Frank Lidinsky and wall of 45s. Photos by Caryn Coyle.

John Lennon’s autograph with the words, “Your friendly compére,” is rare. Add the autographs of George, Paul and Ringo on the same slip of paper — framed and authenticated by Frazer’s of London – and you have a valuable piece of Beatlemania. It hangs on a wall in Frank Lidinsky’s house with thousands of Beatle items.

“Collectors like to ‘one up’ each other,” said Lidinsky. “I can usually trump them with my ticket stub from the Beatles first appearance in Baltimore on September 13, 1964.”

Lidinsky’s fascination with the Beatles began when he was a student in the eighth grade at St. Wenceslaus School in East Baltimore. “Their music was so different than anything else on the radio.

The first Beatles magazine, which sold for 15 cents.

The first song I heard was ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand,’ and it went right to the top of the charts, knocking off ‘There! I’ve Said It Again,’ a ballad by Bobby Vinton,” said Lidinsky.

Sitting on an aluminum folding chair of cornflower blue in the center of his Beatles room, Lidinsky played “Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand,” the Beatles recording of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in German. His twenty by twelve foot room has three lighted display cases, two book shelves and walls covered with 45′s, their sleeves, album covers, publicity shots, posters and the prized autographs with the infamous quote from Lennon.

Lidinsky said, “Everything is chronologically ordered and organized by me.” Though, he added, he did not know how many items he had collected.

The first authorized biography, The Beatles, by Hunter Davies, McGraw Hill, 1968, is one of many on the bookshelf. In a dark wooden hutch are miniature Beatles instruments, including one of Ringo’s drum set with the signature “Beatles” logo, and baby clothes that carry John Lennon’s name.

There is a check — never cashed for $.75 — on display from Apple Records. It is a refund for the dues Lidinsky paid as a member of the Beatles’ fan club. The check was sent to him when the Beatles disbanded in 1972. “I was a member of the fan club from its inception in 1964 until they no longer performed as a group and the fan club was dissolved,” he said.

Display case of Beatles artifacts.

In one of his display cases is a black and white photo of the crowd entering the Civic Center in 1964 and Lidinsky’s ticket stub. Neither of the Beatles’ shows that day was sold out, he explained. “There were probably ten thousand at each show, but you could still walk up to the Civic Center and buy a ticket. It was the most exciting day to be in Baltimore.” At the Civic Center, Lidinsky recalled, “I was outnumbered by screaming girls, ten to one.”

Lidinsky maintains that he never lost interest in the Beatles, “By the mid seventies, most guys were into The Who, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones. I always remained loyal to the Beatles.”

Autographs of all four Beatles.

Word spread about Lidinsky’s collection and young women who had outgrown the Beatles, offered their memorabilia to him. “I’ve been doing this for almost fifty years,” he said, holding the first magazine he purchased for 15 cents at a drug store before he saw the Beatles perform at the Civic Center.

Lidinsky had his photo taken on Abbey Road when he visited Britain in1972. “The people at Apple Records were very nice,” he said. “They were blasé about the Beatles, though. Their fascination was with Elvis!”

He invites “believers,” not tourists to see his collection and listen to the Beatles. Along with “I Want To Hold Your Hand” in German and English, Lidinsky played “The Magical Mystery Tour” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” He reported that a member of the British House of Commons had come to visit. But not John, Paul, George or Ringo.

“I would love to show this to Paul or Ringo,” Lidinsky said. On the wall leading to the memorabilia room are collages of the newspaper coverage on the day George Harrison died. There is also a framed headline from The Baltimore Evening Sun: “Ex-Beatle Lennon Murdered in New York.”

“There is a Beatles museum in Liverpool,” Lidinsky said, sitting in a room that could possibly rival what is on display in Britain. “But none that I know of in the U.S.”

Linda and Adrian Citroni

“Pat died of internal injuries sustained in the collision,” his father said. “He wore his helmet, protective gear, everything. He was only going 22 miles per hour.”

It was the discovery of the five hundred pocket sized copies of the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution that Pat’s dad found in the trunk of his car that pulled him through his grief.

“The first year was awful. Holidays. Vacations. Pat — the energy force of our family — was gone,” said Linda Citroni, Pat’s stepmother, who has been married to his dad for fourteen years. “If there was one phrase that described Pat, it was “his love of life.”

His dad added, “Pat and I worked together. We shared a ten foot by ten foot office and we called ourselves the ‘Mortgage Bikers’ because we worked in the mortgage business and we rode our motorcycles everywhere, together.”

Adrian Citroni knew that his son had been passionate about liberty since he first read the Declaration of Independence and Constitution in the sixth grade. “We didn’t know the extent of his passion and found out Pat had been handing out the pocket sized books to everyone he met,” his father added. “Pat believed firmly that every man and woman was created equally.”

Citroni called his son’s elementary school, the Sacred Heart School in Glyndon. He took the pocket sized books to Sacred Heart and handed one to every sixth grader. “All of the words were written to be understood by all the people, many with less than an eighth grade education,” Citroni said. “I gave out seventy to eighty of the books. The teacher told me that the kids were reading the constitution at recess!”

In the Citroni’s living room on Christmas Eve, 2010, Pat’s stepbrother, Ben Rohde, presented Pat’s dad and stepmother with a portrait he had commissioned. He announced a plan to create the Patrick J. Citroni Liberty Foundation. “I knew what I wanted to do and I got lots of help from friends who have experience with foundations,” explained Rohde. “Pat’s foundation is a non-profit and I had to set up a board of directors, file an application, develop a mission statement.” Patrick’s portrait is now prominently featured on the website Rohde established for his stepbrother.

In August, the Foundation holds its first annual golf tournament. Rohde set a goal of 70 golfers for the initial tournament, which will benefit the foundation. He signed up 72. “Eventually, I want to double that number,” he said. “The golf course [The Mountain Branch Golf Club in Joppa, Maryland] can handle 144.”

“Pat had just discovered his passion: liberty and making certain everyone he met understood it, ” Adrian Citroni said. “I want to carry it on for him.” The father of five, (seven with his stepchildren) and the grandfather of five, wants to get the pocket sized copies of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution into the hands of every sixth grader in Maryland. “Sometime, someone will be really inspired. Like Pat was.”

The Patrick J. Citroni Liberty Foundation will fund the pocket sized books, which sell for $5 individually. The initial supply of five hundred, found in Pat’s trunk, has been distributed. Adrian Citron has ordered more, with an inscription inside the front cover of every one:

“Barry Levinson told me I had to dramatize the bad parts of my life,” said Leonora “Peachy” DiPietro Dixon, the author of A Peachy Life.

Leonora "Peachy" DiPietro Dixon

“I knew he was coming into the restaurant. I had seen his name on the reservation roster,” Dixon, who works at Sabatino’s in Little Italy, explained. “I waited until he finished his dinner. There were fifteen people in his group and one of them was Chip Silverman [one of the original Diner guys].”

Dixon said she went up to Levinson, took his hand and kissed it, begging him, “Please Mr. Levinson. If you could please read what I have written, I would be so grateful.” She handed him a thick manila envelope with her manuscript in it.

“Mr. Levinson read the whole thing and told one of his people to call me. He told me that I had to dramatize the part with my husband [who raped her on their first date].” Dixon added, “I had to rewrite my book all over again.”

