Back when Jerry Brown was dating Linda Ronstadt, I was a freshman English major at Loyola College of Baltimore. I’d just signed off a container ship where I handled lines, chipped paint and read David Copperfield to figure out how stories were “made.” Ashore, I began tugging at the veil of literature for clues.

One of the first books I was assigned in the fall of ’76 was My Antonia by Willa Cather. I promptly ignored it. At 18, a pioneer story from the 19th century Nebraska prairie was not my idea of a good time.

Somehow – turning in papers soaked with what the novelist Tim O’Brien calls “spiced-up hogwash” – I passed. And soon landed a clerk’s job in the Baltimore Sun circulation department, my first rung toward the feast (succulent entrees side-by-side with lustrous but empty calories) of the written word.

I’ve always collected books. A new set of the World Book Encyclopedia in the 2nd grade (with the transparent, overlapping pages showing how the innards of a frog connect) is among my all-time favorite gifts.

For me, and many thousands like me, something to read (preferably not trash) must always be close at hand. Especially if you’re stuck somewhere.

Over the holidays about a decade ago, I picked up my daughter Amelia (whom I forced to read Travels With Charley when she was a kid) at the airport. When we got to my Toyota pick-up there was no room for her luggage, books fore to aft. Behind my back, Amelia filmed the moment without telling me, watching as I wrestled with everything from the alchemy of Roberto Bolano, church cookbooks and advice about children who wet the bed.

As I tossed titles around like sacks of flour to wedge in her bags, she asked, “Where did all of these books come from?”

“People moved and people died.”

That Christmas, she gave me a bright red hoodie emblazoned in black: “PEOPLE MOVED AND PEOPLE DIED.” It’s not something you can wear to midnight Mass.

 I now have a Corolla hatchback so stuffed with books that my four seater has become a two seater. And that brings me a half-century down the road from absconding with an English degree from a Jesuit university, as I stand in a Glen Burnie parking lot, about to get what’s left of my hair shorn to the scalp and needing something to read as I wait my turn.

Pop the hatch and there it is: My Antonia, a beat-up, broken spine edition from Dover Thrift, two bucks new in 1994!

 How did it wind up there? People moved, people died and those who were left behind called their friendly neighborhood writer freak to come and get it.

Not one in 10,000 writers at any rung on the ladder can pull a rabbit like this passage out of their typewriter.

              “As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up…there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running.”

I was hooked like a Chesapeake Bay rockfish. And dove deep into all things Cather (1873-1947), highlighted by a road trip in May to her childhood home in Red Cloud, Nebraska. I deliberately put off finishing Antonia until arriving.

[And in my haste bypassed nearby Hastings, mentioned in the book several times and renowned as the birthplace of Kool-Aid.]

I stayed in an apartment at the old Red Cloud opera house (now headquarters for the thriving Willa Cather Foundation) where, in 1890, Willa delivered her high school graduation speech.

Across the street, the post office (the smallest of American towns have one, even if it’s a double-wide trailer), a saloon with a good offering of pork and beef and a coin laundry where, on the community bulletin board, was a request for birthday cards to be sent to a recently rescued dog. I happily did so, but the pooch didn’t write back.

The population of Red Cloud hovers around 950, many of them employed in health care and agriculture. Men walk around with pliers on their belts to twist ranch wire the way cops carry guns.

It was close to 2,500 when nine-year-old Cather and her family arrived from Virginia and Nebraska had been a state for about a dozen years. There, she befriended a Bohemian girl named Annie Pavelka upon whom Antonia Shimerda was so closely modeled as to be a biography.

Cather loved Annie and I fell for Antonia and her spirit while enduring hardships from which Jim Burden (narrator and fictional stand-in for Willa) and his family were exempt. The Shimerdas lived in a dugout cave, they arrived without being able to “speak enough English to ask for advice…” – and despaired the suicide of Antonia’s delicate, beloved father whose heart ached to play the violin for his friends back in the old country.

Visiting the landmarks was nice, among them the train depot where the Cather family was delivered more than 140 years ago and the old school newspaper office of the Red Cloud Chief where Cather published her earliest stories.

It was not on the front steps of Willa’s childhood home on Cedar Street or even the 600-acre slice of remaining Nebraska prairie that carries her name where I became entranced. I was seduced on the page, way out in the universe of ink and paper where certain souls are immortal and many others are dead on the page.

All because I needed something to read while waiting for my name to be called at the barbershop.

Revisiting classics

Young people have been avoiding reading assignments since the days of Gutenberg. The ranks of those who revisit the texts decades later – finding pleasure and enlightenment — are much smaller.

In a casual canvas of friends and strangers, many of them avid readers, the usual parade of jilted works rolled in: Moby Dick, Don Quixote, Ullyses and its progenitor, The Odyssey.  Thomas Hardy came up often.

For Grace Bigelow, back when Nixon was president and she was Muffie Doyle at Roland Park Country School, it was Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles that proved unwelcome in the 9th grade. She found it “a slog.”

“I gave up several times,” said Bigelow, now living in Hamilton. “Only to become slightly obsessed with it in my early thirties.”

Maybe it’s like Brussels sprouts or lima beans. A 13-year-old’s sullen trudge across the dinner plate often becomes enticing in early middle age, perhaps because they’ve learned the hard way not to take food for granted.

As an adult, said Bigelow, “I went on a kick reading the classics I avoided in school, discovering all the things I’d missed because of youth and inexperience. Wow! Tess was so overwhelmingly sad and frustrating, so much juicer and tragic than I expected –  misogyny, class distinctions and religious zealotry. I had no clue!”

Here is perhaps the greatest tribute a writer can hope to earn, an honor that generally occurs without notice. It comes from Baltimore artist Ann Feild, perhaps best known for her front page cartoons of the Oriole bird in The Sun. 

 “My mother had no formal education beyond high school but was a lifelong lover of literature,” said Feild of her mom, the former Rebecca Jane Stromberg. “She gave me many books to stir my imagination … by Tennyson, Thomas Mann, Barbara Tuchman. And My Antonia.”

Cather was Rebecca’s favorite, standing a notch above other cherished authors like Edith Wharton. On the day she died, remembered Ann, her mother was “clear minded and in good spirits’ as they discussed Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop over tea and toasted raisin bread. It was late January 2000, a hint of snow was in the air.

That night, Mrs. Feild died in her sleep, a rosary on her nightstand and a certain book among her final thoughts.

“When my siblings and I visited the house the next day, I noticed that Cather’s novel Song of the Lark had been pulled from the living room bookshelf.”

Is that not a Nobel of sorts?

Rafael Alvarez has made pilgrimages to the graves and hometowns of many authors over the years, including Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, Sherwood Anderson and Marcel Proust. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

Long ago, when Baltimore was truly a Catholic city, Joseph Portera was an altar boy at Saint John the Baptist church near the Lexington Market, dutifully showing up for a Novena service every Wednesday and three times on Sunday when other boys were listening to the radio or playing ball.

The famiglia Portera lived in the 600 block of West Franklin Street and Joe walked to St. John’s for school and Mass.

“When they closed the [parish] school in 1951, I was the only altar boy left,” said Joe, a retired letter carrier and postal union official. “I served Mass until I was 18 years old.”

Now 84, he can still recite the Confiteor – the communal admission of sins “in thought, word and deed…by my most grievous fault” at the beginning of Mass – in Latin. 

Joe’s mother, Mary Cannatella Portera was the longtime “church lady” at the Paca Street sanctuary, which in 1987 became independent from the Archdiocese as the Nationwide Center of Saint Jude Devotions, commonly known as the “Saint Jude Shrine.” The Pallottine Fathers, who served the church from its 1888 founding, own the property.

“I did everything but say Mass and hear confessions,” said Mary, who died in 2016 at 101. Her funeral was held at the church where she cooked dinner for the priests, laundered altar linens, greeted busloads of visitors with doughnuts and coffee and ran a gift shop that bears her name.

And each of her four children – Joseph and three sisters – were somehow put to work there as conscripted volunteers. Can you imagine?

“If Mom said it, you did it,” said Joe who, in his job as a postal union official, directed annual holiday food drives. “One Sunday when they changed the clocks, I missed Mass. I never missed it again.”

The area around Paca and Saratoga – anchored by bakeries, the Church and the produce trade at the Market – was one of several heavily Sicilian Italian enclaves in Baltimore from the late 19th century to the mid-1950s.

It was the glory days of Catholicism in Baltimore, the first archdiocese in the United States; the city of Teddy Roosevelt’s good friend Cardinal James Gibbons; indelibly Catholic from Govans to Pigtown and back again.

When a house went up for sale, classified newspaper ads identified the area as “Saint Dominic’s,” “Saint Rose of Lima,” “Saint Charles Borremeo,” back in the Fifties and Sixties when more than 200,000 Catholics lived within the city.

Vince Fava grew up working at Trinacria, his family’s 124-year-old Italian grocery two blocks from St. Jude.

“When I was a kid working here the store would be packed on Wednesday with all those Italians coming in after the Saint Jude novena,” said Fava, 60. “A lot of them would leave right after Communion to get here before the crowd.”

As the Sixties faded into the Seventies, he said, “families moved out to Catonsville and Harford County and they kept moving out from there. People got older, started to get sick and die. It all started to change.”

Indeed – aside from the names of Italian families on the back of pews sponsored years ago – Trinacria is the only visible reminder that the old neighborhood was once home to hundreds of Italian-Americans and the faith they brought from the old country.

Cultural changes, exacerbated by an epidemic of sexual abuse by priests, resulted in a plunge in Mass attendance that shows no sign of abating. A wave of expected lawsuits against the Archdiocese by abuse victims motivated Archbishop William E. Lori last year to place the organization in bankruptcy. As of earlier this month, an estimated 700 people had filed for compensation.

Baltimore’s observant Catholic population has plummeted to about 5,000 people attending Mass regularly. The decline accompanies a dramatic drop in the overall number of city residents. In the wake of this, the Archdiocese is closing 38 of 61 churches, most of them in the city and a few of them just over the line in Baltimore County.

A list of the landmark churches being shuttered – St. Vincent de Paul, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great and Corpus Christi among them – is nothing less than a trail of tears. To give the Archdiocese the benefit of the doubt, there aren’t many left to shed them.

When most other kids were copying their school reports out of the World Book Encyclopedia, Leo Ryan was consulting the Catholic Encyclopedia, a gift from his uncle, a priest. In 1972, he graduated from the Shrine of the Little Flower, a longtime anchor of the Herring Run area of Northeast Baltimore.

Known as “The Shrine” since it opened in 1926, the parish at Belair Road and Brendan Avenue is also closing. Taken with the dozens of others it “feels like a death,” said Ryan, adding that as one moves into old age such deaths – Memorial Stadium, Haussner’s, old sweethearts and close relatives – “become a companion.”

A faithful Catholic who sent all of his children to parochial school, Ryan worships closer to his Towson home but now and again goes back to the old neighborhood for Mass.

“There’s maybe 15 people there,” he said of the large sanctuary. “How do you pay the electric bill? You can’t keep these places open as monuments.”

When Baltimore was indelibly Catholic, attorney and Beatles scholar Frank G. Lidinsky was growing up at 921 North Linwood Avenue near Eager Street. It wasn’t enough to be Catholic to attend St. Wenceslaus neighborhood school, he said, your bloodline had to go back to old Bohemia.

“At school we went to daily Mass and I remember my family said the rosary at the dining room table together about three times a week,” said Lidinsky. “We said it during the [1962] Cuban Missile Crisis, praying while listening to President Kennedy’s speech on the radio.”

Saint Wenceslaus, built in 1872, is where members of  Mother Teresa’s Sisters of Charity ministered to victims of AIDS in the early 1990s. Less than a mile from Johns Hopkins Hospital, it is also on the dark list.

Who wants to bet a crab cake that Hopkins will eventually take control of the property?

