning an injunction blocking-for the moment-the Browns move to Baltimore. As this issue went to press, the case remained unresolved-as did questions about whether Modell eventually would agree to let Cleveland keep the name “Browns” in the event the city wins another NFL franchise.)

In early July, after five months on the job, John Moag is back at square one. Negotiations with the Bengals are dead. Which NFL prospect would Maryland flirt with next?

The answer comes in a phone call to Moag’s office from First National Bank of Maryland’s Frank Bramble. “John,” Bramble says, “Al Lerner would like to meet with you.”

It looks like Moag’s option play is working. A few months back, he had ordered background reports on key executives and owners at NFL franchises in financial trouble. He’d been particularly impressed with Lerner’s bio. This isn’t a guy who places casual calls, Moag thinks. This isn’t a guy who wastes time playing games.

The son of Ukranian immigrants, Alfred Lerner grew up in New York City, living in apartments attached to a succession of candy stores his father owned. He graduated from Columbia University, then signed on with the Marines. After his discharge, he moved briefly to Baltimore, earning $75 a week selling furniture for Ethan Allen.

Lerner then moved to Cleveland and turned his attention to real estate, earning his first fortune during the ’60s and ’70s by buying, selling and syndicating apartments and shopping centers.

In the ’80s, Lerner moved on to banking. He invested in Equitable Bancorp of Baltimore and eventually became director of Baltimore’s largest bank. He and a partner also made a run at Cleveland’s leading bank, AmeriTrust Corp. Though the duo never succeeded in gaining control, they did manage to turn an estimated $30 million profit before walking away.

In 1989, Lerner sold Bancorp of Baltimore to MNC Financial, Inc. He later became chairman of MNC and is widely credited with rescuing the company from deep trouble.

With a fortune estimated at more than $850 million, Lerner is a fixture on Forbes magazine’s annual list of the 400 richest people in America. He and his wife, Norma, live in the exclusive Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights.

Lerner’s involvement with the Cleveland Browns dates to 1988, when he bought a 5 percent share in the team. At about this time, Modell’s health faltered and he was no longer able to travel in the players’ plane and stay in the same hotels. Lerner and Modell began flying together in Lerner’s plane to Browns road games.

Lerner’s interest in owning an NFL expansion team in Baltimore dates at least to the early ’90s. (By some accounts, his overtures date back to 1985.) But no firm proposal developed until the waning weeks of the 1993 expansion campaign, after the NFL awarded a team to Charlotte. Baltimore, desperate for someone with NFL connections, turned to Lerner. But the strategy flopped when Jacksonville got the second team.

“Lerner became our last hope,” recalls Herb Belgrad. “And I guess there was some degree of disappointment because we anticipated he would make an all-out effort to lobby the owners in advance, and that Art Modell would be by his side . . . A lot of the preliminary effort that we had anticipated never took place.”

In the end, not even Modell voted for Baltimore. (Today, Modell says owners were reluctant to choose between the two recently spurned cities of St. Louis and Baltimore, so they opted instead for Jacksonville.) Despite mixed feelings about Lerner’s performance, the leaders of Baltimore’s expansion campaign never blamed Lerner or Modell for the defeat. Other villains-most notably, NFL Commissioner Tagliabue and Washington Redskins owner Jack Kent Cooke-earned Baltimore’s ire by opposing the city’s bid more directly.

At 2 p.m. on the afternoon of July 28, John Moag walks through Baltimore-Washington International Airport, bound for a runway rendezvous with Al Lerner. Moag expects to meet a very substantial and very straightforward man. Once aboard the plane, he’s not disappointed. Lerner offers Moag a bottle of water, as the two sit and exchange introductions.

“I want to know where you guys are coming from,” Lerner says simply.

The two discuss Maryland’s deal in broad outlines. Already, Lerner knows most of the details from his participation in the Baltimore expansion effort. Moag tells Lerner of the year’s-end deadline, and he stresses the importance of secrecy.

”You’re going to have to leave town by Monday,” Modell tells his wife of 26 years. ”You can’t be livlng here when I make this announcement.”

The meeting is short, simple and serious. Lerner asks only a few questions. “I have been through many years with this man, trying to make things work in Cleveland,” he says of Art Model!. “I believe Art has come to the conclusion that it is simply not going to work out.”

As the meeting ends, Lerner promises to call soon. After leaving the plane, Moag drives to Annapolis to meet with the governor. As a dealmaker, Moag has learned to check his emotions-Don’t get too pumped up, don’t get too discouraged, he often reminds himself-but now he briefly loses that equilibrium. “The fact that Al Lerner flew in here to talk to me, to find out what our situation was, indicated to me that Art Modell was fed up in Cleveland,” Moag would say later.

Arriving at Glendening’s office, Moag’s optimism shows when he bursts in wearing a broad smile. “Governor,” he announces, “I think we’ve got a team.”

“John, are you certain?” “Yes.”

“You know we’ve heard this before. Are you really certain?”

“Yes.”

Moag is anxious for the meeting to wind down so that he can get to Bethany Beach and join his family on vacation. Glendening offers Moag a piece of parting advice: “Now John, look, I don’t want you to be worrying about this on your vacation. After all, it’s only your career.”

“Thanks a lot, Governor.”

Moag’s enthusiasm proves infectious. A few nights later, over dinner at a restaurant, Glendening confides the news to a friend: “I think we have a better than 50-50 chance of getting the Browns.”

His friend is confused: “The Browns what?” “The Cleveland Browns.”

“Yeah, sure. Have another beer.”

On the evening of September 6, in the warehouse adjacent to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, the private Camden Club is jammed with sports celebrities, visiting dignitaries and business elites. In a few hours, Cal Ripken is expected to play in his 2,131 st consecutive game for the Orioles, topping Lou Gehrig’s legendary record.

Al Lerner and John Moag are among the celebrants. Though the rest of the negotiations between the Browns and Baltimore would be veiled in secrecy, on Ripken’s triumphant night Lerner and Moag meet in this thoroughly public forum. The two drift off to a corner for 15 minutes of low-key talk, mostly about Maryland’s chances to swing a deal for a team by dealing directly with the NFL offices. Both men think such a strategy is a longshot at best.

It’s Moag who presses the conversation forward. “I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t get to work on this deal,” he tells Lerner. “Then we can put it in a safe-deposit box and keep it quiet until you’re ready to run with it.”

“Fair enough,” Lerner responds. “I’ll call you Thursday. It may be time for you to meet Art Modell.”

Art Modell was born on June 23, 1925. After his stint at Bethlehem Steel, he served in the Army Air Corps during World War II. Upon returning to New York he sold ABC on a plan to familiarize the public with the new technology of television by installing custom-made TV sets in 200 New York City supermarkets. Later, Modell owned a television production company and became a partner in an advertising firm.

After buying the Browns and moving to Cleveland, Modell had an immediate impact on the city. In the early ’60s, he was a fixture on the downtown nightlife circuit, gathering regularly around Table 14 at the Pewter Mug restaurant with the likes of George Steinbrennerthe shipping magnate who would later buy the New York Yankees-and Michael D. Roberts, who would become editor of Cleveland Magazine.

“He liked people and had a sense of generosity, not only with money but with his feelings,” Roberts once recalled. “There was a sensitivity about him, countered by a sometimes curt manner. Sometimes he was ruled more by emotion than by logic.”

Modell lived at Winton Place, a lakefront high rise 10 minutes west of downtown. He was well-liked, known for kindness and generosity. When Browns star Ernie Davis died of leukemia in May 1963, Modell chartered an airplane to fly the Browns contingent to the funeral in Elmira, New York.

In 1969, the 44-year-old Modell married Patricia Breslin, an actress who sacrificed her career in Hollywood to join Modell in Cleveland. Modell immediately adopted his new wife’s two sons, David and John.

In the ’70s, Modell’s business ventures grew broader in scope. His Cleveland Stadium Corporation purchased an amusement park in Tennessee, property in Cleveland’s suburbs and a hotel in downtown Cleveland. But by the early 1980s, his real estate dealings were deeply in debt. He tried to sell the business to the Browns, but was blocked in court by Browns minority owner Robert D. Gries.

Some observers suspect that Modell’s biggest financial mistake was his reported failure as a younger man to buy life insurance designed to help his heirs pay off estate taxes. Around the National Football League, says financial planner Robert K. O’Dell, Modell’s current situation is known as the “Robbie Dilemma,” after the late Miami Dolphins owner Joe Robbie, whose family was forced to sell the team in 1994 to pay estate taxes.

But for Modell, who had heart bypass surgery in 1990 and a hip replacement in 1993, such an insurance policy had become prohibitively expensive by the time he saw what happened to the Robbie family.

On September 17, Moag strolls into a tobacconist’s shop in Georgetown. “I’ll have two boxes of Davidoff Double Rs,” he informs the clerk.

This is not one of Moag’s usual errands. He’s not much of a cigar smoker, but lately he’s been asking friends what brands are top of the line. Moag signs a credit card slip to pay the tab. It isn’t until he and the cigars are back in his car that he checks the receipt. Two boxes of Davidoff Double Rs cost $890.

At noon on September 18, Moag strolls purposefully into Al Lerner’s New York City office, cigar boxes tucked under his arm. Maryland Stadium Authority general counsel Alison Asti and MSA executive director Bruce Hoffman also have made the trip.

The first thing the Marylanders notice is the breathtaking view, floorto-ceiling windows offering a panorama of Central Park. The trio walks past a dining table, set with china and silver for eight, on their way to meet the Browns contingent gathered in the chairs and sofas arrayed near Lerner’s mahogany desk. Awaiting their arrival are Lerner; Modell; Modell’s son, David, vice-president of the Browns; Jim Bailey, executive vice president of the Browns; and attorney James Berick.

Moag hands one box of cigars to Lerner, an aficionado whose devotion is such that he maintains a humidor in his office. Lerner demurs, suggesting that perhaps Moag should offer them to David Model!.

“No, no,” Moag protests, extending the second box in David’s direction. “I’ve got one for you too.”

Finally, Moag, now empty-handed, turns to the elder Model!. “And Art,” he announces, “I’ve brought you a $200 million stadium.”

After a round of introductions, it’s the stout, snowy-peaked Modell who breaks the ice, in a voice that betrays his Brooklyn origins. “I know you’ve been burned time and again,” the Browns owner says, “but I’m here in good faith. I’m not going to use you. I don’t think it’s appropriate to use Baltimore to extort a stadium out of Cleveland.”

Modell’s voice starts to shake with emotion as he talks of leaving his home of 35 years. Referring to the stadium situation in Cleveland, Modell says, “I’ve waited long enough. It’s clear to us that nothing is going to happen.”

Asti is impressed. In nine years representing the Stadium Authority, she’s negotiated near deals with many of Baltimore’s NFL suitors-Buccaneers, Rams, Raiders and Bengals. Now, hearing the strain in Modell’s voice, a glimmer of hope punctures the cloak of her cynicism. Maybe he is coming to Baltimore.

Moag speaks first for the Maryland contingent.

“I want you to know,” he assures Modell, “that if you’re interested in doing business with us, I will be very straightforward. I will not bulls–t you.”

When a waiter arrives, carrying a tray filled with salmon, chicken breast and London broil, it’s time to break for lunch. Guests serve themselves from the tray, then take seats at the dining table. Moag and Lerner dominate a spirited political discussion about the coming presidential election campaign. Members of the Cleveland contingent express hope that then-undecided Colin Powell would opt to enter the race.

After lunch, Moag sums up the state of negotiations by saying, “You know what this deal is, Mr. Model!. I don’t have to sit here and rehash it.”

As the meeting continues, it becomes clear that only three major issues remain unresolved. First, the Browns want to cover moving expenses by selling personal seat licenses. (Increasingly common, PSLs force fans to pay a onetime fee for the right to buy season tickets.) Second, Modell and Lerner want to form a new firm, the Maryland Stadium Corporation, to manage the new stadium. And finally, the Browns want the right to select a concessionaire.

In the minds of Moag, Asti and Hoffman, none of these issues is insurmountable.

How is it that Baltimore, a city without an NFL team since 1984, could bring a $200 million football-only stadium and lay it on the table before Art ModeII? Oddly enough, the answer starts with the often-vilified Colts owner Robert Irsay.

When Irsay moved the team to Indianapolis, he sparked a panic among Baltimore’s civic leaders. Was Baltimore about to lose its major-league standing? Fears deepened that Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams might move his baseball team to his hometown of Washington, D.C.

In 1986, then-Governor Hughes asked Herb Belgrad to look into strategies for dealing with the crisis. Three short months later, Belgrad gave new governor William Donald Schaefer a remarkably prescient set of recommendations.

First, Belgrad concluded that renovating Memorial Stadium wasn’t a viable solution in the new sports economy of the ’80s. Only a new stadium would suffice. Second, he said, rather than a multi-purpose stadium, Baltimore would need a baseball-only stadium for the Orioles first-and then, perhaps, a football-only facility if the NFL ever returned.

Schaefer, who was mayor when Baltimore lost the Colts, took Belgrad’s report to a skeptical General Assembly. An arduous uphill lobbying

campaign eventually convinced legislators that the state should invest heavily in professional sports as an economic development tool.

“Now that everybody loves Camden Yards, people forget just how controversial it was,” recalls attorney Alan M. Rifkin, who was then legislative counsel for Schaefer. Rifkin predicts a similar phenomenon over football will unfold in the coming years.

When John Moag considers the upheaval over franchise moves in professional football, he sees a simple, hard truth about the new sports economy. Cities that choose to make professional sports teams an economic priority-by spending big money on state-of-the-art facilities-will get and keep teams; cities that don’t will lose them.

On October 6, less than three weeks after the New York meeting, the deal is in the hands of the lawyers. At the Washington law offices of Jones, Day, Rea vis & Pogue, Alison Asti meets with Modell’s lawyers for a daylong, line-by-line review of a proposed stadium lease. But the deal hasn’t cleared every hurdle yet. The days ahead bring some tense moments. When the two sides reach an impasse at one point, Moag calls a halt to the talks.

Lerner and Moag smooth things in a subsequent phone call, during which Lerner explains one of his golden rules of deal-making by relaying an anecdote about his father: The elder Lerner was once on the verge of buying a liquor store, but the deal turned sour when he and the seller argued over who would take possession of some toilet pa per stored in the building. Lerner concludes his tale with a moral: “Never let a deal fall apart because of the toilet paper.”

By mid-October, negotiations are back on track. The two sides agree on an $80 million cap on PSL revenue. Stadium management issues are resolved.

Pen in hand, Modell doesn’t hesitate. He already has steeled himself to the task at hand.

On the weekend of October 14, Alison Asti flies to Milwaukee for a sports-facilities conference attended by team owners, municipal officials and members of the media. She overhears talk about the state of Baltimore’s negotiations with the Buccaneers. Someone stands up in a meeting at one point and discusses the critical nature of the upcoming referendum vote in Cleveland. Is n’t it interesting, Asti thinks, that no one has a clue?

Back in her hotel room, Asti opens a package that’s been overnighted from Cleveland. It contains a nearly final version of a lease agreement between Baltimore and the Browns.

On the morning of October 27, John Moag arrives on time for his 8 a.m. meeting after all. In fact, he’s the first one at BWI, pulling up in his balloon-bedecked Lexus. Governor Glendening’s car arrives just as Al Lerner’s plane taxis toward the airport’s private Signature terminal.

Glendening emerges and surveys the scene. “That’s a nice plane,” the governor marvels.

Once aboard, Glendening takes a seat across from Art Modell, while Moag sits down next to the Browns owner.

“I bet you didn’t think this was ever gonna happen,” Modell says, slapping Moag’s knee.

“There were days when I wondered,” Moag responds.

Modell then turns to Glendening, whom he is meeting for the first time. “This is one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done,” he says in a somber tone. The two chat amiably for more than half an hour, touching on health care issues and pausing on the coincidence that both their wives are active in the hospice movement.

Eventually, the moment of truth arrives. Pen in hand, Model! doesn’t hesitate. He already has steeled himself to the task at hand. I know this is the right thing.

He and Moag each sign two copies of the lease. One copy will head back to Cleveland. The other will end up in a locked drawer in Moag’s desk. Both sides agree that the deal won’t be announced until the end of December.

The Cleveland contingent, which includes Lerner and David Model!, passes out victory cigars. Glendening, an avid anti-smoker, declines to partake and soon grows uncomfortable in the haze. Modell notices the governor’s discomfort and extinguishes his cigar.

But the atmosphere remains exceedingly thick. Excusing himself, Glendening is the first to leave the plane. The others stay aboard for another 45 minutes, celebrating and ironing out details.

On October 31, the veil of secrecy surrounding the deal is falling away. Media in both cities are already chasing rumors of an imminent Browns move to Baltimore.

Modell is certain the leak originated in Maryland; Moag suspects it started in Cleveland. In either case, Modell’s now in a bind. If he confirms a move, he risks ruining his team’s season. If he denies a move, he’ll have to admit his deception in the months to come. And then there are the voters to consider: The referendum on Cleveland Stadium renovations is just eight days away.

I’ve got to level with the public, Modell concludes. He calls John Moag and tells him it’s time to schedule a press conference.

Later, in the Modells’ Waite Hill home, Art informs his wife of 26 years about the change in plans. “You’re going to have to leave town by Monday,” he says.

“Why?” Patricia asks.

“You can’t be living here when I make this announcement.”

Patricia is crestfallen at the thought of never again seeing her house, of leaving Cleveland. She realizes that she has just a few days to pack. Slowly, she faces up to the task before her.

I’d go with Art to the North Pole if he wanted me to, she tells herself.

That evening, in Baltimore County, Peggy Moag returns home from Halloween trick-or-treating with Lauren and Alexandra to find her husband pacing the house like a caged lion. Peggy and the girls give him space.

At 8:30 p.m., three hours ahead of schedule, John walks past his wife on his way to the stairs. “I’m going to bed,” he says, distantly.

“Okay,” Peggy replies, not wanting to ask.

Forty-five minutes later, John reappears downstairs.

“I’m going for a run,” he announces. “Okay,” Peggy says.

But he never leaves the house.

Instead, he heads for the screened-in back porch, where he lights a cigarette.

One evening later that week, Moag hears a caller to a sports-talk show on WBAL radio announce in breathless fashion that the Browns are moving to Baltimore and that he heard the news from one of the governor’s bodyguards. The show’s hosts, skeptical of such a longshot possibility, simply move on to the next caller. Whoa, Moag thinks, if the state police are talking, we’ve got a serious problem on our hands.

On the night of November 3, Baltimore’s WBAL-TV breaks the story.

The next morning, as the news spreads through Cleveland, a gentle snow is falling—eerily reminiscent of the weather that 1984 morning in Baltimore when the city learned of the Colts’ departure.

At 11:45 a.m on Monday, November 6, Patricia Modell finishes packing in her suburban Cleveland home. All weekend, she’d been too busy organizing to really focus on events. Now, the situation finally hits home. A couple of Modell family employees notice the shell-shocked expression on her face and ask if she’s alright.

Patricia reassures them. She’s determined not to cry.

Fifteen minutes later, while Patricia is in a car headed for the airport to catch a plane bound for Florida, her husband is 358 miles away in downtown Baltimore.

Despite the fact that temperatures have dipped under 50 degrees, Art Modell is not wearing an overcoat as he climbs a makeshift dais in a downtown parking lot, the planned site of the city’s new football stadium.

Joining him on the platform are Glendening, Moag and Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke. Minutes later, the governor delivers the news that will shock Cleveland and surprise Baltimore: The Browns and Baltimore have eloped.

This story is a joint project of Baltimore and Cleveland magazines. Jim Duffy is senior editor at Baltimore. Geoff Brown is a contributing writer at Baltimore. Shari Sweeney and Jay Miller are contributing editors at Cleveland. All reconstructed dialogue comes from at least one party to the conversation.

Source

Of Thee They Sing

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:31:51 +0000

New and immaculate, the War Memorial on Gay Street was draped in sunlight for its 1931 opening, with Mayor Howard Jack son on the portico, facing City Hall, looking out over the crowd.

One year into the Great Depression, though, Jackson’s outlook was far from sunny. “In some homes today, there is more suffering, more heartache than war ever brought,” he announced. “Our real obligation to those who died [in World War I] is to find a solution to the economic problems of the present.”

His present, of course, is now the past. Today’s banks have real money inside. The stock market is soaring. Employment is at a record high. But other problems reminiscent of the Depression linger, as problems do. There are still hobos under bridges. Still soup lines. Still factories closing. And old and forgotten, the marble War Memorial has lingered, too, darkening in city soot, weather ing, growing weary.

Now it sits draped in a blanket of fog and blackness on a cold March midnight. On the front portico, where a mayor once spoke of betterment, a homeless Vietnam vet named Bill sleeps with his head pressed against a tall golden door. From here, the War Memorial seems heartbreaking: soiled and silent in the shadows of downtown. Even the front courtyard appears disheveled, muddled in low mist, that patch of land where “The StarSpangled Banner” was first performed in 1814. And across the courtyard, City Hall tolls its bell: one o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four. Nothing changes, save the scatter of rubbish whirling in rich, black breeze.

But come 5:30, light nips at the horizon. A short woman sips coffee at the corner and shivers, hawking newspapers for 25 cents. Police officers hasten toward headquarters. Batches of businesspeople bustle by, ignoring the old memorial, and Bill awakens on the portico, fumbles with a handful of cigarette butts, and lights one.

At 7:30, Civic Works employees perform calisthenics in the front plaza, and at 8:05, a car pulls to the curb. A candidate for U.S. citizenship emerges, ready to be sworn in as part of a monthly ceremony. She is old, feeble, with light-brown skin and long gray hair, with two tall sons in turbans helping her from the sedan to a wheelchair. And she is smiling up at the War Memorial, a smile of hope and excitement. Long ago, just after this monument was built, this old woman would not have been allowed to take her citizenship oath here. State veterans had forbid use of the building “for other than veterans.” But that idea didn’t last—this is American, after all—and the policy was overturned on Constitutional grounds.

Eventually, the building became a museum, and was rededicated to also honor veterans of World War II and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. The Disabled America Veterans, the American Legeion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars took office space over the years, and in 1997, Cynthia D. Coates became the building’s first non-veteran, its first female, and its first African-American executive director.

Today, the first day of spring, Coates is in her office downstairs as 351 citizens-to-be assemble in the auditorium above. She listens as Lloyd Marcus sings “Celebrate America” and Howard German croons “America the Beautiful.” She hears 351 voices—legal alien voices—take the oath of U.S. citizenship and she hears congratulations booming from the stage, cries of “Welcome to America!”

Then she hears 351 voices—citizen voices, now—whooping on the portico, on the stairs, on Gay Street and beyond. And Cynthia Coates sits in her chair smiling at the joyous sound of her old and maybe not entirely forgotten building. A building still of patriotism, still of pride, and now, again, of hope.

Source

Edward Norton Goes Electric

Jess Mayhugh — Sat, 08 Jun 2019 01:29:27 +0000

—Photography by John Sann

Edward Norton is talking about Bob Dylan. This is significant for a few reasons. For starters, when you spend the day with Edward Norton, he will talk about a lot of things. He will casually quote C.S. Lewis and Cyril Connolly; he will hold forth on solar energy and the environment; he will go into elaborate detail about a prehistoric tribe of miniature people that may or may not have been a separate species from homo sapiens. (Asked if he is researching this tribe for any particular reason, he will look at you curiously and say, “No, I’m just interested.”)

He will speak to the Japanese clothing stylist—in Japanese, mind you—trying to find out where he can find the best scallion pancakes in Manhattan, where he now lives. He will talk about the evil Yankees. (“I’d sooner vote for Bush than root for the Yankees,” he’ll say, playing off his well-documented lefty politics.)

And yes, he will talk about film-directors Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick and Spike Lee, who are among his heroes. And Steven Spielberg, whom he considers to be a “paint-by-numbers” director.

So if you spend the day with Edward Norton it is advisable that you bring your A-game, intellectually speaking. It’s also advisable that you bring a pen to jot down some of his passionately recommended books and lecture series and films.

Which brings us to Dylan.

“You haven’t seen Scorsese’s Dylan documentary?” Norton exclaims at one point during the discussion. “Oh, you can not miss that. That is one of the most riveting things I’ve seen in a long time.”

It has just been a few days since he’s seen the documentary, No Direction Home, so he admits that it is still rattling around in his head quite a bit. But his fascination with the iconic folk singer is not insignificant.

What Norton admires about Dylan is his unshakable integrity; the singer’s fidelity to his own vision and his refusal to, in the idiom of his time, “sell out to The Man.”

“At 21 years of age, he clearly became this point onto which an entire generation was projecting its hopes and needs for an expression of who it was,” says Norton. “And he just went, ‘No [freaking] way! You got the wrong guy. I’m an artist, I’m not a politician.’ And when he did things that he didn’t think his audience wanted him to do, like plug in an electric guitar, he did it with the supreme confidence of, ‘Yeah, you’re booing, but you’ll catch up. And I don’t really care anyway.'”

A smile plays at Norton’s lips. He clearly loves the defiance of that thought.

“Anybody pursuing a creative life should watch that film,” he says. “It’s one of the best portraits I’ve ever seen of a person who is totally committed to his own muse.”

The notion of following one’s own muse is a very basic concept for Norton. He comes across as someone who is not at all susceptible to outside influence, almost preternaturally self possessed. When asked if he has ever gotten swept away by the Hollywood machine, he matter-of-factly replies, “I’ve never really been swept away by anything.”

As a result, he has no professional advice-givers—none of the typical coterie of agents, managers, reporters, hangers-on whispering in his ear, telling him what to do. He goes his own way.

However, if he did listen to outside influences, they would probably tell him that it wouldn’t be the best idea to take a three-year hiatus in the middle of a red-hot career.

Which, of course, is exactly what Edward Norton did.

The notion of following one’s own muse is a very basic concept for Norton.

Can it be just 10 years ago that we first laid eyes on him? It seems like our native son, our point of collective pride, has been around forever. But it was just 1996 when the Columbia-raised actor with the squinty eyes and the insinuating voice imprinted himself indelibly onto the cinematic landscape.

His role in Primal Fear called for a virtuoso performance-one where Norton’s sweet stuttering Aaron Stampler turned out to be a skeevily malevolent criminal—and Norton delivered. His first film out of the gate and he was nominated for an Academy Award. Pretty heady stuff.

“It was an extraordinary performance,” says Washington Post (and former Sun) film critic Stephen Hunter. “I had been told, ‘There’s this kid from Columbia and he will blow you away.’ Sometimes, when you have those kinds of expectations, quite the opposite happens. But I immediately realized that this young man has a fierce and powerful talent.”

The funny thing was, Norton’s friends from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia didn’t even know he was that into acting. He performed at Toby’s Dinner Theater and plied his craft there, but at school, he was an under-the-radar kind of guy.

“He hung out with the popular kids,” says Maureen Grace Antill, a Realtor and mother of two, who was friends with Norton in high school. “But he wasn’t technically popular. He was very laid back, kind of quiet. He didn’t strike you as somebody showy or flashy.”

Antill says that he was primarily known for being part of Columbia’s First Family—Norton’s grandfather was famed visionary developer James Rouse—and because of that, he kept his nose to the grindstone.

“He was very focused,” she says. “He took a lot of AP classes. He was more involved in community affairs than the average high schooler.”

Norton says that he felt no special pressure being the grandson of James Rouse: “It certainly wasn’t negative. [My grandfather] was beloved. He wasn’t like Peter Angelos, a divisive figure. He was seen as this person who had success on a national level but who had stayed at home and committed to his hometown.”

Plus, Norton says that James Rouse was a fantastic grandfather—a “ballpark and fishing trips kind of granddad.” He adored him. (Norton is also quick to point out that he didn’t live the life of privilege that many assume he did. His father was a federal prosecutor and his mother, who passed away in 1997, was a school teacher. They were solidly upper middle class.)

After Wilde Lake, Norton went to Yale, where he majored in history. He did some development work with the family’s Enterprise Foundation in Osaka, Japan. Then he moved to New York, got seriously into acting and auditioned for the role in Primal Fear that would change his life.

He invited his high school friends to the film’s benefit premiere at The Senator. “He was funny about it,” says Antill. “He was like, ‘Can you believe I’m here?”‘

One thing that Antill—and others—were shocked by was the ferocity of Norton’s performance. In his career, he has gravitated to dark roles; he has played a neo-Nazi, a killer, and at least two career criminals.

“Given his very pleasant upbringing in Columbia and his [time] at Toby’s, his four years in New Haven, his work for the Rouse company in Japan, he can play down and dirty,” chuckles Hunter. “He can play tough and mean.”

In person, Norton is slighter than you might think. On the day of the interview, he is dressed in jeans, a gray thermal shirt with a corduroy shirt-jacket over it, and motorcycle boots. His hair is cut short-nearly buzzed-and he has a closely trimmed goatee that gives him a vaguely Teutonic appearance. He has been pumped up for roles in Fight Club and American History X, but this more wiry, slender build is his true physique.

He smiles infrequently, but when he does, he projects an irresistibly boyish sweetness. He is a keen listener-there is an alertness about him. One thing he doesn’t look like, though, is a bad ass. Guess that’s why they call it acting.

“I haven’t seen a lot of his movies,” admits Antill. “They’re too violent.”

Norton’s friends from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia didn’t even know he was that into acting. He performed at Toby’s Dinner Theater, but at school, he was an under-the-radar kind of guy.

After Primal Fear, Norton could’ve done a lot of things. He could’ve pursued a profitable franchise, like Spiderman or The Bourne Identity. He could have sought out the kinds of safe, middlebrow, status-quo confirming parts that win Academy Awards. He could’ve done a genre pick—maybe action or horror or a buddy comedy.

Instead, he followed his own path—working with directors he admired like Spike Lee and Woody Allen and David Fincher; choosing scripts that inspired him; going his own way.

“I really honestly don’t think about how I want my career to go,” explains Norton, now 36. “I don’t even really know what that means. That sounds very confining, the idea of ‘Oh, this is my career.’ I don’t look at doing things that are creative that way. It’s too conscious, too cerebral. My agent, the reason I work with this guy, he never says things to me like, ‘It would be really good if you mixed in one of these.’ Cause I’d fire him. I just don’t want that kind of thinking around me. I don’t think that way myself.”

So Norton insists that the fact that he has not technically appeared on screen in almost three years (last year he did play the role of the leper king in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven, but his face was obscured by a mask), is not part of some master plan.

He was just doing other things: an off-Broadway play—Lanford Wilson’s incendiary AIDS allegory, Burn This—for one; his continued charity work, which includes a board membership at Baltimore’s Enterprise Foundation and founding the BP Solar Neighbors program, for another. He wasn’t looking to work for the sake of work, or to advance his career, or to please anyone other than himself.

“In 2002, I made a big popcorn movie [The Italian Job], and then I made The 25th Hour and then I made a play, that was probably one of the most intense performance things I’ve ever done,” he says. “I was just content. I was satiated. You do a play like Burn This and what are you going to do? Walk off and walk onto another movie set? It’s like, no way.”

Then, one day, he got a script from his agent for a little film called Down in the Valley. The movie focuses on a lonesome cowboy named Harlan who is living in the present-day San Fernando Valley. With his laconic charm and old-fashioned chivalry, the cowboy is able to ingratiate himself to a directionless teenage girl (Evan Rachel Wood) and her sad-sack kid brother (Rory Culkin). As the film progresses, it becomes clear that the cowboy is not all he claims to be, and that the film is actually a kind of deconstruction of the romantic myth of the West.

The film’s writer/director David Jacobson, who had one film under his belt, the cult biopic Dahmer (yes, about that Dahmer) was skeptical that he’d get his dream star Norton for the role of Harlan, but figured it was worth a shot.

“To me, he’s far and away the best actor of his era,” says Jacobson. “I admire his creativity and his choices he makes as an actor. He has the charisma and chops to be a leading man yet he can sink into these character roles. And I love that.”

Much to Jacobson’s delight, Norton agreed to meet with him. Jacobson admits to being nervous, but the two men were almost immediately simpatico.

“I’m not friends with tons of celebrities, but he doesn’t seem very much like an actor to me,” Jacobson says. “There is a definite actor type. He’s not ‘me, me, me, look at me!’ If you sit down with him, he’ll talk about everything. We’d often talk about the environment or politics, and finally get to the film.”

They became collaborators. Norton was a producer and editor and even helped with the rewrites. And the developer’s grandson saw how this film fit in neatly with his family’s life work:

“I said to David, ‘Why don’t we make a Western about our West? The West that people our age actually experience and what has that actually become? You can’t ride a horse across it anymore. It is this wilderness of sprawl. It’s a very community-less, sprawling environment of concrete and highways and tiny little pockets of former communities that are now all fragmented. It’s totally bankrupt.”

The film, like so much of Norton’s work, is challenging. By the end, you don’t know if Harlan was the destroyer or the savior of the two kids. Which is just fine by Norton. He hates films that spoon-feed the audience.

“If you really think about the films that sort of hang around in your head and sort of tickle at you over time, they are usually the ones that don’t answer the questions for you,” he says. “They are usually the ones that aren’t ersatz ‘disturbing’ films. They’re films that are in fact disturbing because they don’t resolve themselves neatly for you. They leave you with as many questions as they do answers.”

“To me, he’s far and away the best actor of his era.”

Down in the Valley isn’t the only film that Norton has coming out in ’06—his The Illusionist played at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews—but it is the one he is ushering into theaters most carefully.

Because the film is complex, and because it has no major stars (maybe Norton would’ve qualified as a major movie star three years ago, but film fans notoriously have the memory of gnats), Norton knows that there’s a chance that Down in the Valley will have just a brief stint in Baltimore before it ultimately finds a second audience on DVD.

“Most of the films that I’ve done that I considered artistically successful have been massive failures financially,” he says with a weary grin. “And yet, in the long run have not been at all. Because video gave them a second life.”

Still, he hopes that Down in the Valley will buck that trend to become one of those magical indie films that strikes a chord across the country, particularly in his hometown.

“I really do hope that Baltimore will go see this film. Because if they do…” he tries to draw an analogy: “It’s like your vote. You don’t think your vote matters, but it does. If people go and see it, it sends messages. It does go up the pipe. And then Baltimore would get more of those kinds of movies.”

At press time, it wasn’t clear yet whether or not the film would have a gala benefit screening at The Senator (as seven of Norton’s films have, raising $750,000 for Baltimore-area causes). But Norton does have a longstanding relationship with that grand old movie house, and its everintrepid owner, Tom Kiefaber.

Those who caught The Senator’s recent run of Heart of Gold, the Neil Young concert film, might’ve heard Kiefaber cryptically thank Norton before each showing.

So what did Norton have to do with Heart of Gold? Nothing, directly.

You see, Kiefaber felt passionately that the film should play at The Senator and asked Norton if he could pull any strings to make it happen. Norton did more than pull a few strings; he called director Jonathan Demme personally and lobbied on The Senator’s behalf.

“I will always be grateful to him for that selfless act of kindness and concern on our behalf,” says Kiefaber. ”When we find ourselves really up against it, Edward has always responded to our ‘SOS.'”

You can probably count on one hand (heck, maybe on one finger of one hand) the number of movie stars who would make that phone call to Demme. But that’s the beauty of Norton.

There’s this massive machinery of Hollywood that manages to consume everyone who encounters it. And yet, somehow Norton stays above the fray-making the films he wants to make, advocating the causes he wants to advocate, and caring enough about his hometown theater to drop everything and make that emergency phone call.

He seems almost constitutionally incapable of selling out.

Bob Dylan—and, more importantly, James Rouse—would be proud.

Source

Screen Star

Jess Mayhugh — Fri, 07 Jun 2019 11:05:21 +0000

It’s hard to compete for attention with a two-headed calf or a Michael Jackson portrait made from aluminum cans, but Johnny Eck holds his own in such company. On a recent Monday afternoon, visitors circulate through Ripley’s Believe It or Not!’s Inner Harbor location, oohing, aahing, and pointing at the oddities on display. This is no hushed museum crowd, and spontaneous exclamations erupt around the galleries: “Look, this dinosaur is all foil wrappers!” “Hey, that’s the suit worn by the guy who walked over the Grand Canyon!” “It’s John Wilkes Booth’s gun!” The Eck exhibit in Ripley’s “Odditorium” evokes much different reactions.

Eck, a Baltimore native, was born without the lower half of his body and barnstormed across the country as a sideshow act-frequently billed as “the half boy;’ “the world’s greatest living curiosity;’ or, as Robert Ripley dubbed him in the 1930s, “the most remarkable man alive:’ Looped newsreel footage playing on a TV monitor and a dozen or so photos on display show why; in fact, some of the poses are so incongruous they appear to be some sort of optical illusion. One shows Eck perched on the top rung of a ladder, sleeves rolled up, smiling at the camera, and looking casual-but he has no legs, just a torso that appears to have been shorn below the ribcage. In another, he holds himself aloft with his right hand and waves with his left, a pose replicated on a nearby mannequin.

The Eck display stops people in their tracks. A woman holding an infant and talking to a girlfriend spots the photos, does a double take, and falls silent. So does her friend. She squints, furrows her brow, and walks forward, as if pulled by some invisible, magnetic force. She examines each photograph and watches the video loop, twice. When the narrator states that Eck was ”born with a body snapped off at the waist,” she instinctively kisses her child on the forehead.

He was fond of saying he was “the most popular man in East Baltimore,” not the most popular half-man.

Two boys in yarmulkes with Orioles patches sewn onto them stand nearby and are similarly transfixed. “He was born that way,” one says to the other, and they nod in sync.

A few minutes later, another woman slows to a halt. After watching the video, she turns to the mannequin, reaches up, and touches Eck’s raised hand. Then, she moves on to the next gallery.

This sort of thing has been going on for decades, as Eck-who also starred in Freaks, Tod Browning’s classic horror film-has captured the imaginations of folklorists and historians, as well as creative types in search of edgy inspiration. In 2001, Variety reported that Leonardio DiCaprio inked a deal to star in an Eck biopic written by Edward Scissorhands screenwriter Caroline Thompson. A few years later, James Franco was reportedly interested in the role. Legendary cartoonist R. Crumb drew his portrait, and Tom Waits nodded to Eck in a pair of songs, 2002’s “Table Top Joe” and 1993’s “Lucky Day (Overture)” from The Bl,ack Rider operetta. The Rolling Stones included a photo of Eck on the cover of their classic album Exil,e on Main Street.

Such folks tend to focus on the carny years, but Eck also forged a second career as an artist, or, more specifically, a screen painter. The Ripley’s display does include three painted screens on an adjacent wall, but they go largely unnoticed. At one time though, Eck’s painted screens were ubiquitous throughout East Baltimore, where his renown as an artist trumped his sideshow rep.

And as the city marks the 100th anniversary of screen painting, which originated in Eck’s neighborhood, his artistic profile figures to soar. He is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and he’s prominently featured in an authoritative book on the history of painted screens, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi in December. He also appears in the film, The Screen Painters, a 1988 documentary that’s just been re-released on DVD.

Such developments will stoke Eck’s local legend and introduce him to a new generation of fans. Perhaps more importantly, they might also humanize him beyond the “freak” persona.

After all, he was fond of saying he was “the most popular man in East Baltimore;’ not the most popular half-man.

John Eckhardt Jr. and his twin brother, Robert, were born at home, 622 N. Milton Avenue, on August 27, 1911. Through the years, Eck polished the story of his birth, which he fondly shared with interviewers, and it went something like this . . .

During a thunderstorm on a hot summer night, an event occurred in the upstairs bedroom of a red-brick row house that shocked the neighborhood. At 10 o’clock, a baby was born, a normal baby weighing six pounds. The room was dark, lit only by a gas burner and the occasional flash of lightning, so the midwife didn’t see that there was a second child. Twenty minutes later, the midwife exclaimed, “There’s another one!” and that baby emerged. More than half of its body appeared to be missing, and it weighed just two pounds.

Here, the story diverged depending on Eck’s mood and to whom he was speaking.

In one version, he claimed the “monster” baby laid on the bed, ignored by everyone, until an elderly neighbor bent over it and compared it to “a broken doll:’ Then, a nurse picked up the baby and held it up to the light, which caused another neighbor to faint.

In the other version, Johnny told pretty much the same story but ended it with the midwife holding him up and declaring, “This is the most beautiful child I have ever seen.” He then added: “I know I was born into a happy family.”

His father worked as a ship’s carpenter down at the docks and frequented the local saloons. His mother, Emelia, minded the boys and their older sister, Carolyn, and did her best to run the house on meager funds from her husband. She dressed the children in hand-me-downs and customized Johnny’s clothes so they’d fit.

The neighborhood in the 1920s was “like living in the country;’ Eck told folklorist Elaine Eff, who interviewed him extensively in the 1970s and 1980s. “It was peaceful. You could sleep out front in a chair all night in the summer time.”

“He said, ‘I can put that boy on the stage’ and promised my mother the rainbow and the pot of gold.”

Johnny learned to walk on his hands and also got around on a board with wheels attached. He was fond of exploring the lumberyard that occupied most of the block across the street. He played with the workhorses and mules that were kept there and climbed the woodpiles with his brother. “And who was the skyscraper climbing up on the biggest pile?” he asked Eff. “Little John.”