The success of her book “made up for much of the bad in her life,” said Gregg Wilhelm, publisher of City Lit Press, and Dixon’s A Peachy Life. “She felt lifted up for the first time when the book came out and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. No one has ever sold as many books as she did the night of her first book signing.”

The book signing was last April at Sabatino’s. “The line snaked out of the restaurant and up the street,” Wilhelm continued. “We were supposed to start at 7 and go until 9. But Peachy sat down to sign books at 6:30 and she didn’t stop until 11 p.m.”

Dixon confirmed Wilhelm’s astonishment, “He’d never seen anyone sell four hundred books in one night.” She added that she has sold three thousand books in the two and a half months since A Peachy Life was published.

“I cracked open the last case of books. There were forty books in each case and I brought ten of them,” Wilhelm stated. “I had been kicking myself before the night began because I thought I had printed too many books and I was going to lose money.”

“I kept calling Gregg and telling him I think we are going to need more books,” Dixon said. “I sent out invitations to two hundred and fifty of my friends and customers at Sabatino’s.”

Wilhelm asked her how she knew so many books would be sold. “I’ve been publishing books for twenty years,” he said. He was not anticipating the sale of more than one hundred books. “Maybe two
hundred, tops,” he added.

Dixon told Wilhelm she had sent reply cards with a notation on them for the number of books each recipient wanted. She had even put postage on the reply cards, “like a wedding invitation.”

“Rod Daniels came into Sabatino’s right before he had to do his evening newscast [on WBAL-TV at 11 p.m.],” said Wilhelm. “He bought twenty books and wanted all of them signed. I knew then. Holy crap, Peachy is right. She is going to sell four hundred books!”

Wilhelm published Dixon’s book because she had a “dramatic and compelling story.” He added, “From a publishing standpoint, Peachy was charting a course that encompasses the history of Baltimore in her own, unique way. Her courageous decision [to leave her husband] and how that shaped her life was also compelling.”

Wilhelm said that it didn’t hurt that she was part of a famous Baltimore Italian family. Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro, a popular Baltimore City Councilman from the first district was Dixon’s uncle. Dixon’s story, according to Wilhelm, shed light on parts of the family that were not well known. He added that her manuscript was like “a patchwork quilt. It needed a lot of editing.”

Publisher Gregg Wilhelm and daughter, Maddy

“I was Little Bow Peep in a school play at Our Lady of Pompei,” she reported.

On the back cover is a current photo of Dixon standing in the same spot. The rose bushes are the same ones as those in the cover photo.

Dixon wanted to write her family’s story and when a knee injury made it impossible for her to work, she wrote. She solicited help from her customers at Sabatino’s and found an editor who told her the manuscript would never be published. Others were more optimistic. One told her to get an agent, so Dixon went to a Barnes and Noble bookstore and bought a book on publishing agents.

“I sent the manuscript to twenty or so agents,” Dixon said. “The lady at the post office, Cathy, and I were on a first name basis.” Each time Dixon got her manuscript rejected, she sent it out again.

It was a customer at Sabatino’s who introduced her to Gregg Wilhelm who accepted her manuscript. The customer was Michael Olesker, longtime Baltimore Sun columnist and commentator for WJZ-TV. In the foreword to A Peachy Life, Olesker wrote that Dixon’s book is “the story of lives that revolved around family and neighborhoods that were the fixtures of Baltimore and are sometimes still its greatest strength.”

“Everything I learned about writing and publishing came from my customers at Sabatino’s,” Dixon said. The advice Levinson gave her elevated her narrative into a compelling and heart wrenching story.

Note: Peachy Dixon will again be signing copies of A Peachy Life at Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley on Saturday, Saturday, July 9 from noon until 2 p.m.

Maryann Boggio Alcaraz

“My mother is on the cover,” wrote an astonished Ray Alcaraz.

“I was floored! I couldn’t believe someone had identified the woman in our cover photo,” said Tandy who published the special edition “to explore the term ‘Hon,’ its relationship to Baltimore past, present and future and why so many feel so strongly about it.”

He added that the cover photograph on that issue — a blonde with upswept hair — is a vintage from A. Aubrey Bodine’s collection. It depicts what appears to be a fierce conversation between the blonde woman and a couple who are sitting at the table upon which the woman is leaning. Their facial expressions reveal rapt attention. “The visual showed the style of a hon – her hair – for example,” said Tandy. “Rather than a parody, like the kids at Honfest. It is a real vintage photo of a hon.”

“That was in St. Leo’s School Hall at a pizza dance,” Maryann Boggio Alcaraz said. “In the photo with me are Henrietta Lancelotta Guiliano and Michael Guiliano. They married late in life. He was a widower. They’re both dead, now.”

“The photograph tells a story in itself,” said Tandy. “The body language — the guy’s look on his face is a reaction – exudes that working class pride.” It also embodies Tandy’s vision for the special edition: to explore who were the “working class women whose memories forever call home to a past as resilient to the erosive ravages of time as the marble steps of an East Baltimore rowhouse.”

Ray Alcaraz’s mother is a Baltimorean, born in 1938 in the house on Stiles Street in Little Italy where she still resides. She does not use the local endearment, hon.

“It’s a Baltimore saying. Everybody calls everybody, hon,” Maryann Alcaraz explained. “To me, when someone asks a question and they don’t know your name, they call you, hon. But I don’t. I’ll say miss or mister.”

To Tandy, a hon is a woman with a “fierce devotion to whatever it is she believes to be right.” He added that the woman will not accept anything derogatory from anyone. “Many people think their mothers, aunts, grandmothers are hons. And someone — quite literally — saw his mother [in the Bodine photograph].”

Jennifer Bodine remembers the night in August, 1969 when the photo was taken, “It was brutally hot.” She had driven her father to St. Leo’s and remembers “standing up on a table to hold the lights” for him to shoot photographs.

Jennifer Bodine was a twenty-one year old college student when she accompanied her dad to St. Leo’s. She had brought a new boyfriend who aspired to be a photographer and wanted to meet A. Aubrey Bodine.

“My father was unpredictable,” Jennifer Bodine stated. She and the boyfriend had arrived from College Park at the Bodine’s Park Avenue home in Mount Vernon for dinner. She believes that they had not yet had dinner when her father announced that “we’ve got to go over to St. Leo’s.”

It was a Baltimore Sun assignment. Jennifer Bodine came across the St. Leo’s photo while researching her father’s collection at the Sun decades later. A. Aubrey Bodine worked for the Baltimore Sun for fifty years. He died a year after the photograph at St. Leo’s was taken.

His pictorial photographs are famous. On his website his work is described as “… documentary pictures … of the finest quality, often artistic in design and lighting effects far beyond the usual standard of newspaper work.” It is said of A. Aubrey Bodine: He did not take a picture, he made a picture.

Maryann Alcaraz remembers A. Aubrey Bodine taking photos that night, “He wasn’t always at the pizza dances, but I know he was at this one.”

Mrs. Alcaraz worked at St. Leo’s rectory. She helped out at all the fundraisers for the church: the ravioli dinners, oyster roasts and the pizza dances, “We’d sell pizzas. There’d be beer, soda, chips, pretzels, and a band. The tickets were ten dollars.”

But she cannot remember what she was saying to the Guilianos that night. She has no recollection of what was being so fiercely debated over that checkered table cloth.

