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Mister Baltimore Goes Down the Ocean
As the grade school teachers used to say: What did you do on your summer vacation?
Autumn is here and I’m just now getting around to writing about the Labor Day weekend I spent at the beach after Mr. Baltimore – the High Roller of Highlandtown and King of the Body Surf – invited me to spend time with him in Ocean City.
[If it’s difficult to conjure summertime thoughts of the beach in October, consider that Chesapeake Bay blue crabs are more plentiful now than any time in the past five months. The other day, I picked up a bushel of good-sized males and females from the Lady Frances crab house just outside of the city on Back River Neck Road for $70, enough to treat a basement full of friends – including composer Lorraine Whittlesey and writer Mark Kram, Jr. - to a feast that would have cost twice as much in July.]
And the weather these days in anticipation of the World Series – Go Anybody but the Yankees! - is more pleasant than it was for much of the Summer of 2003, when there were five days of rain for every ray of sunshine.
When the end of August rolled around, Mr. Baltimore sprung for a room at the Plim Plaza on the Boardwalk and we sat in rockers on the porch like a couple of old-timers, stuffing ourselves with caramel popcorn and telling lies of our teenage summers when who should go strolling by in flip-flops and a pair of Washington Bullets basketball shorts?
Leo Donohoe!
Friend of the little man, hero to thousands, brother of the wild goose!
And one heck of a good-looking Irishman.
Donohoe, now closing in on a half-century of slurping the world’s oyster , is a true son of Washington, D.C. who grew up vacationing in Rehoboth Beach at the same time me and Mr. Baltimore were splashing around some 15 miles south in Ocean City.
 | | Donohoe over the past 20 years: Less hair, more money. |
The years have been good to Leo, national sales manager for WTOP Radio and a good-hearted rock-and-roller who befriended me and Mr. B back in the Marble Bar days of the Slickee Boys.
The friendship became permanent in the Summer of 1983 when I was covering Ocean City for the Baltimore Sun, Mr. B was between ships, having just returned from a voyage on the Overseas Alice, and Leo was selling advertising for a local station at the beach.
The summer was as debauched as my editors back on Calvert Street suspected. The party never stopped and all Leo had to do was sign his name at various gin joints to keep the beer and crab cakes coming.
We lived off of currency that never ran out: Leo trading air as I traded ink. Together, we had the time of our lives.
But while Mr. Baltimore was drinking himself stupid and passing out on the beach and I was working on an ill-fated basketball novel called “Hoops by the Sea,” Leo Donohoe had his thinking cap on.
I spent long afternoons taking oral history from a recluse who lived in a derelict ice cream truck – the immortal Watterson “Mack” Miller – and Mr. Baltimore spent hundreds of dollars at the Purple Moose while Leo went hunting for gold.
 | | Alvarez on beach poster |
Lo and behold, he bought five acres in rural Delaware, about four miles inland from Bethany Beach, five acres of an old chicken farm just minutes from the beach for $27,000.
His father said “Do it!” and Leo secured an old-fashioned signature loan from Baltimore Trust in Bethany, getting the place for a song.
“There was nothing in it but a toilet and a sink,” said Leo. “The neighbors told me where some abandoned farm houses were and that’s where I got the cabinets and a stove.”
Some 20 years later, Leo has sub-divided the property into five lots along a lane he has named in honor of his family. Hand-built by chicken farmers aptly named Cooper, the old cottage will soon give way to a modern, 3-bedroom, 2,000 square foot home with a two-car garage.
And so 2003 was the last summer for Leo’s Love Lair – a rock and roll campground for his huge constellation of friends and extended family, the place where we had a blues barbecue with an endless string of chicken chorizo, live music by Tom Larsen and more than 200 guests.
It was as close as a bunch of Elmore James fans ever got to the Mississippi Delta.
Mr. Baltimore was as thrilled as I was to see Leo strolling down the boards last month and we jumped up to call out to one of the few Washingtonians with enough soul to appreciate our beloved Mobtown.
 | | Old postcard from Ocean City |
We stood around makng pleasantries when out of nowhere, Mr. B suggests we take a ride over to Frontier Town, where none of us had been for decades. The whole way over and the whole way back, Leo did what he does best: talk.
“To me,” said Donohoe as we watched an Old West gunfight in the West Ocean City theme park. “Baltimore is more neighborhood oriented than D.C., it’s more authentic.”
“Both city's have every kind of ethnic group, but in Baltimore they actually live in the same area. And Baltimore feels friendlier to me. It’s citizens have pride in their city and I envy this. Mark Noone and I are the only ones we know that have pride in D.C.
[For more information on Slickee Boy emeritus Noone – who Leo the Good Catholic claims is more sought-after for private audiences than the man in Rome – see last month’s column: “Mr. Baltimore Goes to the Ballgame.”]
“Baltimore has great food, and more of a party attitude than Washington,” continued Leo. “Baltimore also has more nuts than D.C. I’m not sure why.”
Indeed, there are exponentially more weird cookies, crazy cats and people who dress like Queen Elizabeth in the Crown Jewel of the Patapsco than any burg in these United States. Not even Charles Kuralt could figure it out. Leo thinks its because of the long-standing weakness locals have for National Bohemian beer but Boh hasn’t been brewed in the Land of Pleasant Living since Jimmy Carter was president.