The Archdiocese has called this extreme pruning “Seek the City to Come,” a bit of PR woo-woo that makes no literal sense. 

In 1994, the late and much respected Sun religion reporter Frank P.L. Somerville covered an early round of closings by the Archdiocese.

Just a few churches were cut loose. One was Holy Redeemer Chapel on Oldham Street in Greektown where I used to walk my grandmother to Mass each week after the Second Vatican Council.

I’m still in the neighborhood and, driving by, I look at the spot where a statue of the Virgin Mary once stood, one of the first things dispatched by the Protestant congregation who acquired the property.

Thirty years ago, Somerville quoted the Rev. Sylvester Peterka, then the pastor of Immaculate Conception at Mosher Street and Druid Hill Avenue in West Baltimore, who argued that St. Ann’s Church at 22nd and Greenmount deserved a pardon.

Said Peterka, “Sections of the city … cry out for a church.”

The lament in those neighborhoods has bloomed anew as both St. Ann’s and Immaculate Conception are set to be closed.

The city to come?

What has the Archdiocese left us to seek? Long-dead grandparents? School-teacher nuns like Sister Mary Pamphilia, known to bring a parrot into her Highlandtown classroom? The volunteer Little League coach, usually the father of a classmate, who practiced patience when we swung three times and missed three times?

Ghosts.

What does Joe have in common with Vince Fava, Leo Ryan and Frank Lidinsky besides their abiding Catholicism? They all left the city a long time ago.

Rafael Alvarez graduated from Mt. St. Joseph High School in 1976 and Loyola College of Baltimore in 1980. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

In pursuit of early 1950s cool, my Uncle Victor defied his hard-ass Spanish father in ways that never occurred to me a generation later when I dueled with my Dad in the epoch of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Early in the Ford Administration, I wanted a pair of platform shoes to go with my cuffed, corduroy canary yellow overalls. I coveted the stompers my heroes wore: Bowie as Ziggy, Keith Moon and Frank Zappa as well as the long-haired freaks I ran with in high school.

The old man wasn’t having it so I settled for a pair with modest (quite tame by New York Dolls standards) soles and heels. The really funky stuff was made by brands like Famolare. Mine were Thom Mcan.

Victor Alvarez, however, was not a man to compromise. He was a Lucky Strikes and vodka tonic guy who knew that Sinatra’s “My Way” was written for him. At the same time, he learned the hard (and sometimes painful) way not to knock heads with his padre, a stubborn shipyard worker from Galicia, Spain.

Back in the day he was known as “Boopie,” a Highlandtown bad-ass with matinee idol looks for whom many a Catholic girl swooned. With wild night calling, Vic would leave his parents’ house on Macon Street in jeans, white t-shirt and everyday shoes. In hand, a bag of clothes for a quick-change where the party was gearing up.

“I had a pair of blue pants with buttons up the side and a yellow jacket. I’d buy all my outfits at Tru-Fit on Eastern Avenue without my mother and father knowing it,” he told me a dozen years ago.

My father’s younger brother and my godfather, he was describing zoot-suit fashion favored by young men known in Baltimore as “drapes,” the rocking flip-side of Joe College boys.

Drapes and squares face off in John Waters’ 1990 film “Cry Baby,” in which Johnny Depp is the cool guy in the duck’s-ass pompadour with a spit curl dangling on his forehead, just like Uncle Vic in his high school portrait.

When the movie came out, Waters was asked if the Highlandtown corner boys were the kings of the Drapes.

“No contest,” the director replied.

Pants were “pegged,” so tight from calf to ankle that some came with zippers. Shirts, almost like a blouse, were as vibrant as Easter eggs. Shoes had Cuban heels and if a drape turned up the collar on his corduroy sport coat, the pattern beneath might be leopard. Unless it was zebra print. 

“It was a guy thing,” said Uncle Vic. “And the girls loved it.”

The girl who especially loved Victor Alvarez was 16-year-old Catholic High School of Baltimore student Claire Wiegmann of South Clinton Street. He first saw her at the Arundel ice cream parlor hangout in the Highlandtown shopping district.

Claire’s parents were less than thrilled when their poodle-skirt wearing daughter brought “her guy” home to meet them. But once the love birds were married in 1957 at Sacred Heart of Jesus on Conkling Street there wasn’t much they could do about it. The union lasted for 64 years, ending with Claire’s death in 2022.

“God he was so sharp,” said his daughter Donna Alvarez Mislak. “No wonder my mother fell for him.”

From dramatic drape to Rat Pack suave

Victor Alvarez died in his sleep on April 17th at Donna’s home in Freeland. He was 88, passing away on the same date as his father 34 years earlier. 

A graduate of Mergenthaler, the vocational high school near Lake Montebello, he learned tool and die making which became his lifelong career.

One of the stories that was never told at Sunday spaghetti dinners at my grandparents’ house was how Uncle Vic wound up at Mervo. Apparently he started out at Patterson Park High School like his siblings (my late father and older sister Dolores) but for some forgotten infraction was asked to leave.

“Mervo was right up his alley, it was the best thing that could have happened to him,” said Donna. “After graduation he apprenticed at Middlestadt,” a machine company at Chesmont Avenue and Belair Road.

Donna, an only child and 1976 graduate of her mother’s alma mater, did everything with her parents while growing up on Lyndale Avenue near Herring Run Park. When she was a student at the Shrine of the Little Flower on Belair Road there was a “generation gap” dance competition in which the groovy generation would jump around to the Monkees and Herman’s Hermits before the jitterbuggers took the floor.

“My parents were great dancers but they came in second,” remembered Donna. “I always thought it was rigged.”

Father and daughter bought cheese and salami at a long-closed Pastores on Belair Road near Erdman and picked out the family Christmas tree each year on Sinclair Lane. A Charlie Brown tree? Forget about it.

“Dad would argue over the price for the biggest, fattest one for our little two-bedroom rowhouse,” said Donna.

Friday nights were for going back to the old neighborhood for ravioli at Illona’s down the street from his childhood home and pizza at Genova’s, a small corner restaurant at Eastern and Highland.

By the time I was old enough to play Beatles records with Donna at our grandparents’ house (she loved Paul, I was taken with John), Uncle Vic had evolved from a dramatic drape to Rat Pack suave.

He drove a midnight blue 1966 Pontiac Grand Prix, a marvelous vehicle some 18 feet long and wore dark suits with matching vests. As the years passed, he resembled his father – with whom he went squirrel and rabbit hunting as an adolescent – in both attitude and looks.

He tracked pheasant, deer, goose and duck, frequently saying he should have been born on a farm. “My mother wasn’t crazy about that stuff,” said Donna, recalling the night pheasant was served at dinner. “Sometimes she’d go with him and once got snowed in alone in a cabin while my father hunted during a blizzard.”

Like combing his hair, laying out his clothes and making sure his tie was fixed right, Claire did it for Vic.

With my father and my brother Danny, Vic went fishing and crabbing on the Choptank River (their small boat under constant repair), having moved to Cambridge in 1983 for a job with the Airpax Corporation after long years with King Seeley and Tate Engineering. He retired at age 63 in 1998.

A World Series foul ball

I have many memories of my favorite uncle, most of them – like his homemade ravioli on Easter Sunday after his mother died and the bouillabaisse he made for his father’s 70th birthday – shared with the rest of the family.

But one I’ll never forget was just me and him and 51,700 other baseball fans at Memorial Stadium. It was October 13, 1970, the third game of the World Series between the Orioles and the Big Red Machine of Cincinnati, forever known as the Brooks Robinson World Series for the third baseman’s MVP heroics.

I was 12 and it was the game in which a pitcher – the O’s Dave McNally – became the only hurler to hit a grand slam in a World Series. Since pitchers don’t bat anymore, it’s unlikely it will happen again.

My most vivid memory of that 9-3 Orioles victory was a foul ball that came to us in the upper deck behind home plate on the first base side.

Uncle Vic – cigarette in mouth – jumped up and for a split second had the ball in his bare hands. I have no doubt that if he had held on, the ball would have a place of honor in my house, the house where he grew up.

A Mass of Christian burial for Victor Alvarez will be held at 10:30 a.m. on Saturday, May 4 at Sacred Heart of Jesus at Conkling and Foster streets in the neighborhood where the coolest guy in East Baltimore had the time of his life.

Rafael Alvarez has been writing about generations of his Baltimore family since 1977. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

When the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in the Patapsco River after being hit by a container ship, those of us who grew up in waterfront families thought of our fathers. It would have been kitchen table conversation along the narrow streets of Crabtown for months, probably longer.

Like the bridge, my tugboat man father and the dads of the guys I grew up with are gone.

Robert and Gregory Lukowski, first cousins born in the mid-1950s, spent just about every weekend of their childhoods at the Seaman’s Cafe, their grandmother’s saloon and boarding house at 1718 Thames Street in Fells Point. The city’s tugboat fleets docked across the street on each side of the Recreation Pier.

“We were maybe nine or ten years old and we’d run across the street and jump on the tugs,” said Robert Lukowski. “We pretended we were driving the boats.”

Both grew up to do just that. The son of a tug captain, Gregory joined a clean-up crew out of high school and rose from a deckhand to Chesapeake Bay pilot. Robert, the brother of a tug captain, lived around the corner from his grandmother. He became a pilot in the Port of Los Angeles after apprenticing on neighborhood tugs. Both are now retired, their thoughts are never far from the water.

“My birthday is in June when school is out,” said Gregory, whose father Jerome was best friends with my old man, Manuel, a chief engineer. “My favorite gift was spending the whole day with my father, moving ships around the harbor.”

By the time the Lukowski boys came ashore for good, the Key Bridge – and the cranes and ships seen from the 1.6 mile span – was one of the few visible symbols that Baltimore remains a mighty port of call.

Perhaps not as robust as early-to-mid-20th century when Bethlehem Steel in Sparrows Point turned out a Liberty ship a day for the World War II effort, but still a bedrock of the Maryland economy. The Port of Baltimore leads the nation in the import and exports of cars and trucks and handles an estimated 50 million tons a year of wood, aluminum, gypsum, iron and steel, and other products.

It’s been decades – particularly in the wake of 9/11 – since Baltimore’s maritime industry was concentrated in neighborhoods, dramatized in Hitchcock’s 1964 movie Marnie. When Tippie Hedren walks out of her mother’s Federal Hill row house on Sanders Street, the scene is dominated by the bow of a cargo ship at the end of the block.

Generations of Baltimore stevedores simply walked from their front doors to ships in port and went to work. The view from Sanders Street has long looked out on a harbor of pleasure boats and amusements.

There are no boarding houses anymore for itinerant seamen like the fabled Norwegian coal shoveler “Mister Olie” in Fells Point, where the Lukowski tavern is now a self-described “local beach bar with laid back vibes.” And no tugboats across the street, all moved behind security fences some 40 years ago.

In the 1920s, the Thames Street pier where the tugs tied up was a spot where my Polish grandmother and her wanna-be flapper girlfriends went to dances. From the time it opened in 1914 to house cargo, boys played ball on the roof, which was covered with a derivative of cork. A ball slugged over the chain-link fence around the perimeter was a homerun.

“I played softball up there all the time,” said Robert. “When someone hit it out, the tugboat guys would fish the ball out of the water and throw it back to us.” 

The recreation pier is now a hotel with room rates averaging about $500 a night, about what my father made in a month in the engine room while putting my brother and myself through Catholic school.

One of the few things that still defines the 17th century village as a waterfront enclave is the water itself.

As a young priest, Cardinal James Gibbons (1834-1921) crossed from Fells Point to Locust Point in a rowboat to say Mass for Polish congregations on both sides of the channel. Water taxis now take people to bars and restaurants around the harbor rim.

A few years after Gibbons earned his red hat, the Lukowski family arrived from Poland and found work as stevedores, tug captains, union leaders and line handlers.