Patrick Tandy

Mrs. Alcaraz recalled, “I remember the dress I wore. It was tangerine. One of my favorites. I bought it on Howard Street. My husband also liked me in that dress.”

“Baltimore still has its Hons, but today many of them live beyond the city limits,” reported Tandy in his special edition.

Not Maryann Boggio Alcaraz. The youngest of her siblings, she and her family have lived down the street from St. Leo’s Church for generations.

A graduate of Seton High School, Maryann Alcaraz met her husband, Remigio, at a Little Italy pizza place where Caesar’s Den now stands. “I would be in there with my girlfriend, Delores. We both knew the owner.”

Remigio Alcaraz, a naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in the Philippines, was in the Navy. “He walked in to get some pizza and all of a sudden, that was it,” Mrs. Alcaraz added. The Alcarazes have a son and a daughter. Ray, who discovered his mother was in the Bodine photo on the cover of HON, and Michelle. Ray graduated from Mount Saint Joseph’s High School and Michelle is an Institute of Notre Dame graduate. Both of Mrs. Alcaraz’s children are also Towson University alumni. They have given Maryann and Remigio Alcaraz seven grandchildren.

At her home on Stiles Street, Mrs. Alcaraz opened Gilbert Sandler’s The Neighborhood, The Story of Baltimore’s Little Italy, published in 1974, to point out the photographs by A. Aubrey Bodine.

The photo of the St. Leo’s pizza dance was not included in the book. But she has purchased several of Tandy’s HON issues, “Ray called me and told me I was on the cover. I was so surprised!”

“My UPS man wanted one,” she added. “He takes good care of me and I give him treats. He’ll keep my packages when I am away. I was feeding him lunch when I showed him the book [the HON issue]. He said, ‘I want one.’ And I told him if you’re good, I’ll give you one!”

It just goes to show that no detail in a business operation is too trivial to micromanage to an indulgent degree.

The mastery of stacking broken-down cardboard boxes is an essential skill for the marketing, exploitation and “concept development” of popular culture.

Granted, costs for waste disposal do matter. But is the only proper way to get the point across to employees with a cringeworthy video, shot from within the dumpster by a mortified friend or employee able to resist the urge to flee long enough to hold a camera?

Frankly, it’s surprising that she calls herself the Dumpster Diving Diva instead of something more Waters-esque like the Princess of Trash.

None made a contribution to medicine as far-reaching or personal as Henrietta Lacks. Until this year, few people even knew who she was.

(Left to right) David Lacks, Jr., David Lacks, Aiyana Rodgers, David Henry, JaBrea Rodgers, Jeri Lacks Whye, Thomas Whye

On a recent blisteringly hot summer day, a small group of people gathered in Turner Station to remember Henrietta and unveil plans for a historic marker in front of the former Lacks home at 513 New Pittsburg Road.

Her story was told in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, published in February by Crown Books.

Cancer cells from Lacks – taken without her permission while receiving treatment at Johns Hopkins Hospital – were the first grown in a laboratory. Known as HeLa cells, a concatenation of her name, they were a breakthrough that led to countless discoveries and launched the multi-billion dollar biotech industry.

Born in Roanoake, Virginia, in 1920, Henrietta grew up on a tobacco farm and married at age 15 to David Lacks, who moved to Turner Station when World War II produced a boom in jobs in the steel mills and shipyards of Dundalk.

Turner Station is a small, close-knit African-American community tucked into the Southeast corner of Baltimore County, separated from the Dundalk Marine Terminal by a 15-foot sound barrier.

Despite the notoriety gained by the release of Skloot’s book and the ensuing publicity, Lacks is not Turner Station’s most famous resident. That would be Kevin Clash, the Emmy-winning puppeteer who is the voice and alter ego of Sesame Street’s Elmo. Clash was born at 510 New Pittsburg Road, across the street from the former Lacks house.

Turner Station is also home of NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam, NBA player Rudy Gay of the Memphis Grizzlies, and former NFL running back Calvin Hill.

But it was Lacks that drew people to Union Baptist Church on Main Street. Jeri Lacks Whye thanked the gathering for coming to honor her grandmother. She quoted scripture, from the Gospel of John: “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

In 1951, as a 30-year-old mother of five children, Henrietta died from an extraordinarily malignant and aggressive cancer of the cervix. At Johns Hopkins, a biopsy of her cancer was taken to a lab where researchers were trying to coax human cells to survive outside of the body. Although scientists around the world had been trying to cultivate human cells for years, the cultures eventually died out.

Lacks’ cells didn’t die. They kept dividing and growing, thriving to this day and achieving a pathological immortality. According to Skloots, more than 50 million metric tons of HeLa cells have been grown over the years, a mass lager than a hundred Empire State Buildings.

HeLa cells were the first to survive outside of the human body, and the first distributed by cell banks. HeLa cells were employed in the development the polio vaccine, and were used to determine that humans have 23 pair of chromosomes. They were he first human cells sent into space. HeLa cells have instrumental in myriad discoveries in medicine and biology, the testing of drugs and vaccines, and advances of in vitro fertilization and cloning.

Although Hopkins never licensed or sold the HeLa cells, nor profited from their sale, they were freely shared with other researchers, institutions, and companies who used them to make valuable discoveries. Entire companies and industries owe their foundation to HeLa cells.

Henrietta Lacks' son, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren

The Lacks family has never received a dime of compensation, nor for a long time even correct attribution. For many years, the source of HeLa cells was reported as Helen Lane. The Lacks children were used for research purposes without their clear understanding of why Henrietta and her family were of such compelling scientific interest. Individuals at Hopkins committed egregious acts, such as giving confidential medical records to newspaper and magazine reporters, that are clearly illegal today.

Skloot’s book documents her pursuit of Henrietta’s story, in particular her relationship with Henrietta’s daughter Deborah. The family was tormented by the thought that Henrietta was still alive in laboratories around the world, and being experimented upon. Does that mean she’s not in heaven? If she was so important to medicine – the basis of huge fortunes – why does the family still live in poverty and without health insurance?

Since the book’s release, the family has gained a new perspective on Henrietta’s role in history. At Union Baptist Church, before a procession walked down Main Street to the former Lacks home, a collection basket was passed to support the family’s travel to Atlanta to attend a memorial honoring Henrietta at Morehouse College of Medicine in September.

Henrietta's son, David Lacks

Skloot established a scholarship fund for Henrietta’s descendants, to which she and members of the public have donated. The foundation may soon get another boost, since Oprah Winfrey announced plans to produce a movie for HBO based on the book along with Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, True Blood).

According to Whye, several family members have begun the process of applying for educational funds from the foundation.

In front of 513 New Philadelphia Road, a Boy Scout troop recited the Pledge of Allegiance and a sign reading “We Will Always Remember” was placed on the sidewalk gate of the property. Family members posed for pictures on the front porch, by the window where Henrietta posed in one of the few images of her that exist.

Later, Whye pointed to the empty spot on the sidewalk in front of the house where a historical marker is to be placed one day.

Video of the ceremony and the family is below.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Vincent Peranio. Photo: Bruce Goldfarb

WTBH: You’re from here, aren’t you? You grew up in Glen Burnie?

Peranio: Yeah. Actually, I was born in South Baltimore, right near School 33, Clement Street. I lived there until I was about 11 years old, and then my parents moved to Glen Burnie.