His mother suggested he befriend girls, because she felt boys would be too rough and might damage him. She subscribed to Crippl,ed Chil,d magazine and encouraged Johnny to develop skills. He could read and write at the age of four. He loved drawing and took lessons after school on Wednesdays from shopkeeper William Oktavec, who opened an art store on Monument Street and started something of a local fad by painting on screens. Johnny also learned to type and was soon editing the school paper. His mother hoped he might, one day, be a court stenographer.

But all that changed the day he attended a magic show at a local church auditorium. When the magician, John McAslan, asked for a volunteer from the audience, Johnny answered the call and climbed onstage. His appearance shocked McAslan, who sensed an opportunity and told Emelia her son was a potential goldmine as a performer. “He said, ‘I can put that boy on the stage’ and promised my mother the rainbow and the pot of gold;’ Eck recalled, years later.

His parents signed a contract, and Johnny, with Rob in tow, hit the road. He was 12 years old .

.Johnny eventually hooked up with Sheesley’s Great Shows and learned to swing from a trapeze and walk a tight wire on his hands. He performed magic tricks, juggled, and developed an act with an elephant where he climbed on its head and slid down its trunk. The crowds loved it. He painted his own circus banners, often 20-feet long, using bright and bold colors to attract attention.

Eck saved up enough money to buy his own truck and tent and worked all over the country and into Canada with dozens of other outfits, including Ringling Brothers, Ripley’s, and magician Rajah Raboid. He became friends with legends like Harry Blackstone and found his way to Hollywood, where he starred in Freaks and appeared in Tarzan films with Johnny Weissmuller in the late 1930s.

He especially enjoyed the company of circus people. “[I’d] sit up late and shoot the breeze with some of the most wonderful people in the world;’ Eck once told an interviewer. “I met hundreds of thousands of people, and none finer than the midgets and the Siamese twins and the caterpillar man and the bearded woman and the human seal with the little flippers for hands. I never asked them any embarrassing questions, and they never asked me, and God, it was a great adventure.”

By World War II, it was all over.

When Elaine Eff first went Eck in 1974, he’d been off the road for decades. The grind of travel and being taken advantage of by unscrupulous managers had taken a toll, so Johnny and Rob returned to the house on N. Milton Avenue. They tried their hand at operating a penny arcade and booking a train ride through Rosedale Amusement Company, but both ventures proved unprofitable.

Then, as Rob told Eff, “we got in with [William] Oktavec. He picked us up. If it wasn’t for Oktavec, I’d don’t know where the hell we’d be. We’d be done:’

Oktavec introduced Baltimore to painted screens, an art form that can be traced back to 18th-century London. Oktavec operated a neighborhood grocery at N. Collington and Ashland Avenues, where, in the summer of 1913, he painted pictures of the produce he sold on the shop’s screen door. Soon after, a neighbor, Emma Schott, realized that the painted screen provided privacy from the street, because passersby couldn’t see in, but those inside could see out. Schott tore a page from a calendar of an idyllic scene of a red mill beside a pond and commissioned Oktavec for a screen of her own. It caused quite a stir, and Oktavec painted upwards of 200 similar screens before the summer was done.

Over the next few decades, painted screens spread throughout the city’s east side, with the scene of choice being a bungalow with a red roof and curving path beside a pond with white swans. They became nearly as ubiquitous as marble steps, and it’s estimated that, at the height of their popularity in the 1950s, there were approximately 150,000 screens up around the city.

Eff, who grew up near Mt. Washington, happened upon painted screens while studying folk art at State University of New York at Oneonta’s Cooperstown Graduate Program. Working as a curatorial assistant with the New York State Historical Association, she was removing frames from a stack of paintings and noticed that two of the pieces, dating back to the 1890s, were done on screens. They reminded her of the painted screens in her hometown, something clicked, and she returned to Baltimore and began documenting the work of Oktavec, Eck, and many others.

Since then, she’s produced two definitive works on the subject: the 1988 Screen Painters documentary and a thoroughly researched, gorgeous coffee-table book, The Painted Screens of Baltimore, which comes out in December. She is curating the upcoming MICA exhibition, The Painted Screens of Baltimore and Beyond. “Three hundred years ago in England, they were used primarily in commercial settings and among the wealthy,” says Eff. “You wouldn’t find a street full of them like in Baltimore. Baltimore completely embraced them and made them their own:’

And Eff embraced Eck during his years as a screen painter, spending many hours at his house, which, she recalls, appeared to be occupied by a pack rat who happened to be a foot-and-a-half tall. Everything, including piles of National Geographic magazines and cans of Wiedemann’s beer, had to be on the floor within Johnny’s reach. He kept his paints, screens, and some canvases near the stairs in the front room, which he used as a painting studio. (He tested paints in the backyard, and if you walk down the alley today, you’ll notice bricks painted red, green, blue, and yellow-none higher than three feet off of the ground.)

Eck held court on his front stoop, often flanked by a beloved dog, Reds or Major, both Chihuahuas that were smaller than him. “I saw him just about every day when I was a kid;’ says Michele Perrera, who grew up nearby on S. Montford Avenue. “He was a character, and people looked out for him:’

‘We knew him as a neighbor, but also as an artist;’ says her mother, Marge Shaw. “He would make cards for us, write calligraphy, and, of course, he did the screens.”

Eck was known for bold colors—the same colors he used on the circus banners he painted.

Eck had a unique style. Like a lot of screen painters, he got his ideas from greeting cards or calendars, but Eck was known for bold colors—the same colors he used on the circus banners he painted—and variations on the usual imagery. Instead of painting the standard bungalow with a red roof, he’d paint a bright blue roof. He painted tugboats in Fells Point, the pagoda in Patterson Park, and Arabbers hawking their produce. He once painted Jesus standing on the shore looking out toward fishermen casting a net into the sea. At first glance, Jesus appears to be waving to them, but, on closer examination, he’s giving them the finger.

Eff has assembled a representative crosssection of Eck screens for the MI CA show, which will run concurrently with The Amazing Johnny Eck, an exhibition of memorabilia collected by Eck archivist/historian Jeffrey Pratt Gordon.

Gordon became obsessed with Eck while working as assistant prop master on Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire. He came across many of Eck’s belongings in a Fells Point antique shop and bought the entire lot. The haul-which is being digitally archived at Gordon’s johnnyeckmuseum.com website—included letters, drawings, photographs, publicity material, props from his tent shows, trunks of clothing, a scrapbook from Freaks, diaries, handmade puppets, a miniature circus made by Eck, audio cassettes, and, of course, painted screens. Gordon, who continues searching for Eck-related items, owns the last screen he ever painted: a leprechaun standing beside a pot of gold.

A carefully curated selection of pieces will be on view at MICA, including previously unseen items such as a cache of erotic drawings that Eck made and hid in the basement, along with his collection of Tijuana bibles and naughty magazines. “He was known as this happy-go-lucky guy, but he was also working out issues related to sex and to death;’ says Gordon, who notes that the racy material will be off-limits to children at the exhibition. “People tend to forget that he had a full range of feelings and emotions just like the rest of us, and I want the exhibition to paint a full picture of who he was:’

Gerald Ross, MICA’s director of exhibitions, echoes and amplifies that point. “I think it is absolutely essential for artists, both young and old, to seek an understanding of the human condition;’ he says. “This exhibition shows the mind of a man whose life could have gone in a very different direction, grappling with being forever on the ‘outside: Instead, he embraced life and filled it with artistic passion and love for humanity:’

Gordon keenly understands the power of that message as it relates to Eck’s life. Through the website, he hears from people with disabilities, amputees, and combat veterans who’ve lost limbs-all saying they were inspired by Eck and the life he led. “Despite everything, Johnny was a whole man and lived a full life;’ says Gordon. ”When you see someone like him making the best of it, it’s inspiring. You start to believe you can do anything you set your mind to:’

On a recent afternoon, Ron Spence sits in a folding chair outside his house on N. Milton Avenue. He’s never heard of Eck, who died in his sleep-in the house where he was born, a few doors away from Spence’s-on January 5, 1991. By that time, Eck no longer held court on the front steps, and he and Rob (who passed away four years later) had become reclusive. In 1988, someone broke into their house and pistol-whipped Johnny, who couldn’t defend himself. The incident broke his spirit and drove him inside.

Standing nearby, Spence’s wife, Melissa, perks up after hearing Eck’s name. She says his house has been vacant for a long time and recalls the day workers with cranes installed 800-pound metal doors on it, front and back. Melissa assumed she met Eck’s son that day, but it was Gordon, who’d purchased the house with hopes of turning it into a museum, hence the fortified doors and windows.

A neighbor by the name of Ms. Cleo, now deceased, told her about its former occupant. “She told me about his condition and said he had all the neighborhood kids around him;’ says Melissa. “He painted, and he was a good artist, too. In fact, he painted a bunch of screens in this neighborhood:’

She points to her neighbor’s basement window: “He did that screen right there:’

Nearly frayed out of its frame, the screen is washed out and faded. No signature is visible. But look closely and you can see, though it’s awfully faint, a pond and two swans with stands of trees on either side of a bungalow. Its roof is painted blue.

Source

Fish Tales

Aaron Hope — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 08:30:00 +0000

By Ron Cassie
Illustration by Chris B. Murray

Sports

Fish Tales

At the World’s richest BillFishing Tournament, catching the biggest marlin may earn you millions. But not until you pass the polygraph.

By Ron Cassie.
Illustration by Chris B. Murray.

The fish that won Glen Frost $1.65 million had probably been hooked before. Caught 55 miles off the Maryland coast, on the edge of a deepwater shelf along the submarine Baltimore Canyon, the white marlin was huge—close to 8 feet from its rapier bill to its forked tail fin—tipping the scales when it was brought back to the docks at Ocean City’s Harbour Island Marina at nearly 100 pounds. Pulled in at the 11th hour of last year’s White Marlin Open, it was the third-largest white marlin landed in the tournament’s nearly four and a half decades, and its girth indicated it had been around for a while, maybe 25 or 30 years, and knew how to get off a line. “Certainly not a dumb fish if it had grown that big,” Frost says. “And it did everything it could to get away.”

PAUL'S TACKLE SHOP, the longtime center of sport fishing in the area. - DALE TIMMONS

A successful Annapolis-based tax attorney who grew up fishing the Gunpowder River in Baltimore County, Frost is a serious outdoorsman. He lives at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay on Kent Island and has fished the Pacific off Costa Rica and Panama. He estimates it took him 20-25 minutes to reel in the prize-winning catch, which he caught in the final afternoon hours before the official end of the five-day tournament. “It jumped [out of the water] several times. I saw right away it was a white marlin,” Frost says. “I knew I had to keep the line as tight as I could. Otherwise it would shake its head until the lure came loose. I just had tunnel vision. Nothing else in the world existed for those 20-25 minutes except me and that fish.”

Winning the “Super Bowl of Sport Fishing,” as the White Marlin Open is sometimes called, in such dramatic fashion was a thrill beyond Frost’s wildest dreams. Getting strapped to a polygraph machine the next morning inside a claustrophobic hotel room on Coastal Highway, not so much. “It was an interrogation,” says the 33-year-old Frost, adding he won’t be competing in the tournament again this month—or, most likely, ever. “They were very aggressive.”

Here’s the catch with the White Marlin Open—the largest and richest billfishing tournament in the world—and similar big-money fishing events: The stakes are so high, the cheating so widespread, that organizers must institute protections to maintain the integrity of the competition. Back in the early 2000s, the WMO implemented polygraph tests for winners for the first time, and now anyone winning more than $50,000 is basically required to submit to a lie-detector screening before they can collect their dough (the total purse for this month’s 45th annual tournament is expected to exceed $5 million).

Those polygraphs are to ensure anglers play by the rules, that they don’t rig illegal lures or stuff their catches with ice, smaller fish, or lead sinkers—all of which have been done at other tournaments—to add weight. Or that the winning fish hasn’t been pre-purchased from a commercial trawler—which, yes, has happened, too—and packed in ice before the tournament. Or that the winning boat didn’t drop lines in the water prior to the official start time, which is the rule the 2016 White Marlin Open winner was actually found guilty of violating. That federal case, The White Marlin Open, Inc. et al v. Philip G. Heasley, the most expensive scandal in sport fishing history, was finally decided a couple of months ago in U.S. District Court in Baltimore. It cost Heasley, the CEO of a Florida-based financial company, all of his $2.82 million in winnings—more money than Tiger Woods ever took home for winning the Masters golf tournament.

In fact, it cost him more than the $2.82 million in winnings. Heasley spent, “conservatively”—his word—$3 million in legal fees trying to win back his title.

If this all sounds a little crazy, it’s about to get crazier: While Frost was out hooking his award-winning marlin last August, he was also a lawyer involved in the litigation surrounding the contested 2016 results. Some members of the crew he was representing—anglers who stood to receive additional purse money freed if the courts ruled Heasley’s team had started fishing too early the year before—had invited him to cast lines with them.

The Case cost Heasley all of his $2.82 Million in winnings–more money than tiger woods ever took home for winning the masters golf tournament.

In other words, Frost caught the 2017 winning white marlin in the Atlantic as he was helping take down the 2016 tourney winner in a Lombard Street courtroom. But hold on. This is a fishing story, so there’s always one more twist. Frost did not pass his initial polygraph last year.

The White Marlin Open issued a press release immediately after the contest last August stating one winner had failed their polygraph—nine fishermen who stood to take home more than $50,000 in purse money were tested—and another winning angler’s initial exam had come back “inconclusive.” In June, WMO founder Jim Motsko confirmed to Baltimore that last year’s inconclusive result, which wasn’t made public, had indeed come from Frost, who did later pass a second polygraph and receive his giant check after a two-month-long investigation. (Motsko noted Frost had been the only member of his boat who hadn’t passed his initial polygraph; in Heasley’s case, all four of the crew members failed.)

When asked about the details of his lie-detector test, Frost declined to answer. Nor did he wish to respond to queries about the follow-up exam or the nature of the questions he was asked while attached to the machine. He would only describe the whole thing afterward as “very bizarre.” “It should be named the White Marlin Fishing Open and Polygraph Tournament.”

WHITE MARLIN OPEN FOUNDER JIM MOTSKO. -AP Photo/Patrick Semansky

According to a long-ago history penned by James Edward “Scoop” Collins, an Ocean City businessman and World War II Navy veteran, it was a Florida angler, Capt. John Mickle, who caught the first recorded marlin off the Maryland coast, hooking a single white in 1934. A year earlier, the Great Hurricane of 1933 had dumped a week of rain before driving 80-mph winds and a 7-foot tide to shore, unexpectedly carving out a natural inlet over the worst of its 36-hour span. The monumental disaster turned Assateague into an island and, fortuitously, it turned out, opened a gaping passage to the Atlantic from Ocean City, a boon to the town’s fishing and resort economy.

FISHERMEN on THE Docks with three white marlin caught near Ocean City circa 1950. -GETTY IMAGES

It was also in 1934, in the storm’s aftermath, that angler Jack Townsend, fishing with his brother, Paul, first discovered a mother lode of white marlin offshore—at a destination still known as “The Jackspot”—that would later earn O.C. the title “White Marlin Capital of the World.” On July 29, 1939, a record 171 white marlin were boated at Townsend’s favorite spot—at the time, the greatest single-day haul of white marlin ever recorded anywhere. Attracted by the burgeoning publicity surrounding the billfishing hotbed, celebrities from all over the East Coast had started making forays to the Delmarva Peninsula. President Franklin D. Roosevelt arrived too late from Washington that record-breaking Saturday to land any white marlin, but he caught two the next day.

Those halcyon days peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when an average of more than 2,200 of the fast-swimming fish were caught each year. (No period since has remotely approached those figures, largely, it’s suspected, because of inadvertent killings by commercial trawlers.) It was on the cusp of that era, in 1966, that Motsko, then a 20-year-old College Park student with a love for fishing, came down to Ocean City and got hired as a mate on Capt. Fred Kerstetter’s boat, Katherine.

After finishing school and trying his hand at banking and real estate, Motsko continued to pull summers as a mate on various boats. Still wiry and perpetually in motion at 71, he explains that he desperately wanted to find a way to stay in the fishing business year-round. “I had one job [working on a boat] that I loved but didn’t make any money; another I didn’t like [in a bank] and didn’t make any money; and another [in real estate] that I hated but made money,” Motsko recalls. “I remember telling my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to do something that you liked and also make a little money?’ But I really started the tournament so I could fish it. I couldn’t afford to pay a charter and enter one of the events that were around then.” (For the record, Motsko fished his tournament for the first 34 years, winning money—$4,000—once.)

THE HEAVIEST WHITE MARLIN EVER CAUGHT AT THE WMO. -dale timmons

In 1974, the first tournament drew 57 boats vying for $20,000 in prize money, and Ocean City Mayor Harry Kelly presented a $5,000 check (which thankfully didn’t bounce) to the winner. The week was plagued by wind and rain, and when it was over, Motsko had lost money. “The first two years, we had to get a loan to pay the winners. The third year, we broke even, and I thought we were on our way because we didn’t have to borrow money to pay out the prizes,” Motsko says with a laugh. Right about that time, Motsko also purchased Paul’s Tackle Shop, which had been open for 30 years and was the center of big-game fishing in the area. With the tackle shop serving as base of operations, the tournament drew 147 boats in 1977, surpassing all other billfishing tournaments in the world—an honor it has held ever since—and becoming a family enterprise in the process when his two daughters joined the business. Last year, nearly 3,000 anglers in 353 registered boats entered the fray, many paying up to $30,000 to participate in the tournament’s big betting pools, which are known as calcuttas and generate the huge payouts. “We took it year by year,” Motsko says. “Never in my life did I dream this.”

By “this,” Motsko means the biggest week of the year in Ocean City, when hotels and slips are booked solid; when the restaurants, beaches, and boardwalk are packed; and the invasion of hi-tech, 60-foot-plus boats, and gigantic dead fish draw thousands of fans to the daily weigh-ins.

And, now, of course, the controversy and litigation.

“It’s been a miserable two years,” Motsko admits. “But we were backed into a corner.”

the official weigh-ins at Harbour Island, WHERE PARTYING CROWDS watch the anglers bring in their DAILY CATCHES. -getty images

If you are not a sport fisherman, if your only contact with sea life comes via a menu or the National Aquarium, it may be difficult to get a feel for the White Marlin Open. It’s kind of like NASCAR on the ocean. “A battle of redneck pride,” Frost says with a laugh. The biggest, best, and fastest boats here generally cost in the $2 million to $5 million range—so it’s mostly a lot of rich guys who own these vessels, which, with their air conditioners, flat-screen TVs, granite-top kitchens, and stately bedrooms, feel more like luxury yachts than your pal’s little powerboat. (From a distance, when these boats take off together in the morning, they look like an armada of massive white Chevy Suburbans hauling ass across the water.) Some contestants simply hire charter boats for the tournament. Private owners, on the other hand, typically hire a captain and a pair of mates, similar to a pit crew, if you will, that enable the boat’s owner and friends to focus on fishing. And drinking beer. As with NASCAR, the politics of the participants and their fans also hue pretty conservative, which has occasionally sparked controversy. In 2016, “White Lives Matter” T-shirts produced by a local vendor mocked the Black Lives Matter movement with a nod to the namesake fish of the tournament.

The names of some boats, too—Skirt Chaser, for example—also evoke a culture closer to say, Mad Men, than the 21st century.

anglers with a white marlin in Ocean City circa 1950. -getty images

But not every competitor is a financial-industry CEO or high-priced lawyer; more seem to have earned their fortunes in traditional, old-school family businesses—printing, construction, government contracting, manufacturing. They all, however, have modern advantages onboard: global-positioning technology, up-to-the-minute satellite weather information, current and mapping systems, and dual-dredge bait operations to attract their prey.

Sport fishing is still sport fishing, and even with all those fancy amenities, or maybe because of them, there is lot of sleeping-off hangovers on the way out to sea (runs to the nearby canyons take 4-5 hours, translating into 4 a.m. launches), and then waiting in the sun, sipping Coors Light and noshing sandwiches while hoping something takes an interest in one of the colorful plastic lures trailing off the back of the boat. “You’ve seen Jaws, right?” angler Frank Massa joked mischievously with a pair of fishing buddies as he cranked a big reel in super-slow motion last year aboard a boat up from Mobile, Alabama, imitating the foreboding click-click-click from the grizzled fisherman Quint’s first encounter with the movie’s infamous shark. In the 1975 film, that click-click-click served as the ever-so-subtle signal that the killer fish had grabbed the bait and was readying for an epic run.

Around the Alabama boat, however, all was calm for nearly their entire second day out. “That’s fishing: hours of boredom, interrupted by moments of chaos,” one of Massa’s crewmates chimed in after an early-morning catch, the only bite of the day.

Along with the top prize at the end of the week for the heaviest white marlin—the biggest payout—and for biggest blue marlin, tuna, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and shark, there are smaller daily prizes. Despite their names, the blues and the whites share the same color schemes: royal blue on top and a whitish-silver underneath. What sets them apart is their size. Blue marlin can grow to more than 1,000 pounds, 10 times the size of their white cousins. Blues are so enormous they generally aren’t afraid of anything, including biting on a line—the problem is getting them onto the boat. Whites are more cautious, and pound-for-pound extremely tough fighters, which is what makes them such a great challenge.

Certainly there is something primal to big-game fishing in what feels like the middle of the ocean. It’s tempting to say masculine as well, but more women, though still a tiny overall percentage, are fishing the tournament each year. (Cheryl McLeskey, of Virginia Beach, won in 2015 with a 94-pound white marlin.) There is also something disconcerting, to an outsider at least, in watching winners grin and pose for photos alongside the enormous, gorgeous fish they’ve just taken from the sea for sport and trophy.

A 1,062-pound blue marlin caught in 2009 at the white marlin open. -Larry Jock, Coastal Fisherman

The packed ritual weigh-ins at the Harbour Island Marina each afternoon and evening are also a little disconcerting. They are a strange blend of reality TV and spring break for sunburned, middle-aged adults. Bon Jovi, Tom Petty, and George Thorogood blare from the speakers. Local journalists (this is the stuff of front-page news in Delmarva) inevitably descend with notebooks and cameras for interviews as the hunters unload their catches and bask in the anticipation and attention of the crowd. Witnessing the slightly inebriated audience cheer and applaud while one of the huge animals is strung up by its tail overhead—its weight and length called out by an announcer—adds to the surreal spectacle.

The fact that these animals have been considered for the U.S. threatened species list—though commercial fishing lines, which inadvertently catch the marlins, are the overwhelming culprit—doesn’t dispel the feeling that sport fishing is more akin to a safari than fishing the local trout stream for recreation (and maybe dinner, if you’re lucky). The thousands of gallons of diesel fuel burned each tournament cannot be good for the marlin’s survival, either. The use of circle hooks, which are more difficult for fish to swallow, does make successful catch-and-release efforts for commercial and sport fishermen more likely and should help rebuild the stock of marlin and other fish. Motsko says that 98 percent of the billfish caught during the tournament are released.

“We’ve been at the forefront of conservation efforts,” Motsko says, adding that he’s also proud that hundreds of pounds of meat each year from the competition get filleted on the docks by a volunteer for the Maryland Food Bank.

An aerial view of the boats coming in at the White Marlin Open in Ocean City. -MARYLAND COAST DISPATCH

The most pressing concern facing the White Marlin Open is the continued use of so-called lie-detector tests. It’s a 1920s technology that, as most people know from TV detective shows and movies, measures physiological indices, including blood pressure, pulse, and respiration, as an individual, i.e., a likely suspect, is asked a series of questions. The underpinning theory is that false or deceptive responses generate physiological responses different from those associated with non-deceptive responses. Yet, no specific physiological reactions are associated with lying. Confounding matters, each polygraph examiner uses their own scoring method.

The FBI, the CIA, and many police departments may still use polygraphs in interrogations, but polygraphs are not admissible in prosecuting criminal cases because of their fallibility. They can, however—although it’s rare—sometimes be introduced as evidence when both parties have previously agreed to their use in the form of a contract, for example, as participants do in signing up for The White Marlin Open. A 2003 National Research Council study found “little basis” that a polygraph test would demonstrate an extremely high accuracy.

Ultimately, U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett ruled the polygraph exams could be admitted in the Heasley case and that the WMO complied with its obligations under tournament rules. He also went by more than polygraph tests in rendering his judgment: During eight days of testimony, Bennett looked at GPS reporting, photography and logs, as well as the crews’ conflicting accounts in concluding that fishing lines had been dropped prior to the official start time.

Heasley, for his part, told the court that “he never wears a watch” and that he had trusted his hired crew to follow the rules. He doesn’t believe, based on the evidence, that his team did anything wrong. He also says he defended himself in court against the tournament to protect his personal reputation and prove he had won the largest billfishing tournament in the world—an accomplishment, he acknowledges, he could hang a hat on for the rest of his life.

it's kind of like nascar on the ocean. "A battle of redneck pride," frost says. the biggest, best, and fastest boats here generally cost in the $2 million to $5 million range.

“Do I have regrets about spending that much money to fight this thing?” Heasley asks. “Absolutely, I do. I’d promised my crew half of anything we win, and I could’ve just given them each the share that I feel like we rightly won instead of spending it on lawyers. I also could’ve given the money to charity.”

Heasley, 69, one of nine children, grew up fishing on Long Island Sound with his grandfathers and dad. He referred to the polygraph testing as a dehumanizing experience. “They asked me if I had ever lied to my parents,” he says. “And if I had ever lied to my wife or would I. Of course I had lied to my parents, but I don’t want to answer those kind of questions in front of people I don’t know.”

Heasley has no intention of stopping fishing, but he is ambivalent about entering another high-stakes derby. Although, he did attempt to enter the White Marlin Open again last year. “They sent my [entrance] money back.”

He also is ambivalent regarding future legal action. His last appeal in federal court was denied, but a civil suit remains a possibility. “I’m in the ‘no’ camp,” Heasley says of further litigation. “But I have a lot of people around me in the ‘yes’ camp.”

Motsko maintains he has never accused Heasley or his crew of anything other than failing the polygraph tests. Once that happened, however, he was left with little choice but to strip their winnings—otherwise he faced lawsuits from other winners, who would inevitably demand their full cut of prize money.

“We started using it [the polygraph exams] because of rumors that kept flying around each year about cheating,” says Motsko. The 2016 and 2017 tournaments were not the first time for failed tests at the White Marlin Open. After the 2007 tournament, a second-place winner in the blue marlin category failed a pair of polygraphs, losing out on several hundred thousand dollars. “A lot of tournaments were already using them by the time we started [in 2004].”

The tournament has tried different refereeing approaches, including putting observers on boats, which is a practice used elsewhere. Motsko found it unworkable logistically. “With the early start times, boats deciding at the last minute which days to fish because of the weather, observers getting seasick, and other issues, it was impossible,” he says.

MOTSKO GIVING winner Vince Soranson His check IN 1974. -“B” Larry Bright

It should be noted that cheating in sport fishing is hardly limited to Maryland. In particular, it appears to be endemic to bass fishing, which has been plagued by black market networks that sell and deliver prize-winning fish to anglers. In Alabama, two men were sentenced to jail time for cheating in a tournament after being charged with tampering with a sport contest. Other states have enacted laws to combat the problem.

Some White Marlin Open participants have suggested placing video equipment on boats to expose cheating or deploying surveillance helicopters. The tournament’s boundaries are considerable, however, from Central New Jersey to Virginia Beach.

Motsko says he has no plans to make any changes.

Although Frost won’t be competing at this year’s tournament, he has no intention of missing it.

“I’m not fishing, but I am going down there this year,” Frost says, adding that the publicity from the trial has been great for his law business. “It’s still a great party all week. And who knows? I may even pick up another client.”

Because, as a trophy-hunting angler and tax attorney would understand better than anyone, greed and the desire to win are primal urges, too, as big as any marlin.

Source

Can Hagerstown Kick Its Habit?

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 08:30:00 +0000

By Ron Cassie and Lauren LaRocca
Photography by BENJAMIN C. TANKERSLEY | July 2018

News & Community

Can H-Town Kick Its Habit?

The worst drug epidemic in U.S. history could be a fatal blow to Hagerstown (and other small towns like it).

By Ron Cassie and Lauren LaRocca.
Photography by Benjamin C. Tankersley | July 2018

seventy-five miles
west of Baltimore,

the sun has yet to rise over South Mountain, but already a line of cars is arriving at the Phoenix Health Center in Hagerstown. Saturday mornings are the busiest days of the week because the drug treatment clinic is closed on Sundays—meaning that several hundred people begin showing up at 5 a.m. to ensure that they can collect their extra day’s supply of methadone or buprenorphine.

The substance abuse treatment center sits across the street from an abandoned hospital parking garage (the hospital moved out of downtown like nearly everything else), and a seemingly endless stream of addicts in late-model cars, minivans, and pickup trucks come and go until the pharmacy closes at noon. A local taxi company sporadically drops people off. Others walk from nearby apartments. Some folks—a waitress with an apron tied around her waist, a guy in construction gear—are clearly stopping by on their way to a job. Others arrive in pajamas and sweatpants, barely awake, clutching telltale lockboxes for take-home doses. A handful, with newer haircuts and cars, might be professionals somewhere in this politically conservative county. For the lion’s share, however—a nearly all-white mix of solitary adults, young and middle-aged couples, teenagers, and parents dragging along children—it looks like life has been a struggle for a while. Maybe longer. There’s an unmistakable world-weariness written into their faces. Most aren’t even here to get clean but to get by.

Washington street leading east at the hagerstown public square in 1957.

Perhaps as many as three-quarters of those in local methadone programs, according to recovering addicts interviewed for this story, still get high, using coke, crack, ecstasy, Spice, or benzos like Xanax, which are particularly dangerous in combination with methadone. Others sell or trade their methadone or bupe (opioid medications used to suppress withdrawal symptoms) to buy the real thing, faking drug tests to game the system. “Maybe 10-15 percent don’t give you any problem and are trying to do the right thing,” says Lee Green, an addictions counselor who is also an active member of a 12-step program. “That’s how strong the grip of this addiction is.”

When a methadone clinic was first proposed at this site, two blocks from Hagerstown’s “main street,” in the spring of 2001, it was met with vehement opposition. For the past 44 years, since Valley Mall was built on the outskirts of town, shuttering the department stores, retail shops, restaurants, theaters, and five and dimes, there have been hopes of reviving Hagerstown’s once-thriving city center. A methadone clinic was not a part of that vision. The mayor and City Council at the time didn’t want it. Neither did the Washington County health officer or then-Hagerstown Police Chief Arthur Smith, who questioned the wisdom of opening a methadone clinic in a city that, he claimed, did not have a heroin problem. It’s true that from the outside, the county seat of some 40,000 people still looks a bit like Mayberry, with its turn-of-the-century architecture, elegant City Park, church spires, tidy sidewalks, and walkable streets. The huge A&W Johnston clock, first built in 1836 and later refurbished, still stands four stories above the town square in a period brick building.

But the sad fact is that in 2018, Phoenix Health Center draws more people downtown than anything else on a Saturday. Two additional private methadone treatment centers have since opened in the area, not to mention the Washington County Health Department’s outpatient addiction program, which treated more than 11,000 patients between 2013 and its closing this spring due to state budget cuts.

It’s nearly impossible to find a family, including those among the Hagerstown Police Department and City Council, that has not been affected by the town’s still-escalating opioid epidemic. Kevin Simmers, a retired Hagerstown police officer, lost his 19-year-old daughter to an overdose and is now building a women’s recovery center, Brooke’s House. Thirty-two-year-old City Councilwoman Emily Keller, a go-getter single mom and insurance agent, lost her oldest friend to an overdose and ran for office specifically to lead the fight against the opioid epidemic. “There wasn’t a door that I knocked on when I was campaigning for City Council that people didn’t say heroin and the opioid crisis was the number one issue,” Keller says. “Everyone had a story.”

“Now it’s everywhere. It’s a phone call away.
They’ll deliver. Quicker than ordering a pizza.”

n its heyday, Hagerstown built the massive Fairchild transport planes that carried U.S. troops across the Pacific during the Korean War; post-war, they made Boeing jets. Hagerstown built automobiles, bottled Coca-Cola, made shoes, clothing, furniture, and Breyer’s ice cream, and was the world’s largest manufacturer of pipe organs. But today, while Frederick, just 25 miles east down I-70, is regularly named among the best places to live in the U.S., Hagerstown more closely resembles a microcosm of Baltimore—essentially a small town with big-city problems, continually in survival mode. In truth, Hagerstown has a higher poverty rate than Baltimore City, a higher percentage of people under 65 with a disability, lower home-ownership rates, and a lower percentage of its workforce with college degrees. (It also broke a record last year with eight homicides, sending its per capita murder rate past Philadelphia and Chicago.)

A Pedestrian on north Prospect Street.

Opioids may be the deadliest catastrophe to hit Hagerstown, but the current crisis follows a long string of blows to a city that never made the transition from a mechanical to a hi-tech economy. While the most pressing question confronting Hagerstown—and other resource-deprived towns in Maryland such as Frostburg, Cumberland, Cambridge, Snow Hill, Elkton, and Edgewood—may be how to get immediate help to those struggling with addiction, the broader question is more vexing: How does an isolated, blue-collar town recover from the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history on top of 45 years of deindustrialization? Economists studying national trends say people should simply vacate towns like Hagerstown—and seek work elsewhere.

“The epidemic has not peaked yet by any means,” says Mike Piercy, director of the Washington County Department of Social Services. “If we were somehow able to turn around the [addiction] numbers today, it would take another 20 years to shake off the damage.”

police investigating a burglary on West Franklin Street

o understand the DNA of Hagerstown, you have to go back to the 19th-century industrial boom. Situated near the Potomac River and what was once Western Maryland and West Virginia coal country, Hagerstown served as a vital gateway to the fertile Midwest. The National Road, Route 40, began carrying wagon trains through Hagerstown to the Ohio River Valley in 1818. The steel tracks of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad started carrying locomotives from Baltimore in the same direction, straight through the heart of Hagerstown, two years after the end of the Civil War. The C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio) Canal, which passes through Washington County and primarily transported coal, was already in operation by then, having been completed in 1850.

But the current economic picture in Hagerstown stands in stark contrast to the days when it earned its Hub City nickname—when five major passenger and freight lines merged here in a way that resembled the spokes of a wheel. Consider, for example, that three of the four railroad properties on the Monopoly board were spokes in that Hagerstown hub, connecting the city to Richmond, Washington, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York.

In the first decades after World War II, during the early rumblings of the automobile age, Hagerstown continued to thrive, becoming a trucking hub as well a rail hub. Now, however, nearly all of the rails leading into downtown have been removed. After the public schools and hospital, the largest employers in Washington County today are the sprawling Citi and First Data call centers.

a view from the abandoned hospital parking garage across from the antietam street clinic.

Even as other Rust Belt towns decline—losing union jobs, community, status, and a general hope for a brighter future—the numbers in Hagerstown are startling when you step back and look at them. In a Brookings Institution study of 114 metropolitan areas that specialized in manufacturing from 1980-2005, the Hagerstown-Martinsburg (West Virginia) area had the second-highest percentage of industry job change in the U.S., a staggering 70 percent. Meanwhile, health care, housing, and education costs have skyrocketed over the ensuing decades, but wages, adjusted for inflation, have remained essentially flat in Hagerstown, growing just 5 percent in total over that 25-year span.

More than 80 percent of students at three Hagerstown public schools receive free or reduced-priced lunches.

And now, Hagerstown’s unique coordinates, once its greatest asset, play a leading role in enabling its public health crisis. Six years ago, at an I-81 coalition meeting of stakeholders, Western Maryland state police commander Lt. Mike Fluharty coined the phrase “Heroin Highway” to describe Hagerstown’s I-81/I-70 nexus. Stretching from New York to Tennessee and Baltimore to Utah respectively, I-81 and I-70 are two of the longest interstates in the U.S., and they intersect in Hagerstown. It’s these fast-rolling interstates that carry the deadly opioids, including heroin and fetanyl, flooding Maryland’s western counties.

The opioid trade has become so lucrative here that dealers from Baltimore and even New York travel to Hagerstown, and often farther into West Virginia, because they can earn up to $40 more a gram for heroin and a similarly higher profit margin for fake pills, like the counterfeit, fentanyl-laced “Vicodin” that killed Prince. “Dealers now have their own pill presses,” explains Drug Enforcement Administration agent Robert Grob at a recent Drug Take Back Day, a collaboration between the Hagerstown Police Department, county health department, and the DEA that encourages local residents to turn in leftover medication for safe disposal. “All it takes is a little fentanyl—or a microgram of carfentanyl, which is 100 times more potent. They buy the stuff to cut it, the right color dye, and press in a number or an initial, and it looks like the real thing—Percocet or whatever.”

Hagerstown Suns’ Municipal Stadium.

Kristie Lockhard, a 38-year-old recovering addict volunteering at the event, says when she first started using heroin in 1999, she would drive to Baltimore two or three times a day to buy it.

“Now it’s everywhere here,” she says. “It’s a phone call away. They’ll deliver. Quicker than ordering a pizza."

More than 1,000 pounds of prescription medicine is collected in the first two hours of the event, which is held in an empty parking lot outside the county health offices. Two more telltale signs of Hagerstown’s plight are present here as well: The county’s storefront offices sit in an all-but-abandoned shopping center, and nearby is a Superfund site, less than a mile from three public schools, and still in need of remediation two decades after it was added to the EPA’s National Priorities List.

Add to all of this one more factor: Three prisons in Hagerstown, includings two state penitentiaries, have had a habit, according to local law enforcement officials, of leaving ex-offenders in town once they’re released. “It’s a problem,” says former Hagerstown police chief Victor Brito, who resigned in May to lead the Rockville force. “With the highways and economic factors, it’s all a perfect storm.”

a shuttered barber shop on Jonathan Street.

“People began to say, ‘Oh, if it can happen to that family, it can happen to my family.’”

y any definition, the epidemic in this part of Maryland, a state with one of the top five death rates from opioids in the country, is among the worst anywhere. Since the start of the addiction crisis, which now kills more in the U.S. than car accidents and gun violence combined, emergency rescue calls have tripled in Hagerstown. In 2016 (the most recent year available), an average of 113 prescriptions for opioids were written for every 100 Washington County residents—nearly twice the national average. At Meritus Medical Center outside of downtown Hagerstown, nearly three children a week are born addicted to opioids.

Home to one-fourth of the county’s population, Hagerstown accounts for the majority of those seeking treatment, as well as the majority of overdose fatalities, which included 21 city residents in the first four-and-a-half months of this year—a pace that would, if it continues, triple last year’s total. In a town with two traditional public high schools—North High and South High—it has become the norm for incoming generations to attend several funerals before seeing their first classmate get married. “I cannot count the number of friends who have died after I almost did,” says Katie Wetzel, 27, a recovering addict in Hagerstown who is now married with three kids. “A lot of them are just taking their normal dose and get hit with this new shit cut with fentanyl. They don’t stand a chance.”

The societal ripple effect of the opioid epidemic can’t be overstated, says Piercy, who doesn’t have to look any farther than outside his downtown Potomac Street office window to witness people nodding and passing out. The crisis, he says, is driving a dramatic increase in infant mortality rates, a bellwether for other social problems. “We had 13 infant deaths over the past two years, eight of whom were born substance exposed and later died at home because of neglect or some other cause,” Piercy says. “We have more kids living with their grandparents and a greater need for foster parents. The number of child abuse cases has gone up. I’m not in economic development, but you also can’t help but wonder, how do you build a workforce and attract new businesses—which we desperately need—when this is happening everywhere in your community?”

A sitting train and truck behind a lot along West Franklin Street.

he one place in Maryland that has had a long struggle with heroin use is Baltimore, of course. And for the past two-and-a-half decades, the city has taken a public health approach to addiction, offering methadone programs, needle exchanges, HIV testing, and inpatient treatment opportunities before the pharmaceutical industry dumped OxyContin and other opioids onto a naïve market. The rest of the state did not share that history, and Hagerstown and towns like it are dealing with something entirely new. These kinds of places are where non-college-educated, white working-class people have been dying in increasing numbers from what Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton referred to in their landmark 2015 paper as “deaths of despair”—suicide, drug poisoning, and liver disease—which are reversing the life expectancy progress that the U.S. has seen over the past 50 years. A mortality rate increase for any first-world demographic group had been virtually unheard of for decades, with the exception of Russian men after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a phenomenon blamed on soaring alcoholism rates. It is a cruel twist that Hagerstown, on the receiving end of so much heroin from Baltimore, has such a shortage of addiction specialists that the Wells House, one of the largest outpatient clinics here, utilizes Baltimore doctors via telemedicine to treat its clients.

Across the country, rural addiction rates have surpassed those in urban areas, yet there is still not a single inpatient drug treatment facility in Washington County.

“People often use the term ‘self-medicating’ to describe why people use drugs or alcohol,” says Ron Zuskin, a licensed clinical social worker and former University of Maryland faculty member who has worked in Western Maryland. “It’s not as conscious a decision as that. But there is often trauma, or simply the stress of living in poverty, that is putting them under intense pressure.”

“It’s not the white picket fence. you can’t find work, can’t pay your bills. who wants to think about that?”