Robert’s late uncle Gilbert Lukowski was once president of International Longshoremen’s Association Local No. 1355. He gave me my first break in the newspaper business with a scoop for the City Paper during a 1977 ILA strike.

When I asked why he was willing to talk to me when the union had called a news blackout, he stared at me like I was an idiot and barked, “Who’s your father?”

That’s how it was in Baltimore – on the waterfront, at the racetrack and the assembly line – for more than a hundred years.

Robert, now 70, was the last family member to work the water. On the day of the Key Bridge crash he said, “The whole thing collapsed like a toy. I’m almost in tears.”

I think I spotted a tear in my father’s eye when I shipped out for the first time after high school in 1976. It was out of love, perhaps pride though he never wanted me to end up on the waterfront.

With dreams of becoming a writer and ignorant that kids like me usually went to college to practice the craft, I bugged Dad my senior year to get me a job on a ship. If he’d been a ringmaster I’d have lobbied him for a job with the circus. This, I believed, was how you made your bones in the world of letters.

I knew nothing of handling lines when I boarded the infamous S.S. Mayaguez to work as an Ordinary Seaman. Dad put a word in with an old sailing buddy at the seaferer’s union and I was hired. The officers called me “Junior.”

A World War II hospital ship converted to containers for runs between Baltimore, Puerto Rico and New Orleans, the Mayaguez had been seized the year before I signed on – just after the fall of Saigon – by the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia. It was recaptured by the U.S. Marines.

Imitating the other deckhands before we shoved off, I saw a tugboat headed toward the ship, which was odd because we were already made fast to tugs that would tow us toward the channel and the not-quite-yet-completed Key Bridge.

As it pulled abreast of us, I heard the shrill and familiar “toot” and looked up to see my father beaming in the wheelhouse of the Baker-Whiteley tug America, waving farewell with Gregory’s father “Romey” at the wheel.

It idled for a moment as I waved back – I can see it now, clear as the summer day when it happened – and backed off to give room for us to be underway.

Rafael Alvarez is the author of the Orlo & Leini tales set in old East Baltimore.  He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

I had but one face-to-face conversation with Peter Angelos, the longtime owner of the Baltimore Orioles who died March 23rd at age 94. It came about because of a photo of a woman hanging by her neck from a tree.

It was the late summer/early fall 1995 and in between filing stories for the Sunpapers on oddballs, bad guys and bluesmen, I sponsored Bosnian refugees in my Greektown neighborhood. A few of them lived with me on Macon Street and I found cheap shelter nearby for a family of five and a few others.

The idea came to me through a trinity of sorts: genocide in Bosnia, the death of a good friend’s father and a marked decline in my neighborhood’s quality of life, this before the gentrification of Canton began edging into Highlandtown and Greektown.

My compañero’s father was buried with expensive jewelry, the closing of the coffin overseen by trusted friends to make sure the treasure went with him. It was the first time I became aware of the practice. It made me wonder what good could have been done if the gold and gems had been converted to cash and given away.

I asked myself what did I have that could be put to good use?

I had a wide network of friends and a few extra rooms, space enough for people who’d appreciate shelter in a worse-for-wear neighborhood that had launched my family in the New World in the 1920s.

And an image that persisted: 31-year-old Ferida Osmanovic, mother of two, hanging from a tree after her husband was slaughtered by Serb troops along with some 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica. The area, nominally secured by the United Nations, was said to be safe for refugees fleeing the war.

A few calls put me in touch with a liaison for the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. Less than a month later a young man named Eldin Cengic who’d seen his father murdered by Serbs, walked in my front door. The first thing he asked was whether I had any Nutella, which he’d been craving since the war started. He settled for peanut butter until we could get to the store.

After Eldin came another young man who’d seen combat against the Serbs, and then a family of five, the Sadjaks. Though a three-bedroom rowhouse was secured for them on Ponca Street, they slept together in one room.

I got help with clothing from Jewish synagogues in Northwest Baltimore (I was covering the city’s Orthodox community at the time) and regulars at a bar around the corner pitched in for groceries. The good-timers later insisted on buying the Sadjaks a Christmas tree. Decidedly unobservant Muslims, the family was thrilled and put the tree near the front window.

I was running out of room. Drugs were being sold on the corner, where a few of the pissant dealers were relatives. When a few houses on my block – where my grandparents would sit outside after dinner on summer evenings and talk with their neighbors – went vacant, I feared that plywood would soon cover the windows and front doors. Another once “well kept” block in the Land of Pleasant Living was fading.

The friends who found desks and bicycles for the Sadjak kids couldn’t help with this part of the puzzle. So I called Peter Angelos, the big idea man who once tended bar at his father’s tavern at the corner of Eastern Avenue and Oldham Street.

Litigating asbestos and tobacco cases for families of the dead and dying – most of them from neighborhoods like mine – had brought Angelos tremendous wealth, enough to become principal owner of the Birds in 1993 for $193 million.

Before I tell you how he responded, let me share what I’ve learned about him since his death.

“I’d see him criticized for the [failures of the] team and thought, ‘If they only knew how generous he is behind the scenes,” said Perry Sfikas, one of three Greek-Americans elected to the Baltimore City Council: Angelos [1959-1963], Anthony Ambridge [1983-1999] and Sfikas from 1991 to 1993.

“It wasn’t just for the Greek community. I’d go to his office with a request from a constituent who couldn’t pay their medical bills and he’d call out to his secretary, ‘Mary Jo! Get me the checkbook!'”

This, said Sfikas and others – told by Angelos not to mention his good works – happened over and over again.

“Everybody went to him for help,” said Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott D. Shellenberger, who worked for Angelos at the beginning of his career. “I’d be walking by his office and I’d see his secretary shaking her head.

“I’d ask what was going on and she’d say some lady wrote him a letter saying she needed money and he’s writing her a check.”

More times than not, said Shellenberger, Angelos did not know the person in need.

I arrived at his office at 100 North Charles Street with a similar story. The cancer of blight was nibbling away at the neighborhood where my father had grown up delivering newspapers, perhaps to the Angelos family before their house was razed to make way for the Harbor Tunnel.

 I made my pitch, thinking he might help us acquire a house or two for families soon due to arrive.

“This is what we do,” he said, moving his index fingers around the desk as though marking boundaries. “We buy up five or six blocks, it’ll cost maybe a million dollars and you can move in a couple dozen families.”

It felt as though someone had dumped far too much mashed potatoes on my dinner plate.

My kids were still in grade school, I had a full-time job on the paper’s city desk and while it was exciting to be doing good works like my heroes Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham at the Viva House Catholic Worker on Mount Street, I didn’t have the time or energy for such an undertaking.

And while my editors knew I was working with folks in need from the other side of the world, I surely didn’t tell them I was going to a guy we covered every day for help.

I stood up, extended my hand and thanked Angelos, telling him I’d think about it.

Before I was back on Charles Street I knew his proposal was preposterous; perhaps not for him, but certainly for me. I continued to help my new friends but dropped the idea of going into the non-profit housing game.

And the Bosnians? 

For more than a year we had good times, hosting each other at family dinners, going to ballgames and working through the manifold problems that confront newcomers to America, particularly when there are few others who speak their language.

If Angelos ever gave a second thought to housing immigrants in his old neighborhood, he never told me about it.  He concentrated on downtown, buying landmark restaurants like Maison Marconi, still shuttered after closing in 2004.

Downtown has not turned the corner – it’s actually a disgrace – but Greektown did without anyone’s philanthropy, beyond anything I could have imagined 30 years ago.

The momentum of Canton’s real estate boom just to the west was strong enough for developers to turn an old trucking company at the end of my street into $350,000 townhouses with garages. Combined with steady Hispanic immigration, the neighborhood has stabilized. I hear kids playing on the sidewalk again, chasing each other and laughing, speaking in a language my grandfather would understand.

One by one, all of my Balkan friends – including one woman who complained so much that Eldin told me she was a pain-in-the-ass before the war – moved away. Just like previous generations of East Baltimore immigrants seeking a better life beyond the city.

Rafael Alvarez has covered the City of Baltimore since 1977. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

Now that both of my parents have passed on – my house paid for and my children long on their own and doing well – I could live anywhere in the world.

It’s something I have fantasized about a lot, especially in the last few years of caring for my elderly mother. The euphoric, wide-open freedom of anywhere!

From my grandfather’s village in Galicia, Spain to the beaches of Goa or the chance to sip Turkish coffee with Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, it’s all become possible as middle-age seeps into old.

But I choose to live in Baltimore – the City proper, the town where I was born when Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” topped the charts.

Am I a fool to stay?

I live in the house in Greektown where my father grew up before the 2nd World War; where his Italian aunts lived up and down the alley and the scent of garlic and simmering tomatoes perfumed the air. Dad’s best friends were his first cousins – friendships that lasted a lifetime – and if a relative was just over the city line in Dundalk it was considered a hike.

On Mom’s Polish side, we go back four generations to Old Canton and the 2700 block of Dillon Street where my cannery worker grandmother and her sisters lived next door and across the street from one another.

Most of my father’s relatives are in Harford County, now something of a second Highlandtown. Several of my mother’s nieces still consider themselves Baltimoreans but live in Pennsylvania. They have their reasons. Except for a second cousin whom I barely know, I’m the only one who remains.

When I speak of the privilege of living anywhere, I mean geography, not status. If I up and moved to Vietnam or Vicksburg I’d find a room with running water and internet within walking distance of a coffee shop and the post office.

My wife lives in a nice condo in Washington. I take the MARC train to be with her.

By the metrics of the fear-driven, postwar American dream, the decision of my friends and relatives to avoid Baltimore, much less live here, makes sense. It’s not easy to defend Baltimore and a few years ago I stopped getting into arguments about it. Like just about every big decision I’ve made – to get married at 22, become a writer, quit the Sunpapers at 42 to work on ships  – the choice is emotional.

When I lived in Los Angeles for five years writing for network TV, the money was good enough to get three kids through college and, if I’d wanted, buy a house. When my NBC contract wasn’t renewed after the ’07-’08 writers’ strike, I came back to the Greektown rowhouse I’ve known all my life and visited my parents for Sunday supper.

I’ve written about different aspects of this story often. Why revisit it now?

In late January – in a post tied to the 214th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe – a guy who writes for one of the same publications that I do published an essay about Baltimore headlined Grimy Margins and Losing Sides.

The author lives here and knows what he’s talking about. His piece wasn’t untrue; take a ride through the many marginalized neighborhoods in town and you’ll know it wasn’t. Just unkind. As the rabbis in Northwest Baltimore’s community of Orthodox Jews say, “Beware lashon hara.”

One of my favorite Baltimore stories comes from the filming of John Waters’ 1988 classic Hairspray in which the inimitable Pia Zadora has a bit part as a “beatnik chick.” While filming on location in a beleaguered neighborhood, Zadora complimented Waters on the realistic set.

To which the fabled director (who never left Crabtown for Tinseltown) replied, “Pia, this isn’t a set. People live here.”

Therein my response to the author’s notion that Baltimore – which he finds “magical” as though it were a rough neighborhood in Oz – is  “a slippery and somewhat seedy place, a city whose limelight tends to rest on history’s grimy margins and losing sides.” 

Aside from Poe and other ghosts of Baltimore past, his observations did not include people living here now. And that is where the true magic lies in the place Randy Newman described in song as “a hard town by the sea…”

All Baltimoreans – even some of the ones who have long moved away – are thin-skinned when it comes to home.

Newman released “Oh, Baltimore” in 1977. Then Mayor William Donald Schaefer (1921-2011) was not shy in saying he thought that it stunk. Said Newman, “I think people in Baltimore who objected to that song had a real good case because I didn’t know anything about it.”

Here are some of the people who make living in Baltimore — where I can walk from my front door to Greek and Italian and Latino restaurants that others drive miles to get to — more than worthwhile.  