Moving to Glen Burnie was a total shock to me because I grew up as a city boy. I loved the alleys and walking all over the place and the different kinds of architecture. Suddenly, my parents moved to a brand new house with all brand new furniture, in 1956, and it was like moving into The Jetsons. All the houses looked alike, everything was new, all the people were young.

I just couldn’t wait to get back to the city. The minute I graduated [high school] I got into Maryland Institute of Art and moved to the city. I’ve been in the city pretty much for the rest of my life.

WTBH: You graduated from the Maryland Institute in ’68?

Peranio: 1968, yeah.

WTBH: I understand that your original intention was to become an artist. Fine art?

Peranio: Yeah. I had a fine arts degree. I was a painter and loved it–I still love painting–but right after graduation, a group of friends and I moved to Fells Point. At that time, most of the buildings were boarded up. It was slated to be torn down.

It was really cheap rent, and you didn’t need to have a year’s lease. It was a month-by-month lease because they didn’t know when they were going to tear the whole place down.

We just loved it down here. It was totally urban docks, like the movie On The Waterfront–tanning factories, the trains coming down the middle of Thames Street and Wolfe Street, down the middle of Fleet Street.

I had an apartment where I just looked out the second-floor window, and there were the boxcars going by on Fleet Street.

WTBH: This was before it was full of bars. There was nothing for people to be down here for.

Peranio: The only thing that was down here was Jimmy’s on Broadway and just a few struggling shops and a few seaman’s bars that we, as young people, loved because we could go in those bars and drinks were cheap. It was like 15 cents a draft. You could go in the bars, and six people would buy you drinks because they were so cheap. You’d start out with six beers in front of you.

We moved into a place that was a former bakery called the Hollywood Bakery, in the 700 block of Broadway. Right next door was Pete’s Hotel bar, and Edith Massey was the bartender.

We’d send the girls out to do grocery shopping–all they’d have to do is go across to the [Broadway] market–and they’d come back four hours later all drunked up with no groceries. They didn’t get past the neighbors.

It was kind of like a party central for young artists and writers at the time. We’d have big parties on the weekends and stuff like that. Nothing to lose.

WTBH: You were living the life.

Peranio: Living the life of a young artist, so to speak. During one of the parties, John Waters, Mink [Stole], Divine, Bonnie Pearce, David Lochary, Van Smith, and Pat Moran showed up. A friend of ours, Susan, brought them.

They had just finished doing a movie called Mondo Trasho. They had a little nude scene at the Hopkins campus and were picked up and put on trial for that, and released. Playboy had just done an article about that. I think that was John’s first publicity. His group and my group became friends.

That year, he was beginning another movie, Multiple Maniacs, and he needed a 15-foot lobster. He said, “Hey Vince, you’re an artist. Can you make me a 15-foot lobster?” So I said, “Sure.”

My whole thing is that I never say no. That’s why I got in this business. You never say no in this business.

The American Brewery. Photo by Chauncy Primm

I did the lobster. My brother and I were inside it, making the pinchers and claws work. In our scene, the lobster rapes Divine. So my first experience with film was raping Divine.

And then it went on. Every time John needed something, a prop or something like that, he would ask me. That was the beginning of a 40-year career with John. I’ve done every one of his films.

And, of course, like me, John is a Baltimorean and truly loves the city.

WTBH: Did you have the idea at the time that the work you were doing would lead to mainstream commercial films and a Broadway show and popular acceptance?

Peranio: No, it never would have occurred to me at that time. I thought, well, Pink Flamingos is a fun little thing and might play at some colleges, something like that. And it did. We had no idea it would be in some theaters playing at midnight for 30 years.

I went on painting for many years. I’d paint for six months at a time–I was in galleries and things–and then John would do a movie. Half the year I’d do a movie, half the year I’d paint. It was working out real well until eventually the film career took over.

It wasn’t anything I planned. It just kind of worked out that way. I could do my art, and I could also, after the first few films, make some money at it.

I just loved Baltimore. I was stubborn and didn’t want to go to LA for a career. I didn’t like suburbia anyway, and LA seemed like a suburban city to me.

I love the idea that we’re doing films in our hometown. Back then it was a little more unusual. And now everything is locations.

WTBH: You’ve worked with John Waters, and David Simon’s franchise, and with Barry Levinson. Each of them has a different perspective of Baltimore. Are any of them closer to the truth of what Baltimore is to you?

Peranio: I think they’re all truths. Those are just three directors of what could be a million stories about Baltimore. It’s so different in so many places. Even though it’s a fairly small city, it’s a city with a lot of ethnic variety, it’s an old city…it’s always fascinated me as a city.

John’s movies, maybe, compared to the others, are more burlesque. He loves that era of the strippers and concentrates on the lower-class people in the communities and the quirkiness of the communities. He likes the perversity and the quirkiness of the city. His city is much brighter, tackier. And it’s true. I see characters who could be in his films walking down the street every day in all kinds of neighborhoods.

Mount Vernon. Photo: Sheila Tough

David’s approach…he’s a novelist, a genius in my thoughts. But he’s a journalist–just the facts, ma’am. And of course he was writing about a part of Baltimore that nobody every wrote about or cared about. It was the neighborhoods that nobody really spoke about. They were really neighborhoods hidden from the white community.

And then Barry Levinson, in his Baltimore series, was really writing an autobiographical approach. Each one of his films is another aspect of his family.

WTBH: And they’re more sentimental.

Peranio: They’re sentimental and nostalgic. He’s thinking back; he’s thinking nostalgically. So everything is a little cleaner, a little more idealized, but it’s also a different part of Baltimore than what John or David are talking about.

So they’re all telling truths about Baltimore. It’s just different truths from different minds.

WTBH: Your sensibilities were involved in, or largely responsible for, this caricature of the gaudy, trashy, big-haired…

Peranio: The hon. I don’t think John Waters invented the hons. The hons have always been here. But somehow that got associated with him through Divine and Hairspray and some of that. And it really took. I know we revived the pink flamingo.

WTBH: The films have really made some significant contributions to popular culture.

Peranio: Yeah, I think so. There was no intention to do that. The intent was just to tell a good story that takes place in Baltimore and kind of be a chameleon to those characters, which is what I try to do.

WTBH: You made bad taste cool.

Peranio: Well, we liked it back then. First of all, we were poor artists. It was the stuff you could get at junk stores, what was around cheap. Half of the bad taste came from the fact that we had no money.

But at the same time, you embrace it. That’s how to conquer it.

WTBH: You own it, make it yours.

Peranio: Yeah. A lot of we picked out of alleys, took things off of people’s porches…

WTBH: Is it true about the orange couch from The Wire, that it came from a dumpster?

Peranio: The orange couch came from a dumpster, the first day we were scouting up in Marble Hill. It was perfect. We weren’t going to start for another month, so I had them put it in one of the vacant houses to hold. And we used it. It ended up being a central part of the pilot.

The pilot was over and everything was dispersed. And then a month later [The Wire] got picked up. We certainly didn’t expect it to get picked up that fast. So I was talking with my decorator and said, “Well, it’s a good thing we still have that couch.” And he went mute. I said, “Oh no, you didn’t throw that couch away, did you?” It’s like a centerpiece for the show. He said, “Yeah, we did.”