A dog tied up behind Byers Market on North Burhans Boulevard. Men outside a Hammond Street garage.

osh Morningstar could be the poster boy for the use of prescription opioids gone awry. Ten years ago, the Hagerstown native started having seizures once or twice a week that left his muscles tense, his bones aching, and his head feeling like it might explode. Along with a prescription for the anti-seizure medication Topamax, his family doctor prescribed him Vicodin to be taken after each episode.

He liked the feeling the Vicodin gave him and began to sometimes take the pills just for that hydrocodone buzz. The seizures, and the refills, continued for about eight months, then ceased, but Morningstar found himself dependent on the narcotic—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Over a period of about three years, he went from prescription Vicodin to shooting up heroin. Though extreme, the transition seemed gradual. When his Vicodin prescription ended, he started buying it on the street, until 5-milligram Vicodins weren’t enough. He moved on to 10-milligram Percocet, then 30-milligram. Then he went from eating it to snorting it. Before long, he was buying heroin because it was cheaper than pills, and he went from snorting to injecting it, simply to maintain the same high—and eventually just to function, if you could call it that.

Addictions counselor Lee Green.

He couldn’t hold down a job for more than a month or two, he says, and bounced around from one employer to the next: cleaning bathrooms, painting houses, waiting tables, making pizza.

“October of 2011, I woke up one day and thought, this is the day you die or the day you get clean. I legitimately thought about that for five or six hours that day. I was gonna overdose and kill myself.”

Instead, he sought help by way of Suboxone (the commercial name for a combination of buprenorphine and naloxone), which he considers a miracle. Methadone, he argues, “is a drug just like heroin.” He found an opiate specialist doctor and took Suboxone for about a year, then safely weaned off.

“Life is great now,” he says. He’s married with children and living his dream of being a full-time musician, touring his original folk-country songs across the U.S. But he moved his family to Pennsylvania a couple years ago, leaving Hagerstown behind.

“It’s low-income, and I think it’s hard for people to find and keep employment there,” he says. “It’s not the white picket fence. When you can’t find work, can’t pay your bills—who wants to think about that? Instead, you go get high and forget about it for a while.”

Forty-year-old Brooks Zombro, who has lived in Hagerstown his whole life, puts it another way: “Hagerstown is a manufacturing town, then we lost all those factory jobs our parents and grandparents had, [and] it has become a playground for big box retail that has all but eliminated and destroyed our downtown’s small business district. We kind of got shit pie handed to us.”

Source: Maryland Vital Statistics Administration

HAGERSTOWN MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLES A MICROCOSM OF BALTIMORE—ESSENTIALLY A SMALL TOWN WITH BIG-CITY PROBLEMS, CONTINUALLY IN SURVIVAL MODE.

s the former managing editor of Hagerstown’s daily newspaper, The Herald-Mail, Dave Elliott witnessed firsthand the city’s downward spiral. He blames forces beyond the city’s reach, as well as futile and often misguided leadership. Plainspoken but good-natured, and a well-respected journalist, Elliott started at The Herald-Mail in 1970. He moved to The Frederick News-Post in 1989 but lived in Hagerstown until 2000.

Big out-of-town industries such as Fairchild Aircraft, which once employed 10,000 people and closed its plant in ’83, and Mack Trucks, which arrived in 1961 (and still makes trucks here, although it employs fewer people), were controlled from a distance and had no stake in the community, Elliott asserts.

Those kind of manufacturing jobs generally pulled up stakes for cheaper labor in the South or overseas, a trend that has continued.

Politically, Washington County has always tilted right. George Wallace campaigned here in 1968 and 1972. President Donald Trump spoke to a packed hangar at Hagerstown Regional Airport during his campaign in 2016 and won the county vote by a 2-1 margin.

councilwoman emily keller.

Herman Mills, a Republican mayor from 1965-1973 who owned several gas stations and stores, was a “sort of kingpin of the local ruling class,” as Elliott puts it—and the last in a long line of businessmen and factory owners investing in Hagerstown. “From the early 1970s onward, there was a vacuum—economically, socially, politically, culturally. There were a few people dedicated to establishing a Maryland orchestra, a few people trying to revive the Maryland Theatre. There were things going on, but no cohesiveness at the top.”

One (seemingly) solid mayor, Republican Donald Frush, who served from 1981-1985 and was known as “the Father of Planning” in Washington County, disappeared during his campaign for a second term and was found by a reporter at a Johns Hopkins psych ward.

Mayor Richard Trump (no relation to the president), who ran for office on a slate that promised to return God to City Hall, abruptly resigned without explanation after nine months in office in 2006.

One of the biggest mistakes city officials made was failing to sufficiantly upgrade Municipal Stadium, the nearly 90-year-old home of the minor league Hagerstown Suns, or build a new ballpark downtown. The team lost its Orioles affiliation in the 1980s when the O’s said goodbye to Hagerstown and hello to nearby Frederick. (Currently affiliated with the Nationals, the Suns draw a South Atlantic league-low 896 fans per game; Frederick led the Carolina League in attendance from 2012-2016, attracting nearly 5,000 fans a game.)

For a century, Hagerstown had been the dominant city, and Frederick a little cow town. In recent decades, they’ve swapped roles. Frederick, which seems worlds away rather than a mere 20 minutes, has benefitted from its MARC train station, which has grown the town into a bedroom community of D.C. It’s also close enough to Baltimore that people make the I-70 commute. Because of that, its residents have more money and higher expectations, and a strong restaurant base and downtown arts and culture district has grown there, sustained by its community. “Hagerstown is still a meat and potatoes kind of place,” says Elliott.

But after 50 years of decline, Elliott and others say downtown is finally showing signs of recovery, even if it is a long road ahead.

The rear of North and Locust Food Mart. A Hagerstown pawn shop.

orking with Philadelphia-based Urban Partners, the city has put together a 10-year City Center Plan, which began in 2014, to enhance the town’s quality of life and attract new developers, investors, and businesses. With a projected $125 million in investments needed to fully develop the proposal—a big if—the project, according to city officials, has the potential to create 875 jobs. Eight planned downtown catalyst projects include an expanded City Farmers Market and the creation of a cultural trail, part of which has already been implemented. A huge component of this initiative includes a $40-million effort, started in 2017, which will expand three key institutions—the University System of Maryland at Hagerstown, the Maryland Theatre, and Barbara Ingram School for the Arts—with a slated completion date of spring of 2020.

When the University System of Maryland satellite campus at University Plaza was established in the city center in 2005, it was the first time anything like that had moved into town in decades: something big, with money behind it and staying power. A block away, two restaurants that would become staples—Jone and Don Bowman’s Bulls and Bears and E. Jay Zuspan III’s 28 South—soon opened. In 2009, an old theater was transformed into BISFA, a magnet arts high school.

As the former Supervisor of Visual and Performing Arts for Washington County Public Schools, Rob Hovermale was involved in conversations as early as 2000 about opening a public arts high school in Hagerstown—talks that were largely dismissed at the time.

“Had we not gotten this building donated, it never would’ve happened,” says Hovermale, who’s lived in Hagerstown most of his life and now serves as principal of BISFA.

Recovering opioid user Katie Wetzel.

The school started with 85 students but this year surpassed 300, even though that meant holding classes in hallways and stairwells. They’re bringing in students from nearby counties and occasionally out of state. “We have a long way to go, but the school has brought life downtown,” Hovermale says. “It’s a huge step forward.” A block away, the City of Hagerstown opened the artist-run Engine Room Art Space and four artist apartments above it in 2015, which also breathes some life into the city.

“You’ll see people dressed up nice to see a play or film, and you have addicts walking around,” says Matthew Hast, a sculptor who lives at Engine Room. Daily, he watches people, mostly in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, selling and scoring drugs in the city’s central parking lot behind the gallery.

Another resident artist, Anthony Jones Jr., is a recovering cocaine addict and alcoholic who credits art—and Engine Room—as part of his salvation, giving him a sense of purpose and allowing him to be creative rather than self-destructive. “This place is a blessing. We get to engage and feel like we’re being a positive influence on the city.”

These ongoing efforts build on one of Hagerstown’s legacy assets, the lush City Park, utilized year-round, as well as the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts therein, where the new Cultural Trail begins before it winds toward downtown.

“Having beautiful open spaces is important, and it’s important to have a connection to your community,” says city engineer Rodney Tissue, who moved to Hagerstown in 1986 and raised his two daughters here. The trail, which he helped develop, is primarily for economic development but also gives residents a sense of place and pride in their community.

Although the city has seen little interest from developers for the empty lots along the trail, Tissue says several nearby buildings have been purchased and rehabbed. “I’ve seen growth in investor confidence,” says Director of Community & Economic Development Jill Frick Thompson, attributing it to the city’s 10-year plan.

Whether these efforts, which remain largely public investment—schools, libraries, parks—can spark enough commercial interest to compete with the Valley Mall, the two Walmart Supercenters, and the Premium Outlets remains to be determined. If effective, they will be a start in rebuilding Hagerstown’s economy and, ultimately, its quality of life. Indirectly, they could have a hand at reversing the public health crises in the long run, civic leaders say.

icki Sterling, director of the Washington County Health Department’s Division of Behavorial Health Services, says the turning point for the county in addressing the opioid epidemic was the death of former Hagerstown police sergeant Kevin Simmers’ daughter, Brooke, who overdosed on heroin 10 days after she had been released from a four-month prison stay. “People began to say, ‘Oh, if it can happen to that family, it can happen to my family,’” Sterling says. “This was a normal kid, the daughter of a respected ex-city cop. My daughter went to school with her.” Up until that point, most people in Washington County viewed addiction as a criminal justice issue. Including Brooke’s father.

Christina Trenton Nee, COO, and Charlie Mooneyhan, CEO, of Wells House.

Simmers, an outgoing, thick-shouldered 53-year-old, joined the military out of high school in the early 1980s with the intention of going into law enforcement. “I fully bought into the War on Drugs and what Reagan was doing,” he says. “I wanted to be in narcotics. I wanted to knock down doors and haul bad guys off to jail, and that’s what I did for 30 years.”

Since his daughter’s death, Simmers and Brooke's stepmother, Dana, have been very public about sharing their experience, sparing none of their family’s worst moments and pain. Their daughter, who grew up playing soccer and basketball, became hooked on pills by 18 and then turned to heroin. She tried treatment and rehab several times, and even laid down on the family’s lawn once, begging her father to shoot her to put her out of her misery. “You can imagine as a police officer and a father how I felt,” Simmers says. “It’s like watching a slow train crash coming that you don’t know how to stop.”

For the past three years, the Simmerses have been working to build Brooke’s House in Washington County. The 16-bed treatment project for women is partly to honor their daughter, who once shared her wish of getting off drugs and opening such a center with her parents, but it is also borne of frustration, as the family repeatedly struggled to get the help their daughter needed. Brooke died while waiting for insurance approval for a $700 monthly shot of Vivitrol, which reduces cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

According to a 2016 report from the U.S. surgeon general, only one in 10 people with an addiction problem receives treatment.

“I’ve been a right-wing Republican all my life,” Simmers says. “But how many people do you know that have been attacked by a terrorist? Or an illegal immigrant? Nobody I know. Now, how many families do you know that have been affected by addiction? That’s everyone I know. This isn’t political. This is across the board—and I’ll be the first to agree that attitudes are changing because more white people are dying—that’s totally fair. I was on the other side, and I get it, and people have every right to make that point.”

Kevin and Dana Simmers at the future site of Brooke's House.

Earlier this spring, Keller, the city councilwoman who lost her best friend to an overdose, announced that the city would be joining several hundred municipalities, counties, and states in pursuing legal action against the nation’s largest drugmakers, alleging that they played a key role in launching the opioid epidemic. She highlighted not just the personal toll of the opioid epidemic on families but decreasing property values, its effect on businesses and workforce participation rates, and the immense strain placed on the city’s police, EMS, and fire department budgets. The City Council will likely be forced to raise property taxes again this year.

In an emotional press conference, she pointed the finger directly at the pharmaceutical companies, including Purdue Pharma, which hired hundreds of sales representatives to promote their product and has been accused of using misleading information to hide the drug’s addiction potential.

“This epidemic, largely caused by the pharmaceutical industry’s complete lack of accountability or care about anyone or anything other than their pockets, has wreaked havoc on my city,” Keller said. (In 2007, three Purdue executives pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the misbranding of OxyContin and paid $34.5 million in fines, while the company agreed to pay $600 million to resolve a Department of Justice investigation.) The first three municipality lawsuits against drugmakers—all Ohio cases—are scheduled to be heard in U.S. District Court in Cleveland early next year. Still, they are something of a Hail Mary pass for municipalities. It's hard to imagine Hagerstown and similar cities receiving restitution anywhere near the true cost of the opioid epidemic and officials acknowledge that.

Later, outside a Rotary Club meeting, Keller talks more optimistically about the city’s current efforts to tackle the crisis.

She mentions the increased training for Narcan, a medication that can prevent fatal overdoses, across the city. She also cites the new safe needle program implemented by the county health department—albeit over the objection of a couple of state delegates—to combat Hepatitis C and HIV infections. She discusses plans for the rollout of a new awareness program, Washington Goes Purple, a symbolic color adopted by opioid prevention advocates, geared toward steering youth away from substance abuse.

She talks enthusiastically—and genuinely—about the $40-million downtown revitalization effort and Hagerstown’s future. “To me, the urban improvement project is huge. We’ve been struggling for decades and hopefully this will get the ball rolling,” she says. “We need to maintain a sense of hope. It’s hope or heroin out here.”

Source

Tomorrowland

Aaron Hope — Mon, 04 Dec 2017 09:00:00 +0000

By Ron Cassie
Photography by Justin Tsucalas. Lettering by Luke Lucas.

News & Community

Tomorrowland

Port Covington will be like nothing Baltimore has ever seen. But at what cost?

By Ron Cassie. Photography by Justin Tsucalas. Illustration by Luke Lucas.

s Mark Rice steps onto one of the city’s new, sleek, black water taxis at the dock outside his company’s manufacturing plant in South Baltimore, he can’t help but gush about the cutting-edge vessel. The 55-foot boat—two similar models are currently in operation, with seven more to follow—comes equipped with WiFi, USB ports beneath every third seat, PowerPoint capability, a weatherproof, flat-screen TV, and cabin lights that can be changed to purple on Ravens game days. With a cool, all-aluminum hull modeled after the classic Chesapeake Bay deadrise fishing boats, it is so deluxe that it is regularly chartered for corporate outings.

The new shuttles—the prototype ran more than $1 million—reach a top speed of 8.5 knots, which is significantly faster than the current 6-knot limit. They stow up to eight bicycles and have a built-in maritime GPS tracking. (Need a lift from Canton to Locust Point on some future Saturday night? Imagine an Uber-like service on the water with an on-demand network of smaller boats.) They deploy fold-down windows for inclement weather and heaters for winter commutes, and carry up to 49 passengers and two crewmembers—although a crew may not be required for long.

“The capability for an unmanned fleet is there,” says Rice, who is leading the taxi tour with Plank Industries executive creative director Marcus Stephens. “The barriers are regulatory, not technical,” adds Rice, whose Maritime Applied Physics Corporation makes both manned and unmanned watercraft for the Navy. “We’d want six months of testing, but that's about it. These water taxis have a lot technology.”

In the midst of City Council deliberations last year over the unprecedented $660 million Port Covington tax-incremental financing request by Sagamore Development—the real estate arm of Plank’s Under Armour empire—another Plank firm, this one called Sagamore Ventures, bought the city’s entire water-taxi operation. Then they announced plans to turn the taxis, previously a tourist attraction, into a state-of-the-art transportation option, inking a 20-year contract with Baltimore officials.

Business & Development

Brand Ambassador

After a tumultuous year, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank is newly resolved to see his company—and city—thrive.

Mike Unger | December 4, 2017

“We had never made a commercial product of this scope,” Rice continues, as the high-tech boat pushes up the Patapsco River toward Fort McHenry, leaving much of old industrial Baltimore in its wake. “Until Kevin Plank called.”

Later, the vessel turns toward Port Covington, which the taxi will soon start servicing. A massive railroad hub in its heyday, the 266-acre site still looks mostly abandoned from the river. Stephens—he’s the guy who designed Under Armour’s famous interlocking “UA” logo years ago—highlights the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on the self-contained urban peninsula. He talks excitedly about the possibilities of creating a “live, work, and play” city-within-a-city from scratch, connecting the transformation of the city’s water-taxi system to Sagamore’s aspirations for Port Covington. Like everyone at Plank Industries and Sagamore Development, Stephens is completely taken with the potential of deploying the latest forward-thinking infrastructure—omnipresent wireless connectivity, super-speed fiber-optic lines, multi-modal streets, green architecture, “sensor rich” buildings, soft-shore landscaping—all of which can be installed unhindered by awkward retrofitting.

A rendering of the future Under Armour Campus at Port Covington. RENDERING COURTESY OF Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

Stephens talks about bringing other concepts to Port Covington, too. Concepts with alien-sounding names like “augmented reality” wayfinding, “frictionless” consumption, and “virtual valet” parking—the likes of which Baltimore has never seen. Most of us think of Baltimore in terms of home or community or workplace, and quirky, historical neighborhoods such as Hampden, Fells Point, Waverly, and Reservoir Hill. But Sagamore’s digital master plan is designed to create a sparkling, smart, tech utopia built around the “city as a service” concept, which takes its cues from the on-demand, “software as a service” model behind Google apps, Amazon web services, and digitized customer relationship management.

Port Covington when it served as a massive railroad hub in South Baltimore. Photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine.

“Port Covington will be nothing like downtown Baltimore,” says Stephens, who plans to visit Songdo, South Korea, a city built from scratch and coined, “The World’s Smartest City.” “There will be ubiquitous connectivity at every interface in Port Covington. Data is everything. Not only will that be convenient, but it will help businesses understand consumer needs and deliver the ‘live, work, play’ experience.”

Sagamore not only plans to install its own redundant fiber-optic network, but also launch its own internet service provider. Company officials envision a Port Covington where a water-taxi trip, bike-share rental (they plan to launch their own bike-share system, too), visit to Sagamore’s distillery or Rye Street Tavern, decision to take in a movie or concert, or shopping trip is curated and integrated into a single experience. Like on a cruise ship. Or at Disney’s Magic Kingdom, as one Sagamore consultant put it, a place where transactions can simply be charged by touching a wristband or card against a touchpoint and are billed to a customer's account.

“I love Disneyland,” Plank told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “The purpose of Disneyland is to make people smile.”

Port Covington: A Brief History

Bounded today by I-95 and McComas Street to the north, Hanover Street to the West and the Patapsco River to the south and east, Port Covington once included a 2,500-car rail yard, a 5-million-bushel grain elevator, a cement elevator, a 1,500-foot ore pier, a 1,000-foot covered merchandise pier, and an intermodal facility for transferring containers to and from rail cars, and various related small buildings.

Tap to Expand

West Covington Park near the City Garage complex.

With Goldman Sachs throwing a $233 million investment into Port Covington, which has recently been touted in Inc. magazine and The New York Times as a serious contender in the Amazon HQ2 sweepstakes, there seems to be every chance the project could surpass the wildest dreams of its most enthusiastic backers over the course of the next two decades. The downside? There is also every chance that it will confirm the worst fears of its toughest critics, further segregating one of the most segregated and poorest cities in the country while becoming another example of trickle-down economic development and exacerbating Baltimore’s persistent income and wealth inequality gaps.

Simply, it is a mistake to frame the long-term outcome as an either/or proposition: As in, either will it create a gleaming new urban landscape that brings thousands of new jobs and new residents to Baltimore as pitched, or it is destined to become an exclusive destination with negligible benefits, at best, for the city a whole and, specifically, disinvested West and East Baltimore.

Most likely, it will do both.

References to Disney and its Magic Kingdom by Plank and Sagamore officials, and phrases like “Dubai on the Patapsco” by others, have not been getting tossed around without reason.

One of the biggest development projects in the U.S., the entire build-out is projected to cost $7.3 billion and take 25 years to finish.

The first phase of Port Covington’s development is a five-year horizon, referred to as “Chapter 1” in Sagamore parlance, with construction beginning as early as next fall. That process includes nine to 11 new city blocks, requisite infrastructure, more than 1,100 new residential units, a 630-room hotel, a million-plus square feet in office space, nearly 800,000 square feet in retail and restaurant development, a 64,000-square-foot entertainment/cinema complex, and an 8-acre waterfront park.

For reference, Chapter 1, which will be built largely on the expansive knoll next to The Sun's printing press, is larger than the whole of Harbor East.

One of the new Sagamore venture Water Taxis.

One of the biggest development projects in the U.S., the final build-out plans call for 47 new city blocks, nearly 9,000 new residential units, at least a half-dozen skyscrapers, a 7,000-seat stadium, and nearly 5 million square feet in combined retail and office space. It is now estimated that it will cost $7.3 billion, including $1.3 billion in public infrastructure funding, and take 25 years to finish. The plan includes 40 acres of parks and, perhaps the highlight for our bay-loving city, 2.5 miles of reclaimed waterfront that Sagamore and Under Armour promise will be accessible to the public.

Meanwhile, the Sagamore Spirit distillery and Rye Street Tavern—call them Port Covington’s “prologue”—are already in place, and the initial response has thrilled Sagamore officials. The distillery, which won’t actually produce its first batch of cask-aged rye whiskey until 2020, has nonetheless attracted more than 9,000 visitors to tour the facility. Next door, Rye Street Tavern, which opened in September and features the food and drink of New York’s NoHo Hospitality Group, including James Beard Award-winning chef Andrew Carmellini, has received rave reviews.

“Realistically, after the first few blocks, everything will be an evolution,” Paff says. “But the heartbeat of the project will remain the distillery and tavern and that campus on the waterfront.”

Walking inside the entrance to city Garage and workers milling about at City Garage in West Port Covington.

A couple of weeks before the mini press tour of the Maritime Applied Physics plant and guided water-taxi voyage (the taxis are branded with a names paying homage to Baltimore history: “Key’s Anthem,” “Cal’s Streak,” “Thurgood’s Justice”), I visited Sagamore’s headquarters in Locust Point for a daylong expedition to all the Plank initiatives already up and running in Port Covington.

The morning began with a slideshow highlighting Under Armour’s success. Baltimoreans know the story by now: From selling perspiration-wicking apparel out of the trunk of his car in 1996, Plank built a juggernaut with nearly $5 billion in annual sales and 15,000 employees around the world, including at its global headquarters here. (Not included in the presentation: Under Armour suffered back-to-back quarterly losses in 2017, and watched its stock price fall 50 percent as Adidas reclaimed the No. 2 spot in athletic shoe and apparel sales behind Nike.)

Taking a coach bus over Hanover Street with Sagamore Development vice president Steve Siegel and Max Oglesbee of the New York-based digital/urban design company Intersection, I got a peek inside three other Port Covington “prologue” pieces—City Garage, The Foundery, and Under Armour’s R&D center, Lighthouse.

“There will be ubiquitous connectivity at every interface in Port Covington.
Data is everything.”

The Foundery makerspace, which offers metalworking, blacksmithing, woodworking, laser engraving, and textile classes, is impressive, but was quiet on this morning. The incubator complex at City Garage bustled, however. A company called Ready Robotics, spun out of The Johns Hopkins University’s commercial tech-development center, demonstrated a flexible-task robot, which has been trumpeted as the “Swiss army knife of robots.” At the end of the corridor, a Balti Virtual creative team was busy perfecting a Stephen Curry hologram that pops up and starts draining three-pointers when you hold his shoe in your hand. Nearby, another Baltimore company, Bustin Boards, was churning out custom skateboards.

The Foundery Makerspace building in West Port Covington.

Over at Lighthouse, Under Armour’s Batcave of research—no cameras, a waiver agreement, the entire staff in white lab coats—UA employees were digging deep into the science of molded plastics, color reproduction, synthetic fabrics, body scanning, and 3-D printing. These folks picture, for example, a day when the midsole of your running shoe is custom tailored from a scan of your foot, 3-D printed, assembled into a complete sneaker, and then same-day delivered by drone to your rowhouse doorstep.

It is all compelling stuff, except it is not the thing really animating Siegel and Oglesbee. They are each obsessed with hatching a new kind of built environment on the empty slab of Port Covington bordered by McComas Street and I-95 to the north, the Hanover Street Bridge to the west, and the middle branch of the Patapsco everywhere else. Like Stephens, Paff, and others at Sagamore, they have been chasing the latest technological trends around the world, hoping to deliver them to Port Covington.

First, Siegel, a 40-something former D.C. developer who worked in economic development for former Washington D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty, talks about the big picture. He references the 42 million cars that pass Port Covington every year on I-95. Those are not just potential targets of Under Armour billboards, but potential Port Covington tourists, visitors, residents, clients—and even employees.

That access to I-95, as well as BWI Airport, Light Rail, Amtrak, MARC, an educated Maryland workforce, and acres of open space, is central to the Port Covington pitch to Amazon, which Sagamore pulled together on behalf of the city. Equally critical, Siegel says, is the allure of other corporate offices, high-end retail, waterfront views, and the ability to attract apartment- and condo-dwelling creative-class millennials—even more so than the (potential) billions in subsidies and tax incentives thrown Amazon’s away. Add to that the hype around 300-mile-per-hour superconducting Maglev trains promoted by Gov. Larry Hogan or, less likely, Elon Musk’s 700-mile-per-hour, vacuum-tube fantasy, also promoted by Hogan, and Port Covington starts to generate genuine buzz.

Inside the Foundery Makerspace.

“Acquiring the land at Port Covington gave Under Armour control of its own destiny beyond the chance to build its own campus,” Siegel says. “Developing a waterfront neighborhood is a bigger opportunity that couldn’t be passed up—and is needed to attract and retain talent in the 21st century.”

If Siegel is obsessed with the macro, Oglesbee keeps his attention focused on more sidewalk-size modernizations. He heralds the digital kiosks in New York City (check LinkNYC) that have replaced telephone booths, offering free gigabyte WiFi, high-speed phone charging, interactive maps, and embedded Andriod tablets, and is anxious to import something similar to Port Covington. He mentions the possibility of a Port Covington-specific “concierge bot”—“like Siri”—that can answer questions about local events, restaurants, shopping, recreation, and transportation options. Like Stephens, he talks about integrated digital-recognition tools that can track a person’s devices, security codes, and preferences as they rent movies in their living room, download music, grab a Zipcar, unlock their front door, or search for take-out pizza or NBA Combine tickets (Under Armour expects to host the combine at Port Covington soon).

“Think about rolling Verizon, Comcast, Apple, and Google into one,” Oglesbee says.

A lot of this stuff is still pie (or rather cloud computing) in the sky. Here is one thing that seems realistic: Utilizing dual-mode, Light Rail car/circulator buses to enhance Port Covington access. A hybrid that can run on rail and road, the vehicle has been used in Japan and could complement the proposed light rail spur. Glow-in-the-dark bike lane technology, first put to use in Amsterdam, is also under consideration, and recently, Sagamore went in front of the city design panel to present their intention to introduce embedded, changeable, high-definition Times Square-type signage to Port Covington.

Siegel, in particular, is a dreamer. He anticipates a transportation future straight out of The Jetsons with Baltimoreans flying in pilotless mini-helicopters to Port Covington. “It is being developed in China,” he says with a smile, looking up from his smartphone. “Look online. Whether it happens or not, we have got to be thinking ahead and make sure we leave room for the innovation from the next generation.”

Local Baltimore company Bustin Boards, which produces custom skateboards at City Garage.

Plank Industries CEO Tom Geddes (L) and executive creative director Marcus Stephens (R).

Years ago, as he watched Under Armour grow at a clip of 20 percent for seven straight years, Plank recognized he needed to expand the company headquarters.

But in 2013, he got word that his efforts to purchase a 7-acre parcel adjacent to their Locust Point headquarters—basically the stretch west toward and including the Baltimore Museum of Industry—fell through after lengthy negotiations with city officials. When Plank got the news, he was in Dubai drinking whiskey with his chief of staff, who thought that maybe it was for the best. The chief of staff told his boss that he thought the property seemed to be a tight squeeze all along.

“I just looked up at the skyline of Dubai, and all I could think to myself was that 15 years ago, that skyline didn’t exist,” Plank recounted to Bloomberg last year. “Until someone with a vision, Sheikh Mohammed, said, ‘I’m going to take this old fishing town and turn it into the economic capital of the Middle East.’ Out of desert and a fishing town. That’s vision. And I’m looking out at it and thinking, ‘Well, what could we do?’”

Siegel and Plank Industries CEO Tom Geddes confirm that story, adding that Sagamore Development was founded soon afterward by Plank and then-Washington, D.C. developer Marc Weller, after Plank had set his sights on the Port Covington peninsula. Weller then secretly began buying up the land. (When it’s mentioned to Siegel that Jim Rouse and his company had secretly acquired Howard County land in similar fashion when they sought to build the economically and racially diverse Columbia from scratch in the 1960s, Siegel notes Walt Disney did the same thing in South Florida.)

The project could surpass the wildest dreams of its backers. There is also every chance that it will confirm the worst fears of its critics.

Geddes adds that, for Plank, one of the selling points of Port Covington was that the property was essentially empty. “He didn’t want to displace anyone,” he says.

To Plank and Sagamore’s credit, they have studied the best environmental practices as they look to develop Port Covington. Sagamore officials say they intend to raise “sensor-rich” buildings that automatically dim lights in the evening, turn down the air conditioning when an apartment or office is empty, and engineer a cityscape that monitors air and water quality, traffic patterns, trash pickup, and a dozen other things. Solar power, micro-grids, green roofs, modular pavement that helps trees thrive and protects sidewalks, and storm-water management systems that repurpose rainwater to cool buildings and flush toilets are all on the table. And those water taxis? They have less than half the carbon footprint of the old staid blue and white fleet.

Sagamore would also like to see Port Covington buildings share combined heating and air-conditioning plants for greater efficiency. Local environmental firm Biohabitats is creating a water-filtering, soft-shore (non-concrete) interface where the Patapsco River meets the land. A trash wheel at the mouth of the Gwynn Falls to collect debris, like those positioned at the Inner Harbor and in Canton, is in the works, too.

“But we don’t want to be thinking just in terms of efficiency and conservation—or even sustainability. What are the possibilities if we start thinking in terms of regeneration?” Paff asks rhetorically.

The question Paff poses is compelling for a brownfield such as Port Covington and for water as dirty as that around the harbor.

But when Baltimore activists and progressive leaders consider what a sustainable or regenerative neighborhood—and by extension, city—looks like, they are thinking in broader terms than environmental issues.

“Port Covington is not an island unto itself,” says Councilman Zeke Cohen, adding that he hopes the project has a positive impact. “What happens in one part of the city affects the whole.”

Inside City Garage in West Port Covington.

The controversy around the Port Covington financing deal began with the idea that a billionaire, Plank, had requested a gargantuan start-up loan and financial package from the citizens of Baltimore. In fact, he got the third-largest tax-increment financing (TIF) deal in U.S. history. Although the TIF money would be used for “horizontal” infrastructure—streets, pipes, and parks—rather than new Under Armour offices or a Sagamore hotel, the project was conceived to propel Under Armour’s expansion, which has come to a halt. Since the agreement was signed, Under Armour has laid off employees in Baltimore—a far cry from the 10,000 new “teammates,” in UA parlance, that they projected to move to Port Covington.

Beyond the TIF agreement, the Port Covington project is eligible to receive roughly $760 million in tax breaks because it sits in an area the city and state have designated as impoverished. Sagamore has also requested nearly $600 million in state and federal infrastructure funds.

An analysis by MuniCap, a public finance consulting firm hired by Sagamore, reported that Plank and his investors would earn $400 million more on the development with TIF financing than they would without.

“A lot of people were upset and frustrated, including myself, that one year after the death of Freddie Gray and all we’ve seen in the aftermath, following the decades of disinvestment in black and brown neighborhoods, city leaders would respond by offering $660 million to one man, Kevin Plank, and his personal project,” says Charly Carter, executive director of Maryland Working Families. “This is about the blending of Under Armour, Plank Industries, Sagamore, and his personal wealth, which is very problematic. It is poor communities—white, too, but mostly black and brown—subsidizing rich developers while our neighborhoods are left to fall apart. It’s the new Jim Crow.”

Carter was also outraged by Plank’s and Sagamore’s aggressive marketing campaign, which included a half-million-dollar ad buy on local television and not-so-veiled threats that Under Armour would go elsewhere if the TIF deal was not approved quickly by the City Council last September. (It is notable that the council that was expected to be overhauled in the November ’16 election—and indeed was—by a more progressive incoming class less likely to embrace a corporate subsidy of that magnitude.)

Quick explanation: A TIF is shorthand for a loan given to a developer, created by the sale of municipal bonds to private investors, which is recouped over the ensuing decades by the property taxes generated by the new development. Essentially, it is a closed funding loop that is cast as cost-neutral for municipalities. Except that has not always been the case—often far from it—when looked at more holistically.

Port Covington by the Numbers

Tap to Expand

In 2011, California Gov. Jerry Brown dissolved the state’s redevelopment agencies and ended the TIF program because the state was in debt and needed the revenue that was being lost after decades of TIF use. In Chicago—which, like Baltimore, is a city beset by racial segregation, a public-education crisis, and violence—TIF financing, in vogue since the mid-1980s, has become increasingly controversial. In recent years, nearly half of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s $1.3 billion in tax-incremental financing has gone toward improving the central business district rather than blighted neighborhoods that the program was initially intended to help.

A rendering of a future Port Covington streetscape. RENDERING COURTESY OF SAGAMORE DEVELOPMENT.

In Baltimore, where roughly 50 percent of all the city’s revenue comes from property taxes, even the most optimistic projections predict Port Covington will not contribute property tax revenue to the city’s general fund until 2039—even as the site will need substantial city resources over the next 20 years. Transportation advocates argue that public dollars for a new Light Rail spur could be better spent on first improving the city’s struggling bus system. Public schools can also suffer, if inadvertently, from TIF math.

As The Sun’s Luke Broadwater has reported, local tax breaks and other, smaller-scale TIFs have led to the loss of tens of millions of dollars in state education funding for Baltimore. That is because state contributions to public school systems are based on an algorithm that takes into account the property values of a given jurisdiction—incorrectly assuming all private property is being taxed locally. Baltimore’s shining new buildings appear to be adding to the city’s wealth in the eyes of the state, but, in truth, many have added little to the city’s treasury. At the moment, the State Department of Education is reviewing its school-funding formula. The good news is that, at least for the next three years, the state has agreed not to cut contributions to Baltimore schools.

The overarching problem, says Carter, who previously served as director of the Office of the Public Advocate under former mayor Tony Williams in Washington, D.C, is that the city doesn’t have a clear vision, process, and set of standards for making deals when approached by developers. “These conversations are done behind closed doors with the Baltimore Development Corporation,” Carter says, referring to the city’s nonprofit economic-development agency. “There needs to be sunlight on the process.”

Under Armour’s Port Covington project is also an example of the increasing influence corporations have on city planning—and not always to good effect.

Lawrence Brown, a professor of community health and policy at Morgan State University who is opposed to the Port Covington TIF and tax breaks, points to Baltimore’s long record of redlining and inequitable public investment. He notes there is no fair-housing mandate and no promise—just goals—for living wages in the Port Covington package. Sagamore’s residential units, mostly studio and one-bedroom apartments, are expected to average $2,200 per month, with condominiums costing $350,000. (Initially, no family housing, schools, civic buildings, places of worship, or police or fire stations were included in Sagamore’s master plan.)

“It is one more example of the city investing in ‘the white L,’ where the wealth is concentrated, and not the ‘black butterfly,’” Brown says. “This TIF will exacerbate the racial segregation that already exists. Wealth and capital flow up, towards each other.”

Outside Rye Street Tavern; and Inside Sagamore Spirit.

Developers play an outsized role in shaping the direction and fortunes of the city, acknowledges former city councilman Carl Stokes, who voted for the Port Covington project. “These projects—like the one at Harbor Point, which I was against—by the time they come to the council for a vote, it’s thumbs up or thumbs down,” Stokes says. “If there are too many thumbs down, then it’s just a matter of negotiating around the edges. I have never seen one voted down.”

Another former councilman who voted for the project, James Kraft, predicts Port Covington will become “an extension of the Gold Coast,” referencing expensive, exclusive new developments swinging around the harbor from Canton and Fells Point to Harbor Point, Harbor East, and Locust Point. Kraft says the political clout behind the project, including support among the council, prevented a longer look at the plans. He says he voted yes out of “councilmanic courtesy” for South Baltimore council member Eric Costello, a huge booster of the project.

Under Armour’s Port Covington project is also an example of the increasing influence corporations have on city planning—and not always to good effect. Amazon’s efforts to create a boomtown in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood have fallen worse than flat, contributing to traffic problems, higher rents (up 64 percent since 2010), and greater homelessness in the city.

It is beyond question that South Baltimore, where 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty line and the unemployment rate is 12 percent—similar to citywide figures—could use an influx of jobs. But Baltimore residents are expected to fill only a third of the 25,000 permanent full- and part-time jobs projected for Port Covington. Instead, many of the employees will come from nearby counties. “Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County are jumping for joy over Port Covington,” Carter says. Developers must ensure construction workers earn at least $17.48 during the TIF build up, but there’s no guarantee other employees would earn a living wage. Baltimore’s hourly minimum wage right now is $8.25 and hits $10.10 in 2018. Mayor Catherine Pugh vetoed a $15 minimum wage bill this year. A living wage for a single adult with a child in Baltimore is $27.68.

A rendered map of the entire Port Covington project. MAP COURTESY OF SAGAMORE DEVELOPMENT

At the same time, Sagamore did sign a precedent-setting agreement that will provide $10 million in baseline funding to boost the six South Baltimore communities surrounding Port Covington over the next five years. It will also generate more than $19 million to the coalition known as the SB6—Westport, Brooklyn, Curtis Bay, Lakeland, Mt. Winans, and Cherry Hill—over the first 20 years of the development and provide more than $10 million over five years to fund citywide programs related to youth, education, and empowerment.

“That $39 million will help keep those communities from collapsing,” says Keisha Allen, president of the Westport Neighborhood Association. Sagamore officials, she adds, “have been great to work with.” Still, Allen is concerned about how the people in those neighborhoods, many of whom rely on public transportation, can get to promised jobs in Port Covington.

“It is across the water from Westport, but it is not accessible,” she says. “We’re detached. There is the swing bridge, and they’re looking to make that a pedestrian/bike bridge that links to Westport to Swann Park. There is no money yet. The city needs to fix the holes in the Hanover Street Bridge, too.

Keisha Allen, president of the Westport Neighborhood Association.

“We have old and out-of-date infrastructure throughout lower South Baltimore.”

She is also concerned about speculators and gentrification pushing up property taxes and rent in neighboring communities, displacing seniors and others. “We have families that have been here for generations,” Allen says. “My family has been in the community here for 50 years.”

“Look at what happened with Harbor Point and Perkins Homes,” she says, pointing to the TIF-financed project underway in Southeast Baltimore. That developer, Michael Beatty, used nearby Perkins Homes income figures to win support for its TIF application, then benefitted when the city decided to move the housing project elsewhere because the land had become too valuable.

In a perfect world, Allen continues, “there would be mixed-income housing built in Port Covington and they would feel like our neighbors. We could use the retail and leisure and sports activities in this area,” she says. “But I’m not sure a kid from Westport or Cherry Hill is going to be comfortable fishing over there when it’s all done.”

In this best-case scenario, Allen says, some people in Westport and the SB6 communities find meaningful employment in Port Covington and acquire equity in their homes and younger families move in. “But it’s tricky,” she adds. “We already have speculators here buying houses. And they'll let them sit vacant until the property value rise enough that they can rehab and flip them.”

Her worst fears?

Port Covington becomes the city of the future that leaves too many stuck in the past.

“The communities in South Baltimore have their own plans that they have been working on and want to see implemented and supported by the city,” Allen says. “Westport and other communities have been ignored for too long. I don’t want to see those plans pushed aside or overridden. My hope is that Port Covington complements the surrounding communities and the surrounding communities complement Port Covington.”

But after watching earlier plans to develop Westport go under in the 2008 financial collapse, and witnessing a Walmart and Sam’s Club development effort fizzle in Port Covington, she’s also concerned Plank’s fantasia won’t quite live up to expectations. The real “Tomorrowland” built at Disneyland in 1955 was intended to represent the future—then 1986—but struggled from the outset to keep pace with an ever-changing world.

In that scenario, Allen says, “The jobs don’t come and the infrastructure work that we need done in South Baltimore doesn’t get done. That community-benefits package gets shortchanged.

“All that money gets spent and it doesn’t pan out.”

Source

A Wonderful Dream

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 08:00:00 +0000

After two decades of work, Baltimore artist
Amy Sherald finds success and a new chance at life.

By Gabriella Souza / photography by christopher myers /
lettering by kelly stromski

The National Portrait Gallery is quiet on this Friday morning as a group of visitors makes its way to the third floor. In a dimly lit, sprawling gallery, past the Louis Comfort Tiffany windows and Thomas Hart Benton oils, they peruse the portraits—mostly photographs, though there are paintings and sculptures, too, all finalists in this year’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Some of the works are large and take up an entire wall. Others are small and intimate. They depict all ages, body types, and ethnicities.

AMY SHERALD.