Some are friends and, as of yesterday, still walking the streets looking for lucky, heads-up pennies like the ones left on Poe’s grave at Fayette and Greene.

Those same rabbis, whom I shadowed for several years as a Sun reporter, believe that the person who saves a single life has saved the entire world. In that spirit, for every one of the following good guys there are many hundreds more in the grimy margins of Crabtown, USA.

• Bruce White, one-time bad-ass pharmacy-robbing junkie who for 15 years has run one of the city’s more successful drug treatment centers.
• Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham, who opened Viva House Catholic Worker around the corner from H.L. Mencken’s home in 1968, the same year that Tio Pepe opened on Franklin Street. Now semi-retired from their lay ministry, the couple has provided corporal acts of mercy to hundreds of thousands.
• Jackie Oldham, editor, poet and folk singer. “I live in Lauraville and grew up all over the city but my first home was the [one time] St. Vincent’s orphanage on Division Street. I love Baltimore because of its ability to transcend the forces that try to divide us.”
• D. Watkins, essayist and memoirist D. Watkins who authored We Speak For Ourselves: How Woke Culture Prohibits Progress. As part of the city’s 61% African-American majority, Watkins writes, “I’m Black. Listen to me, respect me, and stop calling me BIPOC.”
• Rev. William J. Watters, S.J., who founded a trio of Jesuit schools for kids who grew up much like Watkins and, just short of 90-years-old, still celebrates Mass downtown.
• Jim Burger, photographer and bon vivant who landed here from Pittsburgh some 45 years ago to attend MICA. “Baltimore took me in without question,” he said. “It stole my heart.” His wife “Sweet Sue” cooks several turkey with all-the-trimmings each Christmas and “Burger” – without fanfare –delivers them to families who are grateful that guys like him still exist.
• The Oblate Sisters of Providence, the first order of African-American religious women in the United States. At Saint Frances Academy on East Chase Street, the Oblates give deserving kids an education that better-off kids in other neighborhoods might take for granted. They do so in the midtown shadow of the Maryland Penitentiary while championing the cause of their founder – Mother Mary Lange (1789-1882) – for sainthood.
• Greg Schwallenberg, the always affable baseball scholar and stadium vendor who once let me hold one of Babe Ruth’s bats. Greg is a glass half-full (of beer) mensch, the kind of guy everyone thinks of as their best friend. Schwallenberg runs with the Back on My Feet project of the Helping Up Mission in which the homeless get up early each morning to gain strength by traversing the same streets that led to their ruin.

I’ll end with a glimpse of the ways in which Baltimore breaks with public perception that overshadows reality, even when crime (serious and undeniable) is down as it’s been for the past year-and-a-half.

It comes from Danny C. Smith, a court liaison at Bruce White’s One Promise treatment center.

Smith lives in the historic Reservoir Hill neighborhood adjacent to Druid Hill Park where the tennis courts were desegregated in 1948 by young Black and Jewish players. His story occurred during widespread mayhem that followed the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody.

“They closed the [Circuit Court] because of the riots and I started driving home, not knowing what I might find,” said Smith, 68. “When I turned onto my street I saw this gang of guys in the middle of my block. I slowed down, thinking, ‘Okay, how you gonna handle this?’

“When I’m maybe 200 feet from my front door, I saw they were playing touch football in the street.” Bottom line: I like cities and this one happens to be mine.

Rafael Alvarez is at work on a book about the Rosary. If you have a good rosary story – or a string of beads to donate – contact Alvarez via orlo.leini@gmail.com

My mother carried a gun that could drop you in the blink of an eye. It was the index finger of her right hand and she had dead aim. When I didn’t want to hear whatever redundancies she happened to be preaching, I’d threaten to bite it off.

To which she’d screw up her puss and say, “Just try it…”

I never did, but once – quite young – I tied a piece of ribbon around her pointy nose while she was sleeping. She was quick to remind those who made mischief at her expense (mostly me) not only that they weren’t funny but they didn’t even know what funny was.

She could be hilarious – an East Baltimore Mrs. Malaprop – and rarely on purpose. A favorite was her twist on the British adage of stoic endurance. When one of us was going through a rough time she’d say, “Keep an upper lip!”

In the three years or so we took care of her after a year of taking care of Dad, we did. Mom passed a week after her 89th birthday on December 22. Now that she’s gone, I’m thinking about all the things her hands accomplished.

Lots of kids got a piece of fruit in their grade school lunch. I was the only one with an orange already peeled. Others got Tastykake. My brothers Danny and Victor and I unwrapped slices of whatever goodie she’d baked that week.  Mom cooked so well — everything from miniature chocolate eclairs to her take on pastitsio – that readers of her January 10 obituary in the Baltimore Sun said the story made them hungry.

She helped me collect pennies to benefit Poe Baltimore; and, alongside my father at the kitchen table (where my brothers and I were often summoned for “round table discussions” about crucial matters like how long we could grow our hair) she stitched the binding of chapbooks featuring my early short stories.

With energy to burn – “I have my highs, I got my lows,” she explained – Mom gardened with gusto in the backyard of our Linthicum home. The modest suburban lawn was a hundred times bigger than the cracked spit of concrete behind the four-room rowhouse where she grew up at 2729 Dillon Street in old Canton.

The brick rancher down the street from St. Philip Neri Church was my parents’ dream house, the hard-earned reward for Manny and Glo, two working class kids who fell in love at Patterson Park High School in the early 1950s.

For neary 60 years they kept it spic-and-span and in fine working order, hosting hundreds of birthday, anniversary and holiday parties. Christmas Eve – with Mom’s pierogi, Galician empanada and paella – was the event of the season.

You want your candles on a pineapple upside down cake? You got it.

After my ’76 senior prom at Mt. St. Joe, on the far side of midnight, my folks served breakfast for me, my date Jeannie Goebert from down the street and a couple of classmates. Two of my teachers attended, got bombed and didn’t leave until the sun was coming up.

“Stay as long as you want,” Mom often told guests deep in conversation and many rounds of “refreshments” with Dad. “I’m going to bed.”

Minus the teachers, extravagant meals were common, featuring chopped clams with onion, garlic and breadcrumbs baked in their shells; Rosemary Chicken; Athenian string beans a la Ikaros and, after dinner, black coffee with Anis del Mono. This was when Dad was home from the tugboat engine rooms in Fells Point. When he was on Thames Street we had gourmet leftovers.

Mom grew up eating none of this, fondly remembering the pinky-sized breakfast links her hard-drinking father fried in onions and brown gravy (skillet grease and flour) with mashed potatoes for dinner. Raised Polish Catholic in the waterfront parish of St. Casimir, “Glo’s” high school yearbook said she aspired to be a housewife. With just a bit of education, she could have run a small company. But only if they did things her way.

Mom’s true religion was house cleaning. Once I asked why she vacuumed behind the sofa, allowing that “nobody’s going to know.”

She thundered, “I’ll know.”

In college, when I’d come home on the other side of 2 a.m. after a night of riding around Little Italy and Fells Point with my friends, I’d find her at the kitchen table in her nightgown with her checkbook, bank statements and what my father called her “Polish pencil,” a portable abacus filled with hot lead.

Bleary-eyed, I’d stand at the threshold and ask what she was doing.

“Looking for a couple of nickels they owe me,” she’d say. “They ain’t gonna cheat Glo.”

Her bravado (Mom had the heart of a lion though she was often at the mercy of her fears) extended to any product she didn’t think delivered on its promise. If slighted, she’d write the bastards a letter.

Once, she suffered two bad cans of Hanover baked beans – which my dad used for his hot dogs and beans party staple – in a row. Get out the stamps and envelope! Not only did she receive a coupon for more beans but they sent her an apron emblazoned with the company logo.

As a 1980s and ’90s executive secretary at Baltimore-Washington International Airport in the operations division, Mom (without asking permission, she’d have made a great reporter) consolidated the sick leave of her colleagues to give to co-workers fighting cancer at home.

When someone protested that it wasn’t kosher, she explained the situation in a letter to then-Gov. William Donald Schaefer. Like Willie Don, Glo was from the “do it now” school. The governor gave her the green light and she never looked back.

Her “I’m gonna do what I’m gonna do whether you like it or not” attitude can be summed up in two words that my good friend Kerry Hawk Lessard will never forget. 

“Along with my grandmother you’d be hard-pressed to find a more authentic Baltimore hon than Glo,” said Lessard, who grew up near Saint Agnes Hospital where Mom got her hearing aids, forgetting that if she didn’t put them in it was pointless to yak-yak-yak to whomever was around.

“Like my grandmother Evelyn or my Aunt Hazel, Glo dispensed hard truths with a sharp eyebrow and an even sharper tongue,” said Lessard, “but you could never doubt their genuine affection for you.”

On one visit to the Alvarez home, Kerry was boo-hooing to Mom about a recent breakup.  She recalled Glo “looking me dead in the eye, raising a finger and saying, ‘You know what I’d tell him? If you don’t like it you can smell me!'”

It immediately became one of Kerry’s go-to kiss-offs. As for malaprops, Kerry always brought her daughter Emma when she visited Mom and Dad. One time after they left, Glo was trying to remember the girl’s name, saying, “You know, the cute kid with the blonde hair. What’s her name? Edna?”

Now a grown woman, in certain circles she will remain, forever, Edna.

Nope, nobody – be it a multi-national bank, a grocery store or the big shots at BWI – was gonna cheat Glo. In the end, however, she cheated herself.

In the 1940s, not long out of grade school, it was fashionable for young women to smoke cigarettes and Mom indulged the habit with the ardor of an addict. When she scrubbed the floor, there was an ashtray next to the bucket.

In January of 1980 – 43 years ago this month – I was a 21-year-old clerk in The Sun sports department assigned to format each day’s mid-Atlantic horse racing charts. The job was easy and I used my free time to freelance stories. One was about the Jews for Jesus movement, then getting a lot of attention via Bob Dylan’s supposed conversion to Christianity.

The day I learned that Mom had a cancerous lung tumor I was interviewing a woman named Betty Grodnitzky, a Jewish cantor who had taken Christ – Yeshua – as her savior. I haven’t spoken to her in decades and don’t know if she still identifies as Christian. Back then, she was on fire for the Lord.

When I told Grodnitzky what was going on with Mom she stopped the interview and asked if I wanted to pray. Why not? In those days lung cancer was a death sentence.

Standing in the middle of the old fifth-floor newsroom on Calvert Street when The Sun was truly a great newspaper, I listened as Grodnitzky prayed on the other end of the line, all around me reporters, editors and copy boys rushing to get the next day’s paper together.

One thing that Grodnitsky specifically prayed for was the flesh around Mom’s tumor to be “clean and healthy.” When the surgery was over, doctors told us that, while malignant,the tumor was “encapsulated.” Once removed, there was no need for chemo or radiation.

What did Mom do with this good news? She began smoking again. Manny, nearly all of his life the bedrock that Mom never had with her own father, threatened to leave if she didn’t see a shrink. Such behavior, he reasoned, had to be insane.

She went and she quit smoking for good. Dad stayed and we had Glo around for another 40 years to tell us what to do.

Rafael Alvarez will be reading at Snug Books, 4717 Harford Road on Saturday, February 17. He can be reached viaorlo.leini@gmail.com

Ever wonder what a homeless person looked like when they were in the third grade?

In this I am in league with Jacob Marley, a ghostly penitent of Charles Dickens’ imagination who never waited for the light to change at the corner of Russell and Conway streets amidst the median strip panhandlers. He didn’t have to because in this world, from London to Lansdowne, some things never change.

Awash in remorse – one teardrop too late to save himself – Marley thundered to Ebenezer Scrooge, “Mankind was my business!”

