Firing probe starts calmly; let's see if that lasts

August 23, 2005

Annapolis - Del. Adrienne Jones, lugging a bulging briefcase, heads for the door with a guy trying to cut her off. She won't make it, not with that briefcase slowing her down. She's trying to vacate the premises after yesterday's first session of the Special Committee on State Employee Rights and Protections. They're the legislators trying to find whether the Ehrlich administration has been taking away people's state jobs just because they have the wrong political leanings.

Recent columns

• Jim Parker was the lineman next door

  July 22, 2005

  JIM PARKER was one of our great storytellers. Some of the stories were true, and some were embellished for comic effect. Buddy Young used to say, "Parker'll call you up at 2 in the morning, just to make up a story." But here's one that's true: Parker, the man who helped keep John Unitas on his feet for 11 years and opened the holes Lenny Moore scooted through, goes to his grave tomorrow, signaling once more the closing of a long-ago era still remembered with infinite warmth and affection.

• Museum puts faces, names to struggle for justice

  June 28, 2005

  REGINA Wright Bruce arrives from a distance of 42 years. She wears a smile of spiritual wonder. She stands in this throng of delighted people at the grand opening of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, and her voice carries through the place like an anthem.

• Deep Throat saga reminds us of need to go with info's flow

  June 3, 2005

  THE uncovering of the world's most famous anonymous source, Deep Throat, sends me into old files I haven't looked at in 30 years. There's Frank Pelz and there's Paul Chester, and there's Turk Scott, too. They were not Richard Nixon, and I would not pretend to be Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein. But the files, on old copy paper now frayed around the edges, reminds me how far we have come in newspapers, and how much of it seems frightening.

• Md. politics: 'Abuse of power' meets 'whining'

  May 19, 2005

  There they were, on stage yesterday at that gentle springtime ritual called the Flower Mart, gritting their teeth for the assembled crowd and pretending they feel a rose petal's ounce of civility for each other: the mayor of Baltimore, Martin O'Malley, and the first lady of Maryland, Kendel Ehrlich, separated only by that thin layer of human diplomacy and tact named William Donald Schaefer. Schaefer, wearing a battered railroad engineer's cap and sticking his tongue out for the cameras, is now the calm one out there. Oh, Lord.

• Mfume turns to face his chief foes: those memos

  May 10, 2005

  KWEISI MFUME no longer runs for the U.S. Senate against Benjamin Cardin. For the moment, Mfume runs against Mfume. Internal memos have surfaced from his years as executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, alleging sexual harassment and favoritism. This is unsettling news for the nation's oldest civil rights organization, and it is potentially murderous for a political campaign.

• E-mails show Steffen not 'irrelevant,' 'mid-level'

  March 14, 2005

  IN THE continuing saga of Official State Dirtball Joseph Steffen, a new name enters the mix: Kendel S. Ehrlich. It turns out, the day before Steffen was to be outed for spreading filth about Mayor Martin O'Malley, he turned to the first lady of Maryland for a shoulder to cry on. Relax, Kendel Ehrlich told Steffen, we need you. The next day, Steffen was shoved offstage. As Shakespeare didn't quite say: Out, out, damned Dirtball.

• The voice at the heart of the Orioles, Colts

  March 7, 2005

  His was the Voice of Summer. Across five decades of Baltimore Orioles baseball, those familiar tones arrived in bedrooms and barrooms, in kitchens and in cars strung out along dark lonesome roads. The athletes came and went with the years, as athletes do, but Chuck Thompson held things together. He brought us the ballgames of summer, and these helped turn us into a community.

• 'Dirty tricks' allegations dot Ehrlich's past

  February 11, 2005

  ON THE DAY Official State Dirtball Joseph Steffen admitted spreading stories to humiliate Mayor Martin O'Malley and his family, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. appeared on WBAL-TV news, where he was asked by reporter Dave Collins, "Have you known about this rumor?"

• Writing off people as hopeless is unfair, as Mfume's life shows

  December 3, 2004

  KWEISI MFUME arrived at the NAACP headquarters nine years ago as Benjamin Chavis made for the door, hoping nobody noticed the shadow of scandal and unpaid bills trailing him. The whole country noticed. But Chavis, the ousted president, wouldn't answer questions about the $3.2 million in debt he left behind. He and some board members had to get away, he said that final morning, and so they did -- in chauffeur-driven cars waiting outside. It was the only case in history of driving to the poorhouse in a fleet of luxury limousines.