But one in particular stands out. She’s the woman in the navy polka dot dress. You can’t help but notice her, as she’s painted against a sky-blue background, staring out at you from the canvas with a determined look on her face. Her name is Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance) and when you get up close, she surprises you. Her face has African-American features, yet at this distance, you realize she’s painted in shades of gray—hues that exist outside the colors identified with race—and the blue background she stands against is textured with flecks of purple and red. But the most eye-catching elements, regardless of your distance, are the enormous red flower perched on her head and the absurdly large white teacup and saucer she holds in her white-gloved hands.

A voice asks everyone to gather, and the members of the media who make up today’s group carry cameras and recording equipment to an open space, where the National Portrait Gallery’s director, Kim Sajet, and the competition exhibit’s curator, Dorothy Moss, stand at a podium alongside some of the artists. After a few words of thanks, they announce the winner of the $25,000 prize and an opportunity to create a portrait of a living person for the museum’s permanent collection: “Amy Sherald of Baltimore, Maryland”—the painter of Miss Everything. They turn to look at the woman, who smiles slightly, without showing her teeth, as if she hasn’t quite realized that she now has the attention of the whole room. She is wearing a camel-colored cape and black pants that graze her ankles. But the most eye-catching parts of her outfit are the red, Saucony tennis shoes on her feet that match her bright red fingernails, and that mirror the bold, whimsical air of her painting’s subject.

The group strolls over to Miss Everything, as Sherald cautiously takes the microphone. “My work is inspired by fantasy with a little bit of reality,” she says. She remembers seeing the movie Big Fish, a Southern gothic fantasy, and “being jealous that I hadn’t thought of the idea first.” People laugh, and Sherald pauses, before taking a more serious tone. Her work has changed since she moved to Baltimore, she says, encompassing a more social context that explores identity and the roles of gender and race. But, she thinks she’s finally found what speaks to her. “I focused on creating a body of work that was an archetype, and I think it’s going to carry me for a while.”

Afterward, she is swept up in a wave of congratulators and interviewers. When she can take a break, Sherald steps into an alcove where a video screen plays footage of the judges discussing the competition. Miss Everything was one of the portraits “that really stood out,” Helen Molesworth says in the video. Chief curator of The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Molesworth goes on to discuss the teacup—which, in a way, makes you forget about identifying Miss Everything as a real-life character. “It’s a very realistic painting in one way, yet the details are all quite surreal,” she says. “And the figure is very self-possessed and confident. A kind of, ‘I will stand here and wait until the world catches up.’” Another juror, photographer and professor Dawoud Bey, who happens to be in attendance today and has been peering over Sherald’s shoulder at the video screen, remarks, “I agree, a very striking painting.” At hearing those words, the until now stoic, self-possessed Sherald exclaims, “Ah!” and puts her head in her hands. The reality of the day’s event is sinking in.

Amy isn’t the only Sherald holding court at the Smithsonian museum today. Her mother, Geraldine Sherald, a tiny woman with a big presence, tells Moss, Sajet, and a gaggle of National Portrait Gallery staffers who encircle her as if she was the queen mother, “Amy called and said, ‘Mom, it’s the most important day of my life, you’ve got to be here.’” The ladies all smile ebulliently, squeeze Mrs. Sherald’s arm, and then insist on taking selfies with her.

A moment later, Moss notes to a bystander how remarkable it is that Sherald has won—especially since she is the first African-American, and the first woman, to win the prize. And then, she leans in confidentially, her voice lowered, and says, “You know her story, right?”

Amy Sherald by the mural on a West Baltimore bridge that she helped several teens paint.

Four months after that momentous day, Sherald sits in her combined studio/living space at Highlandtown’s Creative Alliance, gazing at the walls. At one point this year, they were covered with the vibrant blues, yellows, and pinks of her portraits, but just recently those works were shipped off to an exhibit in Chicago and all of them sold. Now, the walls are the bright white of a just-rented apartment. Such is the paradoxical life of a successful artist.

Barefoot, in a black tank top and jean shorts, Sherald ponders that piece of her identity. Since the Outwin Boochever prize, and really for the last five years, her career has been on an upswing. She’s booked a show in New York for the spring of 2017, and has a waiting list for about 20 paintings following the sold-out show entitled A Wonderful Dream at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago. Her work is in collections at museums like the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African-American History & Culture. She’s been featured by The Huffington Post, the BBC, and The Washington Post, and this latest prize is an addition to a growing list of awards.

“People look at success like once you get it, it’s easy,” says Sherald, 43. “At least for me, I feel a little bit alone in it. It’s really overwhelming to go from desperation to striving for something, and then all of a sudden, it’s there. The presence of it is heavier than the absence.” She pauses and considers this for a moment. “It’s wonderful, but it’s definitely something to be reckoned with.”

That’s particularly the case because three years ago, Sherald’s life could easily have ended. Diagnosed with heart failure as an adult, she underwent a heart transplant and gained a new lease on life. But it was also the start of an at times difficult journey that is still continuing. Sherald feels the lingering effects of depression and anxiety, conditions that are known to follow heart transplants, and this has changed her personality slightly, she says.

“Success is wonderful, but it’s definitely something to be reckoned with.”

“It’s like doing a pull-up—once you get your chin over the bar, you’ll be happy. But post-transplant, I’m kind of constantly floating just below the bar,” Sherald says. “I’m always a little subdued.”

Today, she is feeling overwhelmed by her achievements. To meet the demand for her work, she’ll have to more than double her output—she usually paints one canvas a month. “I feel like I’m on survival mode,” she says. “It’s like, wait a minute, is this what I asked for? Is this my life? Is this what I wanted when I was like, ‘God, please let me be successful?’”

She is half joking. One-on-one, Sherald is funny, youthfully joyful and sassy, without losing thoughtfulness, and she seems to find humor and levity in every situation. But you can feel that there is sincerity in what she says. She folds her long legs under her on the couch with a tinge of vulnerability. “It’s scary,” she says.

Sherald’s success has baffled her, partly because she’s never thought of herself as the best artist. “There are people out there who I was in class with who are probably better painters and drawers than me. I just work really hard,” she says, before using an explanation she often turns to in her life—magic. “Maybe it’s good karma, or maybe there are some art gods out there, I don’t know. There’s really no rhyme or reason to why it happened. It just did.”

Though she’s always been naturally drawn to art—she remembers doing small drawings at the end of sentences in her notebooks during second grade in Columbus, Georgia—it wasn’t seen as a viable option in her well-educated family. “My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, ‘The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist,’” she says. Still, she remembers first recognizing art’s transformative power when, while on a school trip to the Columbus Museum, she saw a painting by realistic portrait artist Bo Bartlett that included the image of a black man.

Sherald’s works, from left, Well Prepared and Maladjusted, The Boy With No Past,
and Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).

Sherald’s works, from top, Well Prepared and Maladjusted, The Boy With No Past, and Miss Everything (Unsuppressed Deliverance).

“That was a seminal moment for me, to see this huge painting with a black figure in it,” she says. “At the time, I was in an all-white school, and I saw this man, and I was like, ‘Wow, he looks like me.’”

Already deep in self-discovery mode, Sherald’s world changed direction when she was a sophomore at Clark Atlanta University. After giving the premed track a try and worrying that she might lose her talent if she didn’t use it, she changed her major to art. She enrolled in a painting class at Spelman College—part of a consortium that includes Clark Atlanta—with the man who would become her mentor, Panama-born artist Arturo Lindsay, whose work focuses on the African influence on the cultures of the Americas. He opened her eyes to what it was like to be a living artist, and she knew she could learn from him, so after the class was over she asked if she could work for him for free.

“No other student had ever approached me like that. As an educator, those are the moments you wait for,” Lindsay says. That only added to his esteem for Sherald that he had developed from observing her in his class. “I’ve met a lot of students who could be very good painters or sculptors, but they aren’t necessarily good artists because they don’t have that hunger. They aren’t addicted to the stuff,” he says. “But Amy was from the beginning, and she only wanted to get better.”

Sherald worked for Lindsay for the next five years as she finished her undergraduate degree. She helped him prepare canvases, accompanied him on teaching assignments, and traveled with his art to exhibits—sometimes internationally—when his schedule did not permit. After she finished school, she started waiting tables, but she soon realized that graduate school would give her the added instruction and exposure she needed to advance her career.

At 28, Sherald began studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting. She was in the last class to have Grace Hartigan as a teacher—the splatter technique she uses for her backgrounds is similar to the technique used by the renowned abstract expressionist artist. (Sherald says she and Hartigan squabbled at times, but a MICA program director later told her that Hartigan once said that Sherald reminded her of herself.)

But while Sherald’s art world was expanding, a visit to the doctor put everything into perspective.

Sherald hates telling this part of her story. “It sounds corny,” she says. But since she was a little girl, she’d had a dream in which she ran a marathon and died. At age 30, while training for a triathlon, Sherald decided to see a doctor, just to ease her mind. Instead, she discovered she had heart failure. “I would have been one of those athletes whose heart just stops and no one knows why,” she says. “I didn’t have any symptoms, but my heart functioning was down to 18 percent.”

In every other way, she was perfectly healthy, and doctors decided to keep a close watch. So, though the threat of heart failure and possibly death loomed, Sherald continued living life, finishing graduate school, traveling to Norway to study with artist Odd Nerdrum, and moving back to Georgia to take care of her mom and two aunts after her father’s death. But she felt the urge to return to Baltimore, to continue the exploration she’d started here.

By then, in her mid-30s and still waiting tables, Sherald began to seek out different ways of seeing herself and other African Americans. That led her to photographs that the writer W.E.B. Du Bois had compiled to be displayed at the Paris Exposition in 1900, depicting African-American men, women, and children in a way that countered some of the mocking and discriminatory representations of the day. “They have this stillness and dignity,” Sherald says of the photos. “I wanted to emulate the quiet presence I saw in those pictures, which were some of the first images where blacks were able to present themselves the way they wanted to be seen. Painting images that look like that was really important, not just for ourselves, but for the rest of the world to see us that way, too.”

Her dream is for people “to look at a black child and see themselves. . . . That’s the magic I want all of my paintings to have.”

Sherald’s work changed from self-reflective and romanticized into a style in which she emulated old masters and tried to marry that with her experiences as a black woman. “I’d go through all these art books and look at technique, but not necessarily see my story represented,” she says. She also started to analyze her presence in the different atmospheres of Baltimore and Georgia and thought of her own experiences, being from a proud, well-established family—her great-grandfather started the oldest, black-owned business in her hometown. On her canvases, she experimented with capturing that awkwardness of not knowing how to fit in, of having different identities, of being stereotyped, and then blended in elements of fantasy that set her subjects free from stereotypes and constraints of the past.

“I’ve always been able to deal with my life through fantasy,” says Sherald, who counts Alice in Wonderland as inspiration. Her dream, she says, is for people “to look at a black child and see themselves. I want my paintings to take you to a different space in reality, and allow you to recognize yourself,” she says. “That’s the magic that I want all of my paintings to have.”

Even the way Sherald chooses her portrait subjects has a quality of make-believe. “It’s instantaneous,” she says, adding that sometimes they are friends, though many times they are strangers. “When I see somebody, it’s that person. There’s something about them. Then I have to work up the courage to chase them down.”

Her first painting that she considers truly successful was her 2008 work, Well Prepared and Maladjusted. In it, a female subject wears an ill-fitting pink checked blouse, buttoned up to her neck, with a too-large bow. Her stiff posture seems to scream how uncomfortable she feels, though her face holds no expression. Sherald’s intention was felt around the country, as the work was selected as a jurors’ pick for the art journal New American Paintings. It has since sold, and it is the one painting Sherald says she will try to buy back if she can.

“That was the transition painting for her,” says Dana Reifler Amato, an artist who became close friends with Sherald while they attended the Hoffberger School of Painting. “It was clear that everything else up until that point had been preparation for that. It was amazing. For years, I had told her, ‘Amy, you’ve got to keep painting. Don’t over think it, it’s all going to work out, because what you’re doing is important.’ And she kept painting, and hallelujah, right?”

But it wouldn’t be that easy. First, Sherald’s 35-year-old brother, Michael—the one who was mistakenly called her twin because they were so close as children—was diagnosed with Stage 4, nonsmoking lung cancer. Then, while visiting him in the hospital in Georgia, Sherald felt out of breath and tired simply walking from the car to his room. “Okay, something’s wrong,” she thought.

Back in Baltimore, doctors discovered that her heart was functioning at 5 percent, and they immediately scheduled her for a transplant consultation. The day before the appointment, in October 2012, Sherald was at the Rite Aid close to her then studio near Lexington Market, when she felt her heart flutter. “Most of the time when that happened, I would prepare myself to fall just in case, and it would go away, it would fix itself,” she says. But that time it didn’t. Sherald awoke on the floor, with blood around her head. Amid the chaos of customers, the manager told her they’d called an ambulance. En route to The Johns Hopkins Hospital, reality began to sink in. “I felt like I could die then,” Sherald, then 39, recalls. “I actually felt that for the first time, and it did scare me. I thought, ‘I can’t be afraid to die,’ so I just made peace with it at that moment. I said, ‘I’m not going to be afraid, it’s all going to be okay.’”

At Hopkins, doctors determined that she needed a transplant. They gave her medicine to help her heart beat a little faster and fitted her with a port, which nurses checked on their rounds to see how her heart was functioning. While she played the waiting game for a match, Sherald, as usual, made the most of it, and controlled what she could in an uncontrollable situation. She organized the desk that swiveled on her bed daily, held wine parties in her hospital gown—“I could have a little bit,” she says—and rooted for the patients in surrounding rooms. Friends were constant visitors—like Amato, who served as a stand-in family member while Sherald’s mother and sister were keeping watch over her brother—and many stayed on the pullout couch.

When news of Michael’s death reached her in December, Sherald felt surprisingly at peace. “I was able to talk about my brother’s death with him while it was happening,” she says. “You’re mourning while they’re still here, in a way, and when it’s over, it’s a sense of relief. He gave me permission to move on while he was alive, and then I had a new guardian angel.”

Eleven days later, on Dec. 18, doctors told Sherald they had a match, and everything moved quickly. Nurses prepared her body for surgery—including taking out her belly ring, which she never got back—and in she went. Six hours later, she opened her eyes and woke up to Amato holding her hand. Not realizing that she was connected to a respirator, which was breathing for her, Sherald looked up at her friend and mouthed, “I can’t breathe.” “I told her, ‘Amy, you’re breathing, everything’s fine, just relax.’ And she lifted up her middle finger and rolled her eyes,” Amato says, laughing at the memory. “Even from the first minutes awake, she was all Amy.”

But it wasn’t all smooth sailing from there. The anti-rejection meds made her sick, which extended her hospital stay until she was finally released on New Year’s Eve, 2013. Her physical recovery moved quickly, but psychologically and emotionally, Sherald wasn’t feeling like herself. She was constantly crying and felt paranoid and anxious, sometimes so much that her hands shook and her teeth would start to chatter. Plus, she had no desire to paint. “I told my friends, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ It felt stupid and selfish,” Sherald says. “I thought, ‘Maybe I should start a new life.’”

Sherald shuffles around her studio, grabbing chocolate for herself and giving a treat to August Wilson, her Pekingese-Jack Russell terrier mix with an adorable under bite who is named for the famous playwright. Upon hearing Sherald’s story, certain items in her living space make more sense—the pill bottles and inhaler that sit on a shelf, for example.

She got August Wilson after the transplant, and the companionship eased her anxiety. She also went to a psychiatrist, who helped her understand exactly what she was feeling and why, and who also prescribed a low dose of the antidepressant Zoloft. “That’s the part of the transplant where they can’t really tell you what life is going to be like afterwards—the psychological and emotional struggles of having to take drugs for the rest of your life,” Sherald says. “It’s changed my personality in certain ways. I don’t feel those little enlightened bubbles anymore. I don’t mean to sound unappreciative, because the alternative is death.”

“i felt like i could die then. . . . It did scare me. i thought, ‘i can’t be afraid to die,’ so i made peace with it at that moment.”

Therapy also helped her start to paint again. She’s continued with the same subject matter, but also exposed herself to new experiences that, combined with the events following the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, grew the social justice component of her work. (She also painted Miss Everything during this time.) She taught art to inmates in the city jail for a year, and in the summer of 2015, helped teenagers paint a mural on a West Baltimore bridge through a Youth Works and Jubilee Arts Baltimore project. “There’s a lot of things I want to do, and a lot of ways I want to engage, not just sit back and make money,” Sherald says. “I got a second chance in life. I have Kristen Lin Smith beating inside of me right now.”

Smith, whose picture is on her coffee table, died of a heroin overdose, and her heart was transplanted inside of Sherald. Her family, whose picture is also on the table, remains in close contact with Sherald, and has cheered her on through all of her accomplishments. “I really wish my brother could have been a donor, but he couldn’t because of the chemo,” Sherald says. “I can only imagine how excited I would be if someone had his heart. So I’m really happy that her family wanted to reach out to me. It’s been a fairy tale of a story.”

Sherald is still considering the impact her second chance has had on her work, but Amato detects a change. “That sense of urgency in making the most of your life while you’re alive, the fragility of it, gave Amy permission to give painting her all,” she says. “She talks about setting her subjects free, and in a way, the transplant set her free to be a painter. She owed it to herself to give it everything, even with all of the doubt and self-criticism that we all face.”

Arturo Lindsay believes that Sherald appreciates the success that has come her way, and that she’s more optimistic than ever that she’s changing the way the world views her subjects. “I remember her talking with me after a fellow student had gotten a bump in his career, and I told her, ‘Sweetie, in a short time, you’re going to be up there also. Just continue to do what the heck it is that you’re doing.’ And she said, ‘You think so, Papi?’ And sure enough, you see where she is now.”

Sitting on the couch, Sherald turns her focus back to logistics. She types up notes for an artist’s talk and ponders how she’s going to get a dozen more canvasses prepared, when Cameron Shojaei, another resident artist at the Creative Alliance, bursts through the door and starts a lively discussion about Sherald’s show in Chicago. “You’re the perfect example of This American Life right here, if they do a show about discovery or something,” he says. “You’re getting discovered right on time, though I bet it seems late as hell, doesn’t it? Call Ira Glass, he’s from Baltimore.”

Sherald looks down bashfully. “Oh no,” she says, with a slight smile.

Shojaei continues. “You’ve got to make like 30 or 40 paintings this year, right? You’re probably at 100 paintings now, right?”

Sherald shakes her head. “I’ve only made maybe 35.”

“No way!” Shojaei exclaims. “Well, Vermeer only made about 40 works. So you’ll top Vermeer in no time.”

She’s laughing now. “Whenever I want to be entertained, I talk to you,” she tells Shojaei.

He grins, and says to her, “This is a real modern artist right here.”

Sherald is beaming. She knows that no matter how hard it’s been, and might continue to be, what she’s feeling now is magical.

Source

Waterwomen

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 09:00:00 +0000

A handful of heroines work the Chesapeake Bay.

By Lydia Woolever. Photography by Justin Tsucalas.

Listen

Left to right, right to left, she moves her feet to a rhythm that became second nature long ago. Left to right, right to left, her worn-out boots do a waltz on the breaking waves.

The warm orange glow of an early-spring sunrise slowly spreads across her face, as beads of sweat begin to break along her brow.

Riding her boat on the mouth of the Patuxent River, just off Solomons Island on the southwest fringes of Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay, Crystal Jordan’s fancy footwork is pushing the pedals of a patent tong.

With each tap of her toes, she moves the cumbersome piece of machinery, swinging it over the side of the boat, splashing it into the water below, watching it dive down to the bottom until the line goes slack. With a pivot of her heels, the hydraulic claw digs up a heaping clump of oyster bed, which rises back to the surface and cascades onto the culling board like wet pocket change on a hardwood floor.

Within seconds, she assesses her treasure trove—discarding dead oysters and golf balls, saving old Coca-Cola bottles and medicine jars, finding the occasional arrowhead and shark’s tooth, which she hands to Little Kevin, her right-hand man and 3-and-a-half-year-old son.

With a keen eye, she spies the market-size oysters—three inches from hinge to bill—and with a stone-skipping flick of her wrist, throws the others back into the bay.

Crystal guides a patent tong onto her boat’s culling board; baby crabs come with the day’s catch.

At 30 years old, Crystal Jordan is part of a profession that has been all but overlooked on this estuary. She is a waterwoman, joining the ranks of the legendary watermen whose weathered faces have long been associated with working the Chesapeake Bay.

For those born and raised on these spits of tidewater, tradition is religion, and in that way, a woman’s role has long been on land—tending to the children, keeping up the kitchen, taking care of the house.

“It’s a cliche, but people thought a woman’s place was in the home until not that many years ago,” says Richard Dodds, curator of maritime history at the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons. “It was the norm, it just was what it was, and the general expectation was that it wasn’t the proper role for women to be out there working.”

Some even thought it was bad luck—though, ironically, boats are often named after watermen’s mothers, daughters, and wives.

Those women were also commonly tasked with the no-less laborious duties of shore work: gearing net, gathering bait, carrying the catch to buyers.

As charter boat captain Chuckie Clark of Rock Hall once put it, “Behind every good waterman, there’s an even better woman.” And when the opportunities arose, some also famously manned the crab-picking houses, and others, before that, beaconed the great lighthouses along the bay.

“In fishing communities like Hoopers Island, Crisfield, and Cambridge, the wives would get up around three or four in the morning to fix their husband’s breakfast, and then, in the evenings, they would meet them at the dock to help clean up and prep for the next day,” says Bill Brooks, fourth-generation owner of J.M. Clayton Seafood Company in Dorchester County.

“Women have always played a supportive role,” adds Don Parks, lifelong Eastern Shore resident and author of Chesapeake Women. “Just as the men, they never saw it as a big deal. It was a means to make a living. They’ve done it for generations. It’s just been the way of life.”

But by the middle of the 20th century, after World War II and sea-change shifts in the workforce, some women started to break with tradition and work the water themselves, as captured by famed Sun photographer A. Aubrey Bodine. Most stood beside their fathers, brothers, and husbands, but in the decades that followed, a small number went out alone.

Waterwomen have always been a rare breed—a pearl in an oyster shell, a whale sighting in the bay—but start asking around these tiny shoreside towns and you soon find a web of working women, as interwoven and intricate as our estuary itself.

“Women have been fishing on the bay for two generations and more,” wrote Lila Line in her 1982 Waterwomen, where she notes they then held 13 of 2,320 commercial fishing licenses in the state. At last count, some 34 years later, they now hold 566 out of 6,758.

“I wish I could tell you more, but documentation and evidence are hard to come by,” concedes Dodds. “But I can tell you there haven’t been many women working the water.”

“This has always been an exception,” says Pete Lesher, chief curator at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, “but the absence of evidence is not proof that it didn’t or doesn’t exist.”

Today the family is working as one; her son helps basket the big oysters.

From the moment she could walk and talk, Crystal Jordan was a daddy’s girl. She would wait for him on the front porch, knowing the rattle of his old truck’s engine before it even pulled up the drive.

When he arrived, they’d go crabbing, out in the middle bay, even in the wind and rain. The few times he tried to leave her home, she raised so much teary hell, he had to turn around to get her. If he could do it, Crystal thought, she could do it, too.

Most watermen tell stories of the generations of men before them—their granddad, and his granddad, and his granddad before that—but few pass the trade onto their girls. For years, Crystal and her father followed the crabs, moving up and down the bay together, on weekends and all summer, from April through December.

“I absolutely loved the smell of the water, the breeze in my face, and the taste of salt on my lips,” she says. “Not to mention the sunrises that took your breath away, no matter how many times you’d seen them.”

When Crystal graduated from high school, she came onboard full-time as her father’s first mate, learning the ins and outs of Some Beach, their 38-foot deadrise workboat named after a tongue-in-cheek Blake Shelton song. But a year and a half later, her dad was diagnosed with brain cancer. “You’re up,” he said, handing her the keys. “It’s time to run the boat.”

For the next year, they went out together every morning, until the day he passed away. “I watched and listened to anything and everything he ever taught me, but nothing can prepare you for losing your best friend,” she says. “I was lost, broken. Many thought I’d fail.”

But with the true grit of that same little girl who refused to be left on land, the then-20-year-old Crystal took over the captain’s seat and weathered the squalls that stood ahead: the expense of buying new crab pots and expanding her aging rig, the days when the crabs weren’t catching or she struggled to get into seafood houses because of her sex.

“But I’m not a quitter,” she says. “I was determined to make my dad proud.”

On the last days of this past oyster season, Crystal has already had a week of hitting her catch limits, so today is just about enjoying the morning sun and bringing in a few bushels. She steers east, out onto the open water, where the rising chop licks up at her wooden boat’s white paint. Flecks of mud freckle her focused face, her skin still tan from last summer’s sun. The warm weather is slowly working up the bay, and soon enough, the crabs will come with it.

By then, she and her husband, Kevin, also a full-time waterman, will be back on Deal Island on the Eastern Shore. Her tongs will come off the boat, replaced by wire pots, and six days a week, she will follow the crabs through winter, often with Little Kevin, just like she and her dad used to do.

His glasses still hang in the front window of Some Beach, and Crystal’s amber eyes well at the thought of certain memories. But she knows he’s still out there. There are too many miraculous moments to think he’s not.

Like that one afternoon, when she pulled up a crab pot so packed, she could see their white bellies before they even broke the waves. And another morning, out in the middle of the lower bay, miles from shore and soaked in sunshine, when a flock of butterflies flew across her path. And a few years later, when she cruised up to her wedding ceremony in Some Beach, lifting her dress off the deck before stepping onto the dock.

To Crystal, “it was his way of walking me down the aisle.”

Around 6 a.m., the sun begins to rise over the Chesapeake Bay.

Crystal, aboard Some Beach.

Crystal guides a patent tong filled with oysters, mud, and other miscellaneous objects onto the culling board of her boat.

Crystal’s son, Little Kevin, likes to pitch in. At 3-and-a-half years old, he has become quite good at spying “boxes,” or dead oysters whose open shells sound hollow when knocked upon, like an empty wooden box, which will then be thrown back into the bay.

Crystal steers her boat out on the open water.

Her dad’s glasses hang in the front window above the steering wheel.

Crab pots wait for the summer harvest.

Feeling the bay bottom beneath her feet, Crystal moves along the water, looking for oyster beds with a good catch.

Kevin, Little Kevin, and Crystal Jordan on Some Beach. Also a full-time waterman, Kevin taught Crystal how to oyster a few years back, and currently runs his own boat.

Many women are like Crystal, born into the bay by a family of watermen. “It has traditionally been a male’s role, but also a family occupation,” says Michael Steen, director of education at The Watermen’s Museum in Virginia. “It’s a hard world to break into. These communities are very close-knit.”

Outsiders are often called “chicken neckers,” which goes back to the old days when out-of-towners and amateurs used chicken necks for crab bait, rather than the true waterman’s choice of eel.

Still, some newcomers boldly strike out on their own, partly thanks to the advent of aquaculture, or the practice of cultivating marine life, such as oysters. In its adolescence in the state of Maryland, aquaculture is unburdened by time-honored tradition, thus opening new doors and breaking down old barriers for women like Jill Buck.

On a calm gray morning at the end of April, Jill lifts a mucky rope from the bottom of the Patuxent River, just west of bite-size Broomes Island, her yellow oilskins slick with rain and white work boots splattered in mud.

At the end of the line is a black cage filled with baby oysters, one of about a thousand on her 15-acre lease. With the weight of her 5’3” frame, she hoists its heft over the side of the boat, opening the wire lid to even out the growing shells and harvest the big ones for market.

Jill pays no mind to the late spring rain. Her blue eyes stare straight ahead, standing out like marbles against the white of her teeth and the silver-gray backdrop beyond. On days like this, water and sky blend into one, with little horizon in sight.

At 49, she has only been out here for six years now, trading in a tobacco farm childhood and lifelong child-care career for the adventure of the bay. She’s one of the many Maryland entrepreneurs getting into oyster farming, having found herself in a 9-to-5 job thinking: There has to be something more.

More, indeed. More mud, more muck, more rain, more headaches. Docking the boat too hard, filling the cages too high, losing income to ruthless poachers. “It was like learning a foreign language,” Jill says. “I knew nothing. There was complete uncertainty.”

She had her doubts, and so did others.

“When I first went out, I had people talking about me, looking at me like I’m a sissy—like girls can’t do this sort of thing,” she says. “But you have to prove yourself when you’re a woman working the water. They’re going to talk, until you earn that respect. And it’s hard work—you definitely don’t need a gym membership. But you have to have confidence.”

On her boat, Jill unhooks the lid of an oyster cage; she and a helper even out the shells and harvest those 3 inches or larger for market.

Eventually, she found her sea legs, and today, while her husband, Andy, finishes up his final years at the power plant, Jill runs the family business full-time until he joins her. During the summer, she trotlines for crabs, and in the winter, she dredges and tongs for wild oysters. She also raises her farmed oysters year-round, and on the side, works as a firefighter and EMT.

Some women disdain the word “waterwoman,” feeling that, despite their equally hard work, it sets them apart from the men, but Jill embraces the term.

“It’s too easy to go out there and become one of the guys,” she says. “I still like girly things. I wear makeup on the boat. As long as I can, as dirty as I get, I’m still going to be a lady.”

By 11 a.m., the boat is full throttle, cutting across the glassy river toward its front-yard dock, a few dozen oysters jangling in the baskets by Jill’s feet. She loves the freedom of her work but is always at the mercy of the wind and tide, which today goes back out sometime before noon.

“Mother Nature dictates my schedule,” Jill says, “and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like me.”

But bad weather doesn’t matter much when you’re working on the bay. You add layers, you peel them off. You get dirty and wet. You deal.

“You can wake up in the worst mood, but the water is medicinal,” Jill says. “We see something new every day. We’re always bringing up all kinds of life: mud crabs, soft crabs, clams, eels.”

“And if you’re still feeling crappy?” she says, giving a knowing grin as she flies over the water. “Unhook the boat and go wide open for a little while.”

Jill gets splashed with water and mud as she pulls a black cage full of baby oysters from the bottom of the Patuxent River onto the culling box of her boat.

Jill stands on her front yard dock at the edge of Broomes Island in Calvert County.

You can’t be afraid to get dirty while working on the water. Dirt and mud comes with the trade.

Jill steers her boat south, out onto the Patuxent River, where she has a 15-acre oyster farm.

Tucked away near Nans Cove, Jill and her husband, Andy, have a peaceful waterfront property, where they also run their wholesale business, Patuxent Seafood Company.

Like their male counterparts, women like Crystal and Jill are working to keep the seafood industry alive in these changing times. On these tiny edges of earth, watermen, let alone women, are considered a dying breed. Fewer and fewer young folks are following in their parents’ footsteps, they say, and across the board, commercial licenses are limited, and equipment comes with quite a cost.

“It’s hard to make a living on the water,” says Steen from The Watermen’s Museum. “There’s less to catch and more regulations. The money’s just not there.”

Nonetheless, a few women are just starting out, and others are continuing the work of a lifetime. The tides change by the minute, but as sure as the sun will rise, Lois Lednum will be out on the water before it does.

At 4 a.m. in the middle of May, her 40-foot fishing boat, the Lois Ann, is heading out of its slip beneath the Tilghman Island drawbridge. At that time of day, everything is sapphire blue—the water, the sky, the other boats—all save for the white fog on the front lights and the little red glow of the heated cedar cabin. Inside, Lois keeps warm as her husband, Dickie, steers out into the morning night.

Before sunup, they’ve crossed the Choptank River and are set up just outside of Royal Oak. He guides the boat as she drops three trotlines into Irish Creek, each attached to weighted buoys and tied with orange bags of razor clams, every 11 feet. “Trick or treat bags,” Lois calls them, as they disappear to the bottom, her eyes focused on their fall. A cool breeze picks up and laps across the water, a sign of coming rain.

Just after high school, Lois and Dickie were married at age 18. A lifelong waterman, he worked the bay while she stayed home, taking care of their four sons. But once the boys were grown, she woke with him before the dawn and took to the water, too.

Without fail, Lois always wears a touch of pink lipstick.

For Lois, it was never a question.

“When our youngest turned 12, Dickie asked me about going oystering, and I said alright,” she says matter-of-factly. “We figured we’d make more money, and more money is better for everybody. And back then, the money was good.”

She liked to work, having grown up milking cows with her father on their family farm near Easton, and in no time, she was culling oysters and catching crabs, baiting line and fixing the boat, like she still does today at 75 years of age.

“I like to stay busy,” she says. “I can’t stand being cooped up inside.”

On Sundays, their only day off in the summer, she tends to her growing garden and takes to the open road with Dickie on the backseat of their cherry-red Harley.

“And you know what she did yesterday?” he says, with proud disbelief. “As soon as we got off the boat, she went home and mowed the lawn.”

With the trotlines set, Dickie hooks one over a roller on the starboard side of the boat and keeps a ready dip net as the orange bags begin to rise. Every few feet, a little white belly comes with them, dangling on the bait like a diamond earring.

In one fell swoop, he scoops the crabs out of the water and dumps them into the washtub at his side, where Lois, armed with her wooden measuring stick and steel tongs, picks up the skittering shells and places them into one of two baskets by size.

If they’re too small, or too soft from their last shed, she plops their wriggling bodies overboard and calls out, “Go home, and grow up!”

She doesn’t want to jinx herself, but she’s only been bitten once.

On the way back in, Lois bags razor clams as bait for the next day.

Lois inside the Lois Ann.

Well before sunup, the morning seems to wear a faint veil of blue.

After nearly 60 years of marriage, Lois and Dickie still work together like each other’s right hands.

Lois guides a trotline into Irish Creek, a quiet narrow waterway located near Royal Oak in Talbot County.

A great blue heron sits along the shoreline.

After Dickie scoops the crab out of the water and into a washtub, Lois grabs the skittering shell with steel tongs and places it into a wooden basket.

On this calm morning, an old waterfowl hunting blind has a near-perfect reflection on the glass-like water.

Though he’s soft-spoken and a little hard at hearing, Dickie has the familial, guttural laugh of a favorite uncle.

Lois then ties each bag back onto the trotline so it’s ready to go in the morning.

Once full, each bushel is closed shut and put off to the side. They will later be sold to local seafood dealers beneath the Tilghman Island drawbridge on their way back in.

The day begins to break as Lois and Dickie run the boat over the lines. They work in quiet tandem, creating rhythms in their tasks. Back and forth, up and down, in and out, like the tides.

There’s no radio onboard for playing Lois’s beloved country music, but there’s still a sort of soundtrack: the chug of the diesel engine, the shifting of gears, the chirp of chatty osprey, the sound of crab shells hitting the bucket with a whack.

Little hints of affection are exchanged—a smile, a “honey,” a few good-humored jabs—and it’s obvious that, without each other, the work wouldn’t be the same.

“I tell him now he’s a spoiled brat,” she jokes. “He won’t go out if I don’t.”

By 3 p.m., after dozens of runs, they’ve filled three bushel baskets, which they’ll drop off for sale beneath the bridge. Dickie finishes his final line as Lois begins to delicately bag the next day’s bait. Tomorrow, they’ll do it all over again. And for the foreseeable tomorrows after that. For as long as they can, Lois says.

Her gray-blond curls blow in the breeze, and even after an accident with an oyster dredge left her with limited use of her left hand, her fingers move lithely, like she could do it in her sleep.

Every so often, despite the mud and muck, Lois’s pink lipstick cracks into a gentle smile.

“They used to say that when the locusts were in bloom, the crabs would be catching,” she whispers, looking off into the distance at white blossoms blowing in a nearby tree.

Water Works

Portraits of the women who work the Chesapeake Bay.

LAURA ERA
63, FORMER WATERWOMAN // EASTON

Laura Era spent 28 years culling oysters and clams beside her husband, Richard. “I won’t make it sound like it was all romantic,” she says. “It’s damn hard work. Your shoulders are aching. Your hands are freezing. You get a mud facial every day.” “It's a hard life, but it's so basic, and there's no prettier place on a beautiful day.”

Richard’s workboat waits for crab season. He still works the water, heading out onto the Little Choptank River from their quiet front yard dock.

Having retired as a fine painter, Laura keeps a light-filled studio at her home, located just south of Cambridge in Dorchester County.

She also runs the esteemed Troika Gallery and Fine Art Studio in Easton, where she displays her own works in addition to other notable artists.

Peggy States Edwards
61, FORMER WATERWOMAN // ROCK HALL

Peggy grew up on a farm but quickly fell in love with the water after working with her husband, Carlton, on and off for 20 years. “You have the most beautiful days, and you’re always with God,” she says. “The sunrises, the sunsets, the moon over the bay. A lot of people don’t get to see that part of life.”

Two summers ago, just feet from the Rock Hall harbor in Kent County, she opened her very own tackle shop, Hook, Line-N-Sinker. Inside, she sells everything from fishing line and lures to reels and rods, and outside, two freezers keep ice cold for beer and fresh-caught fish.

“I can remember leaving out of this harbor and going out and fishing in the winter. We’d leave at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning,” Peggy says. “I learned a lot because I was an old farm girl. It was a different life I’d never seen before.”

She also stocks locally made gifts and gourmet goods, which continue to be best sellers, especially during the holidays.

VERA MEREDITH
59, CHARTER BOAT CAPTAIN // GRASONVILLE

Growing up on the mouth of the Chester River, Vera Meredith now captains a 65-foot fishing boat along its marshy shores.

Most months of out the year, she captains the Island Queen II charter boat, carrying fishing parties up and down the bay to catch the likes of rockfish, catfish, and perch.

A blade of grass peeks through planks of the old dock at Wells Cove, just beneath the Kent Narrows drawbridge in Grasonville.

She runs the boat with her father, Elkridge, pictured center. “Ever since I was a little girl, I went out on the boat with my dad,” Vera says. “Today, he’s always with us, and never lets us go without him.” Her brother, Tyrone, pictured left, keeps his own boat in a nearby slip.

RACHEL DEAN
34, WATERWOMAN // SOLOMONS ISLAND

Even with a teaching job at the local high school, Rachel works the water every day, oftentimes alongside her husband, Simon, brother, Jason, and even sometimes, her mom and dad. “We’re first-generation watermen,” Rachel says. “My dad didn’t do it, his dad didn’t do it, and we probably wouldn’t be able to do it if we didn’t have each other. It takes a family, it really does.”

During the slow spring, Rachel kills time before the crab and rockfish seasons by potting for eel, which will be sold to local buyers to be marketed as food and bait. “You can’t just say I’m going to be an oysterman, or a fisherman, or a crabber,” she says. “You have to do a little everything to get by.”

Razor clams are used as bait for the eel. Before long, the snake-like fish transforms the onlooker’s opinion from squeamish fear to total fascination.

Slippery and fast, the eels attempt a last escape.

SHEILA STRONG LINGERMAN
48, FORMER WATERWOMAN // ROCK HALL

After a lifetime on the water, Sheila now works on land, shedding soft crabs and running a successful seafood shop out of her backyard with her husband, Chris. “If we didn’t have this place,” she says of Chester River Seafood, “I’d want to be out there.”

Inside, old photographs hang above a large cooler case, filled with soft crabs, oysters, and all kinds of fish.

As they get ready for crab season, the smell of Old Bay hangs in the air.

In the meantime, Sheila partakes in an age-old piece of shore work: gearing net, which will then be used in the state’s annual spring rockfish survey. She is one of the last women in Rock Hall who knows how to do the dying trade.

TERRY WITT
56, WATERWOMAN // SHADY SIDE

Both born into multigeneration families of watermen, Terry and her husband, Rob, are now embarking on a new tradition with their growing oyster farm. Year-round, they cultivate “spat-on-shell,” meaning oysters grown on river bottom on top of other shell. Up and down the West River, not far south of Annapolis, the couple moves along its leases, with Rob working the power dredge and Terry culling the catch.
“I always said I was not going to marry a waterman,” she quips. “Talk about eating words.” “And not only did you do that,” Rob says with a laugh, “but now you are one!”

caption needed 46

Stacks of cages line their front yard, ready to carry spat, or baby oysters, to the river bottom of their oyster farm. Year-round, they cultivate “spat-on-shell,” meaning oysters that are grown on top of other shell.

Up and down the West River, not far south of Annapolis, the couple moves along its leases, with Rob working the power dredge and Terry culling the catch.

A sign of hope for the Chesapeake Bay, as small oysters grow larger and new oysters attach to old shell.

Source

The Fault in His Stars

Mike Smith — Mon, 13 Apr 2015 08:30:00 +0000

hortly After 10 o'clock on the night of April 14, 1865, the celebrated actor John Wilkes Booth pulled off the most dramatic stage entrance of his short theatrical life. The play onstage at Washington, D.C.’s, Ford’s Theatre was the crowd-pleasing culture-clash comedy Our American Cousin starring British leading lady Laura Keene. Keene, however, was offstage then, ceding the spotlight to her co-star Harry Hawk, who was playing the titular cousin—an unsophisticated American who had come to claim his inheritance from his English relatives. Alone on stage, Hawk unleashed one of the play’s surefire laugh lines. “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—you sockdologizing old man-trap.” As expected, the audience of approximately 1,700 roared. Next came a loud bang, followed by a commotion in the private box at stage left where President Lincoln and his guests were watching the play. And then, displaying the daring athleticism that had earned him a reputation as one of America’s most exciting young actors, Booth vaulted over the box’s balustrade and dropped 12 feet to the stage below, catching his foot on the bunting decorating the box and breaking his left leg on the landing. Ever the consummate showman, Booth did not let whatever pain he felt prevent him from hitting his mark. He rose and moved to center stage where, lifting his dagger above his head, he cried, “Sic semper tyrannis!” a phrase supposedly uttered by Brutus during the assassination of Julius Caesar. It means “thus always to tyrants.” Moving assuredly through the familiar theater, Booth exited upstage right and slipped out the back door to his waiting horse before disappearing into the foggy spring night.