Mankind is in abundance – in tents, under cardboard and splayed out on lawn chairs – around Blessed Sacrament parish on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The church where Bing Crosby was married for the first time (1930) and a Mass of Christian Burial was held for slapstick king Mack Sennett (1960) is surrounded by the casualties of mortal curses.

In A Christmas Carol, those torments are personified by a boy named “Ignorance,” and his sister, “Want.”

They are as one, “wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable.” Their youth puts the lie to my fanciful notion, that washing up on the street is a steep descent and not a pitiful trudge from cradle to grave.

Ignorance and Want – stand-ins for the urchins that Dickens knew so well, having been one himself – tremble beneath the robe of the Ghost of Christmas Present; the specter warning Scrooge, “Beware them both …”

I attended afternoon Mass at Blessed Sacrament earlier this month – December 6, the date of my first wedding 43 years ago. I sat in a pew near the altar and, until the priest mentioned it, wasn’t aware that Deborah Rudacille and I had exchanged vows in 1980 on the Feast of Saint Nicholas.

(Just 22, I signed the guest register at the Loyola College chapel “John Lennon,” no way of knowing that Beatle John would be taken from us two days later.)

At Blessed Sacrament, where John Wayne, Irene Dunne and Frank Capra traded stories after services, perhaps admiring the massive front doors of bronze donated by fabled director John Ford, buried from the church in 1973.

For some time now, the homeless and those close to the edge have been fed and counseled at Blessed Sacrament in bright Los Angeles sunshine, a glare that makes the gulf between haves and have-nots especially disconcerting.

Many of those in the orbit of Blessed Sacrament also attend Mass, as I discovered via the sound of someone slurping a kiddie box of Yoo-Hoo through a straw.

I turned to see a middle-aged woman, surely younger than she looked. She wore an old corduroy jacket like the kind high school kids used to wear, soiled hands just below the soiled cuffs.

In the silence that accompanies much of daily Mass, she began singing “O come, O come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel…that mourns in lonely exile here …”

Her voice was weak but beautiful. It reminded me of the mystical, 26-second recording “Tramp with Tom Waits & Full Orchestra,” in which a homeless Londoner – poetically known in Britain as “rough sleepers” – sings over and over and over again: “Jesus’ blood has never failed me yet, never failed me yet, never failed me yet…this one thing I know, cuz He loves me so…”

When it was time for Communion, which she did not receive, she again held forth, soloing on the John Michael Talbot hymn, “One Bread One Body.” At the moment for the faithful to offer one another a sign of peace, I approached her with a smile and an open hand. She quickly turned away.

The gospel reading was the miracle of the loaves and the fishes in which Christ feeds many thousands with a couple of fish and five loaves of bread. It’s my favorite of all the Bible stories, probably because my grandmother always knew how to stretch Sunday pasta in Highlandtown when a few more guests showed up than were expected.

After Mass, I stopped to shake the young priest’s hand – a Jesuit named Father Mike Manalastas –and asked the name of the woman who’d been singing.

“Laura,” he said and I thought, “She’s been singing those songs since she was eight-years-old.”

                                                                      -o-

I was in Los Angeles the first week of December to celebrate an early Christmas with my daughter Amelia (Baltimore School for the Arts, ’99), her daughter Lake (age 3) and husband Jon, grandson of the singer and actor Ed Ames, who played “Mingo” on the 1960s television series Daniel Boone.

Amelia, born in the first year of my marriage to Deborah, was more than eight months pregnant and I wanted to spend time with her family before the new baby arrived. My first order of business as Lake’s grandfather: Buy a real tricycle, a red one made of metal with a silver ‘trrring‘ bell on the handlebars.

I found my way to Classic Toys on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City where they had exactly what one conjures when thinking of an early 1960s tricycle. Better than that, it was assembled.

Lo and behold, a few doors away from the toy store was Art’s delicatessen, where every meal is a “work of art.”

You don’t know what a smile is until you get one from strangers while carrying an old school kiddie trike down the street in the middle of the afternoon. I parked it beneath the table and enjoyed a corned beef on rye with brown mustard and raw onion.

Lake loved it, though she was told by her father (again, some things never change) not to ride it in the house. On this, at least that night, dear old dad was overruled by Mommy and the kid began working her legs to make it go.

All of this, however, took place after the biggest gift in the Alvarez family landed this year.

Amelia wasn’t due until on or about Christmas Eve. The first night I was in town I had dinner at her house. Jon cooked braised chicken thighs with sweet potatoes, carrots and dates in a Dutch Oven, a classic Ashkenazi dish called tzimmes. We strung lights on the tree and Amelia, feeling achy and out-of-sorts, read Lake a Little Golden Book about the life of Lucille Ball.

And then I went back to my hotel near the Hollywood Walk of Fame, where I took a photo of the sidewalk star honoring Alvin and the Chipmunks, one of Amelia’s favorite childhood cartoons.

I awoke the next morning to the news: Romee Jean had arrived, three weeks early and right on time. Perhaps one day when she’s about eight-years-old we’ll go to Mass together at Blessed Sacrament and I’ll tell her the story of her birth.

Rafael Alvarez wrote for network television in Los Angeles from 2005 through 2008. He was very glad to get back to the Holy Land of East Baltimore to chase the stories closest to his heart. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

Every autumn my brother Danny grinds about 40 pounds of pork butts, spicing it with paprika, garlic, kosher salt, cracked black pepper, crushed red pepper, coriander and cumin. The flavors seep in for a few days in the fridge before he stuffs dozens of links, tying them off with twine.

Voilà – chorizo!

An everyday, no big deal thing in Spain, chorizo has been an especially desired plum in our family since my grandfather landed in Highlandtown from Galicia in 1925. Danny’s product is a far cry better than the imported, matador-red grenades packed in lard the old man used to get in tins from New York.

Back then, we only got a taste – two slices floating in a shimmering broth of cocido – each New Year’s Day. In 1986, I wrote a story for The Sun about Charlie Vega, a classical guitarist who made chorizo the way his Seville-born grandmother did. Danny tweaked Vega’s recipe to near-perfection and now we enjoy it all year long.

Come late October, it takes a star turn. A week or two before Halloween, we throw a party – Fiesta de Chorizo – in the backyard of my East Baltimore rowhouse, built in 1920 and purchased by our grandparents in 1935. 

In the October of the 1950s, wooden barrels held fast with metal staves crowded the narrow yard, filled with water to “swell” as my grandfather prepared to make wine. I have one of them in the corner of the basement.

Now, the scent of grilled “sah-seege” on Macon Street mixes with the sounds of the Mississippi Delta. The ever-changing Chorizo Blues Band is anchored by Jimmy Orr on piano and guitarist Pete Kanaras, the latter having toured Spain this summer with the Chris O’Leary Band. In Chicago this year, he backed-up Buddy Guy.

About sharing a stage with the 87-year-old, Louisiana-born Guy, Kanaras confessed to nerves until Buddy “called a slow blues in C, his usual” and the groove rolled from there. A regular at Cat’s Eye Pub blues jams, he surely wasn’t nervous playing a backyard barbecue near the ruins of the Crown, Cork and Seal bottle cap factory.

Also around the upright this year: Veteran blues journeyman Robert Ross, a guitarist whom I met at No Fish Today in 1982 when he was on the road with J.B. Hutto. And harmonica-man “Mister Larry” Hambrecht, a card-carrying Communist from Philadelphia by way of Cincinnati who assaulted a KKK wizard in 1982 on live television in Boston.

Special guest: Heonjin Ha, a brilliant bluesman from Seoul, South Korea. He stayed with us for a week – from Baltimore to New York City to Mississippi and back to Baltimore before flying home – playing traditional slide guitar there and back. His 20,000 mile adventure included a passionate cover of “Long Distance Call” at the unveiling of a new Muddy Waters historical marker in Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

Of the fiesta, Heonjin said, “It was a two-hour non-stop jam like a freight train. A magical moment turned a Greektown [rowhouse] into a Mississippi juke joint.”

The guests are lifelong friends, folks I meet along the way and, especially, family. It includes cousins who trace their Italian and Polish roots to the alley separating Macon Street from Newkirk Street when our grandmothers all lived within two blocks of one another.

Diane Parzynski Wit is the daughter of Lucy Adornato Parzynski, my father’s first cousin who passed away a few months before him in 2021. Diane’s father, Adam Parzynski, owned Adam’s Cafe, a crab house at the corner of Foster Avenue and Newkirk Street. Uncle Adam used to walk a case of National Bohemian longnecks down the alley to my grandfather’s kitchen door every other week, taking away the empties.

A long-ago Baltimore Colts cheerleader, Diane came with her husband Jerry and Jerry brought a big pot of homemade string bean soup, an East Baltimore delicacy going back to summers when immigrant Poles lived in tents in then rural Anne Arundel County to pick beans and strawberries.

Other side dishes from guests: homemade apple pie, arroz con pollo, pork and beans, garlic bread, cucumber salad and a full table of desserts. Of course there were deviled eggs. An old clawfoot iron tub separating rose bushes and chestnut trees held ice and drinks.

My youngest brother, Victor Paul Alvarez of Bristol, Rhode Island, joined us for the first time. A world class chef who pushes words around a computer screen for a living, Vic took over the grill to turn out chicken wings and thighs while Danny mingled.

In going through stuff in my parents’ Linthicum basement since Dad died, I found a  hand-cranked meat grinder my folks used to make Italian sausage and kielbasa. Somehow no one thought to make chorizo until I met Senor Vega. My Polish grandmother, Anna Potter Jones from Dillon Street in old Canton, used a hollow steer’s horn.

I fastened the metal grinder to the end of the picnic table as a prop and it soon became the only thing my five-year-old grandson Gus was interested in. He and his buddy Jack Glazer took ice from the tub, put it in the top of the grinder and cranked away.

Future snowball stand entrepreneurs!

Last year we made Oriole orange t-shirts in memory of my father – Manuel on the back with the outline of a tugboat – and this year I surprised Danny with his name above the Lost in Space robot, a childhood favorite.

My journals, a 50-year jumble in my grandmother’s china closet, suggest that we first had the party in 2012. The next year I had my friend Mark “Petey” Pietrowski, an old hippie from Patterson High School, paint FIESTA DE CHORIZO 2013 on the wall of my kitchen in red and yellow, the colors of Spain. Each year, he comes by to bump the number up and enjoy a sausage.

There have been a handful of years when the shindig wasn’t held; once when the backyard sewer line had to be replaced, again during Covid and the year of my father’s death.  

Pop loved the fiesta, though Mom wasn’t always thrilled with how much he enjoyed it. Once folks had eaten a sausage or two and the band was digging deep in the bucket, Dad would walk from guest to guest with a bottle of Anis del Mono anisette, pouring a few drops with all who cared to sip with him. Some sipped more than others.

Here’s the funny thing about being an aficionado of all things Iberian, from the great Cervantes to sardines grilled over an open flame. My brothers and I are one-quarter Spanish, another quarter Italian and, on our mother’s side, nearly 100 percent Polish-American.

Yet the culture of España, particularly through food, has suffused the family since Mom and Dad married 70 years ago this November. Though my father learned Spanish in high school and practiced it with his father and waterfront friends at the foot of Broadway, no one in the family really speaks the language or has more than a cursory knowledge of the country’s history.

I guess this is an American tale.

Rafael Alvarez grew up being called “Ralph,” the name his grandfather adopted at the Bethlehem Steel shipyard in Sparrows Point where he worked as an outside machinist for several decades. Ralphie can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Editor’s note: This column won first place (Division C) in the Sports Column category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2023 Contest. Read our other award-winning pieces here.

Orioles legend Brooks Robinson was a good and decent man. If you don’t know that by now – a week after his death at 86 prompted hosannas throughout the baseball world – then you’ve probably never heard of Mister Rogers either. 

Every Baltimorean of a certain age seems to have a Brooksie story – great ballplayer, greater human being – and they’ve poured in by the hour since the news of his passing on September 26.