• Ehrlich looks good on TV, not on record

  November 16, 2004

  BRAVELY DEFYING all risk of severe autumnal chafing, I emerged from the house last weekend to do my own yardwork and, as a Maryland taxpayer and voter, I resent it deeply. Where was the governor of Maryland, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.? Apparently, he had more important things to do. Raking some other citizen's yard, maybe, or cleaning some voter's bathroom. It says so in the TV commercials. It's all Robert Ehrlich all the time now, brought to you by. ...

• Ravens star's legal trouble draws liberal amount of bias

  October 5, 2004

  ON THE ISSUE of crime and punishment, everyone I know around Baltimore, street cops included, now becomes miraculously liberal. Jamal Lewis goes to cut himself a deal, and all those who previously cried for harsh mandatory sentencing laws on narcotics now ask plaintively, "Can't this wait until the off-season?"

• Hearing today may shed light on how our schools derailed

  August 3, 2004

  THE SON WAS angry much of the time, and is angry still. But the anger has a different target now. The son went to public school and the father went away on the railroad, and this was supposed to change the whole country. But the son stands there in the old Camden Yards train station and remembers his father's struggle, while a few blocks away, at the federal courthouse, school officials prepare to defend themselves today, and to explain all of the lost years.

• True showman Reagan gave nation what it wanted to see

  June 8, 2004

  ON THE DAY of his first presidential inauguration, Ronald Reagan invited the whole country into his new White House digs, in a way we had never gone there before. We were accustomed to Jimmy Carter, in his cardigan sweaters, fretting gloomily over America's malaise during our long national winter. Now we had Reagan all dressed up like New Year's Eve, lifting a glass of champagne and inviting everybody to drink along with him.

• Grief for three slain children brings strangers together

  June 4, 2004

  THE TWO of them climbed aboard the No. 7 bus from Lombard and Broadway, in Fells Point, and they rode all the way out to upper Park Heights Avenue in Northwest Baltimore, where the big crowd filled the street to comfort itself and remember three children lost at the edge of a blade. And for a moment, in this city grown numb to wholesale murder, they helped turn a killing field into a holy place.

• Ehrlich comments made at expense of others

  May 14, 2004

  OUTSIDE Pimlico Race Course yesterday, there was Michael Steele, the lieutenant governor of Maryland. He was talking with a couple of horse breeders, Yu Wang and Richard Wang. This looked dangerous, and possibly un-American, as perceived by Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. The Wang brothers are Chinese. Steele is an African-American.

• State should answer siren call of slots, taxes

  March 26, 2004

  THE CREDIT card companies are making eyes at me again. Bank One whispers seductive interest rates in my ear. Wachovia Securities offers to show me the world. Union Plus shows up, flowers in hand, to make its own sweet pitch. Their mailings have all arrived this week. Around my house, we have a name for three credit card offers in one week. We call it a Slow Week.

• Schools loan doesn't solve problems of city's children

  March 19, 2004

  IHOPE nobody is doing cartwheels over the city's financial bailout of its schools. For all the angst of the last few months, money's the easy part of education. Stand outside school headquarters sometime and look straight across North Avenue. The block's a once-elegant lady who has had most of her teeth knocked out.

• Bond ratings, money aside, schools mess gets personal

  March 16, 2004

  NOW WE get personal on the schools. You start with a couple of ticked-off City Council members, Robert Curran and Keiffer Mitchell, and you go to Mayor Martin O'Malley turning his back on the governor, and you put aside for one moment all talk of multimillion-dollar bailouts and trembling bond ratings, because now it comes down to something as simple as the perceived human kiss-off.

• Norris' life of privilege ends with plea in court

  March 9, 2004

  THE WORLD of privilege is different from yours and mine. It's a world where public servants commit fraud and consider it a professional perk, and the corporate execs make big money and think it's never enough. Edward T. Norris imagined he had a place in such a world. Yesterday, he was shoved out the back door.

• Gay couples should have opportunity to marry

  March 2, 2004

  ELEVEN YEARS ago, preparing to march down the wedding aisle (for a second time), I bumped into my friend Patrick, who has never in his near half-century on earth enjoyed the marital option.