We had to make that couch. Make the frame, send away to Scalamandre in London for the fabric because they were the only place that had crushed orange velvet. It was not popular at the time we were shooting the show. Then we had to age it, split it, pull the stuffing out. It ended up being a $5,000 couch. But we made it as close as possible to the other couch. I don’t think anybody knew. We didn’t even tell the producers.

I’ve always felt that the different films I’ve done here were, in a way, chronicling Baltimore. It was my own little thing, that I was showing Baltimore to as many people as possible. And showing them as real a version as possible, even though one might be more colorful or more nostalgic or more realistic. It was still the city.

In Homicide especially, since it was all about murder, you could have murder anywhere in the city. We went everywhere. We went to the B&O train museum, we had had murders in Ruxton, we also went to the drug dealer neighborhoods. I probably went to 20,000 locations for that show alone. Of course, that was seven years’ worth of scouting.

I’m always finding new discoveries in Baltimore. Even after I think I’ve seen everything, somebody comes up with something else.

WTBH: Is Baltimore a good canvas for film?

Peranio: Baltimore is a tremendous canvas for film. The city has a tremendous amount of architecture from all eras. And different neighborhoods. We’ve got Victorian neighborhoods, the Eutaw Places, the Federal neighborhoods of Bolton Hill. We’re always turning those into Georgetown. And the historical businesses of Fells Point. Twice now I’ve turned Fells Point into the 1800s.

WTBH: What are some of your favorite places? There are some locations that seem to recur, such as the American Brewery.

Peranio: Well, I love the American Brewery. I’m so glad it’s been restored. It’s an incredible building. It stands like a castle on a hill over the short buildings around it. Ever since I’ve been a child I’ve been fascinated by it.

There are a lot of places still, a lot of buildings, that really need help fast. The lighting district, on Wolfe and Oliver, is a whole complex that the city used for their lighting warehouses. I don’t know if it was a factory or what, but it’s a whole group of buildings that were done in the 1880s that I don’t think will last another ten years unless somebody does something. And I hope they do.

I love the Peabody Library, Mount Vernon Place–the most beautiful part of the city. We turned that into Paris once. And it worked very well.

It’s amazing that there are little pockets in the city, of all different periods, that I guess because the city was so poor for so long didn’t get so corrupted with modern buildings and things like that. Fells Point was like that for many years. Now with Harbor East right here, it will be a little harder to film in if you want to do a period piece. Now, though, they can take all that stuff out.

I enjoy showing Baltimore to people, even if they are murder sites.

WTBH: Are there places where you would like to film but have not had the opportunity to work in somewhere yet?

Peranio: You know, I’ve shot so many things here that I think I’ve got most of the ones I would like to film in. But, when you film you’re lucky if you see 20% of what you do.

I’d like to film in all of them again. Peabody Library I’ve filmed in a lot because it’s a gorgeous building and looks beautiful on film. I love downtown, Howard Street. We have Dickeysville, which can instantly be turned into colonial days. These are for period pieces. The ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s are easy to do here.

WTBH: Are there clichés, places that have been done to death?

Peabody Library. Photo: Chuck Robinson

Peranio: Well, except for the three guys I’ve worked for, most directors come in from out of town. So they don’t know a thing about Baltimore. They all fall in love with Mount Vernon Place, they all fall in love with Peabody Library. Unless that’s the only place to film, I try to take them to other places that haven’t been filmed so much.

WTBH: How does the process go when you’re working as a location scout? You start with the script?

Peranio: Basically, they’ll send me a script. I’ll read through it to see the story, but in the back of my mind certain places will come to mind. Then I break it down–how many houses, how many offices, schools, all the different scenes we have to do. I look at it, think about the characters and where they would live, and take it from there.

We have a location manager who I go with. Eventually he gets scouts who are scouting places to show us. But in many cases, because I’m so familiar, I know I’ll want to go to Calvert and 33rd Street or this delicatessen in this neighborhood.

WTBH: This is all from memory? You don’t have an album?

Peranio: Yeah, from memory because I’ve been doing it for years and years. I’ve forgotten more places than I remember.

WTBH: If a Wire script says that a scene takes place in an alley, you have a choice of thousands of alleys in Baltimore. How do you choose one?

Peranio: Here’s how you work that out. Let’s just talk about The Wire. It’s a good example because it’s really just one type of look of a neighborhood.

An alley, don’t even bother to look. Find the hard things, like Marlo’s lair. We knew it was going to recur. We didn’t know how long, it could have been for a couple of years. So that’s a constant. Pick your constants. Over the years, we picked constants that were in this neighborhood or that neighborhood. Part of it is not very aesthetic. The trucks do not want to move. We have four blocks of trucks and 200 people. To move them from one place to another takes two hours of filming time that we don’t want to waste.

You have your clusters of places that you know you have to show. Then you find an alley near them, a bar near them. There are some times when you can’t find it, and then you build it or change a place.

We were shooting at the courthouse, and we had a couple of hours that day to do something, so we rented a second floor across the street from the courthouse and turned it into a tattoo parlor because there was a tattoo parlor in the script. That’s how we could combine it.

I’ve got favorite tattoo parlors, favorite restaurants, cafes, bars, and stuff that I use for my research. I might take a tattoo parlor on Baltimore Street that I really like and reproduce it on Calvert Street.

WTBH: A lot of The Wire was right here in Fells Point. You had Orlando’s, Stringer Bell’s copy shop. Was Carcetti’s campaign office also on Broadway?

Peranio: No, Carcetti’s office was on Conkling [Street].

I’d say we shot the majority of that show on the east side, even though it was supposed to be the east and the west side. For two reasons. East Baltimore was a lot more bleaker than West Baltimore. West Baltimore might have the same amount of crime, but it has more trees. It has more houses with porches on them, and lawns in front of them. For our story, especially after Homicide, I didn’t want it to be the same look. I really thought bleakness was really the thing. It worked out for us because East Baltimore has very few trees. You just see lines and lines of rowhouses, boarded up rowhouses and stuff like that. It was very close to us because our offices were on Conkling Street, so the trucks didn’t have to go far. It was convenient for the crew.

And that’s one of the things about Baltimore. You can’t judge a book by its cover. One rowhouse you go in and it’s totally Victorian, another you go in and it’s totally open and modern. I’ve been in thousands of people’s places. You can be in the worst ghetto and go in this one house and it’s neat as a pin, a sweet little house. Those are the people I feel sorry for. They’re trying so hard to live in the city under adverse neighborhood conditions.

I used to try to figure out what kind of people lived in the rowhouses from what I could see outside. If they fly flags, it usually means they’ll let you in the door because they’re exhibitionists, so to speak. They’re usually friendly people. Looking for the kinds of curtains, if I’m looking for an old lady’s house or a modern house. Is it lace curtains in the window and little knick-knacks, or is it the pleated shades?

One time we needed a boy’s room. My location person and I, we knew what neighborhood we wanted. We went to that school, and we followed some kids home that we thought looked like our characters. When they went home, we knocked on the door and spoke to their parents.

WTBH: And you’d say, “I’m a location scout, can I see your kid’s bedroom?”

Peranio: I say, “I’m a location scout, and we’re looking for boys’ rooms.” ‘Oh yeah, I got boys. Come on in.’”