Of all the ones I’ve heard, this one is by far the best. Surely there were countless others that Brooks kept to himself.

In 2007, Jason Policastro was working the annual Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award banquet in downtown Baltimore. Brooks was a featured speaker and one of Policastro’s jobs was to wait and escort him into the hotel.

“I was maybe 26 years old,” said Policastro, now a financial advisor. “I’m standing out front when Brooks gets out of a cab. I’m about to shake his hand and out of an alley between the buildings comes this guy saying ‘Brooks, Brooks!'”

The man, said Policastro, appeared to be in his 40s, perhaps older, and seemed to be living on the street. He rooted around in the closest trash can, found a raggedy sheet of newspaper and politely ran up to Brooks, saying, “Mr. Robinson, can I have your autograph?”

“Brooks doesn’t bat an eye,” said Policastro. “He gives the guy his autograph and they chat happily for a couple minutes.”

Only after the man finished talking, said Policastro, did Brooks go inside, one of hundreds, if not more than a thousand, chicken dinner charity events at which he spoke over the decades.

With all due respect for silent auction cocktail parties supporting the cause du jour, I’d argue that there’s no greater definition of charity than Brooksie’s moment with the man on the sidewalk.

Said Policastro of the Hall of Fame third basemen from Little Rock, “Everything they say about him is true.”

This Sunday past, before the last game of this fabulous 101 win Orioles’ season (a 6-1 loss to Boston), I ran the story about Brooks and the homeless man by C. Peter Hoffberger, born a year after the 18-year-old Robinson landed in the big leagues in ’55.

Hoffberger’s parents were the former Alice Berney (1925-2016) and C. Jerold “Jerry” Hoffberger, who died at age 80 in 1999. Jerry Hoffberger owned part and eventually the majority of the team throughout Robinson’s career.

Of the story of Brooks and the unkempt stranger, Peter said: “Most people cast off the homeless. But with Brooks the extraordinary is almost a cliche.”

Which translates into: Everything they say about Brooks is true.

In the basement of his home near the Park School, Hoffberger keeps mementos of National Beer and the Orioles, two indelible symbols of Baltimore once owned at the same time by his father.

One photo shows Brooks and Jerry clasping hands in a near embrace at a victory party after the 1970 World Series, the championship in which Robinson defined greatness at the hot corner. He signed it, “Jerry, my best to you. Enjoyed our friendship. Brooks Robinson.”

Growing up when the Birds called Memorial Stadium home, the Hoffberger family seats were behind the third base dugout. Traditionally, the home team uses the first base dugout but, said Peter, “the sun was right in your eyes over there so we moved the Oriole dugout to third.”

At third, he watched Brooks prepare before each pitch was thrown: The quiet, intense crouch, nimble on the balls of his feet, taking off his glove and putting it back on, eyes locked on the batter, moving forward just an inch or so. 

“I’d keep looking to see if he’d get distracted and he never did,” said Hoffberger. “I can’t imagine that discipline, going through that routine…” more than a dozen times an inning multiplied by nine innings times 162 games a year times 23 years. All with the Baltimore Orioles.

One time, young Hoffberger didn’t look down at his own feet until it was too late. A 16-year-old summer intern in the club’s PR department in 1972, Peter was in the Orioles’ clubhouse one day and somehow didn’t notice that 6-foot-4, then 240-pound Boog Powell – who caught more throws at first from Brooks than any other player – was kneeling beside him.

 “When I started doing the hat dance, [second basemen] Davey Johnson and [centerfielder] Paul Blair began howling,” said Hoffberger. “Boog had slipped a pack of matches under the sole of my shoe and gave me a hot foot.”

 Welcome to the big leagues, young man.

As a youngster, Kiel McLaughlin’s father — the late Jim McLaughlin — kept boxes of meticulously curated baseball cards at his home in southwest Baltimore. He often told Kiel that the collection – Mantle and Koufax; Aaron, Mays and Banks – would be worth something one day.

“Brooks was his favorite,” said McLaughlin in a Facebook post. “He told stories of getting change from his Mom as a child and taking the bus from Pigtown to Memorial Stadium to see Brooks play.”

Going through his father’s collection to see what “the highest bidder” might be willing to pay, Kiel came upon a Brooks Robinson card. “I think about him at nine-years-old pulling his hero from a pack and how excited he must have been,” wrote McLaughlin.

That card, he said the day after Brooks died, is not for sale.

A final thought. Would you believe – given all that’s been said about the man, particularly the accolades at yesterday’s Camden Yards memorial – that Brooks Robinson was connected to fraud? It’s true, only Brooksie wasn’t aware of it.

If your father or grandfather or great-grandfather passed along a photo or baseball signed by Brooks – and that forebear happened to be given moments of bad public behavior – the keepsake might be a fake.

Peter Hoffberger knows because – unbeknownst to Brooks – he perpetrated the deception.

During his “hot foot” summer, Hoffberger worked with Bob Brown, Orioles chief PR man for 35 years. Before the team’s media department employed more staff than the roster had relief pitchers, Bob pretty much ran the show single-handedly.

“It was Bob and me,” said Hoffberger. “If a fan came into the office with a complaint but they were polite, I could assuage them by getting a player’s autograph. Of course, everyone wanted Brooks. So I’d get him to sign something and send them on their way.

“If they came in and they were a jerk, they also got a Brooks Robinson autograph, except Brooks didn’t sign it. I did.”

Reasoned Hoffberger: “I wasn’t going to bother Brooks for a jerk.”

On October 13, 1970, Rafael Alvarez saw Dave McNally hit the only grand slam by a pitcher in World Series history at the fall classic in which Brooks Robinson was the MVP. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

Nothing screams ROCK & ROLL like redeeming your mother’s H&S Green Stamps at the Two Guys in Dundalk for Deep Purple’s Machine Head !

But first …

In January of 1977, when a Georgia peanut farmer named Jimmy became president of the United States, I was a 19-year-old English major at Loyola College on Charles Street. Eight months later I’d meet the Hopkins kids putting out a tabloid called City Squeeze and earn my first professional bylines.

With Watergate behind us (Ford pardoned Nixon, Carter pardoned Vietnam draft dodgers) and a notebook taking me to neighborhoods well beyond Highlandtown, I was determined to earn a seat at the banquet of literature, which always has room for one more. All seemed possible.

Obsessed with rock and roll from the night the Beatles were on Sullivan – (Little Richard, Nils Lofgren, Zappa and The Who) – I was working the previous summer on a container ship that regularly docked in New Orleans. At a record store there, I happened upon a free music paper out of Houston. 

It was called The Lamb, an echo of the album that the crowd I ran with listened to constantly at the time – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – the last great Genesis album released nearly 50-years ago.

So taken was I with the theatrical fantasia of the music and the story that I gave the lyrics to Loyola English professor Thomas Scheye, my mentor, sure that he would see the genius of lyricist and singer Peter Gabriel, raised on a Surrey dairy farm.

A few days later, we crossed paths on campus and he handed the lyrics back to me, chuckling, “What is this? Some kind of acid trip?” I was not yet well-read enough to say that the author was not Aleister Crowley.

In my parents’ basement, putting off a term paper for Scheye on The Rape of the Lock, I sat down to write Jimmy a note of congratulations. And make a request.

Did I want President Carter to legalize marijuana? Willie Nelson was already the nation’s chief reefer lobbyist, getting high on the roof of the White House with Jimmy’s son Chip. Come to dinner at my parents’ house for crabs and spaghetti? I once extended that invitation to Zappa, but Frank declined.

My bright idea was to ask the President of the United States to buy a subscription to The Lamb for the White House library. By the time I received a non-committal thank you on White House stationary, The Lamb had folded.

And then, things began moving fast. Punk put a cap in the ass of prog (“We were trying to save rock and roll,” explained Joey Ramone) and voters kicked Jimmy to the curb. The guy who trounced him decided that the Shining City on the Hill ran just fine on fossil fuel and removed solar panels Carter installed on the roof where Chip and Willie smoked one of Nelson’s “Austin Torpedos.”

I married the young woman who’d once traded green stamps to listen to “Smoke on the Water ” anytime she wanted. Now a professor of writing, her name is Deborah Rudacille and to this day can recite The Lamb Lies Down in full.

“I sing it to myself sometimes, every word,” she said. “It amazes me.” More amazing is that directly upon our wedding at the Loyola College chapel we had three kids in five years. Shit got real.

It would be decades before I listened to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway again but my interest in Jimmy Carter never waned.  I followed the good works that led to his 2002 Nobel Peace Prize and paid attention as reassessments cast his single term in office in brighter light.

On a cross country road trip in 2011, I stopped at a Baptist church in Plains, Georgia where Jimmy taught Sunday School for 40 years. Maybe I’d get to shake his hand and thank him for being a decent human being.

Nope. I was in for a turnabout as strange as they come. President Carter, said the man at the door, was on a fishing trip with friends off the coast of Peru, but I was more than welcome to stay for the lesson. Too embarrassed to turn away, I walked into a classroom at Maranatha Baptist and there, sitting in the back, was a man dressed down to the mole on his cheek as Abraham Lincoln.

It was February, a few days after Presidents Day, and Dennis Boggs was in the Peach State to give a few lectures and remind schoolchildren that no matter what their parents may have told them the American Civil War was about slavery. He’d also hoped to meet Jimmy.

At Mom’s Kitchen, a nearby soul food diner on Highway 27, Boggs and I talked about the peculiar burden of celebrity impersonators, from Marilyn to Elvis to Cher. I asked when he knew he’d truly embodied Lincoln, not just the look (the mole was fake) but the man’s character.

Reminding me that we were in the Deep South, he talked of being heckled in parades by fathers and their children and called a terrorist. “You know when they hate you,” he said.

All of which – Jimmy Carter, Peter Gabriel, Deborah and our 40-year-old son Jake – brought us to Madison Square Garden a week or so ago to take in Gabriel’s first North American tour in a decade.

Because The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway takes place in Manhattan, many among the 18,000 or so in the crowd hoped he might sing a song or two from the album, something he’s rarely done since leaving Genesis after the album’s release. That he didn’t was no surprise.

It’s what he did just before the show’s final encore – Biko – that rocked the garden. Talking (sometimes preaching) between songs about everything from Artificial Intelligence to the way time, far from being on our side, has us “in its claws,” Gabriel ended with a number sung everyday by everyday folks around the world.

“It takes enormous courage to stand up for what you believe in…particularly when you put your life at risk,” he said. “There are hundreds of people all over the world who are doing exactly that. One of the great champions of human rights [is] one of your ex-presidents.”

By the time he mentioned the Nobel Peace Prize and the fight “to eliminate obscure diseases that [big] pharma wouldn’t touch,” it was clear of whom he spoke.

“He’s coming up on his 99th birthday and he’s at home with his family. I would ask …if you could sing happy birthday Jimmy to President Jimmy Carter.”

And we did.

Rafael Alvarez never got high with Willie Nelson but he did smoke a joint at No Fish Today on Eutaw Street with blues harmonica legend James Cotton. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

Editor’s note: This article won second place (Division C) in the Sports Column category of the Maryland, Delaware, and D.C. Press Association’s 2023 Contest. Read our other award-winning pieces here.

There are sacred initiations over which a Baltimorean – particularly a grandparent – must preside. The Charm City trinity involves teaching a little one how to eat a steamed crab, walking the child to the neighborhood snowball stand on a hot summer night and taking the youngster to their first Orioles game.

Parents often do these things first, particularly in an age when extended families don’t always live in the same city, much less the same neighborhood as was once common throughout Baltimore.

I’m proud to have fulfilled the baseball rite-of-passage last month at Camden Yards with Augustine “Gus” Squires, the almost five-year-old son of my daughter Sofia. At that age, cultivation of team loyalty is crucial, particularly because the boy lives in Brooklyn, New York. You simply cannot take chances.

