‘The Wire’ Stands Alone

(NYTimes) “The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.) Continued

A woman’s name on the Declaration of Independence

(Washington Post) This Fourth of July, look closely at one of those printed copies of the Declaration of Independence.
See it? The woman’s name at the bottom?
It’s right there. Mary Katherine Goddard. Continued

The House that Mencken Built

(City Paper) ... To read “Happy Days” in Baltimore is a disorienting experience. Mencken brings the city, especially Hollins market, to such vivid life that to walk out into the actual city of the present feels both familiar and uncanny. It is almost like science fiction. He writes of his father’s cigar shop, the saloons, the African-American culture in the alleys, the Arrabers, the police, the country house in Mount Washington, and everything is at once familiar and different. As Mencken wrote in 1925, “the old charm, in fact, still survives, despite the boomers, despite the street-wideners, despite the forward-lookers, despite all the other dull frauds who try to destroy it.” Continued

Harry Gilmor's Raid

(Wikipedia) Gilmor's Raid, also known as The Magnolia Station Train Raid, was a foraging and disruptive cavalry raid that was part of an overall campaign against Union railroads, led by Maj. Harry W. Gilmor with 135 men from the First and Second Maryland Cavalry regiments. It was authorized by Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early during his Valley Campaigns of 1864, which threatened Washington, D.C., during the American Civil War.
As Early advanced north and east toward Baltimore, Maryland, a Union force led by Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace met Early's forces and was defeated in the Battle of Monocacy on July 9, 1864. The cavalry brigade of the Second Corps, led by Brig. Gen. Bradley T. Johnson advanced further eastward into Maryland, led by cavalry forces under the command of Maj. Harry W. Gilmor. Upon reaching Westminster, Maryland, on July 10, Gilmor attacked Union cavalry forces, driving them out. Johnson's main cavalry force continued pressing Wallace's retreating Union troops, pursuing them into Cockeysville-Hunt Valley, Maryland, north of Baltimore, and then turned south destroying tracks and trestle bridges along the North[ern] Central Railroad. Upon reaching Timonium, Maryland, Johnson divided the Second Corps cavalry brigade. Continued

Images: 1. "The invasion of Maryland--capture of a train on the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad at Magnolia, near Gunpowderb sic [B]Ridge, July 11" 2. Harry Gilmor. 3. Bradley Johnson. 4. Wade Hampton and Bradley Johnson, long after the war.

Before I got rid of my Maryland accent

Don Shula

(Wikipedia) Donald Francis "Don" Shula (born January 4, 1930) is an American former American football coach.
He is best known as coach of the Miami Dolphins, the team he led to two Super Bowl victories, and to the National Football League's only perfect season. Shula was named 1993 Sportsman of the Year by Sports Illustrated. He currently holds the NFL record for most career wins with 347. Shula only had two losing seasons (below .500) in his 32-year career. Continued

Cab Calloway

(Wikipedia) Cabell "Cab" Calloway III (December 25, 1907 – November 18, 1994) was an American jazz singer and bandleader.
Calloway was a master of energetic scat singing and led one of the United States' most popular African American big bands from the start of the 1930s through the late 1940s. Calloway's band featured performers including trumpeters Dizzy Gillespie and Adolphus "Doc" Cheatham, saxophonists Ben Webster and Leon "Chu" Berry, New Orleans guitar ace Danny Barker, and bassist Milt Hinton. Calloway continued to perform until his death in 1994 at the age of 86. Continued

Haldan Keffer Hartline

(Wikipedia) Haldan Keffer Hartline (December 22, 1903 – March 17, 1983) was an American physiologist who was a co-winner (with George Wald and Ragnar Granit) of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in analyzing the neurophysiological mechanisms of vision.
Hartline began his study of retinal electrophysiology as a National Research Council Fellow at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, receiving his M.D. in 1927. After attending the universities of Leipzig and Munich as an Eldridge Johnson traveling research scholar, he became professor of biophysics and chairman of the department at Johns Hopkins in 1949. One of Hartline's graduate students at Johns Hopkins, Paul Greengard, later also won the Nobel Prize. Continued

Cal Ripken, Sr.

(Wikipedia) Calvin Edwin Ripken, Sr. (December 17, 1935–March 25, 1999) was a coach and manager in Major League Baseball who spent 36 years in the Baltimore Orioles organization, also as a player and scout. He played in the Orioles' farm system beginning in 1957, and later served as manager of the parent club, on which his sons Cal Jr. and Billy played.
Ripken's 13-plus years in the Baltimore farm system was the longest tenure of any minor league manager in Orioles history. As a manager in the minor leagues for 13 years, Ripken won 964 games, and later compiled a 68-101 record managing the Orioles. Several of his students, including Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, and most prominently his son Cal Jr., went on to Hall of Fame careers. Continued

Photo: jimmyack205, some rights reserved.