The amazing thing is how many people in Baltimore, in all types of neighborhoods, will let you in the door. I mean, who comes knocking at the door anymore? There aren’t traveling salesmen anymore. Most people were very friendly, especially after they knew about the show, after it had been on a couple of years. They’d say, “Oh, can I be the victim?”

WTBH: People wanted to be victims?

Peranio: Yeah. We had several of the house owners as the victims. “Now, we have to put fake blood on you,” that kind of stuff.

When we were doing the morgue–that’s another thing I reproduced. The first year of Homicide, we shot in the morgue quite a bit. The second year, they had a main character who was the chief coroner. It was too awful being at the morgue. You’d get in there at 5 o’clock and everything was cleaned up, but it smelled weird and all of that. So we reproduced that. Then everybody wanted to be victims on the slabs in the morgue.

WTBH: Did friends get to be cadavers?

Peranio: Oh, friends, people at locations. It was a fun thing to be.

WTBH: I’ve been to the Medical Examiner’s Office. That scene in The Wire when McNulty brings his kids to the morgue, that was not the lobby of the real morgue in the lobby in front of the elevators, with the rows of pictures on the wall? That was reproduced?

Peranio: Oh no, the lobby was real. The downstairs was not. The basement is a set.

WTBH: You also do production design. To a civilian such as myself that’s one of those terms like key grip and best boy. What exactly does a production designer do?

Peranio: I really liked the term art director before they changed it to production designer. That’s basically what you do, you direct the art.

The easiest way to see what a production designer does: you have your actor in costume; they’re lit beautifully, and they’re in a white limbo. I fill in the white, whether it’s foreground or background. I make the world the actors participate in. Sometimes it’s taking a location and changing it.

One of the hardest things we ever had to do was filming a murder in a Chinese restaurant. We went to tons of Chinese restaurants. They were all lovely, lovely people, but no, they were not interested in letting us film. We finally realized that they are very superstitious people, and a murder in their restaurant could be a sign or something. They just weren’t going to cooperate, so we had to make a Mexican restaurant into a Chinese restaurant.

So even when it’s a location, you’re still making the worlds. You’re picking a place to make a world.

Three days of the ten-day shoots were always done on stage. That’s where the mayor’s office and hallway and conference room complex was. Three police stations–the central, the Western District, and the Major Crimes Unit. Then different apartments–McNulty’s apartment, drug dealer’s apartments, things like that. Sometimes we could have found them on a location, but the fact is that scene is on a day we’re supposed to be on the stage, so you make it rather than just picking it.

So that’s what I do, I run the art department. I have about 6 set dressers, a decorator, probably about six carpenters, and six painters on a normal day, [as well as] a designer and an office person. Around 30 people. And when we’re building a set that can go up to 60 people.

WTBH: If you do your job well, people don’t notice it. It all blends in.

Peranio: That’s the thing. It’s not like fantasy films. We do reality films.

We’ll take an alley that’s all messed up, clean up the alley, and then re-dress it as a filthy horrible alley with clean things like bundles of clothes and couches from Goodwill. Because, you know, the actors and crew don’t want to spend the day in filth.

WTBH: So it’s good trash, artistically designed trash.

Peranio: Yeah, but it can’t look like good trash. It’s aged and everything like that.

I do a lot of stuff that people don’t realize. I hope they just accept it for what it is and what it tells us about the characters or their situations, and just go with the story.

WTBH: It would seem to be a terribly difficult career path to try to aim for. Are there courses on production design? How do you learn how to age trash?

Peranio: People have been doing it for centuries. A lot of it is from old theatre stuff. Throw the trash on the ground, then you get some aging. You make some paint that looks like dirt and filth and spray it on the stuff, throw some of this other junk on it. And then you clean up after yourself. That’s the thing, to leave Baltimore still unscathed. Then you can come back.

WTBH: Speaking of trash, it seems that John Waters has become mainstream.

Peranio: Oh, absolutely.

WTBH: What changed? Did his sensibilities change, or have American tastes changed to embrace his?

Peranio: I think his sensibility helped change American’s tastes. When John first did his films, we had a censor board. We were the only state in the union with a censor board. We kind of made fast work of that. I think the censor board eventually closed because of John’s work.

At least in the state, he helped bring that about. I think John’s become a personality now. Even more than a filmmaker, because he does so many things. He has art shows around the world, he’s just written a new book–which is a good little book, I just read it.

We just burn up. We were young kids trying to find who we were, trying to be different from everybody else. John’s whole thing was, I can’t afford to do a whole blockbuster movie, what can I do to get attention?

WTBH: But he wasn’t aspiring for mainstream commercial success, was he?

Peranio: He was aspiring to be a star. He and Divine always wanted to be stars. Now, he didn’t want to be an actor star. But a celebrity. From day one, it was their little wish.

WTBH: Part of that acceptance is not including things like eating dog poop and that sort of thing. I don’t know if he would include something like that in a movie today.

Peranio: He wouldn’t do it now because it wouldn’t be shocking anymore. The whole thing of shocking audiences is much harder to do nowadays. I mean, I saw Pink Flamingos on TV. It was cable, but never in my lifetime would I have I thought it would be on TV.

WTBH: It’s funny how far all that stuff has come.

Peranio: Yeah, and we look at it with amusement. We were just doing it because it was fun and goofy and underground.

WTBH: What a life. What a period of time, to have that freedom.

Peranio: It was a great time. It was a great freedom because there was no filming done in Baltimore. They didn’t have any permit system or anything like that. We’d just take a crowd of 60 people and Divine in a bad bathing suit, and she’d be chasing people all over Fells Point on a Sunday morning. No notice to neighbors or anything like that. We were artists. Guerrilla artists.

I can’t talk for John. I think he still loves Baltimore and all that. But he doesn’t need to do the shocking stuff anymore. It’s been done. By him.

David Franks

I first met the Baltimore photographer and writer David Morley when he was a student in Barbara Simon’s English class at North County High School (once known as Andover) in Linthicum.

I was a reporter for the Sun, Barbara — president of the Maryland State Poetry & Literary Society until her death in 2007 — was still with us, and Morley was a kid who wanted in on the writing game.

I’m not sure what I told the students that day, probably something about telling stories for the right reasons (because they need to be told.)

Several years later I bumped into Morley at the Daily Grind on Thames Street in Fells Point. He reminded me of my visit to his class, and I soon commissioned him to write a chapter about Holy Trinity parish in Glen Burnie for my People’s History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, released the year Barbara Simon succumbed to pancreatic cancer.

By then, Morley had made a “documentary” worthy of “This is Spinal Tap” in which he plays a Crabtown street poet named Butchie – complete with ridiculous fake mustache — called Southside Survivor, released by Zinnia Films.

David Franks' Hermes 3000

The parts about a niece gone wrong, Butchie scaring away a flock of pigeons, and the local delicacy known as “pit beef” are especially memorable. The movie poster is a send-up of the cover of Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” album. But Instead of a red baseball cap stuck in the back pocket of Butchie’s jeans, it’s an old-school Orioles cartoon bird hat.

One summer I took Southside Survivor down the ocean to watch with the kids and their mother. My then-teenaged son and I laughed like idiots. The girls and Mom hated it. That’s how good it is.

Now comes Morley with a new film, a video documentary of the January 31, 2010, memorial service for the poet David “Footlong” Franks at the Creative Alliance in Highlandtown.

