Gary M. Almeter - A Lovely Place, A Fighting Place, A Charmer: The Baltimore Anthology

Copyright 2022, Belt Publishing

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

First Edition 2022

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-953368-40-9

Belt Publishing

5322 Fleet Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44105

www.beltpublishing.com

Book design by Meredith Pangrace

Cover by David Wilson

Contents

Introduction

Rafael Alvarez

So, you think you know Baltimore because you own a TV?

Then you must suffer from a chronic condition known here in Crabtown as ARD: Aint Right Disorder!

In 1987, when hometown boy John Waters was filming Hairspray here, he cast Pia Zadora as a hippie chick living in squalor with a hippie boyfriend who was played by the late rock star Ric Ocasek.

Looking around at the boarded-up buildings, abandoned vehicles, and trasha slice of sad-ass iconography that would become synonymous with Baltimore via HBOs The Wire Zadora complimented Waters on the authenticity of the set.

Pia, a bemused Waters is said to have replied, this isnt a set. People live here.

This book introduces you to those people: ice-house laborers, civil rights leaders in Congress and on the street, poets impersonating physicians, horseradish kings, and Hall of Fame ballplayers. All the while giving the lie that Baltimore is synonymous with anything but people making it from one day to the next.

Baltimoreans are often strange (Abe Sherman, the citys most famous newsstand vendor, threw almost as many people out of his shop as he served) and more often indefatigable . You will find fact and fiction in this book, some of it delivered in verse celebrating a town where the phrase, Shes a character, is taken as a compliment.

In the late nineteenth century, the work of Edgar Allan Poewho is buried here at the corner of Fayette and Greene Streetswas forbidden in the childhood home of a privileged New Yorker named Edith Wharton.

The snooty elders of the future author of The House of Mirth reportedly denigrated the great poet as the drunken and demoralized Baltimorean.

Just the type of mug that a local bus driver, line cook, or stevedore would welcome as my kind of guy.

When I exiled myself from Baltimore for five years to pan for fools gold in Tinseltown, I was often asked what my hometown was really like.

You know all those great John Waters movies? Hairspray ? Crybaby ? Id say, Theyre documentaries.

The waters along the edge of this colonial port citywhere bolt holes for shackles that detained slaves sold at auction can still be foundare deep enough to supply material for a dozen volumes about life in the Queen City of the Patapsco River.

No one featured in this book is more important than those who were left out, among them West Baltimorean entertainer Cab Calloway, who put the word boogie into common usage; Theodore Balls Maggio, who skimmed the harbor for lost balls and then sold them back to kids on the street; Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice; and a Pimlico racetrack balloon salesman named Mr. Diz.

We wish there could have been more, particularly since the city of Mencken and Lucille Clifton is rich in writers who would do them justice. But as my late Polish grandmothera true East Baltimore hon, as in Whatcha doin hon? often said, You cant put ten pounds of gwno into a five-pound bag.

So this is what we shook out, straight from the Land of Pleasant Living where people still sit on their front steps to drink beer no longer brewed here; take two buses to work three jobs; and swear theyre never coming into the city again because its really getting bad (a rant heard since the 1960s) while others declare theyll never leave.

Over the years, I have given many talks to young people who believe they want to become writers. Without fail, a kid will raise their hand and ask: Where do you get your ideas?

You live in Baltimore, I tell them. Have you walked outside today?

The author with his Baltimore journal. Credit: Jennifer Bishop.

Reporter / Reverend / Baltimorean

M. Dion Thompson

Baltimore baffled me at first. In some ways, after thirty years of living here, it still does. What to make of its head-spinning contrasts in neighborhoods? Of its story and its dual memory of itself? I say dual because all you would have to do is lay 1950s issues of the Baltimore Sun or the News-American side by side with Afro-American and you would see two different worlds. One white, one Blackeach giving only the faintest hint that the other exists.

As I said, this baffled me at first. Even more so was a drive through town on an early visit to find a place to live. Our driver, a future colleague of mine at the aforementioned Sun , took us all over Baltimore, giving bits of information about the neighborhoods and the city I would soon call home and be writing about.

What I most remember was the warning given as we drove through Hampden: You dont want to live here. They dont like Blacks.

Huh? It was the last two years of the 1980s, and I was being warned against moving into a certain neighborhood. I dont know if I was more disturbed that Hampden was off-limits or that this fact was an accepted piece of the citys life. We did not move into Hampden. But a year or so later, a Black family did. Their claims of being Moorish fooled no one. And they were gone within a week or two. All I could do was shake my head and say to myself, I guess its true.

That was more than a generation ago, and I use it as a marker of how the city was when I arrived and what it has become. Today, the Avenue in Hampden is hip. Hon Fest is a Baltimore party, complete with beehive hairdos and cat-eye glasses. Pink Flamingoshonoring the John Waters film of the same nameare one of the citys emblems along with Natty Boh and the cartoon Oriole baseball bird.

A neighbor of mine once had a T-shirt with the familiar National Bohemian one-eyed little man character on the front, but this one sported an afro do. Who was he? Natty Bro, of course.

I am baffled and amused. Not only do we have The Night of 1,000 Elvises but a Black Elvis too. I interviewed him once, the self-proclaimed high priest of all things Elvi.

And I am pained by the history that comes with the territory.

If Maryland is said to be America in miniature, then Baltimore can equally lay claim. All of our countrys history is here. Streets such as Paca and Howard bear the names of Revolutionary War heroes. Walk along Pratt Street and youre walking where slaves were held before being marched in chains to Fells Point. From there they were loaded onto ships headed for the auction blocks of New Orleans.

Somewhere between the old President Street Stationso named because Lincoln passed through on the way to his first inaugurationand the original city neighborhood of Fells Point is where Frederick Douglass caught a train and escaped to freedom. The alley street where he built a churchSouth Dallas Streetis also known as Douglass Row.

Baltimore gave the country its trains and clipper ships, Edgar Allan Poe and Babe Ruth, Frank Zappa, Chick Webb and Billie Holiday, Thurgood Marshall, Barbara Mikulski, and Nancy Pelosi.