It was a family outing along the first base side: Gus’s mom (who sold lemonade at the Yard during high school), her mother Deborah (a long ago “Junior Oriole”), myself and my wife, Phoebe Stein, raised in Potomac with nary a childhood memory of Orioles baseball.

The boy was decked out in a kid’s No. 8 Ripken jersey handed down through Phoebe’s family and a denim O’s hat adorned with the smiling cartoon bird. Last year, Gus was wearing the cap while his mother pulled him in a wagon along a Brooklyn sidewalk. A man whizzed by on a bicycle and yelled: “Put a Yankee hat on that kid!”

See what I mean? 

Along with the rest of us – some 30,700 strong – Gus took to shouting “Let’s Go O’s!” and was intent on what was happening on the field, understanding that the players in the bright white uniforms were “the good guys” and the ones in gray were “the other guys.”

[I had told him that the Colorado Rockies were “the bad guys,” but his mom corrected the assertion, telling Gus that the visiting team was not “bad” but merely our opponents. Fair enough, though I would have argued the point had we been playing the obnoxious you-know-whos from the Bronx.]

Gus’s eyes were peeled for the Oriole Bird, which, as a toddler visiting Baltimore, he thought was a duck. Because we were high above the home team dugout, where the mascot tends to perch, we didn’t get a glimpse. And because we lost the Bird didn’t run onto the field waving the victory flag.

It took place 56 seasons after my first game at Memorial Stadium in 1967, the home nine versus Carl Yastrzemski and the Red Sox, that year’s American League champs. By then, my maternal grandfather – William Zamenski Jones of Dillon Street in old Canton, a saloon drinker who believed Ty Cobb a better player than Babe Ruth– was bedridden. But he made my first ballgame happen.

Before getting sick with cancer, “Pop” worked at the National Brewery, walking distance from his front door. The brewery was owned by the same man who owned the Orioles, World War II tank commando C. Jerold Hoffberger [1919-1999].

Pop’s only son was my baseball-loving “Uncle Bill,” a Dundalk mailman who died in 2013. His two youngest daughters – Beth Ann Jones Hall and Ann Marie Jones Wood – always knew when a trip to 33rd street was in the offing.

“When Dad was frying up coddies and crab balls you knew you were going to the game,” said Ann Marie.

Beth Ann grew up listening to games with her father on a small transistor radio with a green leather cover, small perforations over the speaker. They’d listen in the dark on summer nights while her mother – the former Betty Feehley, a Boog Powell fan – cleaned up after dinner. 

“One of Dad’s mailman friends was an usher,” said Beth. “Dad would buy cheap seats and we’d get to go over to the good ones.”

Accompanying me and Uncle Bill to seats in the mezzanine was a brown paper lunch bag of beautifully fried crab balls. Family lore holds that the tickets – about $2 each in ’67 – were somehow secured through the brewery. No one is alive to set the record straight though I do know that Natty Boh was the connection when he took me to the first game of the 1969 World Series against the Mets. Enough said about that. 

My own father was a fishing and crabbing man. His padre, an immigrant from Spain, arrived in Baltimore in the mid-1920s when the International League Orioles were winning consecutive championships under Jack Dunn. Grandpop never took to his adopted country’s national pastime, preferring to hunt for rabbits in the wilds of 1940s Rosedale.

Unlike Camden Yards, there was no playground at Memorial Stadium. The cavernous brick-and-concrete colossus across from old Eastern High School, dedicated to the nation’s war dead and simply known as “the Stadium, ” was recreation enough.

Gus spent a few moments going up-and-down the “birdhouse” slide, reclined in a big orange “egg” and held his mother’s hand up the escalator to $23 seats in Row 15 of Section 318. And there it was: the brilliant green diamond, a panorama remembered long after the score has been forgotten.

Deborah remembered being taken to Sunday afternoon games by her steelworker father Ralph “Rudy” Rudacille back when she said, “It was all about Frank [Robinson] and Brooksie.” 

As it is now about Adley and Gunnar, Cedric and Anthony “Tony Taters” Santander in this current dream of a season. In the late-1960s Orioles glory days, before Deb and her brother Jeff piled into the car, her Italian Catholic mom would extract a promise from Rudy to take the kids to Mass first. This did not always happen. 

For most of the game, Gus ate popcorn out of a black and orange box sporting a generic bird, packaging about as exciting as a rain out. It reminded me of something from the old days – the cardboard megaphone in which popcorn was sold at Memorial Stadium.

At his first game, lifelong Orioles fan Leo Ryan, Jr. (the pride of the Shrine of the Little Flower) innocently asked his father if Frank and Brooks were brothers. For it was the Robinsons – who traded on the sibling farce in a 1980 beer commercial – for whom young Leo cheered.

“The popcorn container tapered from the opening to the bottom. You’d tear away the perforated bottom, insert your salty lips inside the cardboard and yell, “CHAAARRRGGGEEE!”

“If you were careful,” said Ryan, “you might get the oil stained cardboard with the folded handle home to your bedroom. Mom would let it stay a day or two before tossing it in the garbage.”

Annapolis native and Dixieland clarinetist Ben Schenck was luckier than that. The leader of the Panorama Jazz Band in New Orleans not only preserved one of the megaphones but had it signed by Al “the Bee ” Bumbry, a late ’70s-mid-1980s center fielder who wore No. 1 and earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam.

“The main thing I remember about the first time I saw Memorial Stadium – I think it was back in ’74 – was the feeling of space,” said Schenck. “In the city, even Annapolis, you’re hemmed in. But as soon as you stepped out of the concourse and into the stadium – everything opened out – real big, real wide.”

What will Gus remember about his first game? Child psychologists hold that long-term memory begins to develop about the age of three. Might he recall the sliding board? The teeming sea of orange? That he was there with folks who love him best?

It may all blur together and fade against more intimate memories of learning to surf at Rockaway Beach with his father Adam, who regularly takes his son to the shore in Queens immortalized by the Ramones to ride the waves.

And when Gus gets the hang of it – as he surely will – I like to think he’ll be surfing in a baseball cap with a smiling orange bird on the front.

Rafael Alvarez wrote about the final request of Oriole Curt Blefary to have his ashes scattered at Memorial Stadium in the Road Grays baseball journal. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.

Canning tomatoes at home, though laborious, is rather simple. But an essential part of the process is sacred to Cindi Hemelt Gallagher – the generous salting of peeled and quartered tomatoes as they simmer on the stove.

This is the moment that reminds Cindi of her late mother, Theresa Adornato Hemelt (1933-2016), a pure product of Italian-American Highlandtown who canned tomatoes nearly every summer of her life, going back to helping her own mother during the Great Depression.

“She always ran the salt box in a circle three times around the rim of the pot,” said Cindi as her family “put up” two large boxes of tomatoes last month at their home in Severna Park. To spirit “Treesey” into the moment, three generations took a turn: Cindi, her daughter Moira Gallagher Ferguson, and Cindi’s eight-year-old granddaughter, Claire Dondero, just a toddler when her great-grandmother died.

“Mom came down here to help us a few years before she died,” said Cindi. “By then, the only part she did was the salt.”

Cindi’s husband Tom Gallagher – a Hyattsville boy with Italian heritage on his mother’s side – did not grow up with the tradition. When he and Cindi began dating back in the Carter Administration, his assignment at family dinners was grating the Parmesan.

“Tom,” his future mother-in-law would say, “I need some cheese.” Having fallen hard for Cindi, the young man complied. Now married for more than 40 years, he could easily can a peck or two by himself.

This year, Tom stood watch over a large, aluminum pot (passed down through the Adornato family) of boiling water, gently slipping in tomatoes with a serving spoon. They emerged less than a minute later, the skin loose for easy peeling. The last time I visited Cindi on canning day, back before the pandemic, her mother’s brother – Ernest Adornato, Jr. – had that job. “Uncle Juidy” died last summer.

After the tomatoes are peeled, cored and quartered (with special attention paid to “bad spots” that need to be removed) they go in a second pot to be cooked. With the salt and heat comes foam. It’s skimmed away and sprigs of fresh basil from the Gallagher yard are added.

“I’m very generous with the basil,” said Cindi, who, like the family cooks before her, is more than generous with the bounty of her kitchen.

Come Christmas, she will give away a quart or two to friends and relatives. This year, two boxes of beefsteak tomatoes – $15 each at Richardson Farms in Middle River – yielded 21 quarts.

Nothing this side of Sicily makes for glorious Sunday supper pasta sauce like freshly canned tomatoes. Anyone with an Italian grandmother (mine, Frances Prato Alvarez, was the younger sister of Cindi’s nonna, Mary Adornato) can immediately parse the good from the great.

Ragu? Paisan, please.

The first job is a cold water bath for the tomatoes, always “seconds,” too ugly or bruised to be a star at your favorite restaurant. Cindi does it in her kitchen sink.

Eleanor Cucco Stein, at 89 a lifelong resident of Little Italy, remembers her mother Antonetta washing tomatoes in the backyard with a garden hose and a big metal tub when they lived at 209 South Exeter Street. When Eleanor was 14, her father – a tailor and clarinet player named Vince – moved the family around the corner to a wide, three story rowhouse where the previous owner kept chickens in the middle room.

“We got the tomatoes from a man on the street with a truck named Leo up around Exeter and Pratt Street,” said Eleanor. “We’d buy them by the bushel. My mother had a hand grinder on the edge of the table. She’d grind ’em up and cook the pulp on the stove.”

When they were done, “we had a hundred jars or more. All week the house smelled like tomatoes.”

When the Cuccos moved to the new house, the canning stopped. “Me and my sisters were all in high school by then,” said Eleanor. “We all got jobs. Mom, too.”

Out of dozens of descendents of the Prato sisters who once lived within three blocks of each other in what was then “the Hill” and is now Greektown, Cindi is likely the only one still canning tomatoes.

My parents did it on Macon Street while my grandmother was alive, assisting at first and then taking charge in Grandmom’s later years. As a little kid – too young to help but old enough to get in the way – I’d be given a hunk crusty bread from Maranto Bakery to dip into a bowl of red gold.

“Do you know how many times we had spaghetti growing up?” said my 87-year-old uncle, Victor Alvarez of Cambridge on the Eastern Shore. “Two and three times a week and we always wanted more. That’s how many jars they had to put up. My father built cabinets in the back of the basement just for my mother’s tomatoes.”

Grandmom died in 1976 and for a while my folks did the job at their suburban home, getting bushels for free at the end of the growing season from a neighbor’s brother who had a small farm near Annapolis. My brother Danny, who continues many Alvarez culinary traditions,  pitched in for many years. 

Our father has been dead for two years now, the Ball jars dusty on a basement shelf. In a nearby drawer is the wide-mouthed aluminum funnel that sits perfectly atop those jars. And just like Cindi pouring the salt, when Pop made his mama’s sauce, she was with us.

The Aztecs called the red and yellow yield of wild vines that grew in the Andes xitomatl, or “plump fruit with a navel.”

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean Nobel Laureate, wrote, “…at the midpoint of summer, the tomato, star of earth, recurrent and fertile star, displays …its remarkable amplitude and abundance…no pit, no husk, no leaves or thorns…”

Less poetically, the Supreme Court designated the tomato a vegetable in 1893 in a case involving customs and tariffs. But the only words that matter when the salsa di pomodoro hits the table are “Mmm, mmm good.”

It’s all about spaghetti and ravioli and lasagna and, in some families where customs die hard, even braciole. But also people, be they blood kin or dear friends, who sit with us at table and say “Can someone pass the sauce down this end?”

It’s about a blonde girl not old enough to handle a knife but able to write the year the tomatoes were canned on the lid of the jar and the name of the loved one to whom it will be given, a girl named Claire who stood on a stool to pour salt on a pot of glistening tomatoes.