“I didn’t know David Franks very well. I met him a few times when I was slinging coffee at the old Daily Grind, where the maritime museum used to be,” said Morley. “I remember hearing his name — that’s David Franks, someone told me — and hearing about his work. Our relationship was peripheral at best.”

Franks, found dead this past January in his Fells Point apartment just before his 67th birthday, had an epic notoriety as a lothario of letters that led folks to whisper: “that’s David Franks.”

It might be followed by an embrace or slipping out a side door before David made recognition.

And so it was that David Morley learned more about poet David Franks by filming his memorial at the old Patterson Theater than by serving him coffee back when the Daily Grind felt like a real coffee house, the Orpheum Cinema was upstairs, and Franks was banging out tales on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter beneath photos of him with Jorge Luis Borges in New Orleans.

Suburban Seattle, a week after the death of David Franks

“Given the nature of the service and the number of people speaking at the event, I opted to keep video activity to a minimum — using two cameras and shooting the entire memorial and reading without interruption,” said Morley. “For me, the most rewarding part was being able to hear the speakers and readers over and over while I edited.

“It’s been great to hear people speak of their love for David, his work, his antics,” said Morley. “It is also heartfelt and sad to sit with the knowledge that David will never touch our lives in the same way, but will now only reach us across time, through his work, through memory, and, perhaps, as one of the speakers suggested, by entering his phone number in the Safeway rewards terminal in the checkout line.”

Of the tributes to Franks captured by Morley, one of the most poignant was Footlong’s friend and Foot of Broadway neighbor Glenn Moomau, author of the rock-and-roll road trip memoir, Ted Nugent Condominium, released in 2001 by Tom DiVenti’s Apathy Press.

Here are Moomau’s remarks to the crowd of about 150 friends and admirers of David Franks who gathered to eat, laugh, recite, remember, and pray.

Filmmaker David Morley and writer Glenn Moomau at David Franks Memorial

“What you just watched and heard was proof that David’s art always led him in brilliant directions, in this case working with a hand bell choir and a videographer in presenting one of his compositions.

“Throughout his life he sought collaborators of all kinds for their knowledge, technical advice, and inspiration. It helped, too, if that partner had the emotional fortitude, and the patience of Job, to follow his vision.

“He worked with an oceanographer, dead poets such as John Keats, and those unfortunate people in New Orleans who called his phone by mistake. He sought the expertise of sound engineers, other poets, lovers, visual artists, at least one tug boat company, and even the drunken bar patrons who David enjoyed recording as they fought in the alley outside his apartment.

“David loved the word ‘collaboration’ and his work with others could be roughly categorized either as ‘voluntary’ or ‘involuntary.’ The collaborations with Keats, who is dead, and the wrong-number callers, were most definitely involuntary arrangements.

“I know that some of you aren’t sure into which category your collaboration with David fell; for some, it started out voluntary, and then things, well, it went…ahhh…yeah. ‘Kill you later, motherfucker,’ as David often said in lieu of goodbye.

Patterson Theater Day of Franks Memorial

“David and I had nearly two decades of unbroken friendship precisely because I refused ALL of his offers — and they were many and constant. David’s first known involuntary collaboration happened when he was a boy. With a tape recorder he’d gotten as a birthday present, he recorded the arguments between his parents that began after his mother discovered that his father had a girlfriend.

“He did this by holding a microphone to his bedroom wall’s heating vent and capturing an echoing, distorted version of his parents’ voices. Late night after late night he made these recordings — this went on for weeks! Screaming, crying, cursing; murmuring, beseeching, and plain cold logic. The fights got ugly. On at least one night, it got violent.

“How terrible that must have been for David, who loved and admired his parents, especially his father. But in those recordings, he would later discover one of his methods, which was the transfiguration of human voices, turning suffering into beauty, using all manner of conceptual brilliance to do so.

“All of you know that when you called him and he wasn’t answering the phone, even then he was inviting your collaboration. It didn’t matter if you were a friend, a bill collector, or an exasperated landlord. For at least 19 years, David’s voice mail message never changed: ‘You have reached a recording of David Franks. If you would like, please leave a recording of your own.’

Sweets for the sweet at memorial for David Franks

“When I saw David for the last time, a week before his death, he told me that he was worried about becoming isolated, having just moved to a new apartment back in Fells Point. This was nothing new for David: isolation was one of David’s recurring fears, and so it makes sense that for all of his productive life he didn’t want to be that lonely boy hiding out with a tape recorder full of terrible voices, but wanted to work with others to make beautiful things.

“It doesn’t matter that this project has yet to be finished: In this case, as in many others, David’s reach exceeded his grasp. He didn’t have enough time; he didn’t enough money, and he didn’t have a helicopter, which was part of big plan.

“Yet he still figured out a way to leave us with the project’s simple and lovely ‘David Franks brilliance,’ captured at its moment of conception: As I read this, please note how many actual and potential collaborations exist in these few words:

     Last summer in the car on the way back from recording the magi-cicadas this happened:
     “…suddenly . I’m composing a piece in my head . of Carillons. & . church bells . connecting one to the other. Over tones.
     Touching to carry a song in  a ring ringing around the entire city at dawn.
     steeple to steeple
     One song . of unity . praise  . & joy — transparent!
     & I tell . Becky Bafford  . my simple transcendent vision
     Fearfully . as such simple  beauty . mostly seems madness
     Until it’s heard . but she  says . “oh that’s beautiful!”
     “I know you will do it”  . & . I’m thinking . yes . probably
I will…

Copies of the “David Franks Memorial Service” video are available from David Morley for $15 or $20 via PayPal. For more information, contact Morley at david_morley@hotmail.com. Please specify “Franks Memorial Video” in the subject line.

Photos by Macon Street Books

Philip Berrigan (center) and others watch draft records burn, May 17, 1968.

On May 17, 1968, Berrigan and eight others entered the Selective Service Office in Catonsville, seized hundreds of draft records, and burned them with homemade napalm in a gesture to disrupt an immoral conflict in Vietnam.

The act marked a turning point in public sentiment against the war, the origin of a new movement, and the genesis of my own moral awakening.

During the 1960s and 1970s, my mother was a theater ticket broker in Buffalo, NY. She had her own agency, selling tickets to shows in New York, Toronto and London until Ticketmaster squeezed the profession out of existence. My siblings and I often attended live theater during those years.

My mother had a retail shop for her agency near the campus of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where she also stocked incense, rolling papers, pipes, candles, posters and all variety of psychedelia – what would today be called a head shop, but was then known as a nuisance by the cops.

Recently my mother sent me a yellowed clip from the January 25, 1972  Buffalo Evening News – a woman-at-work profile about her agency – that hit me like a greeting card from the Age of Aquarius.

In the photo she cradles the phone against her ear, pencil at the ready in the other hand, smiling brightly behind owlish glasses. The photo is a time capsule of my mother in her prime – with her short “mod” haircut and sleeveless print dress, surrounded by day-glo kitsch.

On the wall behind her desk is a poster for The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play written by Daniel Berrigan based largely on trial transcripts that was produced for the stage in 1971. I remember attending a performance of Catonsville Nine by a touring company at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo.

Catonsville Nine was the first play to really engage my mind and make me think, so much so that I sought out and read the script.