John Wilkes Booth had just shot President Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln finally expired at 7:22 the next morning, Booth became America’s first presidential assassin. Even during a time of extraordinary upheaval, after four years of civil war in which roughly two percent of the population was killed, Booth’s act shocked the nation.

John Wilkes Booth poses at the height of his acting career.

Partly it was the novelty of the act. No one had ever succeeded in killing a president before, and many naively believed no one ever would. And partly it was because of who had done it. Booth was a member of a famed acting dynasty from Maryland that included his father Junius Brutus Sr., his older brothers June and Edwin, and various in-laws. At 26 years old, with what we would today call “movie-star good looks” and an easy swagger, Booth was the heartthrob of his day. Imagine a young Matthew McConaughey shooting Obama and you’re in the ballpark.

It was a deeply strange event for the public, and it retains its strangeness even now, 150 years since. However odd it was for the public, it was even more shocking for those who knew Booth. When a biographer was researching the Booth family in the 1930s, he interviewed Elijah Whistler, an old classmate of the assassin’s, who, even then, couldn’t reconcile the boy he knew with the man who had shot Lincoln in the back of the head at point-blank range.

“Everybody was stunned—couldn’t believe Booth would do such a thing,” Whistler said, adding that, far from the deranged villain of public imagination, “Johnnie was kind and gentle.” This sentiment is echoed again and again in accounts of Booth from those who knew him best: “Warm,” “magnetic,” “generous,” and “lovable” are adjectives that recur. But he could also be “moody,” “erratic,” “impetuous,” and “stubborn.” He was a man who loved animals and children, who rescued a katydid from certain death in his sister’s insect collection but who, during adolescence, practiced marksmanship on neighborhood cats; a man who offered to protect an African-American servant during the New York City draft riots of 1863, but who was incited to murder by the thought of “nigger citizenship;” a man who decried the extremism he felt was tearing the country apart, but became a dangerous radical himself. Twenty-five years after the assassination, Booth’s brother Edwin, a staunch Unionist and Lincoln supporter, admitted he was no closer to understanding his infamous younger brother. “He was so peculiar. I never seemed to know him,” he said.

Gold-toned daguerreotype of Junius Brutus Booth taken between 1844-1852.

John Wilkes Booth made his debut on May 10, 1838, in Bel Air, Maryland, the ninth of 10 children born to Junius Brutus Booth and Mary Ann Holmes. His parents were English but emigrated to America in 1821, in part to further Junius’s acting career. It worked, and Junius quickly became the nation’s theatrical colossus.

He also built a reputation for being unconventional, temperamental, often drunk, and, sometimes, downright crazy. Tales of his exploits were legendary. As historian Terry Alford writes in the new biography Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth, “By the time John was born, Junius had compiled an unenviable résumé of trouble. He had shot one man in the face, assaulted others, attempted suicide on three occasions, and been jailed in four states. With the deaths of [four of] the children in the mid-1830s, Junius grew even odder and the number of disturbances increased. In 1835, he wrote to Andrew Jackson threatening to cut the president’s throat.”

From top to bottom: Booth, left, with brothers Edwin, Center, and June in Julius Caesar, Nov. 1864; Playbill and tickets for Our American Cousin; one of the last photos of Abraham Lincoln, taken Feb. 5, 1865.

Perhaps the biggest scandal to embroil Junius—and that’s saying something—erupted in 1846, when it was revealed that, the entire time he’d been in America, he’d had a second family back in England, with neither family aware of the other. The papers had a field day after his English wife came to Baltimore to confront him. Eventually, he obtained a divorce and officially married Mary Ann on John Wilkes’s 13th birthday.

But Junius had many redeeming qualities too. He could be gentle, generous, and captivating, and he was nowhere more likely to display these characteristics than at the family farm in Bel Air.

Living at the farm with the Booths were Joseph and Ann Hall, two African-American workers. Junius detested slavery. There is evidence that Junius and his father, Richard, occasionally sheltered runaway slaves on the Bel Air property. In accordance with these beliefs, the Halls were paid and treated like family. Ann Hall helped raise the children and loved John like a son. In fact, not even his murder of Lincoln, the great emancipator, could shake her loyalty. Asked by a neighbor afterward if she would help John should he turn to her, she replied, “Indeed, I would, honey. Give him all that I have.”

That the elder Booth’s abolitionist leanings were absorbed by some of the children and not others was not uncommon. The ideological differences that resulted in the Civil War were also played out within families. Tom Fink, president of the Junius B. Booth Society, a nonprofit that is working with Harford County to turn the old Booth homestead into a museum, thinks John would have turned out very differently had Junius been around more. “Junius died in 1852 when John was just 14 years old,” he explains. “Previous to that, Junius was on the road most of the time, so John didn’t really have that father figure helping him along and teaching him his values.”

In many ways, Booth’s mother, Mary Ann, was a single parent, and she and John were especially close. Family lore has it that while nursing him by the fire one night, Mary Ann had a vision and saw the word “country” spelled out in the flames. She interpreted this to mean he would die for his country, a belief that made her especially protective. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she made Booth promise he wouldn’t fight, a pledge he kept, until he could no longer stand it.

Stories, especially Greek histories and Shakespeare, were the lifeblood of the Booth family, and John was particularly enamored. He was attracted to the dramatic, the romantic, the larger-than-life. If he could combine these tales of glory with reckless action, all the better. According to Alford, he would ride through the woods on his horse “shouting heroic speeches, and waving an old lance.” But mostly, Booth’s was a garden-variety country boyhood: lighting firecrackers, searching for Native American remains in the woods, and roughhousing with other boys. The only notable thing about his behavior to his sister Asia was that, “He is [always] the one to be hurt or found out, and all the rest get off clear. And he’s not a bit worse than they.”

In 1845, Junius moved the family from Bel Air to Baltimore’s Old Town neighborhood, just above where Little Italy is today. From then until Junius’s death in 1852, the family would split its time between the brick townhouse at 62 North Exeter Street and the farm in Bel Air where Junius had decided to supplant the existing whitewashed log house with a grand Gothic-style cottage that Asia dubbed Tudor Hall. Because Tudor Hall still exists and the Baltimore townhouse is long gone, the perception persists that the Booths were primarily a Bel Air family, but Baltimore shaped them as much as Bel Air.

PERSONAL EFFECTS: ARTIFACTS FROM FORD’S THEATRE COLLECTION

From left to right: The single-shot, .44-caliber deringer pistol Booth used to kill President Lincoln; Booth’s pocket diary in which he recorded his thoughts while on the run after the assassination; Booth’s boot, which Dr. Samuel Mudd cut off of him in order to treat his injured leg; horn-handled dagger (with sheath) used by Booth during the assassination.

Baltimore in the 1840s was the second-largest city in the country and an eager participant in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. “As a result,” Alford writes, “John’s childhood was more cosmopolitan than that of most others who found their way to the Confederate cause. While their roots tended to be exclusively rural, his mixed the country with the most sophisticated city life the South offered.”

Booth’s schooling was a mixed bag as well. He started in a one-room schoolhouse across the road from the farm before moving on to the more prestigious Bel Air Academy and then to the Milton Academy for Boys in Sparks, a Quaker boarding school housed in the fieldstone building that is now The Milton Inn. An undistinguished student who had difficulty learning through traditional methods, Booth’s school days were most notable for what occurred outside of the classroom. While at the Milton Academy, Booth gave what was likely his first public performance, as Shylock in a scene from The Merchant of Venice.

From top to bottom: Etching of Booth home at 62 North Exeter Street; The Milton Inn (formerly Milton Academy); mural depicting Edwin Booth At the Bel Air Post Office; reproduction of wanted poster for Booth and conspirators.

During this time, he also met a gypsy who told his fortune, which he later breezily relayed to Asia. “Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras [sic],” the gypsy is to have said. “Full of trouble. . . . You’ll die young, and leave many to mourn you, many to love you, too, but you’ll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. . . . You’ll make a bad end.” Whether it was an intuition, a premonition, or just a lucky guess, the gypsy’s words added to Booth’s growing sense of himself as a doomed romantic hero.

Booth’s final school was St. Timothy’s Hall in Catonsville, an Episcopalian military academy that attracted students from some of the South’s best families. Accustomed to far more latitude than the school’s strict code of behavior allowed (no drinking, no smoking, no playing cards, no coarse language, no firearms, no food from home, etc.), Booth chaffed at the strictures and continued to struggle academically. But he also began to adapt and find his own identity separate from his family’s long shadow.

School ended for Booth at the age of 15 following his father’s sudden death. Without a steady income to support the family, his mother rented out the Baltimore townhouse and proposed farming at Tudor Hall. With the older sons, June and Edwin, already off pursuing their own acting careers, John suddenly found himself the head of the household and a farmer to boot.

In her memoir, Asia remembers the era fondly, as years of happy, simple domesticity, when John rose with the sun in his east-facing bedroom, worked the fields, and then attended country dances at night. But the truth was, he was a lousy farmer, dead tired, and yearning for the stage. When Edwin returned from the West in 1856 and suggested the family rent out the farm and return to the city, John was relieved.

Free to pursue his own goals, Booth aimed for the stage. He was determined to equal if not eclipse the success of his father.

Booth had made his first appearance on the professional stage on August 14, 1855 in Baltimore in a one-off performance as Richmond in Richard III. After he was able to cast off the yoke of farming, a friend procured him an entry-level position in the stock company at Philadelphia’s Arch Street Theatre. He would be billed as “J. B. Wilkes.”

Though his early performances were shaky at best—Booth was visibly nervous and, on one occasion, forgot his character’s name—most agreed he had potential. His greatest strength was his exciting and visceral stage presence. He excelled in fight scenes, but also performed ably in romances, comedies, and tragedies. And it escaped no one’s notice that he looked, in the words of one acquaintance, like a “young Apollo.”

Booth was asked back for the following season in Philadelphia, but declined, feeling he’d failed there. He moved on to the Marshall Theatre in Richmond, VA, which was co-managed by Baltimore theater manager and family friend John T. Ford. He loved Richmond, and Richmond loved him back. There he ascended to star status and began using his own name on playbills.

It was also while there that national politics began to intrude. The nation was staggering ever closer to a crisis regarding slavery. Skirmishes out in the western territories between pro-slavery and abolitionist militias were increasingly common. Still, it seemed to most Virginians like a problem that was far away. But the problem came to their doorstep when radical abolitionist John Brown mounted an attack on the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry in October of 1859. His goal was to incite a slave uprising using weapons from the arsenal. For many Southerners, this was their worst nightmare. Booth was horrified. According to Alford’s biography, Booth told friends he wanted to “help shoot the damned abolitionists” himself.

After Brown was captured and sentenced to death, militias were called up to maintain security before and during the hanging. Richmond units went, and though Booth was not a member, he went with them. The experience was profound. The day before the execution, Booth visited Brown in jail. (Unfortunately, their conversation is lost to history.) The next day, Booth stood about 30 feet away from the scaffold as Brown was hanged. He came away from the experience with no new sympathy for the abolitionist cause but much respect for Brown, even keeping a piece of Brown’s coffin and a spear Brown had used in the raid as souvenirs, two talismans unwittingly passed between opposing zealots. “He was a brave old man; his heart must have broken when he felt himself deserted,” Booth later told Asia.

Back in Richmond, Booth picked up where he left off, packing in audiences and romancing as many women as he could juggle. In the fall of 1860, he embarked on his first starring tour, stopping in small cities in Georgia and Alabama. The tour hit a snag however, when Booth’s manager accidentally shot him in the leg forcing him to miss several performances while he convalesced.

He rebounded in early 1861 with a tour of several smaller Northern cities, playing Albany, NY, on the night Lincoln passed through en route to Washington for his inauguration. But just as Booth was gaining professional momentum, the war broke out.

PARTNERS IN CRIME

There were nine notable conspirators involved in the Lincoln assassination plot. Most were captured quickly. Four were put to death; four were imprisoned; and one was tried but not convicted.

David Herold Former druggist’s assistant. Accompanied Booth on attempted escape. Hanged, July 1865.

Lewis Powell Confederate veteran and attacker of Secretary of State Seward. Hanged, July 1865.

George AtzerodtGerman-born Marylander told to kill Vice President Johnson, but didn’t. Hanged, July 1865.

Mary SurrattWashington, D.C. boarding house owner and mother of John Surratt. Hosted conspirators. Hanged, July 1865.

John Surratt Son of Mary Surratt. Evaded arrest for over a year. Eventually tried but let off by a hung jury.

Samuel ArnoldSchoolmate of Booth’s at St. Timothy’s. Sentenced to life in prison. Pardoned in 1869.

Michael O’LaughlenChildhood friend of Booth’s. Sentenced to life in prison. Died in Florida jail in 1867.

Edman SpanglerStagehand at Ford’s Theatre. Asked to hold Booth’s horse during assassination. Given six-year sentence. Pardoned in 1869.

Dr. Samuel MuddDoctor who set Booth’s leg. Sentenced to life in prison. Pardoned in 1869.

Though it’s uncomfortable to acknowledge, war can be good for some people. Ulysses S. Grant was an aimless drunk before the Civil War made him a military hero. After the war, he became a two-term president. The war was good for Abraham Lincoln, too. Over the course of the war, he went from personally believing the right thing to actually doing the right thing, and he dragged the country along with him—knocking the laws of the land into better alignment with our highest ideals.

The Civil War was not good to John Wilkes Booth. It undid him. Sure, he was thriving professionally. He toured Chicago, New York, Boston, St. Louis, and Baltimore. He performed in Washington at least once with the President in the audience and, on a separate occasion, with the President’s son, Tad, in attendance. And his reviews were the best of his career, referencing his “originality” and “genius.” Emotionally, however, Booth was unraveling. The country was changing and he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—change with it. As Alford writes, “His powerful personality harbored consuming likes and dislikes. . . . It was impossible to change his mind. . . . Booth never had a new thought after his core opinions were formed in his teenage years.”

As a Marylander, Booth found plenty to dislike during the war. Then, as now, debate raged about Maryland’s identity as a Southern or Northern state. Slavery was legal in Maryland, so the state could have sided with the Confederacy. If it did, Washington, D.C., would have been surrounded by hostile territory. Lincoln couldn’t risk Maryland’s secession. So in May 1861, Lincoln sent 1,000 federal troops into Baltimore to occupy the city, aiming cannons at the downtown from atop Federal Hill. Martial law was imposed and the mayor, police marshal, and board of police commissioners—among others—were rounded up and imprisoned at Fort McHenry without charges or trial. The men complained that their detention was in violation of the rule of habeas corpus and some members of the Supreme Court agreed. Lincoln ignored them. In fact, in September of 1861, federal troops and Baltimore police officers arrested all pro-Confederate members of the Maryland General Assembly during a special session in Frederick.

A gothic-revival "cottage," Tudor hall replaced the family's whitewashed log cabin and was to be Junius's dream home, though he died before it was finished.

Like most Baltimoreans and Marylanders, Booth resented these infringements. Through his family, he knew some of the incarcerated, and he began to think of Lincoln as a tyrant grinding Maryland—and indeed the nation—under his boot heel. What he wanted was to fight for his country, by which he meant the South. But his promise to his mother kept him in check.

Sometime in 1864, he vented his feelings in a letter to her. “For four years I have lived (I may say) a slave in the north (a favored slave it’s true, but no less hateful to me on that account). Not daring to express my thoughts, even in my own home. Constantly hearing every principle dear to my heart denounced as treasonable. And knowing the vile and savage acts committed on my countrymen, their wives, and helpless children, I have cursed my willful idleness. And begun to deem myself a coward and to despise my own existence. For four years, I have borne it mostly for your dear sake. And for you alone have I also struggled to fight off this desire to be gone.”

As his radicalism waxed, his interest in acting waned. He suffered vocal problems and tired of the road. He did appear in the occasional benefit performance, the most famous—and ironic—being a performance of Julius Caesar with his brothers in November 1864. But mostly his attention was elsewhere. He speculated in oil in Pennsylvania and visited family and friends—and there were always women. Above all, he plotted.

It is unclear exactly when Booth began to consider a plot to kidnap Lincoln and hold him for ransom in exchange for Confederate prisoners of war, but by August 1864, he had set the wheels in motion. He recruited fellow Southern sympathizers to his cause, starting with his old St. Timothy’s schoolmate Samuel Arnold and his childhood friend from the Old Town neighborhood, Michael O’Laughlen. Eventually the group grew to include David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Powell, John Surratt, and his mother Mary Surratt, at whose boarding house the conspirators often met, see below.

If assassination had been the goal at this point, Booth would have had a perfect opportunity on March 4, when he attended Lincoln’s second inaugural as the guest of Lucy Hale, the daughter of a New Hampshire senator and vocal abolitionist. A picture exists of that day, and sure enough, above Lincoln, in a scrum of guests on a raised platform, Booth is visible.

The closest the conspirators got to enacting their plan was on March 17 when the President was scheduled to attend a play at a hospital. The conspirators prepped, but Lincoln’s plans changed, and an attempt was never made.

After this, the enthusiasm of several of the conspirators began to flag, but Booth held steady, insisting they try again. The events of April 9 changed all that. That day, General Robert E. Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, VA. Other ragtag bands of Confederate soldiers would fight on for a few weeks, but symbolically, the war was over. The South had lost. Booth knew that a kidnapping was too little, too late.

On the evening of April 11, 1865, a jubilant crowd gathered in front of the White House to hear Lincoln give what would be his final public address. In it, he touched on his plan for Reconstruction and called for black suffrage. Standing in the crowd next to co-conspirator David Herold, Booth seethed, “That means nigger citizenship. Now, by God, I’ll put him through.”

At tudor hall, John Wilkes Booth used the balcony outside his room to practice dramatic scenes and speeches.

He got his chance just three days later, when, picking up his mail at Ford’s Theatre, he learned that the President would be attending that evening’s performance. He improvised a new plan in which he would kill the President while co-conspirators David Herold and Lewis Powell would kill Secretary of State William Seward, and George Atzerodt would kill Vice President Andrew Johnson. Booth’s hope was that, in doing this, they would plunge the federal government into chaos, thus giving the Confederacy a reprieve.

Atzerodt, though, got cold feet, and Johnson was never attacked. Herold helped with reconnaissance, but did not participate in the violence. Powell, however, brutally stabbed Seward several times in the face and neck. Miraculously, Seward survived.

After Booth shot him, Lincoln never regained consciousness. He was carried from the theater across the street to a house where he died the next morning. “We shall appreciate him at last,” predicted New York lawyer and diarist George Templeton Strong when he heard the news. How right he was. Never popular until he died, Lincoln was almost immediately elevated to the status of secular saint.

As the nation began an extended period of mourning, Booth, accompanied by Herold, was making his way through southern Maryland, hoping to cross the Potomac into Virginia where he might find safe harbor, see map, page 160. Writing in a pocket diary, Booth recorded his dismay at the public reaction to the assassination. “I am here in despair. And why: For doing what Brutus was honored for, what made [William] Tell a hero. And yet I, for striking down a greater tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat,” he pouted.

Booth and Herold made it to Virginia but found little welcome. Even those inclined to approve of Booth’s crime were reluctant to help in case they became targets of the massive manhunt underway. Finally, on the morning of April 26, Union troops surrounded the barn in which Booth and Herold were hiding. Herold quickly surrendered, but Booth, proud to the end, refused. Hoping to force him out, the troops lit the barn on fire. As it burned, a soldier man named Boston Corbett fired at Booth. The shot hit him in the back of the neck, piercing his spinal cord. Booth was then pulled from conflagration and carried to the porch of the nearby farmhouse where—fully conscious but paralyzed—he waited to die. As death approached, Booth said, “Tell my mother I die for my country.” Then, he looked at his limp hands and uttered, “Useless, useless.”

THE ESCAPE ROUTE

While Lincoln’s legacy is clear-cut and assured, Booth’s is thorny. He is undoubtedly an important and fascinating historical figure, but there is a question of how much attention and remembrance he deserves—especially when he remains a folk hero to some anti-government radicals. (For instance, when Timothy McVeigh carried out the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with Booth’s favorite motto: sic semper tyrannis.)

Tom Fink of the Booth Society knows that most of the visitors to Tudor Hall come because of John Wilkes. Some are Civil War buffs, some are conspiracy theorists who think Booth got away, some are modern-day Confederates, and some, mainly women, are nursing major historical crushes on the dashing assassin. “They come in all starry-eyed. They say, ‘Tell me about John! I have such a crush on him,’” he says with a bewildered chuckle. But Fink hopes that, once inside, visitors come to appreciate the rest of the clan, too. “Junius [Sr.] and Edwin are my two favorites,” he says. “I love what they did for theater and just their fascinating, complex lives.”

The Booths themselves understood that John’s actions cast a long shadow over the family. After the assassination, they all—to varying degrees—spent the rest of their lives walking a tightrope between shame and stubborn, familial attachment.

For four years after his death, Booth’s remains were stored in various government facilities until, after several requests, they were released to the family for burial. The family brought him back to Baltimore for interment, and he still reposes in the family plot in Green Mount Cemetery. Edwin decided his brother's grave should bear no permanent marker lest it become a shrine. But that doesn’t stop hundreds of people from making the pilgrimage to the cemetery every year. Though Green Mount is the final resting place of several notable names including Johns Hopkins, Enoch Pratt, and a handful of Civil War generals, the biggest draw—by far—is John Wilkes Booth. “Oh yeah, we know who people are going to look for when they come in,” says one administrative assistant. “Poor Johns Hopkins,” she continues shaking her head, “No one ever comes looking for him.”

Many visitors think that a small stump of marble in the far left corner of the family plot indicates Booth’s location, but it doesn’t. It’s actually his sister Asia’s footstone. Still, many leave pennies, bearing the profile of the slain President, on top of it to condemn Booth. But some visitors leave other tokens, too.

On a clear day in January, a bouquet of faded red roses lies on the obelisk that anchors the family plot. Elsewhere in the cemetery, a single rose decorates the headstone of fellow Lincoln conspirator Samuel Arnold. (Curiously, conspirator Michael O’Laughlen’s grave, also located in Green Mount, is flowerless.) That Arnold’s grave earns a rose too makes it likely that the bouquet is intended for John Wilkes and not any of his kin. Asked why someone would leave flowers for a dead presidential assassin, the office assistant just gives a wry smile and a seen-it-all shrug and says, “I guess ’cause he’s a bad guy.”

Source

The Sea Also Rises

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 05 Jan 2015 12:00:00 +0000

The Sea Also Rises

The Eastern Shore is already facing the dire consequences of global warming. Baltimore, Annapolis, and the rest of the region are on deck.

Ron Cassie - January 2015

The Sea Also Rises

The Eastern Shore is already facing the dire consequences of global warming. Baltimore, Annapolis, and the rest of the region are on deck.

Ron Cassie - January 2015

The Hooper's Island Road Causeway at High Tide. —Greg Kahn

The first thing you notice is the standing water in the roadside gullies, even though it hasn’t rained in a week. Then, you notice the small houses and churches all teetering on concrete blocks or bricks four or five feet above the muddy, soft ground. But driving down Maryland Route 335 toward Hooper’s Island, it’s the trees that give you the deepest pause. Thousands of pine trees have been stripped bare of their needles, branches, and brown bark in this part of south Dorchester County. Ramrod straight, white as ghosts, the hollow trunks look like some kind of zombie deadwood, the staggering aftermath of an unfolding calamity.

Which, it turns out, is exactly what they are.

The land here is sinking beneath a fast rising Chesapeake Bay and the pine trees can’t survive the encroaching saltwater. Look closer, says Shawn Riley, a local waterman who makes his living harvesting oysters and blue crabs, and you can see that the process has been picking up speed. “Out on the boat, you’ll see trees leaning like this,” Riley says, holding his arm at a 45-degree angle. “There are tons of stumps, too, in the water. We have to maneuver around ’em.”

Riley, 53, grew up in the nearby small town of Crocheron and has lived on Hooper’s Island—the original home of the state’s century-old, family-owned Phillips Seafood—for 20-plus years. Technically, he lives in Hoopersville, the middle of Hooper’s string of three islands. Well, two islands now.

Or maybe one and a half.

The lower island, known as Applegarth, once a thriving village with its own post office, washed away decades ago. And Riley will tell you that Hoopersville, where it seems half of the remaining few dozen homes are for sale, probably isn’t long for this world, either. With rising sea levels accelerating erosion, Hooper’s Island is losing about two acres of land a month. “The street in front of my house is named Steamboat Wharf Road because there used to be a wharf down the way where the steamboats came in,” he says, pointing maybe two hundred yards away. Today, little remains of the old thriving wharf area, or of nearby Hickory Point. “That’s been [eroding] since I’ve been here.”

A Dorchester county pine tree withering in encroaching saltwater. —Greg Kahn

A dozen years ago, Hurricane Isabel swept the bay across the island, flooding and destroying Riley’s house, among many others. He says he considered leaving, but ultimately rebuilt with the help of a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) grant and a low-interest loan. “They only offered the money if you built on the same site,” he says. “What else was I going to do?” His home now sits on a foundation that’s five cinderblocks high, but other issues press. The causeway from the upper island, known as Fishing Creek, to Hoopersville has begun flooding at high tide most of the year. A couple of years ago, when Riley needed to replace his old Chevy truck, he went with a bigger, taller Silverado, in large measure just to get home safely from work.

“I know those Arctic glaciers are melting and that water has to go somewhere,” Riley says, shrugging in his driveway on a recent, unseasonably warm afternoon. “I guess it’s coming here.”

It is not just Maryland’s Eastern Shore islands that are in danger of disappearing beneath the surface because of global climate change and rising sea levels. In truth, 13 of the lower bay’s charted islands, many of them once inhabited, are already gone. Even more alarming are stories foretold by the interactive displays at the visitor center at the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in nearby Cambridge. Those models show that by the end of the century more than half of Dorchester County, the third-largest county in the state in terms of land area, will be under water. Of course, much of the Eastern Shore—most urgently, the lower counties of Dorchester, Wicomico, Somerset, and Worcester, which includes vacation haven Ocean City—is threatened by rising seas, erosion, tidal flooding, and storm surges. So, too, are western shore small towns in Anne Arundel, Harford, and eastern Baltimore counties.

The question really isn’t what will be lost anymore, but what we will decide to save.

Due to the region’s geology and Atlantic Ocean currents, sea levels in the Chesapeake Bay are rising twice as fast as the global average and are projected to jump by as much as two feet in the next 35 years, and up to five feet or more by the end of the century. That leaves the state’s two largest cities on the bay vulnerable: Baltimore, with its iconic waterfront and port, and the state capital, Annapolis, with its historic city dock, will be challenged like never before in the coming decades by near constant flooding. So-called “nuisance flooding,” when storm drains get overwhelmed and water pools two or three feet deep, has already become more commonplace here than anywhere else in the country. Floods have already increased by more than 900 percent in both cities since 1960. Some projections call for 225 or more such floods a year for Baltimore and, essentially, daily inundation for Annapolis by 2045, according to a recent study based on National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

“The question really isn’t what will be lost anymore,” says Jim Titus, a Maryland resident and leading sea-level-rise official at the Environmental Protection Agency, “but what we will decide to save.”

The last house on Holland Island, which succumbed in 2010. —David Harp

Annapolis, facing a growing crisis, is already one of cities most susceptible to flooding in the U.S. —Amy McGovern

The Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and the greater Baltimore Harbor area will be challenged by ever-stronger storm surges. —Baltimore City

Dundalk, in Eastern Baltimore County, is regularly forced to close roads today after storms. —John Long

With 3,190 miles of shoreline and 265,000 acres of rural and urban land situated less than five feet above the high-tide line, Maryland, along with Louisiana and Florida, is among the states most vulnerable to sea-level rise. With slowly sinking land around the Chesapeake (still settling from the last Ice Age, ironically enough), rising seas will eventually necessitate the need for revised or completely ne

Going by the upper-end projections of sea-level rise—which we’re likely headed for as atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels surpass concentrations not seen in millions of years—more than 440,000 acres of land, $42.3 billion in property, and 94,000 homes in Maryland will be in increased danger of inundation.“By our estimate, we should prepare for a sea level that’s going to come up to our knees by 2050 and then chest-high by the end of the century. It’s no longer a question of ‘if’ sea levels will rise that high, but ‘how fast,’” says Donald Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and technical chair of a 2013 Maryland Climate Change Commission report that updated sea-level-rise projections. “Houses are going to have to be raised, and you do not want to locate firehouses, police stations, hospitals, and schools—buildings that are meant to last—in places that are going to be destroyed in every flood.”

Nothing in either the Climate Central or the Maryland Climate Change Commission report would come as a surprise to Mary McCoy, 60, who lives not on the bay, but about 90 feet up from the Chester River outside the small Eastern Shore town of Centreville in Queen Anne’s County. McCoy readily recalls the early morning hours of Sept. 19, 2003, when she and her husband decided to ride out Hurricane Isabel at home. When the winds finally quieted, they went downstairs, hoping damage to the home, previously owned by her grandparents, was minimal. That is, until McCoy looked out her first-floor windows. “The lawn was glistening in the dark,” she says. “The Chester River was in our front yard. We were moving the furniture as it began seeping through the floorboards. When it receded, there were jellyfish and sticks and things all over the grass.”

Water entering the house was something that had never happened in the 80-year history of McCoy’s home. The ductwork in the basement needed to be replaced, and soon she and her husband, like certainly thousands more in the coming years, had to start making decisions about a future that they hadn’t considered previously. Initially, they discussed landscaping options, and then, later, sought a bid from a contractor to move the house further from the river. Ultimately, moving the home, though probably necessary in the long run, was too costly at the time. McCoy had hoped to pass the family home onto her younger cousins, but now she’s doubtful that will happen. “I ‘Googled’ and found a Maryland Department of Natural Resources map showing that the Chester River will eventually be lapping at the foundations of my house,” she says.

By our estimate, we should prepare for a sea level that’s going to come up to our knees by 2050 and then chest-high by the end of the century.

Even more than the compelling data and science—the past year also recorded the warmest global temperatures since they began being measured in 1880—such anecdotal evidence, says Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, is at least helping Marylanders recognize that climate change is undeniable. The change in sea level may be imperceptible year by year, but when a flood comes rushing in like never before, the message gets driven home, he says. “It’s something that is difficult to wrap your mind around when scientists talk about projections in 2050 or the end of the century,” Tidwell says. “But when you hear more people say, ‘That never happened before’—and we’re hearing a lot of ‘that never happened before’ these days—people begin to connect the dots.”

One recent “never before” was Superstorm Sandy 26 months ago, which flooded the Inner Harbor, but mostly spared Baltimore City. Sandy walloped much of the Eastern Shore, including Ocean City and Salisbury, where the mayor instituted a civil emergency and a curfew during the storm. Sandy hit Crisfield, a town of 2,726 and the self-proclaimed “crab capital of the world,” very hard, with waves of white caps literally pouring into the heart of downtown and driving caskets up from their graves. At the Captain’s Carry Out on Main Street, which remained without power for days, the Little Annemessex River, at the mouth of the Tangier Sound, came rolling in halfway up the counter.

With devastation to Long Island, NY, and the Jersey Shore grabbing the national attention, the fallout in Crisfield has been widely overlooked. The storm displaced hundreds of local families, some of whom never returned home, and, eventually, residents there began thinking about climate change in relation to the town’s precarious location on the Delmarva Peninsula. “It made believers out of everyone,” says former mayor Percy Purnell, whose own property, as far away from the shoreline as you can get in Crisfield, was inundated with two feet of water. “There’s no question sea levels are rising, in my mind. Every time you rebuild a dock here, it has to be built two or three feet higher than it used to be when I was a kid growing up.” The town has received money since Sandy from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency to install tidal gates in the town’s storm drains and is working with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to drop a series of breakwaters near the town’s shoreline. Two nearby barrier islands need be rebuilt to protect Crisfield as well.

The town is also close to passing legislation requiring that the first floor of all new structures be elevated above ground. New homes receiving FEMA money have been elevated four to seven feet off the ground, in accordance with their regulations.

[In terms of climate change], Sandy made believers out of everyone.

“Sandy completely changed the community’s consciousness around climate change,” says James Lane, a Crisfield minister and community historian. “People recognize that we are, and will be, consistently challenged by rising sea levels now. And we will have hard choices to make. We lost a lot of people who moved after Sandy, elderly people who didn’t feel like they could deal with something like that again, as well as young families and newer residents, who don’t want to face these issues their whole lives. So, what do we do? Abandon and move? Those people become climate-change gypsies, as I call them, or refugees,” Lane continues. “Then again, what about the people who can’t leave because they’re poor and have no place to go? We have a lot folks who make a living on the water or in the maritime industry, struggling to get by as it is.”

In many ways, Crisfield, in making decisions where and how to rebuild, is on the forefront of a complicated, multi-pronged process that will play out over and over again across low-lying areas of the state.

More than 40 percent of the homes and assets of Somerset and Worcester counties lie below the five-foot high-tide line, and more than half of Dorchester County lies below 4.9 feet above sea level. In Baltimore City, low-lying areas include dense commercial and residential districts such as the Port of Baltimore, Canton, and Fells Point, where most residents and business owners have already become dedicated sandbaggers in the wake of various hurricanes and tropical storms. Models show that the whole Inner Harbor would be at risk during 8-foot storm surges, which are projected to be a fairly common event by the end of the century.

Other populated areas in Baltimore County, such as Middle River, Bowleys Quarter, Dundalk, and Edgemere, which already face severe flooding problems, will see an increase in storm surges, too. In Anne Arundel County, Glen Burnie is expected to see greater flooding and some residents of Shady Side and Deale could find themselves underwater by the end of the century. In Harford County, places like Joppatowne and Havre de Grace will be in greater harm’s way.

TWO feet high and rising

CHESAPEAKE BAY FACTS MAP

Led by the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, the most recent state report recommends Maryland plan for up to two feet of sea-level rise by 2050, highlighting the need to build adaptation into the state’s natural and built environments. The study’s assessment only worsens moving forward, with a “best estimate” of sea-level rise of 3.7 feet by 2100 and the possibility of a 5.7-foot sea-level rise by the end of century. With 3,100 miles of tidal shoreline and 265,000 acres of rural and urban land situated less than five feet above the high-tide line, much of the state faces a significant increase in flooding in the years ahead.

Of course, Queen Anne’s County, especially vulnerable near Kent Narrows just over the Bay Bridge; Talbot County, which includes scenic St. Michaels and Tilghman Island; and Kent, St. Mary’s, and Calvert counties; also have a lot of hand-wringing to do about where and how to protect shoreline, infrastructure, and homes. (On a related note, consider that Garrett County in Western Maryland was a center of the U.S. maple syrup industry before rising temperatures pushed the industry farther north.)

In fact, the mantra often heard in response to climate change and sea-level rise from federal, state, and local officials and planners these days is not prevention, but adaptation. The choices are generally presented as “defend, retreat, or accommodate.” The euphemism “managed retreat”—a mixture of the three, but not a phrase many politicians will want to be associated with—has also been thrown around among planners and climate scientists.

In general, sea-level rise planning efforts for most counties and municipalities largely remain in the early assessment stages. Considered at the forefront, however, the Baltimore City Department of Planning has created a new initiative: the Disaster Preparedness and Planning Project (DP3), which is addressing, among other issues, existing flood problems and expected higher sea levels. The city has already set new building guidelines to offset higher sea levels, including lifting the base elevation of new structures from one to two feet above the 500-year tidal flood plain. The DP3 also recently completed a report identifying vulnerable assets and critical facilities.

At the same time, Baltimore City is considering other projected climate-change and natural hazards, including more frequent and more intense precipitation episodes, as well as droughts and potentially deadly heat waves. According to a 2013 DP3 report, average air temperatures are expected to rise by 12 degrees in Baltimore by 2100, at which point the city will feel more like New Orleans. “It gets overshadowed by the attention on sea-level rise, but we have ‘hot spots’ in many parts of the city, like in East and West Baltimore, that are of an immediate concern, especially for senior citizens and children in those neighborhoods,” says Kristin Baja, the city’s climate change czar within the Office of Sustainability. “Heat waves like we’ve experienced in the past and other cities have experienced can be life and death situations.”

While the powers that be in D.C. work to protect the national monuments on the Mall and New York City plans the initial construction of “The Big U,” a 10-mile, $335-million fortress of berms and moveable walls to safeguard lower and midtown Manhattan, compromises on the Eastern Shore (as the minister from Crisfield referenced) are already underway.

Several months after Sandy, state officials offered controversial buyouts to a number of homeowners on Smith Island, which is eroding and sinking into the bay. The buyouts seemed more practical than reinvesting in an island with 276 residents that, in the long run, appears doomed. On Kent Island, Gov. Martin O’Malley and the state Board of Public Works have sparred with local officials and developers over the addition of a big condominium project because of the potential impact on what they consider an already at-risk flood area and over-burdened environment.

You can look at the Gulf of Mexico. You lose wetlands and you have Hurricane Katrina.

Following an executive order by O’Malley in 2012, two months after Sandy, new formal guidelines for state construction projects were published last year, recommending that future state and/or other major infrastructure projects should avoid, wherever possible, areas likely to be inundated by sea-level rise in the next 50 years. By setting the guidelines, says Zöe Johnson, director of resiliency planning and policy for the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the state is trying to lead the way for counties and municipal government planning. She also notes that Maryland needs to keep working on maintaining and building natural protections against sea-level rise, such as wetlands barrier islands, because they remain critical to protecting shorelines. "You can look at the Gulf of Mexico,” she says. “You lose wetlands and you have Hurricane Katrina.”

Along with Baltimore City, Johnson adds that Annapolis and Anne Arundel County have been working with the state in developing flood mapping, planning, and mitigation efforts for the past several years. “We really want to work with every jurisdiction and provide all the technical assistance and financial assistance that we can,” Johnson says. “We are supporting them as much as we can, but we really can’t do it for them. In the end, it’s going to be up to each county and community.”

Tidwell, of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, believes that recent polls indicating support for additional clean-energy goals in Maryland at least offer hope for the future. He’s also pleased the state is at the forefront of reducing carbon emissions, noting that outgoing Gov. O’Malley made dealing with climate change a priority, signing legislation to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020. Now, Tidwell and his organization are trying to raise the bar on clean energy, pushing a new goal of 40 percent by 2025.

Even with new Republican Governor Larry Hogan, who has criticized the state’s sustainability and alternative-energy goals, taking office, Tidwell believes there’s opportunity to make progress. “[Former Republican Governor] Bob Ehrlich actually signed the state’s first greenhouse gas emissions bill, the Maryland Healthy Air Act, and one of the original clean-electricity mandates into law,” he says. If the state legislature is willing to act, he says, legislation can get passed. “If you walk around the state house in Annapolis, about 90 percent of the pictures from around the state include water,” Tidwell continues. “Maryland is a water state, and it only makes sense that we should be leaders in dealing with climate change and sea-level rise.”

High Water Mark

THIS GRAPH CHARTS THE PROJECTED FREQUENCY OF TIDAL FLOODING IN THE NEXT 15 AND 30 YEARS.

U.S. coastal communities, including those in Maryland listed to the right, are already dealing with more tidal-flooding episodes than in the past. As climate change pushes sea levels higher — through melting glacial ice and rising ocean temperatures, which expand water volume — flooding over the next 15 and 30 years is projected to occur much more frequently. With rising sea levels also creating higher tides and greater storm surges, flooding will reach previously “safe” ground as well, and cause more disruption, particularly along the East Coast and Chesapeake Bay region, where sea levels are rising twice as fast as the global average.

Courtesy of Union of Concerned Scientists

But so much climate change and sea-level rise is “baked into the cake” at this point, says Boesch, that in reality, any action taken in the next 40 years likely won’t make any major impact in Maryland until the next century. “There’s little we can do now to reduce sea-level rise by the middle of the century, but we can potentially help by stabilizing global temperatures and sea-levels by the end of the century, for the next century,” Boesch says. “I can tell you one anecdote about this that’s funny but also a little sad at the same time,” he continues. “There’s an elderly couple on the Eastern Shore that I visit from time to time. They used to always ask me, ‘How much longer is our house safe?’ Well, the last time I saw them, they didn’t ask about the house. They told me they’re going to be buried in Oxford, and they wanted to know if their graves would be safe. I told them, ‘Probably until the end of the century, I can’t make any promises after that.’”

Unfortunately, this means that much of what we consider quintessentially Maryland on the Eastern Shore, including significant state natural treasures, such as the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge and the Assateague Island National Seashore will be lost. Historic landmarks, too, such as Harriet Tubman’s birthplace and the museum planned in her honor are at tremendous risk.