• Good intent not enough to save city schools

  February 27, 2004

  IN THEIR endless hour of humiliation, give the deep thinkers in the Baltimore schools this much: Their road to ruin was sometimes paved with noble intentions. They knew how children had been cheated, first one way and then another, and they tried to overcompensate. The only thing they lacked was the ability to count.

• Courtside at the crisis in Baltimore's public school system

  February 20, 2004

  THE VOICE ON the radio said the temperature was 38 degrees. The shadows were falling on East 20th Street, directly behind the Baltimore school headquarters on North Avenue, and these kids in the neighborhood schoolyard were defying every lurking pneumococcus in the frigid, fading daylight.

• Blame game skips over victims of school fiasco

  February 17, 2004

  THE BLAMING started with Kevin A. Slayton, who came in from the cold on North Avenue yesterday morning wearing a bow tie and a take-no-prisoners attitude, and announced he would like six members of the Baltimore school board to be shot at dawn on Good Morning America. At the very least.

• Governor's state address rings empty

  January 30, 2004

  RUNNING time for Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s State of the State speech yesterday was 30 minutes. Walking-out time was about 15. The 30 minutes included introductions of friends, scattered polite applause, attempts at humor. Example of humor: The weekly Board of Public Works meetings, deprived of the legendary Glendening-Schaefer scraps, are "no longer the No. 1-rated TV show," the governor declared. More wit has gone into Chamber of Commerce speeches, and more effort, too.

• Through it all, Norris still manages to smile

  December 12, 2003

  IN HIS hour of public humiliation, Edward T. Norris emerged from the U.S. District Courthouse yesterday afternoon smiling confidently. This was considered quite remarkable for a man formally accused of stealing money for hotel rooms, clothing, cologne and Victoria's Secret negligees for "romantic encounters" with a series of women who were not his wife. In police circles, such allegations give an entirely new meaning to the term "undercover operation."

• Want to make a federal case out of free passes to arena?

  November 7, 2003

  WHEN THE subpoena from the U.S. attorney's office arrived this week, City Councilwoman Lois Garey put the thing aside without opening it. She wanted to play with her grandchildren instead. This is known as an act of mental health.

• Among wreckage, families find reason to be thankful

  September 23, 2003

  ON BAY DRIVE in Bowleys Quarters, everybody's worldly possessions are now scattered around everybody else's yards: furniture and toys and front porches, and the sides of houses that were ripped away last week as whitecaps bullied their way onto land and rushed between homes.

• Even without slots, gambling is fair game at the state fair

  September 2, 2003

  IN THE MORNING, Millie Slechta said no for the third time. No, no, and no again. The people in charge at Aberdeen Middle School called her on the telephone, and they asked if she would please come in to teach English and science, but Millie said she had other important plans.

• Candidate leaves race to face a new challenge

  July 8, 2003

  TWO MONTHS BEFORE primary election day, the city of Baltimore has already suffered its first political loss. The legendary Eugene "Reds" Hubbe, who filed to run for a City Council seat, has dropped out. The biggest loss for everybody is the sound of laughter.

• Colts legend honors memory of his son by helping others

  April 22, 2003

  DAD, I think it's gonna be all right," Leslie Moore told his father, as he looked up from his hospital bed that winter evening.

• Ehrlich took slots plan and fumbled it for a loss

  April 8, 2003

  TO KEEP himself from looking like a complete legislative loser, Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. will now do what he thinks he does best. He will hit the road and talk directly to voters. He will exhibit his schoolboy charm. He will make himself available to the radio talk-show guys who already think he's swell. He will attempt to rewrite the story of the past 90 days for people who don't know the history of the last 20 minutes.

• For Clarence Mitchell IV, a cold shoulder from GOP

  February 27, 2003

  AND SO Clarence Mitchell IV trudges through the snow to the unemployment line. Annapolis insiders say he was shoved out of the $92,000-a-year job Gov. Robert Ehrlich handed him as a political payoff, though Housing Secretary Victor Hoskins diplomatically says no, Mitchell quit. In either case, the former state senator is now out of a job, out of favor, and out of participation in all existing political parties.

• We shovelers should be wary of back-breaking snow work

  February 20, 2003

  YESTERDAY morning, having spent the previous two days shoveling the alley in which my car was parked and awakening a chorus of muscles previously asleep since the first Reagan administration, I did what so many brave and foolhardy people of my generation were doing: I telephoned my chiropractor and asked for diplomatic asylum from the snow.