I was intrigued by these people – particularly the brothers, the poet and the priest – who risked excommunication and imprisonment to make a statement and challenge the state. Then 14 or so years old, it was the first time being exposed to big thoughts like social justice, moral imperatives, civil disobedience. A light switch flipped on.

Knights of Columbus building custodian John Leonard Moxley examines a window broken during the encounter between draft board staff and the Catonsville Nine

Race riots erupted for five days in Washington, DC. Portions of the city burned. My oldest brother graduated from Georgetown University, where ceremonies were canceled due to unrest. (Georgetown’s class president of 1968 was Bill Clinton, who made good on a pledge to hold the school’s belated graduation party at the White House.)

A month later, I watched news about a group of Catholic missionaries who burned draft records at a Selective Service office in a bucolic suburb of Baltimore.

Within a couple of weeks, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles.

My brother began law school at Northwestern, arriving in Chicago days before the 1968 Democratic National Convention. I vividly recall huddling in front a snowy black-and-white television screen and watching the police attack protesters with batons and tear gas outside the convention center, terrified for my brother’s safety. I was 11 years old.

Those years were tense, with anti-war protests at Berkeley, Columbia University and more than 100 campuses throughout the nation. We lived about two blocks away from the SUNYAB campus, where my father taught dentistry. Like many campuses, there were periodic squabbles between protesters and cops.

I remember summer nights with the pop-pop-pop of tear gas canisters in the near distance through my bedroom window. The police once shut down my mother’s store when she provided kids with bandanas and a bucket of water to defend themselves against tear gas and pepper spray.

There was more bloodshed too. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard killed four students at Kent State University. Less than two weeks later, two students were killed by police at Jackson State.

The incident that affected me most was the riot and subsequent massacre at Attica State Prison in September, 1971. Attica is about 25 miles east of Buffalo, near where we went to scout camp.

Knights of Columbus building, 2010

Inmates took over a section of Attica on the morning of Thursday, September 9, holding a number of guards hostage during several days of negotiation. The events unfolded during the first days of eighth grade. I followed the news closely, bringing an AM radio to school and reading all of the coverage in the newspapers.

New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller refused to come to Attica to forestall a seemingly inevitable bloodbath. After five days, Rocky ordered the state police to take the prison back by force, resulting in 39 deaths, including ten corrections officers and civilian employees – all killed by state police.

My father was one of a handful of dental school faculty who volunteered to fix the prisoners’ teeth that had been knocked out during the retaking and subsequent retributive beatings. Over dinner, he shared first-hand accounts of the siege and conditions inside Attica.

Two inmates were charged with the death of a corrections officer killed during the takeover. As a teenager, I attended their trial in Buffalo, where I met radical lawyer William Kunstler and Ramsey Clark, who had been Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general.

Rockefeller became Gerald Ford’s vice president and died while having sex with his mistress in 1979. The families of slain inmates and employees sued the State of New York for civil rights violations. The case was settled for $12 million in 2004, 33 years after the fact.

What impressed me about the Berrigans was not just how they spoke of peace and justice, but how they acted with profound gestures in ways that transcend violence and approached performance art.

At the time of the Catonsville draft record burning, Philip Berrigan was on probation for spilling blood on draft records at the main Selective Service office in the Custom House downtown.

Daniel Berrigan (right) at the Pentagon

Over the years, I kept hearing about the Berrigans as the Plowshares movement evolved and turned its attention to nuclear weapons, staging protests that involved breaking into military facilities and striking missiles with hammers – attempting to beat ballistic swords into plowshares.

When I came to Baltimore in 1981 to attend UMBC, I didn’t know much about the city. I didn’t know anybody who lived here, and for a while felt very much a stranger in a strange land.

The students with whom I shared a rowhouse introduced me to some interesting people, including the cartoonist and writer Tom Chalkley and Dean Pappas, an aging hippie who taught physics at UMBC.

I spent a lot of time in the Catonsville area, and have lived in the community for more than two decades now. Over the years I’ve asked many people about the Catonsville Nine, and specifically where the old Selective Service office was located.

Some people had heard of the Catonsville Nine, but few recall the details. Nobody knows where the draft board was in 1968.

A watershed event that played a pivotal role in changing public sentiment about the Vietnam war transpired in my neighborhood. There should be a historical marker on the spot, but I still had no idea where that spot was.

Then a few months ago I discovered an extraordinary online collection put together by the Enoch Pratt Free Library – Fire and Faith: The Catonsville Nine File.

Coordinated by Stevenson College historian Marilyn Julius, the collection explains the events in Catonsville through photographs, video, oral histories and a variety of contemporaneous documents. I spent hours browsing through the material.

I saw, for the first time, footage of the draft records being burned, recorded at the time by a newsman from WBAL-TV.

I also learned, much to my surprise, that the person who made the napalm for the Catonsville Nine was my UMBC acquaintance Dean Pappas, who followed a recipe in the U.S. Special Forces Handbook.

And there in the collection, reprinted from the Catonsville Times, was a photo of the front of the draft board building. I recognized it immediately.

It’s the Knights of Columbus building at Frederick and Beaumont – next to the Catonsville Public Library and across the street from the post office. The building is a fixture on Catonsville’s main drag. I’ve driven past it thousands of times.

The Knights of Columbus building was formerly a summer home that had been extended and added to many times over the years. Its appearance changed little since 1968.

On a recent morning I pulled to the curb on Frederick Road to look at the building more closely and see if there was any sort of marker or sign in the vicinity. There isn’t.

Maybe one day there will be.

Color images by Bruce Goldfarb

Local writer and cartoonist Tom Chalkley created an amazingly detailed poster with caricatures of 176 noteworthy, interesting, famous, and infamous Baltimoreans of the past and present. And about 40 architectural landmarks too.

Through the miracle of  hypertext, Welcome To Baltimore, Hon! linked the Cartoon Map to biographical pages and related information to create a truly one-of-a-kind interactive resource designed to be as entertaining as it is informative.

Many well-known Baltimoreans are depicted on Chalkley’s Cartoon Map – Edgar Allan Poe, H.L. Mencken, John Waters – as well as some obscure but significant historical figures. The Cartoon Map includes saints and villains,  titans of commerce and industry, actors and talk show hosts – people who have made meaningful contributions over the years.

Every person on the Cartoon Map is – or will be – linked to a biographical profile, which in turn is linked to other resources within Welcome To Baltimore, Hon! or elsewhere. The profiles include images, video, audio, maps, and links to museums or other external resources – whatever helps tell a story.

Clicking on the image of Edgar Allan Poe leads to a profile that is linked to the Poe House and Museum, Westminster Church and Burial Grounds, as well as information about the Poe Toaster.

In this way, the Cartoon Map becomes a visual point of entry for paths of discovery, allowing visitors to point-and-click through a vast encyclopedic resource. We believe this is a unique way to learn about the past and Baltimoreans who helped shape the present.

At present, only a portion of the people on the map have stand-alone pages. In time, as many people as possible will have their own full-page profiles.

Chalkley’s Cartoon Map poster – signed by the artist – is available for sale online. The full-size 24”x36” poster (it fits a standard-size frame) showcases Chalkley’s eye for detail, and is printed in color on heavy paper stock.

The Cartoon Map is an ideal gift for the Baltimore-lover and an engaging conversation piece for the home or office.

Your comments and feedback are appreciated. Has anybody important been overlooked? Send your suggestions here.