In Anne Arundel County alone, 422 archaeological sites, including four historic lighthouses, as well as historic downtown Annapolis and its centuries-old city dock are at risk in the next decades. “A few of these sites are 3,000 years old, Native American sites, that will inundated by flooding over next 100 years,” says county contract archeologist Stephanie Sperling, who participated in a two-year study of the county’s threatened assets. “A huge part of our cultural legacy, will just wash away.”

Historically, of course, Marylanders have long had to struggle with rising water levels and erosion. Before the 20th century, this was largely due to the slow subsidence of the land along the Chesapeake and Atlantic. With climate change accelerating the process since the Industrial Revolution, the problem is taking on a more serious existential threat for many Marylanders.

On Smith Island, where the official Maryland state dessert, Smith Island cake, is still made by local women at the Smith Island Baking Company right off the dock, the looming threat to home, community, and a way of life, is never far from the minds of the remaining residents. A 45-minute boat ride from Crisfield, the island remains happily isolated from the harried pace of modern life and people here like the sunsets. It’s the last of Maryland’s inhabited lower bay islands not accessible by car.

The post office is only open four hours a day and the public school, with 11 students, is the smallest in the state. Home to watermen, a few retired folks, and a couple of bed-and-breakfasts mostly catering to summer visitors, the island rallied after the state offered buyouts, turning them down and instead organizing a group called Smith Island United to fight for grants to build badly needed sea walls and jetties to slow down erosion, and, at least, delay what is most likely its fate.

Erin Pruitt, who grew up on nearby Tangier Island, on the Virginia side of the bay, is one of the bakers at the Smith Island Baking Company, and like all the women working in this friendly atmosphere, she doesn’t want to leave. Only 26, she lived in Ocean City for a while before falling in love with a young man and moving to Smith Island. She admits occasionally missing the convenience of living inland, but she cherishes the slower pace and strong sense of community here.

“It’s the people here I love more than anything else, and if the island ever disappears, the culture and community will, too,” she says. “And that’s what I grew up with.”

Lively and thoughtful, a white apron tied around her waist as she removes the nine-layer chocolate and coconut cakes from the baking racks, Pruitt pauses and looks down for a moment. “People ask, from time to time, ‘Do you think when you have kids and grandchildren that Smith Island will still be here?’” she says. “‘I hope so,’ I say.

“But the truth is, and the reason it takes me a while to answer that question,” she continues, “is that I don’t want to think about it. That’s the harsh reality.”

Source

O.J. Brigance Inspires Other ALS Patients

Jess Mayhugh — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:30:00 +0000

There’s a certain elegance to O.J. Brigance.

The chair he’s sitting in behind the desk in his office at the Ravens Under Armour Performance Center in Owings Mills is his permanent perch. He’s wearing black slacks, a perfectly pressed pink-and-white checkered shirt, and a simple gold wedding band on his crooked left ring finger. His short, graying hair is neatly cropped. A black ascot stylishly hides where the white tube from his ventilator enters his trachea.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), one of life’s ugliest diseases, has left him unable to speak or even breathe on his own. This once world-class athlete, the man who recorded the first tackle for the Ravens in their first Super Bowl, can’t force his mind, the only part of his being ALS has spared, to move his dying muscles. Yet somehow, the corners of his mouth seem to curl upward.

His body won’t surrender smiling.

Atop a cabinet in the corner are four game balls the team awarded him, and on the wall hang pictures with personalized messages from good friends like Ray Lewis. But the football mementos receive no more prominent display than the drawings and letters from school kids, or the quotations written on a dry-erase board that serve to motivate both him and the players he mentors.

It’s a freezing Thursday in February, but Brigance is in a warm mood. He’s the kind of relentlessly positive guy who doesn’t mind Baltimore winters, because, as a kid growing up in Houston, he never got to play in the snow.

“We are all dealing with disability in one form or another,” he says through an augmentative communication device, essentially a computer he controls by pointing his pupils at letters and buttons on a monitor positioned a few feet in front of his face. It’s a time-intensive process, and, as he composes sentences, only the coldly mechanical sound of the ventilator activating every three or four seconds fills the room.

“I have refused to give in to my circumstance,” says Brigance, who was diagnosed in 2007. “I don’t think anyone would blame me for going into seclusion and [living] a life in the shadows, but that would be a waste. I recently received letters from a fifth-grade class [that] studied the story of Joseph from the Bible and thought his attitude was similar to mine in my fight against ALS. When I hear of how my trials have encouraged others, it shows me the purpose behind what we are enduring.”

It is difficult at first not to feel pity for those unfortunate souls afflicted by this cruel neurological disease, which sentences Adonis-like men and petite, gentle women to lifetimes as prisoners in their own bodies. But spend some time with Brigance, 44, or some of the other 30,000 people living with ALS and you’ll often hear them use curious words to describe their situation.

“I don’t want to come off as a victim,” says Mike Davis, 63, a Severna Park resident who was diagnosed with ALS in 2012. “I’m a survivor. I’ve got doctors and nurses that have done way beyond the average. If anybody had to get this disease, I wish they were as lucky as I’ve been.”

Unlike Brigance and Davis, who had little to no awareness of the disease before they got it, Beth Tenser, 45, knew all too well what her future held when she was diagnosed in 2012. She was her mother Myrna’s chief caregiver before ALS took her in 2005.

“This illness, I feel, is a gift,” Tenser says through an iPad text-to-speech app. “I have met so many special people. I inspire them as they in turn inspire me.”

ALS entered the country’s collective consciousness in 1939, when baseball legend Lou Gehrig was diagnosed with the disease now unofficially named for him. The Yankees’ Iron Horse was told he had three years to live. Two years later, he passed away at the age of 37.

Doctors and scientists have made frighteningly few ALS breakthroughs in the ensuing 75 years. Today, Dr. Justin Kwan, co-director of the renowned ALS Clinic at the University of Maryland Medical Center, says half of his patients live three to five years following diagnosis. As the disease progresses, patients lose functional use of their skeletal muscles, which usually leads to paralysis. Mercifully, many report no significant pain, though Brigance says he still gets itches he cannot scratch, and his muscles feel like they need to be stretched, as if he’s been on a long car ride. The cause of death is most frequently respiratory failure, induced by the atrophying of the muscles used to breathe.

No one knows what causes ALS. While there is some evidence to suggest that abnormal proteins in neurons or abnormal DNA might exist in some patients with hereditary cases, Dr. Kwan says, 90 percent of patients at the Maryland ALS Clinic have no family member with it.

“As we better understand the human genome and it becomes much more feasible for us to sequence individual DNA, we need to understand how the environment influences a person’s risk for developing the disease,” he says. “I’m hopeful that within my lifetime we’ll be talking about ALS like another chronic disease.”

The road to diagnosis is often long and littered with incorrect conclusions. Unlike say, HIV, there’s no simple blood test for ALS, meaning many other muscular and neurological disorders must be ruled out first.

“We test the motor neurons in their brains,” Dr. Kwan says. “Studies show that clinical diagnosis, even in the absence of a specific test, is fairly accurate. It’s an awful disease, and there’s never an easy way to discuss it with a patient. But mortality is something that we all must face. I tell them we have to be optimistic and hopeful, but that they have to allow themselves to grieve.”

Davis’s initial inclination that something was wrong came in July 2011, when, out of the blue, he started having breathing problems. Various doctors theorized that his troubles stemmed from his weight (at that time he tipped the scale around 300 pounds) or a problem with his heart. Eight months later, he was told he had ALS.

“The doctor who diagnosed me literally cried giving me the death sentence,” he says. “She sat on my bed. . . . you never want to hear a doctor say, ‘We have to have a serious talk.’ When you hear that, you’re in deep shit.”

Tenser began slurring her speech in September 2010. Overworked at her job as a graphic designer, she thought stress or even allergies were to blame. Nothing hurt worse than when people assumed she was drunk. Knowing the disease took her mother and her Aunt Betsy, she feared the worst.

“For eight years I felt like it was a black cloud over my head,” she says. Asked what aspect of it scares her the most, she begins to cry as she types. Her response is gut wrenching.

“Death, of course.”

Brigance was 37 when he first noticed muscle weakness in his right arm following a racquetball game. Although his playing days were over, he was working for the Ravens (he’s the team’s senior adviser to player development) and still in great shape.

“There was a time, probably a year and a half post diagnosis, when it really hit me,” he says. “Initially, it had not severely impacted my physical abilities. When it became increasingly more difficult to brush my own teeth and complete other daily tasks most of us take for granted, that was the hardest part. The weight of possibly being dead by the age of 40 brought me to tears. Once my wife and I finished being sorry for ourselves, we decided to dry our tears and fight.”

After they make peace with their diagnosis—if they ever do—ALS patients encounter a daunting new reality. As their muscles slowly wither, they lose their independence, their ability to speak and eat, and ultimately their life. But on a day-by-day basis, each is confronted with the same existential question we all face when we look in the bathroom mirror each morning: How can I move forward today?

Left to right: O.J. Brigance embraces his wife of 24 years, Chanda; Mike Davis, a Severna Park resident who was diagnosed with ALS in 2012, poses with his girlfriend and caretaker Mary Fricano. - Photography by Mike Morgan

O.J. and Chanda Brigance have been together for more than 20 years, but their marriage is no longer just a union of two. A staff of four nurses, whom Chanda calls “angels from heaven,” care for Brigance 24 hours a day.

Mornings are a three-hour process during which they administer personal hygiene and conduct the arduous task of transferring him into his wheelchair. After Brigance spends a full day at the office, the bedtime routine clocks in at nearly two hours.

In his autobiography, Strength of a Champion, Brigance credits Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti for ensuring “we’d have the top medical care in the world and access to everything we could have asked for.”

His augmentative communication device, with which he has the ability to shop online, send e-mails, download books, and even operate the TV remote, cost more than $10,000. It takes Brigance, a man of forced patience, anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes to compose sentences, which are then read aloud by a computerized voice. Even this he has turned into a positive, saying it’s made him a better writer and forces him to think before he speaks.

“Imagine if you were strapped to that chair with duct tape over your mouth,” he says. “That is my life with ALS. My communication device re-opens the world for me. I know life would be very different and difficult without a caring support system. The simplest task can become monumental, often leading to frustration, anguish, and loss of hope. For those who don’t have a support system in place, each day can be a burden just to live. Without mobility and strength, it would lead to home confinement and loss of purpose. Independence is a precious gift taken for granted all too often.”

Davis faces a far different economic reality. A self-employed building contractor for most of his life, his hands were the tools with which he survived. Now, no two fingers on his left hand rest at the same angle. He can’t even use it to cut food.

Health insurance was just a rumor to him for years until a friend recommended he buy a life insurance policy as he approached 60. After the mandatory physical showed that his blood sugar was off, he purchased a health plan from Aetna. While the $730 monthly premium and $4,000 annual deductible are significant expenses for a man whose business is waning as his health does, he still thanks God for it every day. Without it, he wouldn’t be able to afford the 24 pills he takes daily, or the five-figure diaphragm-pacing device that helps him breathe. (Since the initial interview, Davis has switched to a plan with CareFirst.)

Like Brigance, Davis refuses to stop working. He uses a ramp he built and a wheelchair lift loaned to him by the ALS Association’s DC/MD/VA chapter to get from the living area of his split-level house to the office in his garage, where he runs his general residential contracting company.

Davis’s girlfriend, Mary Fricano, is his caretaker. They met 12 years ago at the dentist’s office where she works, attracted by a shared sense of humor and easy rapport. They rely on her salary and his business to pay the mortgage and his medical bills. Financially, she concedes, they’re barely hanging on.

“She stays with me for love, because it ain’t for the money,” he says, as they both laugh. His voice is labored and strained, and he stops to gasp for air every two or three words. He no longer answers the phone in the office, because he believes his tone scares off potential customers. Mary brings him a glass of water and reminds him to take his time.

“You lose things. I can’t walk, I can’t dress myself, I can’t write. Imagine sitting in a chair, and you can’t even get up to go to the bathroom by yourself. You psychologically have to adapt, because if you fight too hard, you get angry and frustrated. I’ve become a big toddler. I have a 3-year-old granddaughter who can do more than I can do. It’s hard to accept.”

After helping Davis prepare for the day, Fricano leaves for work around 7. When she gets home 11 hours later, she feeds him, bathes him, and helps him with basic hygiene tasks like brushing his teeth.

“I took care of my mom, and I took care of my dad,” she says. “You have a certain relationship with your parents, and you have a certain relationship with your husband or your boyfriend. When something like this happens, you have to shift gears. You become a caregiver. The emotion is still there, but it’s on the backburner. I can’t feel. You become almost like a robot. It’s like I’m two people. I’m the girlfriend, but I’m the caregiver.”

Davis seems to fight an internal battle between hope and despair. In February, he was defiant, recounting his mother’s fight against cancer from his dining room table. “She died from it, but she fought like hell for 10 years. She’d be ashamed of me if I give up. I refuse to.”

But by June, an e-mail message was more resigned: “I fight the sense of overwhelming doom. ALS doesn’t let you get false hope. It is fatal. You know that, and you can accept it and live your life as you see fit. There is a calming peace in that.”

Throughout the disease’s arc, many people go through stages of denial and depression, says Tremetris Harrell, director of care services for the ALS Association’s DC/MD/VA chapter.

“A patient has to rely on their loved ones for everything,” she says. “You do see what unconditional love is. Those who have strong family support and are connected to the chapter or their faith are more likely to accept the diagnosis, and not let the diagnosis control them.”

The Brigances have leaned heavily on their belief that God has a purpose for O.J. It led them to establish the Brigance Brigade, a nonprofit foundation that has raised more than $1 million to equip ALS patients with needed equipment like button hooks, grab bars, and wheelchairs—as well as nursing services and communication devices. In April, its inaugural 5.7K (Brigance’s jersey number was 57) drew more than 1,000 runners to Canton.

“This crisis instigated a sense of urgency to make a difference in the world around me,” Brigance says. “ALS is devastating on the people who receive the diagnosis and their families. Though it is dire, it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. The people who fight this battle are special folks who have great resiliency.”

People like Mike Davis, who admires Brigance’s strength, and like Beth Tenser, who calls him “a role model for us all.” Sitting on the couch of the Pikesville apartment she shares with her father—and used to share with her mother—her fingers furiously peck away at her iPad.

“When you have so many people who care about you, I feel it is an obligation to live for them and for me,” she writes as she smiles and her eyes begin to well. “Life is for the living.”

Source

Field of Dreams

Jess Mayhugh — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 08:30:00 +0000

Photography by Daniel Bedell

Every Orioles fan describes April 6, 1992 as a beautiful day. Perhaps they’re referring to the ideal weather, or maybe it was more about the excitement in the air. This was opening day for the city’s new ballpark, something fans had been anticipating for years.

The crowd came to the downtown gem in droves that day, riding the shiny new Light Rail or walking en masse through the Inner Harbor—much different scenery than the Waverly houses that surrounded Memorial Stadium a few miles north. Turning the corner onto Eutaw Street, many got a glimpse of the Yard for the first time: the sprawling B&O Warehouse, the steel-and-brick trusses like ballparks of a bygone era, the lively concessions on the open Eutaw corridor.

After marveling, fans eventually made it to their slatted green seats, which preserved the old Orioles logo but provided considerably more legroom than Memorial, and took in the game. Rick Sutcliffe, a veteran pitcher who had signed as a free agent in the winter, threw a shutout against the Cleveland Indians, and the Orioles won 2-0 in a swift game-time of just over two hours. Satisfied Orioles fans, facing none of the feared traffic jams, made it home safe.

Anyone who attended that game probably finds it hard to believe that it was 20 years ago. Yes, there have been a number of monumental seasons and a fair share of not-so-monumental ones since then, but Oriole Park at Camden Yards still feels timeless.

“It is one thing to get something shiny and new and to be excited at first,” says Orioles manager Buck Showalter. “But, what is it like 20 years from then? All this time later, it still doesn’t feel old and dated.”

Naturally, that’s a testament to many things—the original design and forethought, the updates over the years, and the relentlessness of the fan base that, even after 14 losing seasons, still considers Camden Yards the ultimate silver lining.

Of course the Camden Yards story begins many years before 1992’s promising debut. In fact, its real origin can be traced back to the ripple effect that started when Bob Irsay moved the Colts out of Baltimore in the middle of a snowy March 1984 night.

“When the Colts left so unceremoniously, that was a moment frozen in time in Governor Schaefer’s memory,” says Alan Rifkin, Governor William Donald Schaefer’s chief counsel when the stadium talks got started. “He never wandered from a desire to try and make amends and attract an NFL franchise back to Baltimore.”

At that point, Schaefer asked his good friend and local business executive Hank Butta to put together a panel to study ways to lure the NFL back to Baltimore—particularly how to modernize Memorial Stadium, by then three decades old and lacking the revenue-producing amenities of many newer parks. The Orioles had been interested in a new stadium for a while and, when they got wind of this, saw the panel as an opportunity to also address the future success and stability of the franchise.

“At some point the Butta commission asked us to look at renovations of Memorial Stadium, which, of course, was a stadium for both football and baseball,” says Joe Spear, principal architect of Camden Yards with the firm HOK Sport, now called Populous. “We did a three-month study and said, in the end, we’d have a solid ‘B’ stadium if we left it multi-purpose. The Orioles stunned Schaefer and Butta by saying they’d only sign a one-year lease.”

It was the Orioles president at the time, Larry Lucchino, who was most adamant about building a new, baseball-only stadium. Schaefer liked the idea but was also nervous about the political ramifications of asking the state to fund two stadiums. What he needed was the backing of then-Orioles owner Edward Bennett Williams.

“We stopped at the Camden Yards construction site. And, right there, I proposed.”—George Will

“I had several conversations with Williams in the early- to mid-’80s and we talked about the best baseball teams in America,” Lucchino says. “I tried to tell him they all played in baseball facilities—Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers. That would be the only way for the Orioles to achieve that status.”

Somewhere along the way, it became commonplace for baseball and football teams to share a stadium, despite the fact that the two games are inherently different.

“We went through this ghastly period from the late-’60s right up until Camden Yards where people decided to build multi-purpose stadiums,” says
Washington Post columnist and baseball aficionado George F. Will. “I guess people did it to save money, but I don’t think they really had a theory.”

Once Schaefer was elected governor in 1987, the stadium issue was vaulted to the top of the agenda, coming to a head during the legislative session that year. With only two weeks left in the session, Orioles owner Williams, despite having chemotherapy treatments hours earlier, gave a rousing testimony for the state to fund two stadiums.

After a seven-hour filibuster, the bill passed by a narrow margin. Now questions arose about where the new ballpark would be located and what form it would take.

The Butta commission recommended three different sites—Laurel, Camden Station, and on the existing grounds of Memorial Stadium. Governor Schaefer was adamant that the stadium stay in Baltimore, so his preference was Camden.

“He recognized that there was some great value in locating the stadium the furthest point south in the city, particularly since the Washington Senators had relocated,” Rifkin says. “Camden was an old, rundown area, but it had great infrastructure.”

Once the location was selected, HOK Sport worked with RTKL on a master plan for the ballpark, and Lucchino got a letter from urban planner Janet Marie Smith, who said she was interested in working on the project. Lucchino felt that Smith’s background in planning city parks was an important asset to this new stadium.

“My best off-season acquisition was Janet Marie Smith,” he says. “We did something unusual in that we all agreed on a minimum requirements document and, whenever the lease was signed, that document would be attached to it. In it, we talked about all the features, amenities, and character. We wanted a traditional, old-fashioned ballpark with modern amenities. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times.”

Some factors that were important to the Orioles were keeping the iconic B&O Warehouse, situating seats close to the game, and having an asymmetrical field.

“Multi-purpose stadiums were round, making the angle between first and third base 90 degrees,” says architect Spear. “But if you look at the geometry of Fenway or Wrigley, it’s an 83-degree angle, which puts spectators closer to the action on the field.”

Another important factor was lowering the playing field and pushing the upper deck back to further reinforce that intimate feel.

“By pushing the upper deck back, the building itself reads as a short building, which was more appropriate in scale with the houses of Ridgley’s Delight,” says Smith, referring to the residential neighborhood adjacent to the stadium. “Eutaw Street was another good planning principle as it blended the stadium right into the community.”

The warehouse was another integral part of the design, but was a point of contention. Columnists called it an ugly “pile of bricks” that should be torn down, but Lucchino advocated for it to stay up, which, many now agree, contributes mightily to Camden Yards’s signature look.

“Camden Yards really made you feel like you were in a much more intimate space,” says Orioles legend Cal Ripken Jr., who played half of his career in Camden Yards. “The enormity of that warehouse made everything else seem a little smaller.”

By the time 1991 rolled around, construction was well underway, with one major decision still not made: the ballpark’s name. A meeting was held with Schaefer, Maryland Stadium Authority chairman Herb Belgrad, and Orioles owner Eli S. Jacobs, who bought the team in 1989 after Williams passed away. The four most popular contenders were Camden Yards, Babe Ruth Park, Memorial Stadium, and Oriole Park.

“There was a huge argument over the name of the ballpark,” recalls Ken Rosenthal, a baseball insider for MLB Network, who worked at
The Sun for 13 years. “Schaefer wanted Camden Yards and Jacobs wanted Oriole Park. I wrote a column saying, ‘Let Schaefer name it!’ Eventually, they compromised. But, think of what most people call it now. I think Schaefer won that one.”

While the new stadium made headlines, there was also the looming reality of bidding farewell to Memorial Stadium. Yes, Memorial was too antiquated, and it needed more premium seating to be a contender in the league. But this was the home to the Orioles glory days, pennant races, and the human vacuum cleaner, Brooks Robinson.

“My first thought was, ‘We don’t need a new stadium. What’s wrong with this place?’” Ripken says. “I was scared we’d lose the rich history of Orioles baseball.”

Everybody seemed to have similar sentiments about the 33rd Street stadium.

“We all grew up there,” says Boog Powell, famed Orioles first baseman, who now sells his barbecued fare at Camden Yards. “My kids were born in Union Memorial. It was very much a part of our lives, and it was like our old friend who was gone.”

“It smelled like an old high-school gym, but I loved it,” says Showalter who remembers it during his time with the Yankees.

“I liked Memorial Stadium,” says Orioles fan Mike Mullen, who has been a season-ticket holder since 1984. “It was like blue collar, it was more my kind. I felt like I was going to a neighborhood pub.”

And while many Orioles felt a loss, there was also some excitement on the horizon that couldn’t be ignored.

“Memorial was right in the neighborhood and it was very charming,” says Frank Robinson, revered Orioles player and manager. “A lot of people I knew were sad to leave, so was I, but you had to keep up with the times. As it went along, it got older, and the modern ballparks made it look more antiquated. You have to put those memories in a treasure chest and move on. We were excited to see something new.”

George Will was so excited about the prospect of a new park that he decided to make a memory before it even opened.

“My wife and I were on our way to Memorial Stadium, and we stopped at the Camden Yards construction site,” Will says. “There was a cinderblock where home plate is now, a big flatbed truck where the dugout is. And, right there, I proposed.”

Others saw the new park as an opportunity to turn over a new leaf and maybe even improve their stats.

“The crowd was always so into it at Memorial Stadium,” says former Orioles power hitter and centerfielder Brady Anderson. “I was shocked when I played my first game there and got a standing ovation for doing a sacrifice bunt. But, when we went off to a new stadium, I was happy because my career hadn’t gotten off the ground yet. It was like a fresh start for me.”

“I think Cal had the money quote at the time, ‘You feel like you’ve been here before.’” —Ken Rosenthal

Fans wanted Camden Yards to be a fresh start for the team, too. After being the worst team in baseball in 1988 and having the “Why Not” season of 1989, the Orioles were hoping the ballpark might spark a reinvigoration. That Orioles Magic seemed possible again as the players first laid their eyes on the stadium.

“We hadn’t seen it yet because of spring training,” Anderson recalls. “And I remember [outfielder] Mike Devereaux and I walked out together. We didn’t say anything for about 15 to 20 seconds. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Damn, Brady.’ We were so speechless at how impressive it was.”

A lot of press, players, and executives saw the inside for the first time at an MVP ceremony for Ripken in November 1991.

“We did a toast with milk in champagne glasses, it was kind of hokey,” says sports writer Rosenthal. “But that was the first time it was open to see and it took your breath away. I think Cal had the money quote at the time, ‘You feel like you’ve been here before.’”

And then, naturally, came the warm-weather win of opening day. True, there had been a dress rehearsal of sorts with an exhibition game with the New York Mets the previous Friday, and fans had gotten to preview the ballpark in a walk-through a week before, but this was the big debut.

Even the people who had been living and breathing Camden Yards were excited to see the park come to fruition and, in many ways, saw something new that first day, too.

“The one thing we couldn’t test was how does it play? What if all these wind studies and sun angles are all wrong?” Smith says. “I think the combination of seeing nine complete innings coupled with the fact that there weren’t ridiculous traffic jams was a huge relief. Schaefer was right all along—that downtown would work. He’d always say, ‘Sure, go ahead and have your studies, but I’ll tell you what’s going to happen.’”

Just like Smith and her cohorts envisioned, Camden Yards was a different kind of ballpark, with modern amenities and luxury boxes, which, in turn, drew a slightly different crowd.

Long-time beer vendor Clancy Haskett, who has been slinging suds for 38 years, said he noticed a difference.

“First of all the beer used to be much cheaper,” he says. “In the mid-’80s it was around $2 and I could sell until the end of the game. People at Memorial were a little bit more crazy. Things are calmed a bit at Camden. It’s more families, kids asking for autographs. And, of course, those beer prices went up.”

“Anytime you leave one of those older parks, and this goes for all cities, there’s a different crowd,” Rosenthal says. “The crowd at Camden Yards wasn’t the Wild Bill Hagy crowd. It was an affluent group of people. You lose something in the switch—atmosphere, personality. But so much good came out of the park. It was such a tourist attraction and a big deal for so many years.”

A Camden Yards ticket was a hard one to get at first. The hype of the stadium was the initial seller, but then big games and playoff runs added to the thrill. The ballpark’s popularity brought the 1993 All-Star Game to Baltimore, which was a spectacle in itself. The 100-degree July night saw the culmination of a week of activities, like tents and live music in the Inner Harbor.

That game was responsible for “one of the most harmless controversies,” says Rosenthal, as Blue Jays coach Cito Gaston never put in Orioles pitcher and fan favorite Mike Mussina, even though Mussina was warmed up and waiting for the call in the bullpen. For the rest of the season, T-shirts proclaiming “Cito Sucks” could be spotted at many Camden Yards games.

Arguably the most unforgettable game to be played in Camden Yards was on September 6, 1995, when Ripken broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive-game record.

“That was the most memorable night of my career,” Rosenthal says. “I’ve covered Olympics, Super Bowls, but that night was perfect. The anticipation was building all summer and we had no idea what to expect. But when you have the President, Vice President, and Joe DiMaggio all at the game, you knew it would be big.”

When the game became official after the California Angels’ half of the fifth, the numbered banners on the warehouse unfurled from 2,130 to 2,131, and everyone in the ballpark exploded into a standing ovation that lasted more than 22 minutes. After some prodding from fellow players Rafael Palmeiro and Bobby Bonilla, Ripken did a now-famous lap around the field.

“I would have preferred the focus was on us playing for the pennant,” Ripken says with characteristic modesty. “But we were out of contention so the focus was on the streak. I didn’t want to mess with the flow of the game, but the ovation kept going on, and Raffy and Bobby said, ‘You’re going to have to take a lap around.’ I did, and I started seeing people who I’ve seen there for years. It was a 50,000-strong celebration that turned one-on-one. Obviously my favorite baseball moment was catching the last out of the World Series, but that was my favorite personal moment on the field.”

Ripken’s accomplishment, in retrospect, feels like the catalyst for an amazing next couple of seasons. In both ’96 and ’97, the Orioles had a taste of the playoffs, courtesy of a wildcard finish and division title, ending up falling in the ALCS both years.

“In those two years, I couldn’t have been more proud,” Ripken says. “We always felt like we had an advantage at Camden Yards. It was our place. Talking about that rich Orioles history at Memorial? Well, this was a realization it was continuing.”

Brady Anderson had some of the best games of his career during that time, hitting 50 home runs in 1996.

“I played with Hall-of-Famers and great teammates. It was also a great time for me personally,” he says. “When I watch baseball highlights, I try not to reflect too much on the past, but that is one time I would love to duplicate over and over again.”

No one could have possibly known it then, but 1997 was the last year the Orioles had a winning season. Since then, there have been sporadic bright spots, but overall disappointment in the team’s play. However, Camden Yards as a stadium has remained an ongoing source of civic pride.

Much of that probably has to do with the details and upgrades that make Camden Yards the stadium that it is. There is, of course, the ever-important grass on the field, a departure from the artificial turf craze of the ’60s and ’70s.

“What’s kind of amazing is how little we’ve had to update the grounds system here since it opened,” says head groundskeeper Nicole Sherry. “This was really innovative stuff. It’s real grass, a rarity in those days, on top of 12 inches of sand. When it rains, it’s like pouring water on a beach.”

There are also the recognizable faces at the ballpark, which, for a long time, included umpires’ attendant, the late Ernie Tyler. Tyler began as an usher in the team’s very first season in 1954 and strung together 3,769 consecutive games over 48 years, giving Ripken a run for his money.

“He worked his day job everyday, then would come to the ballpark,” says Tyler’s son, Jim, a clubhouse manager at the Orioles. “He was there so long that umpires would look forward to coming to Baltimore just to see their old friend Ernie.”

Another familiar face is vendor Haskett, who earned the nickname Fancy Clancy because of his over-the-top tricks while pouring beer. Haskett first got his job selling sodas at Memorial Stadium when he was 15.

“You’ve got to have personality with this job,” he says. “I talk to every single sale, I don’t care if I know them or I don’t. You have to treat everyone like family. I remember I went down to Aruba, and I was in the casino when I heard, ‘Hey, Baltimore!’ All the way down there and someone knows me from the stadium.”

Another vendor who gets a lot of recognition is Powell, who has been selling his pit-beef sandwiches and talking to fans at Boog’s BBQ since Camden Yards opened.

“When three million people come by your business every year, that doesn’t hurt,” he says. “Plus, I love the fans. I can’t tell you how many people come up to me with an old photo and ask me about a certain game. I’m very fortunate to be at the ballpark after all these years. And I don’t have to worry about striking out.”

Concession-stand owners like Powell know that fans’ tastes over 20 years tend to change. And officials at the stadium authority and Orioles understand that, too.

“A lot of our concessions, retail, and restaurants seem aged and dated,” says Smith, who is now the Orioles VP of planning and development. “We’re in need of a new look, as well as the fact that people’s taste in foods has changed. They want more local and fresh items that are unique to Baltimore.”

The concession company Delaware North, which replaced Aramark at the park in 2011, acknowledges this and has recently added local items like Gino’s burgers, Pollock Johnny and Stuggy’s hot dogs, crab cakes, and a Little Italy meatball sub.

In addition, the Orioles added the Miller Lite Flite Deck in right field a few years ago for a more social environment, and a new outdoor deck and bar on the rooftop of the wall in centerfield will be added this season.

“When it opened in ’92, these weren’t amenities that many ballparks had,” says Greg Bader, Orioles director of communications. “We want to make it contemporary.”

Other changes over the years have been the installation of new seats, the addition of HD scoreboards, and refurbishing the brick siding and roof on the warehouse.

This season, the right-field wall will be lowered four feet, and the Orioles will be installing new sculptures in the bullpen area to honor the team’s Hall-of-Fame players.

“That is the ultimate thing a ballclub can do to honor you,” says Frank Robinson, who will be at Camden Yards for his statue’s dedication on April 28. “If the Orioles can commemorate these experiences, then I’ll always feel connected to that stadium.”

As beloved as Camden Yards is in Baltimore, its most powerful impact has, perhaps, been felt nationally. Since 1992, a retro ballpark with modern amenities was imitated over and over again.

“From the start, we loved the idea of Camden Yards,” says Lucchino, who is now the president of the Red Sox. “But we didn’t know it would light a fire across the baseball world and its progeny would end up in a dozen-and-a-half towns and cities.”

Suddenly, the concept of multipurpose stadiums plummeted in popularity and HOK Sport was regarded as the go-to firm for ballparks. People started using the phrase “just like Camden Yards.”

“We won a lot more arguments after Baltimore,” Joe Spear says. “It established us as the guys who knew what we were doing.”

Retro-classic stadiums that fit into the downtown landscape started popping up everywhere, like Turner Field in Atlanta, Jacobs Field in Cleveland, and AT&T Park in San Francisco. Even when Fenway was getting renovated, the Red Sox looked back to Camden Yards for inspiration, creating the ultimate full circle.

“The thing we’re most proud of is how many ballparks have emulated Camden Yards,” Smith says. “I think the fact that they’ve gone into downtowns and urban settings is the most important victory for America. And, 20 years later, not a single ballpark has been built with concrete.”

“We always felt like we had an advantage at Camden Yards. It was our place.” —Cal Ripken Jr.

Another powerful effect Camden Yards had was to prove that ballparks can be about more than just a three-hour game.

“Now ballparks give fans a chance to do more than just go to the game and then back to the suburbs,” Frank Robinson says. “Now it’s a way to experience a city.”

Maybe the well-regarded ballpark’s most crucial contribution is how it has buoyed the Orioles in tough times.

“While the stadium is a nice place to go either way, it’s really the team and the game that brings crowds,” Rosenthal says. “But, if the stadium wasn’t as nice, the team might be in real trouble.”

Indeed, Camden Yards can take at least partial credit for the fans being such a persistent bunch, that they’re still crowding the annual FanFest in January, selling out opening day, and remaining optimistic at least into the summer.

“I think some of it is history. There have always been a lot of really good baseball fans in Baltimore,” Powell says. “And they’re dying for a winner. Every year, it’s always hope springs eternal.”

But for some, like fan Mike Mullen, who is renewing his season-ticket package yet again this year, things are a bit simpler.

“I run a tab with Clancy,” he says. “There’s a cool girl in the right field flag court, and I always go out of my way to buy a beer from her. It’s a whole day, and it’s like they want you there, like you’re one of the family.”

Despite woes on the field, fans like Mullen come back again every year in what almost feels like a religious fanaticism. And even after the crowds leave and the vendors clear out, there is something about the building itself—perhaps what Lucchino, the architects, and even Schaefer intended—that feels spiritual.

“Every time we come off a road trip,” Showalter says, “At 2 or 3 a.m., I just sit in the dugout for a couple minutes and think. Camden Yards is almost ethereal—it’s like a cathedral.”

Source

When Oprah Was Ours

Jess Mayhugh — Sun, 01 May 2011 11:00:00 +0000

In 1976, when Baltimore’s WJZ-TV decided to expand its six o’clock news format to an hour, the station couldn’t have possibly known that it was about to make history.

At the time, the news was anchored by Jerry Turner, arguably the most beloved broadcaster in Baltimore. But the one-hour format was deemed too long for a single person to handle, so then-news director Gary Elion conducted an exhaustive nationwide search for a co-anchor.

After watching more than 100 audition tapes over the course of many months, Elion still hadn’t found anyone he wanted to hire.

“I was getting the usual boring tapes,” he recalls.

But one of the tapes caught his eye: It featured an ingénue from WTVF-TV in Nashville, TN. Her name was Oprah Winfrey.

“She was relating a story about something that had happened at City Council,” Elion says. “And she explained it so well. Knowing nothing about the politics of the place, I understood exactly what had happened and the significance. It made her hugely different from anyone else I had seen.”

So Elion hired her. It was a bold move for the station to pair a rookie with an eminent anchor, but he was confident.

“I never had any doubt she was right for the job,” says Elion, now a practicing attorney in Sante Fe, NM. “But I felt she could acquire the experience. What she had was this incredible ability to communicate—that was apparent even then.”

The station promoted her with the tagline, “What’s an Oprah?” and Baltimore was about to find out, as Winfrey (age 22 and making $22,000 a year) debuted on August 16, 1976.

Working in a bustling metropolis was an adjustment for the girl born in rural Mississippi.

“I was assigned to learn every neighborhood in Baltimore,” says Winfrey, speaking to us from California. “I ended up doing neighborhood festivals every weekend. I never learned any of the streets. I was always lost and had to look for the TV tower to know where to go.”

It was no-frills for the talk titan back then. “No one did my hair and makeup,” she says, laughing at the memory. “I would be driving my Chevy from Columbia with my hair just washed and leaving the windows down for it to dry. I would be taking the rollers out as I was coming up TV Hill!”

The job itself also presented a challenge. Winfrey—always a sympathetic soul—took the stories to heart, which made her ill-suited to the bad news business of anchoring.

“I didn’t like every day having to think of the worst thing that was going to happen that day,” says Winfrey. “I never felt great doing it. I remember being at a funeral and not asking the family of the [deceased] child to comment and getting in trouble for it. The assistant news director was like, ‘You get back out there and ask,’ [but] I couldn’t do it. I was too emotional—I felt things so deeply it was hard for me to let things go. I was worried about the family. It helped lay the groundwork for knowing what I didn’t want to do.”

Station stalwart Turner was equally unhappy with the hire.

“He had an old-fashioned sense of men and women,” explains WJZ anchor Denise Koch. “He was from the South.”

Furthermore, it was difficult for Turner to fully embrace his fledgling co-anchor, given the fact that he assumed his friend, veteran WJZ reporter Al Sanders, would fill the spot. The combination was ill-fated from the start.

“She was teamed with the dean of Baltimore newscasting,” says WJZ weatherman Bob Turk, “and she was completely out of her league. She didn’t read well, she didn’t know news, geography, history, politics, or names. She was just very much in the wrong place and too young and inexperienced to be an anchor.”

Winfrey is the first to say the pairing was disastrous. “I remember being like a fish out of water with Jerry Turner,” says Winfrey. “I walked into a cesspool there. It was Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters all over again. He didn’t want me there. I was young. I wasn’t just green behind the ears—I had cornstalks growing back there.”

Less than eight months after she was hired, Winfrey was unceremoniously dumped from the evening news just hours before she was about to go on air.

“I shall never forget April 1, 1977,” says Winfrey. “I got called out of the newsroom to meet with the general manager. He said, ‘We think you are so talented, we want you to have your own spot. We are going to move you to morning cut-ins.'” (Cut-ins are local announcements inserted into the network broadcast.)

“I was devastated,” Winfrey says. “I knew it was a horrible demotion, and Jerry Turner was saying, ‘I didn’t know anything about it, babe,’ when, in fact, they had been planning for weeks to replace me [with Al Sanders].”

Later that spring, Bill Baker, who had created Cleveland’s Morning Exchange, the highest-rated local program in the country, was hired as general manager of WJZ, and given the task of reinvigorating the ailing station.

“WJZ had slipped from number one to number three,” Baker says. “I was supposed to get things going again. I started looking at the news, and I also thought maybe it would be a good idea to do a local talk show.”

Baker met Winfrey for the first time at a cocktail party, though he was already familiar with her hiring history. Intriguingly, it was his wife, Jeannemarie, who identified Winfrey’s true potential.

“Jeannemarie was a housewife at the time and watched daytime TV,” Baker says. “And she said, ‘You know, if you are going to do a local talk show, that Oprah would be a great host. There is something magical about her—she wears her heart on her sleeve, and she is not at all pretentious.’ I agreed. She had all the right attributes to be a successful talk show host.”

As Baker developed his newly named show, People are Talking, he was convinced that Winfrey was the perfect person to cohost along with veteran newsman Richard Sher. Winfrey, on the other hand, felt she wouldn’t be taken seriously as a journalist.

“It was the last thing in the world she wanted to do,” Baker says. “She said, ‘Bill, I don’t want to do a talk show.’ She had tears in her eyes when she said it. I said, ‘If you are successful, you can have more power to do good and make more of an impact on the community than you would have in TV news.'”

But from the very first show on August 14, 1978, it was clear that Winfrey—with her warmth, natural presence, and ability to extensively ad-lib—had found her calling.

“From that first day, I knew instantly this is what I was supposed to do,” she says. “I felt like I had come home to myself.”

The New York Times TV critic Bill Carter, then at The Sun, remembers watching the show’s debut, which featured Tom Carvel, founder of Carvel ice cream, and two actors from All My Children.

“I watched the first show with my wife, and she said to me, ‘Wow, Oprah is good at this—every question she asked is the question I was thinking in my head,'” he says. “She connected with the female audience instantly. She was very in tune with the way people thought and was extremely comfortable and appealing when she stepped into this format. Oprah was genuine.”

Before long, the question, “What’s an Oprah?” was a rhetorical one, as the duo beat national talk-show behemoth Phil Donahue in the local ratings and was syndicated on 17 stations from Bangor, ME, to Honolulu.

“Making the transition to the talk show was the golden moment in her life,” says Koch. “News anchoring just wasn’t her thing.”

Where Winfrey’s partnership with Turner was toxic, her pairing with cohost Sher was a match made in ratings heaven. The chemistry between the cohosts was palpable, due mostly to a mutual respect for one another.

“We had fun all the time,” Sher says. “We never had an argument and we supported each other.”

Says former People Are Talking executive producer, Arleen Weiner: “She was very comfortable sitting in that chair next to Richard. She had a great respect for him and really cared about him as a person and colleague.”

And though things didn’t always go smoothly on air—an audience member’s hair once caught on fire from a light bulb, a show on orgasms inadvertently was conducted in front of an audience of church members—the two shared a lot of laughs and made compelling television together.