Richard Cassilly

(Wikipedia) Richard Cassilly (14 December 1927 – 30 January 1998) was an American operatic tenor who had a major international opera career between 1954 and 1990.
... Born in Washington D.C., Cassilly spent his childhood on a farm near Aberdeen, Maryland before moving to Baltimore, Maryland with his family in his early teens. He first became involved in music through singing in his high school's glee club. In 1946, at the age of eighteen, he entered the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University where he studied singing with Hans Heinz. As a student he sang in college productions of The Flying Dutchman (as the Steersman) and Madama Butterfly (as Pinkerton). During this time he also had the opportunity to study under Rosa Ponselle who had retired from her career and was residing in Baltimore. Continued

Photo: Wikipedia

Rodgers Forge designated as historic by park service

(Towson Times) Move over Stoneleigh. Rodgers Forge is now also on the National Register of Historic Places.
The community recently gained that designation from the National Park Service. The process took nearly three years, according to Janice Moore, president of the Rodgers Forge community association. Continued

Mystery writer captured the Baltimore of old

(Jacques Kelly) A Maryland murder mystery writer came to mind the other afternoon as darkness was coming over Lafayette Avenue in Bolton Hill. It was an atmospheric old Baltimore scene on a dreary early December day: worn granite curbs, moss in the sidewalk cracks, wet brick on the 1870s rowhouses. I glanced inside some windows and spotted some Hepplewhite chairs. A few minutes later, I passed the clock tower at Mount Royal Station. It seemed to say, "It's getting on to 5: Go home and read a good book." Continued

Photo: Girl Detective

Maryland Historical Society cuts operating hours, staff

(Baltimore Sun) A $670,000 budget shortfall caused by the dismal economic climate has prompted the Maryland Historical Society to cut hours at its Baltimore museum and library and to eliminate several staff positions, according to the president of its trustee board. ... it also limited operating hours at the museum and library to noon to 8 p.m. Thursdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, and the 28 trustees agreed to double their gifts to the society's annual fund. Continued

Photo: "Eleanor Darnall," one of the many paintings in the Society's collection.

Part of Clipper Mill project foreclosed

(Baltimore Sun) Part of the Clipper Mill development in North Baltimore will go to a foreclosure auction later this month, including more than two dozen partially built upscale homes - the first setback for a project that has transformed long-vacant factories into a mix of shops, offices and homes. BB&T Bank has foreclosed on unfinished homes and lots in Overlook at Clipper Mill, planned as a community of contemporary two- and three-story houses, as well as on the cavernous Tractor Building, meant to become apartments, offices and parking. Continued

Photo: Woodberrymill.jpg (Marylandstater/Wikipedia)

For Poe, This Has Been the Year to Die For

(NYTimes) ... Disenchantment is Poe’s intellectual theme as well. He scorns the Transcendentalists and other American writers with their visions of transformation and possibility. He rejects ideas of moral uplift. The New World holds no promise. But the Old World, in which so many of his stories are steeped — the realm of old families, cultivated tastes and long traditions — is also corrupt and rotten.
Poe seemed to enshrine reason as the only plausible authority, creating in his famous detective stories an archetypal model later used by Arthur Conan Doyle. Poe’s hyper-rational detective Dupin is a master of reason. But he uses it to lay bare the brutish, disruptive forces lying underneath its polished surface, just as he deduced the existence of the rampaging orangutan on the Rue Morgue. Poe’s madmen are singularly rational. His reasonable men are singularly mad. Reason is not to be fully trusted. Continued

Photo: Library of Congress

Morris Louis

(Wikipedia) Morris Louis (Morris Louis Bernstein) (November 28, 1912 - September 7, 1962) is a United States abstract expressionist painter, one of the many such painters to emerge in the 1950s. From 1929 to 1933, he studied at the Maryland Institute of Fine and Applied Arts (now Maryland Institute College of Art) on a scholarship, but left shortly before completing the program. He worked at various odd jobs to support himself while painting and in 1935 was president of the Baltimore Artists’ Association. From 1936 to 1940, he lived in New York and worked in the easel division of the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. Continued

Photo: Wikipedia

Washington Wizards owner Abe Pollin dies at age 85

(ESPN) Abe Pollin, the Washington Wizards owner who brought an NBA championship to the nation's capital and later had the mettle to stand up to Michael Jordan, died Tuesday.
... Pollin was the NBA's longest-tenured owner. With his death, a group led by longtime AOL executive Ted Leonsis is poised to take ownership of a Washington-area sports empire that began when Pollin purchased the Baltimore Bullets in 1964. Continued

Baltimore Opera Theatre shows promise in its first production

(Baltimore Sun) ... Described in the program book as "a new opera company with an aesthetic view of the arts ... not based on frivolous budgets and grandiosity," the enterprise offered a production of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville" that contained roughly equal portions of professionalism and provincialism. It would have been unrealistic, of course, to expect an operatic savior to emerge so soon after the Baltimore Opera Company's liquidation. And it is entirely possible that the next Baltimore Opera Theatre production - Verdi's "Rigoletto" in March - will be much sturdier and more consistent. Continued

Photo: Bibliothèque nationale de France ; from Le Hanneton, a satirical magazine of Rossini's era. (Via Wikipedia)

William Walker Atkinson

(Wikipedia) William Walker Atkinson (December 5, 1862 – November 22, 1932) was an attorney, merchant, publisher, and author, as well as an occultist and an American pioneer of the New Thought movement. He is also known to have been the author of the pseudonymous works attributed to Theron Q. Dumont and Yogi Ramacharaka.
... William Walker Atkinson was born in Baltimore, Maryland on December 5, 1862, to William and Emma Atkinson. He began his working life as a grocer at 15 years old, probably helping his father. Continued

Negro League baseball museum proposed for Baltimore

(Baltimore Sun) Baltimore would become home to the first East Coast museum devoted to Negro League baseball teams and players, under a $4.1 million plan that has been approved by the Dixon administration. The plan calls for redeveloping Pennsylvania Avenue's historic Sphinx Club and adjacent properties with a sports-themed museum, entertainment and dining complex designed to draw tourists and help rejuvenate the corridor. Continued