Dr. Spaulding

No, I didn’t see Sarah Palin. But I did take a few photographs I liked:

I biked over to Little Italy Monday to catch one of the stops along William Donald Schaefer’s last tour of Baltimore. Here are a few of my favorite shots. Click to enlarge. Former Mayor Thomas J. D’Alesandro III holding one of the many African violets residents presented to the mayor. Schaefer aide Lainy LeBow-Sachs receiving [...]

I’ve been collecting links this week of journalists’ memories of working with Mayor Schaefer. Enjoy: Schaefer: Politics as performance art, by Dan Rodricks Remembering Schaefer, by David Ettlin David Simon on Schaefer: Always Real, on WYPR’s Maryland Morning Michael Olesker remembers Don Schaefer “He Kept the Town Alive” by Michael Olesker “My tormentor, my nemesis, [...]

MCOM 407 students Chris Paul, Lauren Slavin and Cari Crabtree interviewing the Ryan O’Doherty, the spokesman for Stephanie Rawlings-Blake. Not pictured is Mike Huber, who had headed to the transportation office for a one-on-one interview. They attended the Board of Estimates meeting Wednesday morning with the hopes of interviewing Ryan O’Doherty, director of the Mayor’s [...]

When Dr. Haller loaned me Mockingbird last Friday, I started it immediately after getting home from work. It was so engrossing that I spent the whole weekend with it, finishing at about 4 a.m. Monday morning. Now I’m feeling the same pull again after reading the prologue to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It’s [...]

A Baltimore tradition may be coming to an end. For 60 years, a mysterious man has appeared at the grave of Edgar Allen Poe shortly after midnight on his birthday leaving three red roses and a bottle of cognac at the tombstone. But the famed Poe Toaster didn’t show this year. Or last. And some [...]

Isabel Wilkerson, the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, will be speaking at the downtown branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library Jan. 12 at 7 p.m. From the Library’s website: In The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson chronicles the decades-long migration of African Americans from the South to the North [...]

Mencken quaffs a legal beer just after the end of Prohibition at a bar on Saratoga Street. Happy birthday to Baltimore newspaperman Henry Louis Mencken (Sept. 12, 1880 – Jan. 29, 1956) who said his early career as a reporter was “the maddest, gladdest, damndest existence ever enjoyed by mortal youth.” Sunday marks the 130th [...]

Don’t just interview the guy who sees the sign. Find the guy who sits on top of it.

When I started Michael Olesker’s The Colts’ Baltimore, I wrote here that these were the stories my uncles would have told me if they’d grown up in Baltimore. But this book isn’t only about Baltimore’s devoted Colts fans. Olesker also interviews members of the team who won the greatest football game ever played: the 1958 [...]