“Believe me, I’ve been around,” said Leo as the Frontier Town chugged past a pen full of goats. “But I’ve never met stranger people anywhere than I have in Baltimore.”
While strolling the dusty streets, we saw can-can girls making money for college, a shoot-out in front of the Golden Nugget saloon with the losers falling dead off the back of buckboard wagons and heard the Rawhide theme coming through the forest.
Mr. Baltimore remembered that when he was an adolescent malcontent, his family spent a week at Frontier Town in a camper but all he and his mom wanted to do was sit inside and wash down supermarket doughnuts with chocolate milk.
His father wanted to go out and explore, feel the breeze and talk to men casting fishing lines. To take it easy and walk around with no particular place to go. To live.
But the poor man couldn’t rouse any enthusiasm from his wife and kids and so – in a fit of disgust – packed everything and everyone up and drove straight home to Baltimore without speaking a word the whole way.
“Now that’s a real American vacation,” said Mr. B, pinning a tin “Deputy Sheriff” badge to his Cheap Trick t-shirt.
One of Baltimore’s more passionate eccentrics is a woman Mr. Baltimore calls Mason-Dixon Molly.
When out-of-town guests want crab cakes, Molly takes them to the Sip & Bite on Boston Street. If they want to see a ship, she drives to the end of Clinton Street to show them the John W. Brown Liberty Ship.
Molly joined us at the basement crab feast on Macon Street with her friend Jenny Pond from Arizona. Pond, a blonde, Wallace Stegner outdoors type, discovered Baltimore through the “Homicide” TV show. Down in the basement, Molly told stories of her own kiddie vacations in Ocean City and Frontier Town.
“Back in the Sixties, Ocean City was more of a quaint, little beach town than the big resort it is now,” she said. “There were always lots of people on the beach but it never seemed crowded. Instead of staying at a motel, Mom would rent a room at one of the boarding houses a few blocks from the boardwalk and a lot of times we just went down for the day.
“One time Dad went along with us and we stopped at Frontier Town. I was probably about 5-years-old. One building had a crooked floor that rolled and made us dizzy. There were also real Indians walking around and when I saw them, I was terrified and climbed up Dad's legs and hung on for dear life.
“The last stop before leaving was the train ride. As we rode through a wooded area on the open train, a group of masked horsemen stopped us and yelled "HANDS UP IN THE AIR!" My hands went up fast and the men talked real gruff and eventually let the train go on its way. I was so glad to get out of there and we never went to Frontier Town again.”
- o -
A Mr. Baltimore Extra Point
Thom Loverro is a sportswriter for the ages, the kind that used to fill newsrooms with cigar smoke and foul witticisms before big-city papers became sterile boxes; the kind of self-described “hacks” I encountered when I compiled horse race results for the Baltimore Sun back in the late 1970s, when the likes of Jimmy Jackson and Lou Hatter and Cameron C. Snyder filed tough prose on deadline and played poker between editions.
I met Loverro in 1984 when he joined The Sun and enjoyed his generous spirit for almost a decade before he left in 1992 to chase sports at the wrong end of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway.
If Loverro didn’t coin the following phrase, he certainly should copyright it: “Never does a sportswriter stand so tall as when he bends to grab a plate from the free buffet table.”
Thom is a big-time author now, with the excellent Encyclopedia of Negro League Baseball to his credit and a brand new book of keen interest to me and Mr. Baltimore: a ghosted autobiography of Baltimore Colts tight-end No. 88, John Mackey.
The book is called “Blazing Trails,” and was published by Triumph Books.
 | | In his 10-year pro career, Mackey was a Pro Bowler five times. |
When Mr. Baltimore found out I knew a guy who’d written a book on one of his old blue and white horseshoe heroes from 33rd Street, he asked me to ask Loverro a simple question: What made Mackey so tough?
Loverro swiveled on a padded bar stool at the Polish National Alliance on Eastern Avenue just off of Broadway and said: “Mackey was the first tight end to combine size and speed. He was 6-foot-2 and weighed 225 pounds, but ran like a running back. He averaged 15.8 yard per catch over his career, an unheard of amount for a tight end, and when he got the ball, he tried to punish people who tried to tackle him.”
Of particular joy to Mr. Baltimore and men our father’s age is Mackey’s devotion to Baltimore, the only town with the right to call an NFL team the Colts.
“When Mackey was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame, part of the ceremony is that the team he played on gives him his ring at a halftime event of a home game,” said Loverro. “That would have meant the Indianapolis Colts, but he refused.
“Instead, when the Dolphins played an exhibition at Memorial Stadium, Mackey chose to have it done there, in front of Baltimore fans, with his old coach, Don Shula, making the presentation.”
That, said Mr. Baltimore, is class.
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Comments from users:
| Helen Wilhelm | Shrewsbury, Pa | | braunie AT webtv DOT net | |
Since I am well acquainted with Mason Dixon Molly, I can vouch that she is the world's biggest booster of anything Baltimore. Walking tours, Oriole ballgames, water taxis, museums, anything Fells Point related makes her an unequaled advocate of Baltimore City and their authors and movie makers. Thank you, Rafael, for including her childhood memories in your article and your gracious invitation to your home several weeks ago
Her Mom |
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Other Stories by Rafael Alvarez
Mister Baltimore Goes to the Movies
Mr. Baltimore's Night on the Town
A Hometown Boy Celebrates The Less-Traveled Baltimore
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