“Richard and I had a very different relationship,” says Winfrey. “He was not resentful of me. He was willing to try to teach me what he knew. Every day he taught me about timing and rhythm and pacing and how to inject the funny. He saw this as an opportunity for himself, and he recognized he couldn’t do it by himself. I had the best time with him.”

Off camera, Winfrey remains close to this day with both Sher and Weiner (mother of WBAL anchor Deborah Weiner), who introduced her to the city’s movers and shakers and gave her entree to Baltimore’s all-important Jewish society.

“At that time, Baltimore was an insular city,” says WJZ weatherman Marty Bass. “And Richard was a major player. To be put on that show with Richard meant Oprah was thrust into a Baltimore society that doesn’t like outsiders and will chew you up and spit you out. This is a town where people still go to their kindergarten reunions. Oprah was able to handle it all like Ripken at shortstop.”

While Winfrey came to Baltimore with undeniable talent, Baltimore itself was her ad hoc journalism school as she learned the tricks of the talk trade. Among them: a real willingness to show her vulnerable side as she revealed parts of herself, from her struggles with weight to her less-than-storybook upbringing.

“Baltimore is a warm, giving community,” says Baker. “It’s the kind of place that opened its arms. Once they saw how real she was, they allowed her to mature and grow. In its collective emotional heart, Baltimore said, ‘We want this woman to succeed. We are going to keep watching and be there for her.’ It was the unique crucible that helped gestate this wonderful, magical talent. There’s no question the place helped her.”

Winfrey says that her experiences were invaluable.

“My goal at that particular phase in my life was to learn as much as I could,” she says. “I looked at Baltimore as a learning opportunity, as a ‘teach me’ school for life. I learned the absolute most about myself there. It was my first time away from home starting out as my own true self—not with any family member—and learning how to negotiate in the corporate world. I look at those years as how they made me into the woman I am now.”

In addition to cohosting People are Talking (and eventually co-anchoring the noon news with Sher), Winfrey explored her love of acting, whether performing a one-woman show at Goucher College or a poetry reading at her church, Bethel A.M.E.

“That’s the first time I realized she was much more than a talk-show host,” says her former coworker and roommate Sandra Pinckney, who is still a close friend. “She starred in To Make a Poet Black and Beautiful and Bid Her Sing and was reading Langston Hughes poetry. I was sitting in the audience, and here comes this booming voice in the back of the church. I said to myself, ‘My God, this is Oprah.’ She was so much bigger than I imagined as she recited these poems in this beautiful, deep voice. The show went from Baltimore to Lincoln Center!”

Says Bass, “When I heard that Oprah was doing a one-woman show at Goucher, I remember thinking, ‘She is incredibly motivated. She is seeing a bigger picture here—in color and 3-D.'”

Even in those years, colleagues recall that Winfrey exuded uncommon confidence with her big personality, boundless energy, and ability to tackle anything.

“She was the most confident person I’ve ever met,” says Koch. “I’ve never met anyone who had such a strong sense of self and what they were going to do in the world.”

Koch, a prominent actress at the time herself, remembers when Oprah auditioned for the lead in a play at CentreStage.

“I remember thinking, ‘Why would they cast her when she’s not an actress?’ But she was sure she was going to get it. She didn’t do it in a bragging way—she just thought she knew her destiny.”

When the part went to a classical Shakespearean actress instead, Winfrey was reportedly livid. “Oprah was furious,” says Koch. “She was like, ‘How could they not cast me?’ She was stunned. I remember her saying to me, ‘What are we doing here, Denise? We should be on Broadway.’ I remember thinking to myself, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here, but I’m here paying the mortgage!'”

Winfrey took the town by storm, but her colleagues secretly harbored the fear that the rising star wasn’t long for Baltimore.

“It was like, ‘We’d love to keep you here, but you’re not staying,'” Bass says.

Indeed, in January 1984, Winfrey was hired to host A.M. Chicago, a faltering half-hour morning show in the Windy City.

Ironically, according to Sher, the show first saw Winfrey when she appeared on an audition tape when producer Debra Di Maio was applying for a job. A.M. Chicago was immediately impressed with Winfrey (and also ended up hiring Di Maio).

Though the station threw a going away party for her at Café Des Artistes, some hard feelings were apparent.

“At the going away party, Paul Yates, the general manager, announced that he was going to give her a big color TV, but she never got that,” laughs Sher, who gave her an attaché case engraved with the word “Ope,” his nickname for her.

Says Pinckney, “I remember her looking so regal and so triumphant at her party. They were going to match her salary to keep her, but they could have offered her a million dollars, she was ready to go. She was ready for bigger and better things.”

Winfrey never questioned her decision to leave Charm City.

“Just like no part of me feels like ending [The Oprah Winfrey Show] at this point is a mistake, no part of me felt like leaving Baltimore at that time was a mistake. I had grown as much as I felt I could grow in that position. I didn’t want to become an ‘anchor institution.’ I didn’t want to be 25 years at an anchor desk reading news. I just wanted a different kind of challenge. I didn’t think I could be fulfilled if I stayed in Baltimore—it would have caused me to settle into a conditioned life. I wanted to be more than comfortable.”

Weeks later, Weiner drove Winfrey to the American Airlines terminal at BWI and put her on the plane.

“We cried at that point,” says Weiner. “She would come to our house for Passover. She would come for Thanksgiving. There were people who told her that there were landmines in Chicago, but I thought she could be much more successful there. Six weeks later, I went out to see her and we couldn’t walk down the street without everyone knowing who she was. I knew her star was ascending, but I didn’t know how far she would go.”

Despite the ups and downs, Winfrey is grateful for her Baltimore years. “‘I wouldn’t take nothing from my journey,'” Winfrey says, quoting from a traditional Negro spiritual. “Every single bit of it, every layer of my Baltimore experience, contributed to me being able to stand where I am today.”

Oprah’s Favorite Things (in Baltimore)

The Hippo
“One time, a bunch of us all went to the Hippo to get in some good dancing,” says former consumer reporter Maria Broom. “The music and DJ at that time was really good.”

Cross Keys Deli
“Cross Keys fries were number one,” says Oprah Winfrey, “and Maryland jumbo lump crabmeat. I remember it was $8 a pound back then. My favorite things, bar none.”

Ruth Shaw
“She laughed at herself if something didn’t fit,” says owner Ray Mitchener.

Tio Pepe
“She used to come in here for dinner on a regular basis,” says former TÍo Pepe maitre d’ Francisco “Paco” Lobo. “And now I watch her show every day.”

Her Apartment (8 Cross Keys Road)
“After a peeping Tom was at my window, Oprah took her key off her key ring and insisted I move in with her,” says Sandra Pinckney. “It was the finest three months of my life.” Says Winfrey, “I loved that place.”

Linen Outfits and Scarves From The Bead Experience
“I showed her how to wear a scarf over her shoulder and how it cut her in half,” says co-owner Idy Harris. “It became her look.”

Louie’s Bookstore Cafe
A popular hangout in the ’80s.

The Pimlico Hotel
“My first experience with a finger bowl was at The Pimlico Hotel,” says Winfrey. “I was like, ‘Okay, there’s lemon in it.’ I was two seconds away from drinking it.”

Bethel A.M.E. Church
“I’d give 10 percent of my [weekly] salary to Bethel A.M.E. Church every Sunday, $22.70,” says Winfrey. “I keep old checks. I think checks are the best indication of how a person has lived their life.”

The Cross Keys Inn
“We hung out there so much that people thought we were too close,” says Richard Sher. “When she left Baltimore, it was rumored that we were having a baby.”

The Prime Rib
“She dined here often,” says The Prime Rib’s general manager David Derewicz. “She usually ate with Richard Sher and sat in our ‘outside’ dining room [which was a porch 40 years ago before being converted to an indoor space].”

Source

God Only Knows

Jess Mayhugh — Fri, 01 Dec 1995 08:30:00 +0000

In October 1992, nearly three decades after realizing his childhood dream to become a priest, Rev. Joseph Maskell was summoned downtown to Baltimore’s archdiocesan headquarters. Though the caller wouldn’t divulge the meeting’s agenda, Maskell couldn’t help wondering: Was it time for him to be transferred to another parish?

But waiting for him in the archbishop’s office on that gusty Monday were two diocesan officials, two attorneys and the archbishop himself, William H. Keeler. They were seated at a round table, their faces grim.

Bracing himself, Maskell settled his large six foot frame into a chair facing the others.

They got right to the point: A former student of Archbishop Keough High School, where Maskell had served between 1967 and 1975, was accusing him of having sexually abused her some 20 years earlier.

Father Joseph Maskell.

Now a 38-year-old mother of two, the Baltimore woman had only recently remembered these alleged abuses, and contacted the archdiocese in late June in search of an apology and some spiritual help.

Church-hired private investigators had since failed to corroborate her allegations; nonetheless, officials wanted to confront the 53-year-old priest directly. Perhaps the show of force would prompt a confession.

But Maskell professed his innocence. He denied ever abusing anybody, and, according to a family member, even offered to take a lie detector test.

The archdiocese, says this family source, countered with more restrictive choices: Either check in to a Connecticut psychiatric facility, or step down from the pulpit.

Maskell looked to the archbishop. “What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Go to Connecticut, said Keeler.

Escorted back to Holy Cross, his parish in South Baltimore, Maskell was given just hours to pack a bag and leave the rectory. His disappearance from Baltimore was cloaked in secrecy; even fellow priests were denied details. Maskell’s mother learned something was wrong only after receiving phone calls asking the whereabouts of her son. (To this day Maskell believes the emerging scandal hastened his mother’s death months later.)

In an earlier era, a concerned archbishop might have taken the accused priest aside, chastised him and transferred him discreetly to another diocese. But with charges mounting nationally that the Catholic church lacked the fortitude to police its own ranks, the pressure was on for a show of self-prosecution.

Even given the prospect that Maskell might be unjustly accused, he would have to fight for himself under the new rules—without the protective embrace of the institution that had nurtured him for his entire adulthood.

Sexual abuse by priests has rooted like a cancer within the body of the American Catholic Church, eluding most public detection until the early ’80s. More than 500 priests have since been accused, prompting legal actions that have drained Catholic coffers of up to $500 million.

The crisis contains disturbing truths about the power of human denial. And it has forced a nationwide soul-searching both inside the Church and out, all of it eventually arising from one profound question: What mechanism of the mind could so effectively suppress the conscience—especially the presumably higher conscience of a priest—that a man might permanently injure children entrusted to his care?

The recent publicity has also forced policy reviews within Catholicism’s fraternal citadel: What is the proper Christian response to accusers? To an accused brother? To the parish community? And does the priesthood’s celibate nature attract men who are earnestly fleeing their urges, only to leave them ill equipped in moments of temptation?

In heavily Catholic Central Maryland, these are no academic questions. Within the past decade, more than 12 area priests have been publicly implicated in the sexual abuse of minors. Most of these men have been stripped of their collars; one committed suicide.

Even against this grim backdrop, the allegations against Father Joseph Maskell reveal the Catholic crisis in its extreme. If the claims are true—and several of them defy belief—they portray a man suffering from more than a dangerous disorder; they show the quintessential authority figure, operating with a badly-damaged moral compass, committing creatively diabolical acts against the innocent for years without correction.

Two of Maskell’s accusers allege rape and other sexual batteries, and have filed a multi-million-dollar civil action.

Operating on one plaintiff’s testimony, county police have quizzed Maskell about his knowledge of a murdered nun whose body was found in 1970, though they have since generally discounted him as a suspect. Meanwhile, city police are still puzzled over why Maskell ordered the graveyard burial of a small mountain of psychological tests and other documents he’d compiled during years of pastoral counseling.

Still other Maskell critics have emerged, with more than a dozen of them telling Baltimore magazine in recent months that the public allegations of sexual misbehavior fit a pattern. Many of those interviewed remember Maskell for his imperious, manipulative or lewd behavior. A group of Towson lawyers claims that, in addition to their two plaintiffs, they’ve met with 15 people who say Maskell subjected them to one or more sexual violations. And a third alleged rape victim, the first willing to be publicly named, has stepped forward to share her story with Baltimore.

Should the charges against Maskell eventually prove little more than faulty 20-year-old memories—some of them retrieved after a long period of alleged amnesia—the simple damage of public accusation may have already made it impossible for Maskell to pursue his vocation again.

While declining to be interviewed for this story, Maskell has repeatedly maintained his complete innocence. And a large group of friends and former parishioners feels that—but for the tragic misaccusations that have ruined his life—Maskell would have continued to be an exemplary priest. His sister, Maureen Baldwin, puts it most emphatically: “My brother has done nothing—repeat, nothing—wrong.”

For a brief moment, shortly after his exile to Connecticut, it looked like Fr. Joseph Maskell’s nightmare might go away.

As a follow-up investigation, two diocesan representatives met with Maskell’s first accuser, Jennifer*, who by now had gotten herself an attorney. When pressed for the names of witnesses or other victims, Jennifer chided her questioners to prove the case without her, and began naming at least a dozen other people who’d allegedly abused her sexually—including a former Baltimore city politician. In the church’s eyes, her credibility diminished with each new allegation.

Even if the charges prove little more than faulty memories, the public accusations may have already made it impossible for him to pursue his vocation.

Jennifer and her attorney soon parted ways, while the archdiocese continued to search for corroboration without her help.

According to diocesan spokesman William Blaul, investigators talked with “dozens” of other Keough students and came away empty-handed. (Though during the years that Jennifer was in high school, some 1,500 students attended Keough.)

Meanwhile, doctors at the Connecticut psychiatric facility, the Institute of Living, conducted a nearly six-month course of evaluation, after which the archdiocese determined Maskell was “able to return to ministry,” says Blaul.

After hearing from canon lawyers that his clerical rights had been violated, says his sister Maureen, Maskell demanded a parish assignment. And with no legal grounds on which to refuse, the diocese gave him an administrative post at St. Augustine in Elkridge.

The reprieve was shortlived. Some St. Augustine parishioners, tipped off about Maskell’s circumstances, protested his arrival. One woman is even said to have handed out anti-Maskell fliers in the parking lot.

Diocesan representatives tried to smooth things over with the parish leadership. And Maskell himself addressed the issue from his new pulpit one Sunday morning, assuring the congregation that he would not run from these untrue allegations.

Maskell knew Jennifer had not let the matter rest, but he clung to the hope that his vocation would endure. “If I lose this parish,” he told his half-brother Tom, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle it.”

Since childhood, Anthony Joseph Maskell seemed destined for the priesthood. Born in 1939 and raised in Northeast Baltimore near Clifton Park, his favorite childhood game was “Mass.” In child-sized vestments his mother had sewn for him, Joe would gather neighborhood children into the family’s basement, where he would dispense the body of Christ in the form of white Necco wafers.

His mother, Helen Maskell, was very keen on her son becoming a priest, recalls childhood friend Bill Heim. “I always wondered if he was going to revolt at some point,” Heim says. “But he never did.”

When young Joe was old enough to join in sandlot baseball games, he would dress in black and take his position of choice behind the plate, calling the balls and strikes. According to Heim, Maskell liked having the authority to say: “This is right; that’s wrong.”

A fastidiously clean kid, a teenaged Maskell one year spent so much time immersed in his bathtub ritual, Heim recalls, that his father announced his displeasure over it. Joseph Francis Maskell, an office-furniture salesman with Lucas Brothers, was known for his short fuse.

At 14, Maskell went off to St. Charles Seminary in Catonsville, but returned after about a week because he was homesick. When he tried seminary again, after high school, he liked it fine, and reveled in the privileges that came with being a third-year sacristan, which included free social time after mass while the congregation prayed. The perk seemed to appeal to his ego. “He used to say with a smile, ‘We’re sacristans. It is our place to be back here,”‘ recalls long-time friend and fellow seminarian William Kern.

Once ordained, Maskell was known for delivering thoughtful homilies with a compelling bass voice, and for excelling in the heroic moment. When Holy Cross parishioner Lynn Gerber Smith gave birth to an ailing baby, the priest rushed to the hospital and performed an emergency baptism. When Maskell’s friend Albert Griffith called to say he was depressed and thinking of “blowing my brains out,” Maskell drove to Severna Park within 15 minutes.

Maskell chaplained for the Baltimore County Police, the Maryland State Police and the Maryland National Guard. He was in his element holding an improvised mass on the hood of a jeep, or cheering up troops in the rain, or walking over to a county police station with one of his own pistols to target shoot with the boys.

More than 500 priests have been accused of sexual abuse since the ’80s, prompting litigation that has cost the church $500 million.

Maskell’s police credentials made their greatest contribution on January 4, 1987—the night of the Chase Amtrak crash that killed 16 people. Maskell had been monitoring his police radio and was on site and past the barricade within 45 minutes. Kneeling in the gravel by the railroad ties, he administered last rites and tried to comfort those still alive, including a woman who had been carried from the wreckage without one of her legs.

“I could tell by the arch of his back that he was personally feeling the suffering that was in front of him,” remembers Chaplain Robert K. Shaffer. “That woman was dying and Joe knew it.”

Tired and distressed by what they’d witnessed at the crash, Shaffer and Maskell left the scene around 11 p.m. Shaffer, a Protestant, went home to his wife of 36 years. As a Catholic, however, Maskell had long ago forsaken any such comfort.

The spiritual value of celibacy, in theory, is to demonstrate a priest’s religious commitment—and his link to Christ. One of the Church’s most controversial codes, clerical celibacy has long been a time-honored tradition, but it’s hardly a founding doctrine. Indeed, some popes, including the very first, Saint Peter, enjoyed the worldly pleasures of family life.

In their 1993 book A Gospel of Shame: Children, Sexual Abuse, and the Catholic Church, authors Elinor Burkett and Frank Bruni characterize the ascent of celibacy—between the fourth and 12th centuries—as an attempt by leaders of the Western European Church to maintain control of Church property and power, which might otherwise have passed to clergy members’ offspring. As far as the authors are concerned, this power play endures. “Mandatory celibacy allows the Church tight control over its priests, who have no dividing loyalties to wives and offspring and thus require minimal salaries,” they write.

Although the Church demands celibacy of its priests, it does little to prepare them for the rigors of that life, says Lutherville psychotherapist Richard Sipe, one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. A retired Catholic priest, Sipe is the author of A Secret World: Sexuality and the Search for Celibacy and the just-published Sex, Priests and Power.

In the comfortable home he shares with his wife, psychiatrist Marianne Benkert, Sipe recalls one seminarian’s experience. Confused about his commitment to celibacy, the student asked his rector for advice. “Don’t worry,” the rector replied. “Once you get ordained, it all falls into place.”

But it doesn’t, says Sipe, who believes that celibacy—when followed out of a well-examined, internal commitment—is noble, but that it is ill-suited to institutional obligation.

Fr. Raymond F. Collins, dean of the Catholic University’s School of Religious Studies, believes seminaries are much better able to prepare students for celibacy today than during the era when he and Sipe (as well as Maskell) were enrolled. Seminarians, he says, need “to be aware of themselves as sexual beings and to realize that their sexuality is going to affect their fashion of dealing with other human beings in each and every instance. The seminary has to help the seminarian realize that he is not a disembodied or angelic being.”

How qualified was Maskell for this difficult course? If his developmental years were any indication, Maskell displayed little outward interest in any sexual life at all.

According to Maureen Baldwin, her brother was so intent on becoming a priest that he never had a date in his life. When a girl he knew in high school told him he had the most beautiful eyes she had ever seen, he had no idea how to respond.

Friends from his teen years can’t recall Maskell ever expressing a libido. “I never saw him with a girl the whole time we were in school,” says Dennis Rogers, “outside of his mother.”

As an adult, recalls Bill Heim, Maskell admitted that, when he was about 10, he’d had a crush on a pretty neighborhood girl. Maskell raised the subject, Heim believes, as a way of saying that at this one point in his life, he had experienced romantic love.

In recent years, the credibility of recovered memory has raised some eyebrows among researchers and the public.

Though it may seem odd to reach so far back for such a memory, the priesthood is filled with men who—bound for the seminary from an early age—never reached psycho-sexual maturity, write Burkett and Bruni. When such a priest breaks with his vow of celibacy, the authors add, he might seek involvement with his “emotional peers … teenagers.” Some men can be drawn to the mantle of celibacy in the hope that it will shield them from disturbing elements of their sexuality, and are disappointed when it does not.

Sipe has interviewed or reviewed the histories of more than 2,000 Catholic priests. Six percent, in his estimate, have had sex with minors; two percent with pre-pubescents. This represents significantly higher rates, he believes, than among clergy of non-celibate denominations.

According to Sipe’s formula, 3,000 of the nation’s nearly 50,000 Roman Catholic priests pose a threat to the children under their influence. From figures in a report commissioned by the Archdiocese of Chicago, priest-sociologist Andrew Greeley also estimates the current national figure of child-molesting priests at between 2,000 and 4,000, with each one of them likely to victimize an estimated 50 minors over the course of a career.

Diocesan spokesman William Blaul counters that celibacy does not pose an inherent problem, and that the paramount issue is screening out potential abusers. (Toward that end, he says, today’s seminarians undergo criminal background checks and a battery of tests designed to ferret out character flaws, though no test is completely reliable for detecting a predisposition to sexual abuse.)

Nonetheless, for some celibate priests, the fact that all sex is forbidden arguably blurs distinctions among different types of sexual behavior. As one deacon told Sipe, “I don’t see what difference it makes whether I use my hand or somebody’s vagina to have an orgasm.” This sort of naive, all-or-nothing thinking, when flamed by the loneliness of the celibate life, according to Burkett and Bruni, can leave a priest primed for bad behavior.

In 1966, about 16 months after his ordination, a young Father Joseph Maskell became associate pastor at St. Clement in Lansdowne. There, 13-year-old Bill* felt like a bigshot whenever the priest would call him out of class at the parish school to chat, usually for several hours at a time, two or three times a week. They often started out talking about sports, but invariably wound to the subject of male anatomy, alleges Bill.

One day, Maskell took Bill and two other boys target shooting. On the drive home, Bill sat up front with Maskell, and as the car rose over a bump in the road, Bill alleges, Maskell reached over, grabbed Bill’s crotch, and said playfully, “Hold on to your balls.”

Bill says he began to feel cautious around Maskell. One afternoon when the school baseball team was changing into new uniform pants, Maskell told Bill that he needed a jockstrap to play. Bill didn’t have one, but Maskell did, back in the rectory. The priest sent Bill to get it, giving him the key to his bedroom. Bill dashed to the rectory, leapt into the jockstrap, and was dressed in record time, he says, just before Maskell arrived.

Bill began telling his friends to be careful around the priest. Word of this filtered back to Maskell, who called Bill into the rectory, several days before graduation, Bill says. Allegedly, the priest confronted him: “Listen, you little m—–f—-r. If one more person says something to me that came from you, I’m gonna make sure you don’t graduate.”

At home, Bill told his mother (since deceased) that Maskell had threatened him. She phoned the archdiocese to complain, he says. Bill graduated on time, and within three months Maskell, though continuing to reside and perform some duties at St. Clement, was assigned to Archbishop Keough High School for girls.

At Keough, Maskell was known by at least two contradictory personae. One was a gruff militarist who barked out commands in the hallway and might search a girl’s locker for drugs or even cut open the hem of her skirt if he believed she was showing too much thigh.

The other was a chummy confidant who developed a following among some of the girls by offering his office as a smoking lounge in a school where smoking was grounds for suspension. Girls pretended to need his counsel so they could get out of class. After hearing his invitation to light up, they’d smoke until they got dizzy, spinning their tales of parental misunderstanding, or boyfriend problems, as the priest would nod appreciatively and take notes.

Lutherville psychotherapist Richard Sipe estimates 6 percent of priests he surveyed have had sex with minors.

Many women today recall his being genuinely helpful. “He was my mentor,” says one. Says another: “He helped me to put my life back together. He let me cry on his shoulder.”

But while dispensing such comfort, others claim, Maskell also sometimes crossed a line.

“My parents fought a lot and embarrassed me,” says one alum from the class of 1972, who mentioned this to Maskell during a smoking session. “He homed in on that. And he said, ‘Come sit on my lap.’ I sat on his lap, and he rocked me back and forth until I started getting weird feelings. As he was rocking me, he said, ‘Your father isn’t affectionate enough with you.’ I was upset because he was saying stuff about my father, and it made me cry,” she says, adding that her mother called the school to complain about the incident only to have her call transferred directly to Maskell. “She told him to just leave me alone.”

Deborah Wisner, of Keough’s class of ’74, also went to see Maskell to smoke and discuss family problems. She says he showed her a series of ink blots, diagnosed her as “sexually frustrated,” and recommended further counseling. She avoided his office from then on by walking up an extra flight of stairs.

Former Keough student Karen* says Maskell called her into his office one morning and told her that someone had seen her with her boyfriend naked in a parked car. “I told him that it couldn’t have been true,” she recalls. “No matter what I said to him, he said, ‘I understand, dear. Now let’s talk about it.'” According to Karen, the priest had specific questions about her boyfriend’s anatomy. For six hours, she says, he interrogated her. “He told me my problem was that I was frigid,” she claims. “He took his big pocket watch out. He said he could hypnotize me and help me.”

Other Keough alums also recall that Maskell presented himself as a sexual healer. Several women even say that the priest claimed to be an actual gynecologist. (“He’s always been a frustrated doctor,” says his half-brother Tom).

One of these women adds that Maskell was so taken with himself that, as part of her counseling, he put his face within a few inches of hers and asked her to look into his eyes and tell him how beautiful they were and how good looking he was.

Stacy* knew Maskell from both St. Clement and Keough, where she was a member of the class of ’72. She claims that one day during ninth grade, Maskell summoned her to his office to mention that her reading aptitude was below par. He sat on his desk, perched above her. “He said that I wouldn’t have gotten into Keough unless he’d pulled strings. I was kind of frightened. I said, ‘Gee, I thought I got in on my own merit.’ And he said, ‘No, you have a reading disability, and you would never have gotten in if it weren’t for me.’ And then he asked me if there was anything that I could do for him. I said, ‘No, not that I can think of.’ I didn’t know what he was getting at,” says Stacy.

Ann*, who doesn’t wish to be named because “I still have a fear of the man,” says Maskell invited her on a boat ride with some other girls. As they drove along the Beltway, she asked him where the other kids were and was told they couldn’t make it.

They arrived at the boat, docked in the Dundalk area, and after helping her aboard, Maskell suggested that they just sit around and talk. At some point, she says, he told her about a church renovation project that unearthed, behind an old radiator, dozens of desiccated condoms.

“I really don’t think you should be talking to me about these kinds of things,” she told him. He changed the subject, but after he lapsed into a description of sights he’d seen on lovers’ lane, Ann says she asked to be taken home.

She stayed away from the priest, but about a year later, she discovered to her chagrin that Maskell was sitting opposite her in a confessional. She claims he quizzed her about her sex life, which, at 14, was nonexistent, and as she tried to answer his questions, she squeezed her eyes tight in the vain hope that he wouldn’t see her. That was her last confession for 20 years.

By early 1993, Jennifer had resumed her quest against Maskell through Towson lawyer Phil Dantes, who enlisted a colleague familiar with Keough to see if there was enough support for Jennifer’s claims to justify an investigation. They quickly decided there was.

Rev. Robert Hawkins got a church scolding after he took Maskell in for several weeks. Says Hawkins: “I think [Maskell’s] really a casualty of the times.”

But what about Maryland’s three year statute of limitations for civil complaints? Could the recently recovered memory of a long-forgotten offense become grounds for a proper lawsuit?

To bolster their proposed legal maneuver, Dantes and colleague Jim Maggio ran an anonymous ad in The Sun seeking other alumni who might have memories from their days at Keough. Copies of the ad were also mailed directly to Keough alums. And for good measure, the attorneys tipped off a Sun reporter about the probe, hoping publicity would scare up witnesses.

Jennifer, meanwhile, allegedly suffered more new images of past sexual abuse, a painful process that had begun years earlier, when she first came to believe an uncle had abused her as a child.

Then, in the spring of 1992, a series of new images convinced her she’d been sexually abused by others, as well. In the first of these alleged abuses, she recalls confessing to a Keough priest that her uncle had urged her to let a dog lick her sexually, and that the dog later died. She claims the priest then began masturbating, saying that if she told anyone, she would go to hell.

Distressed at the memory, Jennifer examined her 1971 Keough yearbook and recognized the face of the priest she remembered in the confessional. Surprisingly, however, it was Maskell’s name under a nearby photo that caused in her “an ugly stir.”

In the following months, Jennifer waded into a stream of increasingly chilling convictions. She claims the two priests instructed her to perform oral sex on them because “the Holy Spirit was coming through them….It was like the Eucharist.” She saw Maskell for counseling sessions during which “he was praying that I would stop being bad.”

Over a three-year period, she says, she and Maskell had vaginal intercourse four times, including once during which he called her a whore. She alleges Maskell once forced her to have sex with a uniformed police officer and at least once to have sex with someone who gave the priest money. Other alleged memories involve a brother from Cardinal Gibbons, anal intercourse and coerced enemas.

In 1993, she says, she recalled that Maskell allegedly hypnotized her: “He would use a certain phrase and everything would just stop.” The phrase, she says, was, “I only want what’s best for you, just what’s best for you.” She says he told her that before divulging a certain incident to anyone, “I was to kill myself.”

Jennifer also claims Maskell once put a gun in her mouth. On another occasion, she claims, he held an unloaded gun to her head and pulled the trigger, allegedly warning that her policeman father, if he ever learned “what was going on,” would surely do the same thing with a loaded gun.

But it was an episode Jennifer says she recalled in January 1993 that alerted Baltimore County police.

Jennifer says that in the spring of 1969, her sophomore year at Keough, she talked with Sister Catherine Cesnik, a popular young English teacher, who asked how Jennifer liked Keough. “I told her I had a hard time with my studies and didn’t like Keough a lot,” Jennifer says. Cesnik asked if she could help, but Jennifer said there were things she couldn’t talk about.

Was someone making her do things she didn’t want to? the nun asked. Was somebody hurting her? Was it someone that Cesnik knew?

To each of these questions, Jennifer says, she nodded yes.

“[Jennifer], is it the priests?” Jennifer indicated that it was.

Sister Catherine “Cathy” Cesnik.

“Oh, God,” Cesnik allegedly said. “I suspected as much.”

Jennifer says Cesnik hugged her and told her to enjoy the summer; the nun would take care of everything. But when Jennifer returned in the fall, Cesnik had changed jobs. Maskell, though, was still at Keough, and Jennifer claims he told her someone had approached him during the summer and accused him of “hurting the girls.”

That November of 1969, Sister Cesnik left the apartment she shared with another nun in Southwest Baltimore, went out on some errands, and never came back. The following January, hunters found her body—bludgeoned to death and partly consumed by animals, her clothes in such disarray as to suggest sexual foul play. The field where she lay was four and a half miles from her apartment, but not far from Maskell’s former parish, St. Clement, in Lansdowne.

In November of 1969, Sister Cesnik left her apartment to run some errands and never came back.

Jennifer claims she now remembers a cold day—Maskell was wearing gloves; she, a coat—when he took her to visit Cesnik’s corpse. It lay in an open, barren place, next to a dumpster. As she bent over the body, she claims she heard him say, “You see what happens when you say bad things about people.”

“When I first remembered Sister Cathy,” says Jennifer, “I felt that I had killed her. I know now that I was led to believe that I killed her.”

She says Maskell and a religious brother would show her items—a necklace, for example—that had supposedly belonged to Cesnik. The men pretended to have discovered the items in Jennifer’s school locker, she says. Eventually, Jennifer claims, she was able to recall the religious brother telling her that he had beaten Cesnik to death.

A private investigator hired by Jennifer’s attorneys contracted county police and asked to look through the old Cesnik file, but was denied access. After police met with Jennifer in the spring of 1994, they reactivated their investigation, but were unable to verify her account, which differed from the original crime scene, says Homicide Commander Captain Rustin Price. There was no dumpster in the field where Cesnik’s body was found, for example, says Price. A newspaper account from the time, however, describes the field as a “dump.”

And county detective Sam Bowerman, an FBI-trained expert in criminal personality profiling, believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger. “Father Maskell would have been more meticulous,” he maintains. “I don’t think Father Maskell’s connected to her death in any way.”

The newspaper ad mailed to Keough alumnae arrived at the Howard County home of Tracy* in the fall of 1993. She cried. She laughed. She ran around her yard. “I was confused,” she says, “yet excited that someone out there was going to take action.”

Unlike Jennifer, whom she claims never to have met, Tracy says she has always remembered some of her encounters with Maskell but that certain graver abuses she recalled only recently. But even the things she says she’s always remembered were bad enough that, for part of her adult life, she kept track of Maskell’s whereabouts with the thought of killing him.

Petite, blonde, with doe-brown eyes and a hawk nose, at 41 Tracy recently graduated from community college with honors and is pursuing a bachelor’s degree. She wants to go to law school and become a criminal prosecutor. Her face has changed since high school: Her features are sharper, her gaze more penetrating.

Tracy first went to counseling with Maskell on October 5, 1970. Her parents were upset at finding drug paraphernaIia in her purse, and Tracy hoped the priest would talk with them. She was crying when her friend Lisa* brought her to Maskell’s office, she says, adding that the priest then led Lisa out the door and locked it.

Tracy claims Maskell hugged her and told her that, although he wasn’t supposed to touch the girls, they found it calming. He pulled his chair around to the front of his desk and allegedly removed her clothing, piece by piece, until she was completely naked, she says. The priest then massaged her breasts and asked if her boyfriend touched her similarly, she claims. Allegedly, Maskell reassured her: “I am touching you in a Godly manner.”

This session led to a series of meetings in which, Tracy claims, she was naked, sometimes sitting on his lap. On one occasion, she says, her friend Lisa was present while Maskell conducted an explicit anatomy lesson with Tracy as the model. (Baltimore magazine’s efforts to contact Lisa have been unsuccessful, though Tracy’s attorneys say Lisa corroborates their client’s account.)

Maskell also took Tracy to a gynecologist, Tracy asserts, and watched her examinations. When the doctor prescribed a thrice-weekly douche, Maskell offered the private bathroom adjoining his office for that purpose. She claims the priest watched her administer douches, as well as enemas.

She says she implored a different priest at Keough to take over her counseling, because Maskell “was a pervert.” “Please help me,” she remembers saying. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” he allegedly replied. The priest advised her to stay away from Maskell and shut the door in her face, she says.

Years later, after her mother died in early 1993, Tracy claims she had several new memories about Maskell, in which the priest had not merely observed her gynecological exams and treatments, but had allegedly helped administer them.

Within a week of receiving the lawyers’ anonymous ad in the fall of 1993, Tracy wrote to them, and got a letter in return explaining that the attorneys were seeking corroboration of alleged sexual abuse at Keough.

Tracy called Dantes associate Beverly Wallace late one afternoon and asked, “Who are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you tell me?” Wallace asked.

“Joseph Maskell,” Tracy said. “Bingo,” replied Wallace.

Tracy offered to be a witness, she says. Her next alleged memory came to her in early March 1994, as she was lying in bed at night. Remembering the second time that Maskell had taken her to the gynecologist’s office in 1970, she suddenly came to believe she had been raped by both men, she says. “I screamed that I had been raped and woke up my husband,” she recalls.

The next morning, Tracy called Beverly Wallace and asked for the name of a therapist.

New alleged memories continued to surface: Maskell and two police men raping her in the back seat of his car; Maskell hypnotizing her; Maskell spraying her and himself with a feminine hygiene product before raping her as Irish music played.

Tracy says she had talked to friends back in high school about Maskell, even about going to the police, but abandoned that plan because Maskell was a “police priest.”

“I had been warned sternly by Father Maskell that I would not be believed—that I was a druggie slut and no one would believe me over a priest,” she says. “He also slapped me about the face, and he showed me his gun.”

Not only did Tracy’s growing cache of allegedly recovered memories support those of Jennifer, but she also decided to become a plaintiff herself.

The Dantes legal team assembled their civil case while sharing information with the state’s attorney’s office for a criminal investigation. And by summer of 1994, they were ready to play hardball with the archdiocese. They gave the Church one month to come up with a serious monetary offer, or they would file the civil suit.

At St. Augustine, as the deadline approached, Maskell drew withdrawn. A tabloid TV show was rumored to be interested in the story. Despite his earlier declaration to parishioners, he asked the archdiocese if he could return to the Institute of Living, citing stress from the ongoing ordeal. In August 1994, with Maskell back at the Connecticut facility, the archdiocese waited out the attorneys.

The hammer came down in two seven-count complaints, asking for a total reward to Jennifer and Tracy of $40 million.

Word of the Maskell lawsuit quickly became a hot topic in the Catholic community, and it even prompted some tongue-clucking one afternoon among four middle-aged women at a parish crab feast. “Do you believe those girls trying to accuse Father Maskell of such outrageous behavior?” one of them said.

Overhearing this, 38-year old Eva Nelson Cruz felt rage, and she snapped back: “Don’t be surprised if someone right here at the table had a problem.”

The group fell silent. Later, during the car ride home. Cruz asked her mother, Babe, what she remembered about Maskell.

Babe Nelson brought up the time when Eva, at age 12, had collapsed at school. Taken to St. Agnes Hospital, she drifted in and out of a coma for two weeks, while doctors struggled to come up with a definite explanation.

One day, Nelson opened the door to Eva’s hospital room to find Maskell, bent close over her daughter, his arm resting on the edge of her bed. Nelson claims Maskell jumped up and said he was hearing the girl’s confession.

But Babe Nelson doubted her daughter was lucid enough to make a confession; the girl even seemed to be asleep. And there was something about Maskell’s posture and his surprise that made Nelson uncomfortable. She didn’t quite believe the priest, but she didn’t want to disbelieve him.

Jennifer testified in the trial that there were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, as had two of the nuns.

“I wonder why I didn’t say something earlier,” Nelson now said on the car ride home, crying quietly.

“Yeah,” her daughter said numbly as she drove. “It would have been helpful.”

Over the next few days, Eva Cruz became consumed with the sound of water slapping against the hull of a boat and the idea that something had happened between her and Maskell.

Even before age 12, Eva Nelson had been tormented by two thoughts whose origins mystified her. She was certain that God didn’t love her, and sometimes, at random moments, she would hear a little voice in her head, her own voice, imploring Jesus to have sex with her. Immediately after hearing this little voice, she says, she would briefly pass out.

The parish crab feast called up a series of fragmented impressions: Maskell’s car, the floor of a boat, water slapping. Physical pain. Being dropped off at the St. Clement rectory.

At the urging of a priest friend, she arranged to meet with archdiocesan officials in her therapist’s Columbia office in October 1994. Cruz brought her mother. Father Richard Woy and attorney Thomas Dame represented the archdiocese.

Cruz told the group that Maskell had taken her to a boat and that she was convinced the two had had intercourse, and also that he had penetrated her with an object she couldn’t picture.

Woy was quiet and a bit awkward as Dame took furious notes. They asked whether Cruz intended legal action.

Cruz told them that she wasn’t planning to sue, but she was interested in some empathy, which seemed to her in short supply. “You’ll never understand the hurt, the pain, the anxiety, the loss of self-esteem that’s happened for most of my life,” she shouted at Woy.

The church administrator appeared unsure how to best respond; nonetheless, he told her to contact him if she remembered anything else.

Efforts by Baltimore magazine to speak with Woy and the other church administrators have all been referred to diocesan spokesman Blaul, who generally refrains from comment in matters of ongoing litigation.

By May 1995, neither the city’s criminal investigation of sexual abuse—limited by the narrower laws of 1970—nor the country’s investigation into the murder of Sister Cesnik had brought any indictments against Maskell. But he faced the multi-million-dollar civil suit filed in city circuit court.

In his search for relevant information, Judge Hilary Caplan, a 12-year veteran jurist, had personally sorted through the load of papers that Maskell had ordered buried four years earlier in Holy Cross cemetery—ostensibly to protect parishioner privacy without violating a ban against outdoor burning. Most everything, however, was water logged beyond recognition.

This first week in May, Caplan was holding a preliminary hearing to consider whether so-called “recovered memories” constituted justifiable exception to the state’s three-year statute of limitations in civil suits. To focus on the narrow legal issue at hand, both plaintiffs’ allegations were to be accepted for now as truthful, and no corroborating witnesses were to be called. What was on trial now was memory itself.

None of the defendants—Maskell, the archdiocese, Tracy’s gynecologist, or the School Sisters of Notre Dame who operated Keough—were present except for a quarter of charcoal-suited attorneys.

At the plaintiffs’ table, Phil Dantes, sporting a mustache-in-progress, was accompanied by Maggio and Wallace.

They called Tracy to the stand, where she carefully recited her old, then new alleged memories of Maskell.

During cross-examination, the attorney for her high school gynecologist portrayed Tracy as an opportunist with a history of drug use. After some wrangling over the dates in which Tracy’s new alleged memories occurred to her, the lawyer argued that all but one of them were remembered after Tracy’s first meeting with attorneys.

“Were you told that you couldn’t sue for your abuse because it had happened such a long time ago?” the lawyer asked in a series of questions.

Tracy regarded the attorney coolly. “I don’t recall,” she said.

Jennifer testified in the afternoon, reciting a number of alleged memories of abuse by Maskell. There were other Keough teachers who’d abused her as well, Jennifer said, as had two of the nuns, including a high-ranking administrator of the school, who “was with Father Maskel, and they were using the vibrator, and she went down on me.”