Who knows who she will be thinking of when her own child is taught the way it’s always been done?

Rafael Alvarez and Cindi Gallagher will be canning tomatoes in their grandparents’  old neighborhood near the ruins of the Crown, Cork & Seal factory later this month. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

A quarter-of-a-century ago, during the summer of 1997 when Davey Johnson managed the Orioles to the American League East pennant, I went on the road with David Simon to research a bio-pic of Muddy Waters.

In February of 1978, as a kid on the staff of the City Paper, I interviewed Muddy at the Marble Bar, just before it became the punk palace of Baltimore. Innocently, I asked the great man where the blues came from.

It was as though he had a deep pocket of stock answers for white boys like me who first heard the music of Mississippi across the sonic boom of Led Zeppelin.

“Well son,” he said, a glass of champagne in hand. “I guess they come from the days when you had to turn the kettle up high and sing down low.”

Five years later, at age 68, Muddy passed away. By then, I was a cops and obit reporter at The Sun and persuaded the features editor to send me to the southside of Chicago to cover the funeral.

Along with a newsroom friendship with Simon based on a love of American music, my blues cred got me the Hollywood gig. From Chicago to Los Angeles to New Orleans, we interviewed every musician we could find who had known Muddy.  And then headed for Rolling Fork, Mississippi where – on April 4, 1915 – McKinley Morganfield was born nearby in a community called Jug’s Corner.

In 1997, the “Mississippi Blues Trail” was not yet established and would not be for another decade. A series of handsome historical markers designate every important person from Charley Patton in Bolton to the Staples Singers in Drew who was either born, performed or died in the Delta.

[A note on the Staples Singers: During  Muddy’s funeral at the Metropolitan Funeral Parlor, Roebuck “Pops” Staples (1914-2000) stood behind the open casket on the altar, alone with his guitar, and sang “Glory, glory, hallelujah…” I doubt I will ever see anything like it again.]

In Rolling Fork, Simon and I could find nothing indicating that Muddy Waters had ever visited, much less came into the world there. So we called on the experts, the kind easily found in the smallest of American towns: the local librarian.

I forget the kind and helpful woman’s name but I’ll never forget her embarrassment. “See that gazebo out there,” she said, pointing to the lawn of the lone library in Sharkey-Issaquena County. “That’s it,” in regard to honoring Muddy Waters.

If no one was around to point it out, you’d take it for just another store-bought gazebo. Simon and I sat down beneath it for a moment and moved on.

 The script, commissioned by Oprah Winfrey’s production company, was never written, much less produced. In 2008, Sony Pictures released Cadillac Blues starring Jeffrey Wright as Muddy. It lost money.

My “big idea” of how to open the movie came to me when we visited the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale and saw the remains of the cabin Muddy lived in when he drove a tractor on the Stovall cotton plantation.

 In 1941, on the porch of this cabin near the rivertown of Friar’s Point, Alan Lomax recorded Muddy for the Library of Congress. The guitarist’s music and its countless siblings have long been heard, played and loved around the world. I saw it for myself at a gig on my birthday in the Koenji neighborhood of Tokyo when South Korean guitarist Mok Kyung Kim ripped into “Shake Your Money Maker” by slide guitarist Elmore James (1918-1963) of Richland, Mississippi.

My idea was surreal, as much Wizard of Oz as Alice in Wonderland: What if a tornado – “It’s a twister, it’s  twister!” shouted Bert Lahr as a Kansas farmhand in the film – picked up Muddy’s cabin and dropped it in all the places around the globe where his music has put down roots as deep as a Magnolia tree?

I’m not sure precisely what Simon replied, only that – to put it mildly – he gave it no consideration.

Alright, are you still with me? Fast forward 26 years to the Rolling Fork of the first week of May. I was there to cover damage from a tornado that ripped through the town in late March, a devastating act of Mother Nature that left at least 26 dead and flattened the town of about 1,800 people. Silver City, about 30 miles to the northeast, also suffered serious damage.

“We went to church Thursday night [March 23] and by the time we were getting ready for bed it had started to rain pretty hard. The lights flickered and then they went out,” said JoAnn Morganfield Williams, 69, daughter of Muddy’s deceased half-brother, Robert Morganfield, for whom the street where she lives is named.

“The next morning we took a walk and all we could say was, ‘Thank you Lord for saving us.’”

Mrs. Williams is married to a local minister, the Rev. Ezell Williams and they spoke to me from the yard of their home across the street from the Walker Funeral Home, which handled many of the dead. The business is owned by Rolling Fork mayor Eldridge J. Walker.

“That tornado was a death angel,” said Rev. Williams. “It tore up everything. I woke up the next morning crying.”

A two-minute walk from the Williams home is the site of the Muddy Waters Blues Trail marker – erected in 2007 – at 130 Walnut Street. Or was. The tornado, with winds up to 195 miles per hour – sheared  it clean from the base. The cast aluminum sign weighing 200 pounds has never been found.

Perhaps, as Robert Johnson once sang, it landed off “in Ethiopia somewhere…”

Rafael Alvarez is at work on a biography of the New York City bluesman Robert Ross, who accompanied him to Rolling Fork this past May. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

When I was a kid of 20, I jumped from the Baltimore Sun circulation department to the morning sports desk on the fifth floor of the paper’s offices at 501 North Calvert Street.

I’d just returned from a road trip to Chicago to interview Studs Terkel and see the Rolling Stones at Soldier Field. My job in sports was formatting each day’s racetrack results as they moved across the AP wire, back when the paper of record devoted an entire page to the ponies.

My desk was near renowned newspaper artist Jim Hartzell, who created the original Oriole “bird” when the team moved here from St. Louis in 1954. Close by was assistant features editor James K. Bock, soon to post to the Mexico City bureau of The Sun when the paper had reporters around the world.

I was on the desk less than a month when Keith Moon – nonpareil drummer for The Who – fatally overdosed on Heminevrin, prescribed to help the 32-year-old with rampant alcoholism.

One of the characters who feverishly called the desk for hot-off-the-wire results was beloved Orioles’ team trainer Ralph Salvon. When the phone rang on September 8, 1978 it wasn’t a railbird but a rock-and-roll compañero who’d accompanied me to Chicago that summer to say, “Keith Moon died.”

Eager to quit writing for the City Paper for a full-time reporter’s gig at The Sun, I told Bock of Moon’s demise and asked if I might file a remembrance of the great and troubled drummer.

Write it up, he said. I did and Bock put it on Page B-6 a few days later below an AP story out of London about a forthcoming toxicology report. “The sound of The Who may belong to Pete Townsend,” I wrote. “But the fury of The Who was Keith Moon.”

When I showed up for the 4-to-midnight shift the next day, there was a sheet of copy paper waiting for me. On it, the assistant sports editor – Seymour S. Smith – listed the tracks running that day.

At the bottom, Seymour scribbled, “Nice piece on the late, famed drummer.”  I had it framed, not knowing that Seymour did likewise for the entire staff whether they covered duckpin bowling or the Orioles.

Headline and byline of Alvarez remembrance of Keith Moon, September 1978.

While the glory of the British Invasion is indelible, this story is about Seymour, who died at 93 last year and of whom I do not say lightly: Next to my father, Seymour Stanley Smith was the kindest, most thoughtful and generous man I’ve ever known.

It’s also about the dilemma of a documentarian: No matter how good you are, you can’t be in two places at once. And delegating assignments to others doesn’t count.

For half of my career, I’ve chased musicians –  Muddy Waters, Frank Zappa, Nils Lofgren, Joey Ramone and Dion DiMucci among them – to get as close to the thrill as possible. The rest has been spent at kitchen tables across Baltimore, sipping coffee while taking down the life stories of my working-class relatives as well as the strange, the obsessed, and the weird.

If I hadn’t followed Johnny Winter around the country for 40 years, I might have celebrated the life of Morris Martick before the fabled Mulberry Street restaurateur died in 2011.

Had I not spent so much time with oddballs from the Block, the foot of Broadway and the Congress Hotel when it was a flop, I’d have published more portraits of the legends who passed through town: Sun Ra at the Famous Ballroom in 1978, Otis Rush ripping up the Knights of Columbus hall in Hamilton in the early ‘90s and, in 1981, the incomparable Ella Fitzgerald at Pier Six.

My sadness last year at Seymour’s funeral was freighted with regret that I’d never gotten to know him beyond our time in the newsroom and his love of basketball. In 1979, he edited an interview I did with Pistol Pete Maravich, one of my childhood heroes, and ran it in the Sunday paper.

At the time of his death, Seymour had been retired for more than 30 years and – widowed in 2018 from his beloved Eunice Silverman – resided at a Mount Washington senior community. We never talked about our shared hometown, Crabtown on the Patapsco. Alvarez regrets the error.

After the service, I interviewed Seymour’s 87-year-old brother, the retired ophthalmologist Morton E. Smith of St. Louis. From Mort, I learned that their South Baltimore childhood was kith-and-kin to the tales I’ve been spinning forever.

“Our father was Israel Zditovsky back in Russia and became Irvin Smith when he landed on Ellis Island in 1912. He had a tailor shop at 1137 South Charles street called Smitty’s,” said Mort, a half dozen years younger than Seymour.

The old family shop is now Kim’s Day Spa, indicative of how far the neighborhood has diverted from its working class, maritime roots.

“Our store was catty-corner from Shane’s shoe store where we lived on the second floor,” said Mort. “After a few years, my parents bought a house a block away at 1230 South Charles Street. Dad died in 1959. A few years later Mom moved to Northwest Baltimore.”

Assimilation was the name of the game for most of the 20th century and though their parents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want the kids to know what was going on, English was the rule.

“We think Mom [the former Mary Greenberg] came from somewhere in Czarist Russia. She came to the U.S. as an infant and we never knew when she was born.”

The neighborhood, said Mort, was largely Catholic – both Irish and Polish,  “with a Jewish pawn broker named Sol down the street and Tony the Italian barber. There was also a Chinese restaurant and it seemed like all the men were longshoremen with funny nicknames.”

Proud of their Jewish heritage, the Smiths were not particularly religious. Irv was crazy for the crab imperial at Haussner’s in the heart of Highlandtown and didn’t mind waiting in the line that went around the block to get in.

Seymour and Mort – who enjoyed many a BLT sandwich growing up and ate steamed crabs with their parents – were most likely bar mitzvahed at the Rodfe Zedek synagogue in the unit block of West Hill Street between Charles and Hanover streets.

“I never went to services again after that,” said Mort. Not long before Seymour died, there was a High Holidays dinner at the senior community and a staffer encouraged him to attend. When he begged off, the staffer said, “You’re Jewish aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Seymour, according to Mort. “But I’m not that Jewish.”

What he was crazy for (in addition to horrible puns) was sports – all sports with a special passion for basketball.  

“The only sport that Seymour didn’t teach me was lacrosse,” said Mort, noting that in his Depression-era childhood, Cross Street Market was a two-story building (destroyed by fire in 1951) with a basketball court on the second floor. “That’s where Seymour taught me to play basketball.”

In 1944, age 16 and too young for the Second World War (he would serve with distinction as an Army corporal in Korea), Seymour was hired as a $17 a week copyboy when The Sun had offices at Baltimore and Charles streets. In 1947 he was made a sportswriter, soon covering the original Baltimore Bullets of the NBA.

Interviewed upon his retirement in 1990, Seymour said, “Maybe it’s because I’m older, but it was romantic in the old days. It was like something out of an Edward G. Robinson movie. Gin bottles in the desks. I don’t remember hearing anyone say, ‘Stop the presses,’ but it was like that.” The greatest guy anyone had the good fortune to know? Seymour was like that.

Rafael Alvarez recently returned from the Mississippi Delta where he reported on the tornado that destroyed Muddy Waters’ hometown of Rolling Fork. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com