• Along with a ton of snow, storm brings a brief respite

  February 18, 2003

  AS THE STATE copes with its worst snowfall since 1922, a moment comes to mind from the years when I did a little work at one of our local television stations, where the slightest precipitation could lead to hours of viewers transfixed by their sets and, presumably, higher ratings if the warnings of disaster ahead were sold dramatically enough.

• Wind beneath his right wing may steer our new governor

  January 16, 2003

  SAY THIS for yesterday's inauguration of Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. as governor of Maryland: At least nobody sang, "You are the wind beneath my wings."

• Thompson brought listeners to the ballpark

  December 12, 2002

  WHEN IT WAS Chuck Thompson's time to say a few words, Fred Manfra led him to the microphone and then Chuck's wife, Betty, and his son, Craig, were there to guide him away. Chuck doesn't see too well now. It is one of the cruel ironies of our time. For so many years, his eyes supplied the vision for a whole community.

• Thompson brought listeners to the ballpark

  December 12, 2002

  WHEN IT WAS Chuck Thompson's time to say a few words, Fred Manfra led him to the microphone and then Chuck's wife, Betty, and his son, Craig, were there to guide him away. Chuck doesn't see too well now. It is one of the cruel ironies of our time. For so many years, his eyes supplied the vision for a whole community.

• In wake of sniper, Baltimore provides a sense of security

  October 22, 2002

  ON GREENMOUNT Avenue, where the neighborhood starts to get a little rough, Dr. Pallavi Kumar pulls into a gas station. She looks around and sees several guys who are nobody's definition of choirboys. She gets out of her car. As she pumps gas into her tank, she feels an odd sense of security she no longer feels at home.

• In Essex, ambivalence about Townsend campaign

  September 1, 2002

  IN THE FIRST flush of a clamorous evening, at the heart of this crowd filling the back room at Mac's Bar on Thursday night on Eastern Avenue in Essex, Shirley Rukowski, 83 years old, sits herself down next to William Donald Schaefer and commences to talk politics.

• Pimlico dream is worlds away from reality

  August 8, 2002

  IF THEY HAD this much action inside Pimlico Race Course, the place would be a gold mine. Instead, while Magna Entertainment Corp. announces multimillion-dollar plans for Old Hilltop that sound like castles in the air, out here in the shadows of the track, they talk of raising maybe $12 for a slight touch of narcotics.

• Ehrlich, Steele have some explaining to do

  July 11, 2002

  ROBERT EHRLICH and Michael Steele aim to be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid for the working-class set. Riding across the state's political prairie, they wish to be perceived as products of their humble origins trying to swipe an election from the spoiled little rich girl, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

• For Grasmick, decision boiled down to kids

  June 20, 2002

  IN THE DARK hours of Monday morning, the answer came to Nancy Grasmick, and all of the agonizing was done. She recalled all those long dreary nights when she haunted the legislative back rooms at the State House. She remembered Parris Glendening trying to tell her how to run the state's schools over the past eight years. She realized something. She didn't want to be like one of those people.

• Grasmick sees opportunity for education in Ehrlich run

  June 11, 2002

  NANCY GRASMICK is Our Lady of the Public Schools, the saintly state superintendent overseeing thousands of classrooms of the young and the academically restless. Now -- maybe -- she will take on a task nearly as daunting: trying to get Robert Ehrlich elected governor of Maryland.

• 'All Baltimore' Dixon - and all Baltimore - await mayor's decision

  May 19, 2002

  SINCE NONE of us can gaze into the complex mind of Mayor Martin O'Malley, we look for little clues. Will he take a shot at governor, or will he not? Sheila Dixon, sitting at O'Malley's right hand, last week seemed to offer a peek into her future at City Hall. Or maybe she was just daydreaming a little in public.

• Debate points out delusions over crime and punishment

  May 14, 2002

  AND SO Wesley Eugene Baker, as repugnant a human being as ever murdered a woman in front of her grandchildren, gets a new (if brief) lease on life. And the family of poor Jane Tyson, shot to death 11 years ago outside Westview Mall, is left to feel pushed aside like some insignificant afterthought.

• Scandal about sins of men, not their beliefs

  March 28, 2002

  IN MY YOUTH, my parents shipped me off to Hebrew school three times a week. They wanted me to discover faith and tradition, and some notion of God. In my restlessness, I would gaze outside the windows of the Liberty Jewish Center and discover what looked like Greater America.