During the 10-minute break that followed, Sun reporter Robert Erlandson buttonholed Dantes in the back of the courtroom. Could these new allegations possibly be true? the reported wondered.

“I just ask the questions,” Dantes replied, his back near the rear wall of the courtroom.

“You know whether she’s telling the truth,” Erlandson insisted, towering over Dantes. It had been Dantes, after all, who’d brought Jennifer to The Sun in the first place.

During Jennifer’s cross-examination, a defense lawyer pointed-out that Jennifer could not recall any teachers from Keough who had not abused her. He then referred to Jennifer’s memories of abuse outside of school, at a pub to which her uncle had taken her. “At the same time that you remember these eight or nine people, you began to have the recollection of Father Maskell.”

“Yes,” said Jennifer.

“Then there was a Brother [Ron*]. Was he on more than once occasion?”

“Yes, quite a few.”

“You also mentioned Brother [Fred*]? Was that on more than one occasion that [he] abused you?”

“Three that I remember,” she said. “One occasion he just spanked me.”

“OK. Now, there was Brother [David*] also?”

“It’s Brother [Gavin*]. . .”

The silver-haired lawyer went on to list six additional male abusers, including the city politician who Jennifer claimed had given a pretend political speech while she was required to perform oral sex on him.

Moving on to the next claim, the lawyer asked if the two nuns Jennifer had named “were merely present? Or did they participate in the abuse?”

“They participated.”

“Didn’t you testify that you found that memory absurd and almost impossible to accept?”

“Yes.”

“Lastly we have the Bishop. What was his involvement?”

Jennifer recalled visiting Father Maskell’s office only to find a bishop there instead. “And he gave me final absolution,” she said. “He spit in my hand. He told me that was my bond with the devil and before I was to wash my hand, I was to consider breaking all bonds with the path that I was on. And to go on a new road.” That was Jennifer’s last memory of her high school days at Archbishop Keough.

As she left the stand, Dantes gave her a supportive hug.

Later in the hearing, psychotherapists testified that Tracy and Jennifer were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from their alleged abuse by Maskell. But neither mental health professional who testified for the plaintiffs was an expert in memory.

In contrast, the defense had four expert witnesses, three in the field of memory and at least two national power hitters, including Dr. Paul McHugh, director of the Johns Hopkins department of psychiatry. McHugh is on the board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, a national support and advocacy group that helps parents whose children are purportedly misled in therapy into believing they were abused. In recent years, the mutability of “memory” and the related legal implications have ignited tremendous controversy among researchers and the public.

Chronicling one of the most infamous such cases, Lawrence Wright, in his gripping 1994 book Remembering Satan, goes so far as to argue that a Washington state policeman “remembered” abusing his daughters in a series of bizarre cult rituals only because overzealous interrogators convinced him of it.

Judge Caplan, after listening to the experts on both sides, did not believe there was sufficient scientific foundation to support the contention that Jennifer and Tracy had lost and then somehow recovered their memories of abuse. “It is a leap of faith that this court cannot make,” Caplan concluded.

At the pronouncement, courtroom 201 became very still. Beverly Wallace frowned openly.

Caplan continued that he was not judging the plaintiffs’ credibility—merely the empirical evidence of repressed memory. “The court is going to grant a motion to dismiss, welcome an appeal, and let chips fall where they may.” (As of this writing an appeal has been filed and will likely be heard in early 1996.)

Outside on the courthouse steps, Maskell’s lawyer and friend J. Michael Lehane said the ruling clearly “vindicated” his client.

Others remain unimpressed. One Finksburg woman, a friend of Jennifer’s who had abandoned Catholicism over the Maskell case, wrote bluntly to Cardinal Keeler: “Through a technicality in the law, this archdiocese has succeeded in avoiding any responsibility to the victims of Joseph Maskell…May God’s justice be visited upon you.”

During the year after her first meeting with Father Woy and diocesan attorney Dame, Eva Nelson Cruz says she avoided media accounts of the Maskell case because she didn’t want to contaminate her own memory. She had been having additional revelations about Maskell.

She recalled that he had encouraged the children of St. Clement to come to him with their “deepest problems,” and that she’d given him her first confession, around age 10. In the confessional, she’d revealed that she used to sit on her grandfather’s lap while he would masturbate her in front of neighborhood children. Maskell asked her to explain the abuse in detail, she says, and prescribed five Hail Marys and two acts of contrition. He also allegedly made this unorthodox pronouncement: “He told me that God did not love me anymore. But that he would make it so that God would love me again through him. But that we’d have to do it alone. No one else could be around. And that he would have to take me somewhere.”

She remembered meeting him in front of the small green rectory on First Avenue and driving out to his boat, a cabin cruiser. (A friend of Maskell’s says he used to lend his 22-foot cabin cruiser to the priest around the late 1960s and later sold it to him.)

Cruz believes there was a second man on the boat: stocky, with a round face and thinning hair. “I remember kicking somebody in the mouth. Hard.”

While recently walking along First Avenue in Landsdowne, she recalled visiting Maskell at St. Clement. In her mind’s eye, she saw him wearing the black clerical cape that he often favored during the winter, and she claims that he asked her to look deeply into his eyes and told her: “You won’t remember. You won’t remember. If you remember you’ll die.” She could picture him twirling fiercely—the cape flapping around his head.

Taking Father Woy up on his earlier invitation, Cruz called him at the archdiocese to say she had additional memories and wanted a second meeting in her therapist’s office. They scheduled one for June 2. Dame was present again, and this time so was Beverly Wallace, even though Cruz still had no intention of suing.

For one thing, her therapist had cautioned her against it. “A lawyer would have a field day arguing that she’s confusing issues of her grandfather with Father Maskell. And that’s possible,” concedes her therapist, Kenneth Ellis. However, Cruz’s memories about her grandfather were very accessible, Ellis says, and yet “there was always something else that was bothering her that she could never get to.”

He brings up some of her dreams from the 1980s: a soldier shoots a nun and then rapes her while Eva watches numbly; Eva skates through a cathedral and is taken aside and raped. “It’s not unreasonable to interpret Eva’s dreams as tapping into repressed memories of her experiences with Maskell,” says Ellis.

Since the previous group meeting in Ellis’s office, Cruz concluded that it had been on Maskell’s instruction that she would ask Jesus to have sex with her. It was part of Maskell’s prescription for re-establishing her in God’s grace, she says. Maskell had insisted that in order for her to be completely cleansed of the incestuous sins with her grandfather, it was necessary for her to disrobe, she says. Allegedly, the preist then opened a vial of holy water and sprinkled some on her vagina, reciting a blessing in Latin. “The final cleansing process was for him to penetrate me with his penis, because Jesus worked through him,” says Cruz. But first he penetrated her with some object—she felt sure, but she couldn’t remember what it was. She remembered pain and bleeding.

County Detective Sam Bowerman believes Cesnik’s murderer was a stranger.

As she tried to figure out what the object might have been, her breathing became heavy and panicked. She needed to pause for several minutes to regain composure. Then, it appeared to her: wooden, perhaps 12 inches long, an inch and a half thick, with a metal figure attached to it. “A crucifix,” she announced.

After the meeting, Cruz asked Wallace to linger an extra moment. “Are other people remembering things like this?” she asked the attorney.

With the exception of the cape, everything Cruz brought up had been reported to Wallace by someone else.

“Pedophilia” the sexual attraction to pre-pubescents, and “ephebophilia,” the attraction to young adolescents, are often regarded nowadays as biological compulsion—no more changeable than, say, adult heterosexuality. As sexual orientations, they are not curable, only containable, usually through a combination of drug and talk therapies as well as eternal vigilance. Certainly many cases of sexual abuse by priests are committed by certifiable pedophiles acting out an unchecked craving.

But other cases are better explained as the consequence of narcissistic personality disorder, according to some experts. “A wise man once said, ‘We’re born selfish and we grow out of it,’” quotes Dr. Frank Valcour, medical director of St. Luke Institute in Suitland, Maryland, one of the country’s leading facilities for priests with sexual problems. But narcissists don’t grow out of it and can become “a law unto themselves,” he says.

Often the object of abuse in their own childhoods, abusers with narcissistic personality disorder are extremely difficult cases, because they are unable to see their own actions from another’s point of view. The narcissist tends to develop a self-concept as entrenched as it is deluded. One priest who admitted to intercourse with a girl saw the act merely as a “reserved embrace,” because he did not ejaculate or display passion, according to Burkett and Bruni. Through reinterpretation the priest was able to maintain that his action was not “a sin.”

The priesthood can provide a dangerous domain for the narcissist, who might be overeager, for example, to embrace his appointed role as the sign of Christ’s presence in the world.

One especially perilous aspect of the vocation, according to Richard Sipe, is confession. Because sexual deeds outside of marital intercourse (and even “impure thoughts,” in some cases) are met by damnation unless confessed, the priest becomes the repository of a tremendous number of sexual secrets. Week in, week out, he is exposed to the lusts of his congregation. This puts men who often lack sexual self-knowledge or perspective, and who are barred from any sexual life, in the dangerous position of having to interact with other people’s sexuality.

The priest who is apt to be corrupted by this process might rationalize that in the service of cleansing other of their sins, he needs to examine that sin in great detail, Sipe postulates. Or even, for therapeutic or other reasons, he might need to recreate that sin—as though his priestly presence would somehow transform the act.

There is yet another path of thought down which a narcissistic or otherwise maladjusted priest can be led astray, according to Sipe. And it goes something like this;

To be male and celibate, as seen through the long lens of traditional Catholic perspective, is superior to being female and sexual, says Sipe. In fact, female sexuality is the scapegoat for a lot of earthly misery, from Adam’s fall on, acknowledges Catholic University’s Fr. Collins.

“When you blame one group for something,” asserts Sipe. “and you declare another group superior, and then thirdly you reserve the power to this superior group, it lines up the inferior group to be used at the service of the superior group.” The temptation for members of the elite, he continues, is to hold themselves blameless for breaking certain codes of behavior, and even for thinking themselves above such codes.

While Catholic University’s Collins is amply willing to accept this as a sociological truism, he is uncomfortable with the next extension of Sipe’s argument, calling it “inflammatory.”

Sipe raises the extreme analogy of S.S. officers who, after a busy day of killing homosexuals, purportedly indulged in homo-erotic behavior amongst themselves. “Sexual abuse is just a symptom of a system of declared superiority, power, the use of other people,” Sipe maintains. “I do believe that there is a connection between this and the roots of the Holocaust.”

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors, noted psychiatrist Robery Jay Lifton turned to the Holocaust as well in his quest to understand how evil can function in a presumably moral soul. Lifton coins the term “doubling” for the mechanism through which a person, especially one of elevated moral standing, is able to reconcile his misdeeds with his conscience by creating an additional perspective. This new perspective does not deny the act itself, but reinterprets its meaning as benign or even heroic. The Nazi doctors killed, but, by their lights, did not murder. Any daily atrocities were reinterpreted as part of the larger, supposedly higher, mission of cleansing and healing Europe. As the Nazi doctor in Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow puts it, “Because I am a healer, everything I do heals, somehow.”

Through this warped looking-glass, anything a priest might do is, by default, holy—a view that often has been adopted by parishioners. And in 1960s Baltimore, as elsewhere, many Catholic children were conditioned to accept this simplified distortion, sometimes at their own peril.

To the victims of sexually abusive priests, mere explanations such as “craving disorder” or “narcissism” or “doubling” surely provide thin solace indeed, and a wholly inadequate foundation upon which to repair one’s spirituality. Sadly, the long-term damage to religious faith remains the cruelest irony of abuse by priests. As one alleged survivor pointed out in a recent confrontation with the archdiocese: “God’s not happy about that.”

As the Maskell case approaches winter unresolved, the beleaguered priest remains largely invisible. Some rumors have placed him abroad. His sister Maureen says he’s simply “up north.”

Wherever he is, Maskell feels tremendously isolated, reports his longtime friend Rev. Robert G. Hawkins, until recently pastor of St. Rita’s in Dundalk. Hawkins took Maskell in for several weeks last year, and got scolded by the archdiocese for doing so. Says Hawkins of Maskell’s plight: “You’d be surprised how your phone stops ringing. People who you knew, all of a sudden they’re not talking to you. I guess people figure it’s like a death.” He pauses to catch his breath and dry his eyes. “I think he’s really a casualty of the times. He’s dead. He can’t function as a priest around here anymore.”

Nonetheless, Maskell is hoping that, after the civil appeal, the Archdiocese of Baltimore will reinstate his priestly faculties, so that he can once again shepherd a flock in some faraway place and reclaim his youthful ideal of being the one to say: This is right; that’s wrong.

Update 12/4/17: The source known as Jennifer in this story is Jean Hargadon Wehner, featured in the Netflix documentary The Keepers. Wehner contacted us and wanted to amend the story from her point of view: Before coming in to give an official statement, Wehner was encouraged by the diocesan representatives to get an attorney. Her first official statement of abuse was held at her attorney’s office, with two diocesan representatives. After giving graphic details of her alleged abuse, she was pressed for the names of witnesses or other victims. Jennifer emotionally told them they should take the responsibility off of her and do something.

A couple of months later, Wehner called a follow-up meeting at her attorney’s office to share names of alleged abusers she had been remembering. Wehner gave the two diocesan representatives names of a number of adults who had allegedly abused her sexually while she was a student at Keough—including a former Baltimore City politician.

Later, Wehner states her attorney was upset with her for sharing names of alleged abusers and not victims. She and her husband fired him. She requested a meeting with one of the diocesan representatives without lawyers present and was told no. Wehner says this action was her final personal interaction with the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Asterisks denote pseydonyms. Paul Mandelbaum is a former Baltimore senior writer and a contributor to The New York Times. This article is the result of more than 100 interviews conducted over a nine-month period. Accounts from legal plaintiffs are taken from their court appearances and public documents. Research assistance provided by Baltimore intern Wil Hylton.

Source

Ladies and Gentleman . . . The Nicest Kids in Town!

Jess Mayhugh — Mon, 01 Apr 1985 08:30:00 +0000

If I have one regret in life, it’s that I wasn’t a Buddy Deaner. Sure, as a teenager I was a guest on the show. I even won the twist contest with Mary Lou Raines (one of the queens of The Buddy Deane Show) at the Valley Country Club.

But I was never a Deaner. Not a real one. Not one of the Committee members, the ones chosen to be on the show every day—the Baltimore version of the Mouseketeers, “the nicest kids in town,” as they were billed. The guys who wore sport coats with belts in the back from Lee’s of Broadway (10 percent discount for Committee members), pegged pants, pointy-toe shoes with the great buckles on the side, and “drape” (greaser) haircuts that my parents would never allow. And the girl Deaners, God, “hair-hoppers” as we called them in Towson, the ones with the Etta Gowns, bouffant hairdos, and cha-cha heels. These were the first role models I knew. The first stars I could identify with. Arguably the first TV celebrities in Baltimore.

I’m still a fan—a Deaner groupie. I even named some of the characters in my films after them. So you can’t imagine how excited I was when I finally got a chance to interview these local legends twenty years later.

The Buddy Deane Show was a teenage dance party, on the air from 1957 to 1964. It was the top-rated local TV show in Baltimore and, for several years, the highest rated local TV program in the country. While the rest of the nation grew up on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, (which was not even shown here because Channel 13 already had Buddy Deane), Baltimoreans, true to form, had their own eccentric version. Every rock ‘n’ roll star of the day (except Elvis) came to town to lip-synch and plug their records on the show: Buddy Holly, Domino, the Supremes, the Marvelettes, Annette Funicello, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian, to name just a few.

You learned how to be a teenager from the show. Every day after school kids would run home, tune in, and dance with the bedpost or refrigerator door as they watched. If you couldn’t do the Buddy Dean jitterbug, (always identifiable by the girl’s ever-so-subtle dip of her head each time she was twirled around), you were a social outcast. And because a new dance was introduced practically every week, you had to watch every day to keep up. It was maddening: the Mashed Potatoes, the Stroll, the Pony, the Waddle, the Locomotion, the Bug, the Handjive, the New Continental, and, most important, the Madison, a complicated line dance that started here and later swept the country.

Although the show has been off the air for more than twenty years, a nearly fanatical cult of fans has managed to keep the memory alive. The producers of Diner wanted to include Buddy Deane footage in their film, but most of the shows were live and any tapes of this local period piece have been erased. Last spring, five hundred people quickly snapped up the $23 tickets to the third Buddy Deane Reunion, held at the Eastwind, in Essex, to raise money for the Baltimore Burn Center. Buddy himself, the high priest, returned for the event. And more important, so did the Committee, still entering by a special door, still doing the dances from the period with utmost precision. I was totally star-struck and had as much fun that night as I did at the Cannes Film Festival. All on Pulaski Highway.

In the beginning, there was Arlene. Arlene Kozak, Buddy’s assistant and den mother to the Committee. Now a receptionist living near Towson with her husband and two grown children, Arlene remains fiercely loyal, organizing the reunions and keeping notebooks filled with the updated addresses, married names, and phone numbers of “my kids.” She met Winston J. “Buddy”: Deane in the ’50s when she worked for a record wholesaler and he was the top-rated disc jockey on WITH—the only DJ in town who played rock ‘n’ roll for the kids. Joel Chaseman, also a DJ at WITH, became program manager of WJZ-TV when Westinghouse bought it in the mid-’50s. Chaseman had this idea for a dance party show, with Buddy as the disc jockey, and Buddy asked Arlene to go to work for him. On the air “before Dick Clark debuted,” the show “was a hit from the beginning,” says Arlene today.

The Committee, initially recruited from local teen centers, was to act as hosts and dance with the guests. To be selected you had to bring a “character reference” letter from your pastor, priest, or rabbi, qualify in a dance audition, and show in an interview (“the Spotlight”) that you had “personality.” At first the Committee had a revolving membership with no one serving longer than three months.

But something unforeseen happened: The home audience soon grew attached to some of these kids. So the rules were bent a little; the “big” ones, the ones with the fan mail, were allowed to stay. And the whole concept of the Committee changed. The star system was born.

If you were a Buddy Deane Committee member, you were on TV six days a week for as many as three hours a day—enough media exposure to make Marshall McLuhan’s head spin. The first big stars were Bobbi Bums and Freddy Oswinkle, according to Arlene, but “no matter how big anyone got, someone came along who was even bigger.” Joe Cash and Joan Teves became the show’s first royalty. Joanie, whose mother “wanted me to be a child star,” hit the show in early ’57 at age 13 (you had to be 14 to be eligible, but many lied about their ages to qualify), followed a few months later by Joe, 17. Like many couples, Joe and Joan met through the show and became “an item” for their fans. Many years later they married.

“I saw the show as a vehicle to make something of myself,” remembers Joe. “I was aggressive. I wanted to get into the record business”—and years later he did.

Joe started working for Buddy as “teen assistant” and, along with Arlene, oversaw the Committee and enforced the strict rules. You received demerits for almost anything: Chewing gum. Eating the refreshments (Ameche’s Powerhouses, the premiere teenage hangout’s forerunner of the Big Mac), which were for guests only. Or dancing with other Committee members when you were supposed to be dancing with the guests (a very unpopular rule allowed this only every fourth dance). And if you dared to dance the obscene Bodie Green (the Dirty Boogie), you were immediately a goner.

“I got a little power-crazed,” admits Joe. “I thought I was running the world, so they developed a Board, and the Committee began governing itself.” Being elected to the Board became the ultimate status symbol. This Committee’s committee, under the watchful eye of Arlene, chose new members, taught the dance steps, and enforced the demerit system, which could result in suspension or expulsion.

Another royal Deaner couple who met on the air and later married was Gene Snyder and Linda Warehime. They are still referred to, good naturedly by some, as ”the Ken and Barbie of the show.” Gene, a member of “the first Committee, and I underline first,” later became president of the Board. Linda reverently describes her Committee membership as “the best experience I ever had in my life.” They later became members of the “Permanent Committee,” the hall of fame that could come back to dance even after retiring. “That was our whole social life, being a Buddy Deaner,” says Gene. “It was a family: Buddy was the father, Arlene was the mother.”

Even today Gene and Linda are the quintessential Deaner couple, still socializing with many Committee members, very protective of the memory, and among the first to ”lead a dance” at the emotion-packed reunions. “Once a Deaner, always a Deaner,” as another so succinctly puts it.

The early “look” of the Committee was typically ’50s. And although few will now admit to having been drapes, the styles at first were DAs (slicked back into the shape of a duck’s tail), Detroits, and Waterfalls (flowing down the front) for the guys and ponytails and DAs for the girls, who wore full skirts with crinolins and three or four pairs of bobby socks. Joe remembers ”a sport coat I bought for $5 from somebody who got it when he got out of prison. I was able after a while to afford some clothes from Lee’s of Broadway” (whose selection of belted coats and pegged pants made it the Saks Fifth Avenue of Deaners).

One of the first ponytail princesses was “Peanuts” (Sharon Goldman, debuting at 14 in ’58, Forest Park, Chicken Hop), who went on the show because Deaners were “folk heroes.” She remembers Paul Anka singing “Put Your Head on My Shoulder” to her on camera as she did just that. She became so popular that she was written up in the nationwide Sixteen Magazine.

“On the show you were either a drape or a square,” explains Sharon. “I was a square. I guess Helen Crist was the first drapette: the DA, the ballet shoes, oogies [tulle scarves], eye shadow—eyeliner was big then—and pink lipstick.”

Helen Crist. The best little jitterbugger in Baltimore. The first and maybe the biggest Buddy Deane queen of all. Debuting at a mere 11 years of age, taking three buses every day to get to the show, wearing that wonderful white DA (created by her hairdresser father), and causing the first real sensation. She was one of the chosen few who went to New York to learn how to demonstrate the Madison, and was selected for the “exchange committee” that represented Baltimore’s best on American Bandstand. She was the one of the biggies who refused to be on the Board (“they had power; a liked because of it”)

Helen’s fans flocked to see her at the Buddy Deane Record Hops (Committee members had to make such personal appearances and sign autographs.) “I got these letters from the Naval Academy,” Helen remembers, “so I went there one day, and all the midshipmen were hanging out the windows. It was a real kick!” Her fame even brought an offer to join the circus.

“This man approached me, telegrammed me, showed up at the show. He wanted me to go to a summer training session to be a trapeze artist. I wanted to go, but my parents wouldn’t let me. I was really mad. I wanted to join the circus.”

Two other ponytail princesses who went on to the Buddy Dean hall of fame were Evanne Robinson, the committee member on the show the longest, and Kathy Schmink. Today they seem opposites. Over lunch at the Thunderball Lounge, in East Baltimore, Kathy remembers, “I could never get used to signing autographs. ‘Why?’ I’d wonder.” She wasn’t even a fan of the show. “It was a fluke. My mother wanted me to go, she took me down to the tryouts. At first I was so shy I hid behind the Coke machines.”

But Evanne “used to come right home and head for the TV. I had always studied dance, and I wanted to go on [the show]. I’m the biggest ham.” Although she denies being conscious of the camera, she admits, ”I did try to dance up front. I wasn’t going to go on and not be seen.” But even Evanne turned bashful on one show, when Buddy made a surprise announcement: “I was voted prettiest girl on this whole Army base. I was so embarrassed. Buddy called me up before the cameras, and I wasn’t dressed my best. The whole day on the show was devoted to me.”

Being a teenage star in Baltimore had its drawbacks. “It was difficult with your peers,” recalls Peanuts. “You weren’t one of them anymore.” Outsiders envied the fame, especially if they lost their steadies to Deaners, and many were put off by boys who loved to dance. ”Everybody wanted to kick a Buddy Deaner’s a–,” says Gene, recalling thugs waiting to jump Deaners outside the studio.

It was so painful. It was horrible/’ says Joe. ”I used to get death threats on the show. I’d get letters saying, ‘If you show up at this particular hop, you’re gonna get your face pushed in.'” And Evanne still shudders as she recalls, “Once I was in the cafeteria. One girl yelled ‘Buddy Deaner” and then threw her plate at me. My mother used to pick me up after school to make sure nobody hassled me.”

The adoring fans could also be a hassle. “I must have had ten different phone numbers,” says Helen, “and somehow it would get out. There were a lot of obscene phone calls.”

And the rumors, God, the rumors. “They all thought all the girls were pregnant by Buddy Deane,” remember several. “Once I was off the show for a while, and they said I had joined the nunnery,” says Helen, laughing. “It was even in the papers. It was hilarious.”

Some of the rumors were fanned on purpose. Because Buddy Deane‘s competition was soap operas, the budding teenage romances were sometimes played up for the camera. “One time I was going with this guy, and he was dancing with this guest I didn’t like,” says Evanne. “Buddy noticed my eyes staring and said, ‘Do the same eyes.’ And the camera got it.” Kathy went even further. “I was with this guy named Jeff. We faked a feud. I took off my steady ring and threw it down. We got more mail: ‘Oh, please don’t break up!’ Somebody even sent us a miniature pair of boxing gloves. Then we made up on camera.”

Romance was one thing; sex was another. Most Deaner girls wouldn’t even “tongue-kiss,” claims Arlene, remembering the ruckus caused by a Catholic priest when the Committee modeled strapless Etta gowns on TV. From then on, all bare shoulders were covered with a piece of net.

Other vices were likewise eschewed. If a guy had one beer, it was a big deal. Some do remember a handful of kids getting high on cough medicine. ” Yeah it was Cosenel,” says Joe. “They would drive me nuts when they’d come in the door, and I’d say ‘Man, you’re gone. You are out of here. You are history.'”

The Buddy Deane Show, a teenage dance party on the air from 1957 to 1964, was the top-rated local TV show in Baltimore.

Although many parents and WJZ insisted that Committee members had to keep up their grades to stay on the show, the reality could be quite different. With the show beginning at 2:30 in some years, cutting out of school early was common. “I’d hook and have to dance in the back so the teachers couldn’t see me,” says Helen. “I had to get up there on time. My heart would have broken in two if I couldn’t have gone on.” Finally, Helen quit Mergenthaler (Mervo) trade school, at the height of her fame. “The school tried to throw me out before. I couldn’t be bothered with education. I wanted to dance.”

“We had a saying: ‘The show either makes you or breaks you,'” says Kathy. “Some kids on the show went a little nuts, with stars in their eyes; they thought they were going to go to Hollywood and be moviestars.”

Yet Joe was a dropout when he went on the show and then, once famous, went back to finish. And according to Arlene, Buddy encouraged one popular Committee member (Buzzy Bennet) to teach himself to read so he could realize his dream of being a disc jockey. He eventually became one of the most respected programmers in the country and was even written up in Time magazine.

With the 1960s came a whole new set of stars, some with names that seemed like gimmicks, but weren’t: Concetta Comi, the popular sister team of Yetta and Gretta Kotik. An then there was teased hair, replacing the ’50s drape with a Buddy Deane look that so pervaded Baltimore culture (especially in East and South Baltimore) that its effect is still seen in certain neighborhoods of this great Hairdo Capital of the World.

Some of the old Committee kept up with the times and made the transition with ease. Kathy switched to a great beehive that resembled a trash can sitting on top of her head. (“I looked like I was taking off.”) And Helen, Linda, and Joanie all got out the rat-tail teasing combs.

Fran Nedeloff (debuting at 14 in ’61, Mervo, cha-cha) remembers the look: “Straight skirt to the knee, cardigan sweater buttoned up the back, cha-cha heels, lots of heavy black eyeliner, definitely Clearasil on the lips, white nail polish. We used to go to stand in front of Read’s Drugstore, and people would ask for our autograph.”

Perhaps the highest bouffants of all belonged to the Committee member who was my personal favorite: Pixie (who died several years later from a drug overdose). “You could throw her down on the ground, and her hair would crack,” recalls Gene. Pixie was barely five feet tall, but her hair sometimes added a good six to eight inches to her height.

But by far the most popular hairdo queen on Buddy Deane was a 14-year-old Pimlico Junior High School student named Mary Lou Raines. Mary Lou, the Annette Funicello of the show, was the talk of teenage Baltimore. Every week she had a different “do”—the Double Bubble, the Artichoke, the Airlift—each topped off by her special trademark, suggested by her mother, the bow. “We really sprayed it,” remembers Mary Lou today from her home in Pennsylvania. ”The more hair spray, the better. After you sprayed it, you’d get toilet paper and blot it. Sometimes you’d wrap your hair at night. If you leaned on one side, the next day you’d just pick it out” into shape.

Mary Lou was the last of the Buddy Deane superstars, true hair-hopper royalty, the ultimate Committee member. “We have a telegram,” Buddy would shout almost daily, “for Mary Lou to lead a dance,” and the cameraman seemed to love her. ”When that little red light came on, so did my smile,” she says, laughing. At her appearances at the record hops, “kids would actually scream when you’d get out of the car: ‘There’s Mary Lou! Oh, my God, it’s Evanne!’ Autograph books, cameras, this is what they lived for. They sent cakes on my birthday. They’d stand outside my home. They just wanted to know if you were real. I was honored, touched by it all.”

Mary Lou was aware that in some neighborhoods it was not cool to be a Buddy Deaner. “Oh sure, if you were Joe College [pre-preppie], you just didn’t do The Deane Show.” “Did you ever tum into a Joe College?” I ask innocently. “No!” she answers, with a conviction that gives me the chills.

But as more and more kids (even Deane fans) did tum Joe College, many of the Committee made the mistake of not keeping up with the times. Marie Fischer was the first “Joe” to become a Committee member—chosen simply because she was such a good dancer. As with the drapes and squares of the previous decade, she explains, “there were two classes of people then—Deaners and Joe College. The main thing was your hair was flat, the antithesis of Buddy Deane,” she says, chuckling. “I was a misfit. Every day I’d come to the studio in knee-highs, and I’d have to take them off. You had to wear nylons. Before long I started getting lots of fan mail: ‘I think you’re neat. I’m Joe, too.’ There was a change in the works.”

Part of that change was the racial integration movement. ”I had a lot of black friends at the time, so for me this was an awkward thing,” says Marie. “To this day, I’m reluctant to tell some of my black friends I was on Buddy Deane because they look at it as a terrible time.”

Integration ended The Buddy Deane Show. When the subject comes up today, most loyalists want to go off the record. But it went something like this: Buddy Deane was an exclusively white show. Once a month the show was all black; there was no black Committee. So the NAACP targeted the show for protests. Ironically, The Buddy Deane Show introduced black music and artists into the lives of white Baltimore teenagers, many of whom learned to dance from black friends and listened to black radio. Buddy offered to have three or even four days a week all black, but that wasn’t it. The protesters wanted the races to mix.

At frantic meetings of the Committee, many said, “My parents simply won’t let me come if it’s integrated,” and WJZ realized it just couldn’t be done. “It was the times,” most remember. “This town just wasn’t ready for that.” There were threats and bomb scares; integrationists smuggled whites into the all-black shows to dance cheek to cheek on camera with blacks, and that was it. The Buddy Deane Show was over. Buddy wanted it to end happily, but WJZ angered Deaners when it tried to blame the ratings.

On the last day of the show, January 4, 1964, all the most popular Committee members through the years came back for one last appearance. “I remember it well,” recalls Evanne. “Buddy said to me, ‘Well, here’s my little girl who’s been with me the longest.’ I hardly ever cried, but I just broke down on camera. I didn’t mean to, because I never would have messed up the makeup.”

In 1985 the Committee members are for the most part happy and healthy, living in Baltimore, and still recognized on the street. ”They kept their figures, look nice, and are very kind people,” says Marie in her lovely home on Falls Road before taking off for the University of Maryland, where she attends law school.

Most are happily married with kids and maintain the same images they had on the show. “We are kind of like Ozzie and Harriet,” says Gene Snyder as Linda nods in agreement. ”I’m a typical housewife,” says Peanuts. “Girl Scout leader, very active in my kid’s school.” Mary Lou is still a star. That she has an affluent life-style surprises no one on the Committee. In her home, near Allentown, Pennsylvania, she serves me a beautiful brunch, models her fur coats, and poses with her Mercedes. “When I get depressed, I don’t go to the psychiatrist, I go to the jeweler,” she says.

Oddly enough, few of the Deaners I’ve talked to went on to show biz. Joe Cash has Jonas Cash Promotions, in Columbia and Silver Spring.. (“my own promotional firm—we represent Warner Brothers, Columbia, Motown—85 percent you hear in this market”)—and Active Industry Research, in Columbia (a “research firm—I’m chairman of the board”). Evanne and her brother run the John Brock Benson Dance Studios, in Pasadena, and have a line of dancers who appear at clubs all over the state. But most have settled down to a very straight life.

And none are bitter. Although the Committee was a valuable promotional tool for WJZ at the time, and belonging was a full-time job, no one (except teen assistants) was paid a penny. Even doing commercials was expected. Mary Lou laughs at the memory of doing a pimple medicine spot on camera. And who could forget those great ads for the plastic furniture slipcovers that opened with the kids jumping up and down on the sofa and Royal Parker screaming, “Hey kids! Get off that furniture!”? Or the Bob-a Loop? Or Hartford Motor Coach Company? Or Snuggle Dolls? The Deaners didn’t mind.

As Marie puts it, “The rewards were so great emotionally that you didn’t have to ask for a monetary award.”

Many had difficulties dealing with the void when the show went off the air. Gene calls it “a big loss.” “It was living in a fantasy world,” says Helen. “and later on, growing up, it was a definite blow: reality.” “I still have a whole box of fan mail,” says Evanne. “If I’m ever depressed, sometimes I think, ‘Well this will make me feel better,’ and I go and dig in the box.”

Holding onto the memories more than anyone is Arlene Kozak, who is by far the most loved by all the Committee members. (They gave her a diamond watch at the last reunion.) ”Do you miss show biz?” I ask her. “Not show biz,” Arlene answers, hesitating, “but the record biz, the people. Yes, I miss it very much. I don’t think I’ll ever get over missing it, if you want to know the truth.”

Many of the Committee members’ spouses faced an even bigger adjustment. In “mixed marriages” (with non-Deaners), many of the outsiders resented their spouses’ pasts. “At 21, I married a professional football player,” Helen remembers, “and he made me burn all the fan mail. I had trunks of it. He was mad because I was as popular as he was. He just didn’t understand.”

But some have dealt with the problems in good humor. When Mary Lou’s husband gave me the long and complicated directions to their home on the phone, he ended with “And there you will find, yes, Mary Lou Raines.” He later confided that when he first started dating her, he had no idea of her early career. “Everywhere we went, people would say ‘There’s Mary Lou.’ I wondered if she had just been released from the penitentiary.”

The Buddy Deane.phenomenon is hardly dead. Each reunion (and a new one is in the works) ls bigger than the last. Deaners seem to come out of the woodwork, drawn by the memory of their stardom. Buddy returns on a pilgrimage from St. Charles, Arkansas, where he owns a hunting and fishing lodge and sometimes appears on TV, to spin the hits and announce multiplication dances, ladies’ choice, or even, after a few drinks, the Limbo. Some of the really dedicated Committee members get tears in their eyes. Was it really twenty years ago? Could it be?

Why not do The Deane Show on TV again? Just once. A special. The ultimate reunion.From all over the country, the Deaners could rise again, congregate at the bottom of Television Hill, and start Madison-ing their way (“You’re looking good. A big strong line!”) up the hill to the famous dance party set, the one that now houses People Are Talking. The ”big garage-type door” they remember would open, and they’d all pile in, past George and “Mom,” the Pinkerton guards who used to keep attendance, and crowd into Arlene’s office to comb their hair, confide their problems, and touch up their make-up. Buddy could take his seat beneath the famous Top 20 Board, and the tension would build. “Ten seconds to airtime. . . . three, two, one. Ladies and gentlemen, the nicest kids in town!”

Source

Long-Form – Baltimore Magazine

On The Wrong Track

Susan’s Choice

How The Deal Went Down

Negotiating under cover of secrecy, Baltimore and the Browns resembled nothing so much as two jilted lovers, eyes meeting across the Appalachians.

Arriving at Glendening’s office, Moag’s optimism shows when he bursts in wearing a broad smile. ”Governor,” he announces, “I think we’ve got a team.”

”You’re going to have to leave town by Monday,” Modell tells his wife of 26 years. ”You can’t be livlng here when I make this announcement.”

Pen in hand, Modell doesn’t hesi­tate. He already has steeled him­self to the task at hand.

Of Thee They Sing

Edward Norton Goes Electric

The notion of following one’s own muse is a very basic con­cept for Norton.

Norton’s friends from Wilde Lake High School in Columbia didn’t even know he was that into acting. He performed at Toby’s Dinner Theater, but at school, he was an under-the-radar kind of guy.

“To me, he’s far and away the best actor of his era.”

Screen Star

He was fond of saying he was “the most popular man in East Baltimore,” not the most popular half-man.

“He said, ‘I can put that boy on the stage’ and prom­ised my mother the rainbow and the pot of gold.”

Eck was known for bold colors—the same colors he used on the circus banners he painted.

Fish Tales

Sports

Fish Tales

At the World’s richest BillFishing Tournament, catching the biggest marlin may earn you millions. But not until you pass the polygraph.

The Case cost Heasley all of his $2.82 Million in winnings–more money than tiger woods ever took home for winning the masters golf tournament.

it's kind of like nascar on the ocean. "A battle of redneck pride," frost says. the biggest, best, and fastest boats here generally cost in the $2 million to $5 million range.

Can Hagerstown Kick Its Habit?

News & Community

Can H-Town Kick Its Habit?

The worst drug epidemic in U.S. history could be a fatal blow to Hagerstown (and other small towns like it).

seventy-five mileswest of Baltimore,

“Now it’s everywhere. It’s a phone call away. They’ll deliver. Quicker than ordering a pizza.”

“People began to say, ‘Oh, if it can happen to that family, it can happen to my family.’”

“It’s not the white picket fence. you can’t find work, can’t pay your bills. who wants to think about that?”

HAGERSTOWN MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLES A MICROCOSM OF BALTIMORE—ESSENTIALLY A SMALL TOWN WITH BIG-CITY PROBLEMS, CONTINUALLY IN SURVIVAL MODE.

Tomorrowland

News & Community

Tomorrowland

Port Covington will be like nothing Baltimore has ever seen. But at what cost?

Business & Development

Brand Ambassador

After a tumultuous year, Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank is newly resolved to see his company—and city—thrive.

A rendering of the future Under Armour Campus at Port Covington. RENDERING COURTESY OF Bohlin Cywinski Jackson.

Port Covington when it served as a massive railroad hub in South Baltimore. Photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine.

Port Covington: A Brief History

West Covington Park near the City Garage complex.

One of the new Sagamore venture Water Taxis.

Walking inside the entrance to city Garage and workers milling about at City Garage in West Port Covington.

The Foundery Makerspace building in West Port Covington.

Inside the Foundery Makerspace.

Local Baltimore company Bustin Boards, which produces custom skateboards at City Garage.

Plank Industries CEO Tom Geddes (L) and executive creative director Marcus Stephens (R).

Inside City Garage in West Port Covington.

Port Covington by the Numbers

A rendering of a future Port Covington streetscape. RENDERING COURTESY OF SAGAMORE DEVELOPMENT.

Outside Rye Street Tavern; and Inside Sagamore Spirit.

A rendered map of the entire Port Covington project. MAP COURTESY OF SAGAMORE DEVELOPMENT

Keisha Allen, president of the Westport Neighborhood Association.

A Wonderful Dream

After two decades of work, Baltimore artist Amy Sherald finds success and a new chance at life.

Waterwomen

A handful of heroines work the Chesapeake Bay.

Water Works

The Fault in His Stars

PERSONAL EFFECTS: ARTIFACTS FROM FORD’S THEATRE COLLECTION

PARTNERS IN CRIME

THE ESCAPE ROUTE

The Sea Also Rises

Science & Technology

The Sea Also Rises

The Eastern Shore is already facing the dire consequences of global warming. Baltimore, Annapolis, and the rest of the region are on deck.

Ron Cassie - January 2015

Science & Technology

The Sea Also Rises

The Eastern Shore is already facing the dire consequences of global warming. Baltimore, Annapolis, and the rest of the region are on deck.

Ron Cassie - January 2015

The Hooper's Island Road Causeway at High Tide. —Greg Kahn

The question really isn’t what will be lost anymore, but what we will decide to save.

The last house on Holland Island, which succumbed in 2010. —David Harp

Annapolis, facing a growing crisis, is already one of cities most susceptible to flooding in the U.S. —Amy McGovern

The Inner Harbor, Fells Point, and the greater Baltimore Harbor area will be challenged by ever-stronger storm surges. —Baltimore City

Dundalk, in Eastern Baltimore County, is regularly forced to close roads today after storms. —John Long

By our estimate, we should prepare for a sea level that’s going to come up to our knees by 2050 and then chest-high by the end of the century.

Pen in hand, Modell doesn’t hesitate. He already has steeled himself to the task at hand.

The notion of following one’s own muse is a very basic concept for Norton.

“He said, ‘I can put that boy on the stage’ and promised my mother the rainbow and the pot of gold.”

seventy-five miles
west of Baltimore,

“Now it’s everywhere. It’s a phone call away.
They’ll deliver. Quicker than ordering a pizza.”

After two decades of work, Baltimore artist
Amy Sherald finds success and a new chance at life.