• College Park needs lesson from N.Y. on community

  September 27, 2001

  SOMEWHERE IN another lifetime, my friend Ron Matz, the television newsman, attended his first class on his very first morning as a freshman at the University of Maryland's College Park campus. The course was held in an auditorium. There were roughly 500 kids in the room when Matz arrived.

• Selling the mall generation on the likelihood of war

  September 23, 2001

  THE PEARL Harbor generation had its famous "rendezvous with destiny." This generation had its famous rendezvous at the shopping mall. The Vietnam generation was blindsided by a war that was never exactly declared. This generation, blindsided by terrorists, has had war thrust in its face - first by its foes, and then by its leaders.

• Comfort amid misery: 'They all just want to help'

  September 13, 2001

  DEEP INTO the evening of its catastrophe, the American quilt spread itself comfortingly across Red Cross headquarters at 4700 Mount Hope Drive in the Seton Business Park section of Northwest Baltimore, and it warmed the whole place.

• Fire, flood and gridlock: mayor's reputation at stake

  July 22, 2001

  IN THE LEXICON of all big-city mayors, a cautionary tale attaches to a name: John V. Lindsay. He was the mayor of New York who couldn't take care of the basics. Handsome as a movie star, articulate as a college professor, he caused people to dream of a municipal Camelot. But the chump couldn't get the streets shoveled when it snowed.

• Woman who wove safety net for others falls in its absence

  February 18, 2001

  IT ISN'T SUPPOSED to happen this way. Vivianne Haxel was always looking out for others -- for battered women and their children, for those who had no place to go in a difficult season. Now she's alone in Edgewood, with multiple sclerosis and no one around, and her plea for assistance lost somewhere in the maze of the Social Security Administration.

• Billions for 'Star Wars,' but little for our defense

  February 15, 2001

  ON THE MORNING my car was stolen right out of my back yard, I naturally pointed the finger at George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan before him. Bush and Reagan are not specifically police suspects, as they were nowhere near my neighborhood at the time. But, in the world of criminals and addicts, they have a name of their own: enablers.

• Project's fall clears blight, offers chance to get it right

  February 13, 2001

  FROM LOMBARD Street, along the remains of the block once known as Corned Beef Row, you could see all the way to Little Italy yesterday.

• Chuck Thompson's voice resonates from his book

  September 24, 1996

  Chuck Thompson arrived behind a microphone back in that distant, primordial time when big league baseball players left their gloves on the field between innings and scoreboards were still operated manually. He remembers broadcasting one game "by peeking through an aperture in the right field scoreboard where they hung the scores" and another from ground level only "10 or 15 feet behind home plate."

• Chuck Thompson's voice resonates from his book

  September 24, 1996

  Chuck Thompson arrived behind a microphone back in that distant, primordial time when big league baseball players left their gloves on the field between innings and scoreboards were still operated manually. He remembers broadcasting one game "by peeking through an aperture in the right field scoreboard where they hung the scores" and another from ground level only "10 or 15 feet behind home plate."

• The Earl of Baltimore becomes king for a day

  August 5, 1996

  Earl Weaver stood there for just an instant before he felt like he was home.

• Weaver's passion a gift to game, hall

  August 4, 1996

  As Earl Weaver sat in the bar of the Otesaga Hotel, nursing a cold drink and a cigarette and every raw anxiety in his considerable repertoire, this village of 2,400 souls and a single traffic light seemed like any other place where 20,000 tourists suddenly arrive, where the baseball Hall of Fame flings open its doors and where former major league stars are agreeable to signing an autograph the very minute you fork over dollars for the privilege.

• Passion was Weaver's greatest gift

  March 7, 1996

  At the hot molten core of Earl Weaver was passion, which was his greatest gift to baseball in Baltimore. Ballgames were won by Eddie Murray crushing one into the cheap seats or Jim Palmer mowing them down from the top of his little hill. But ballgames mean nothing if the heart isn't involved.

• Chuck Thompson put the audio into boys' dreams

  February 11, 1993

  One time, gotta be 30 years ago, I drive past Conlon Field in Northwest Baltimore, around the corner from the clubhouse at the Forest Park Golf Course.

• Chuck Thompson put the audio into boys' dreams

  February 11, 1993

  One time, gotta be 30 years ago, I drive past Conlon Field in Northwest Baltimore, around the corner from the clubhouse at the Forest Park Golf Course.