Andy & Anna Farantos

And then the show begins, a cabaret of odd balls and life long customers who know that the best place to pretend it’s 1955 is the diner off the corner of Eastern Avenue and Eaton Street, next door to the lottery outlet/liquor store and across from one of the city’s first supermarkets.

The first guy in the door has a face like George “Goober” Lindsey on a bad day and some kind of not-from-around-here accent, maybe Crisfield or West Virginia.

Goober stands by the grill and bangs Andy’s ear about the weather–how it always feels colder in the winter if you’ve been caught in the rain. Affable as only someone with nothing better to do can be, he talks about the weather for a full five minutes before taking a stool at the counter.

Andy notes on the sly that such a man will often comes in, ask for nothing but a glass of water and never shut up. The man promptly proves the Greek wrong by ordering a cup of coffee. Running between the grill and the cash register, Andy has an off-the-menu discussion with a much slower speaking young man–good hearted to the point of naivete, an unsettling, tapered shape to his head–who has saved up to buy himself a New York strip steak on Friday.

Farantos unwraps a rectangle of aluminum foil to show the young man a defrosting slab of prime beef and the regular leaves with a breakfast sandwich in hand and dreams of eating like a king in less than 48 hours.

By this time Goober has befriended a middle-aged African-American woman on the stool next to him.

“My son, he’s been sick,” says Goober to this perfect stranger. “He’s got nerve trouble. Who doesn’t have trouble?”

The woman nods–mmm-hmmm–and somehow the conversation turns to Goober’s art work–how he’s been getting back to it lately, how the quiet sketching relaxes him, how, if she doesn’t mind waiting for a moment or two he’d like to show her some recent drawings.

He runs across Eastern Avenue and returns with a large sketch book, opening it on the counter while Anna sets a blueberry pie into a see-through cake dish and dear old Dad lays out the first wave of the day’s hot dogs, described as “all the way” when served with mustard, onion and homemade chili.

On the counter: drawings of barn swallows, magpies and tree swallows while egg sandwiches fly out the front door.

Beauty shared.

Beauty found.

Crisfield crab soup

I had the grilled oysters; six for $8.99 that were served with bacon, fresh goat cheese and barbeque sauce. They were exactly as Strawser described them, “Very different.” The flavors blended together. They were spicy and warm and the cheesy flavor added a little kick to them.

Strawser, who works nine to twelve hour days, opened the Perry Hall Bill Bateman’s last June. “We’ve been open just six months,” he said. “We are serving three to four thousand people each week.” Add the three thousand weekly carry out meals he also serves and Strawser’s franchise is one in which Bill Bateman, himself is very proud.

Bateman, who is a good friend, “takes a lot of pride in his food, he made it all himself,” reported Strawser. Bill Bateman’s homemade Crisfield crab soup, which sells for $5.99 a bowl, is his personal recipe. Hearty, the soup is considered a tomato based Eastern shore favorite. It has crabmeat, fresh carrots, potatoes, corn, peas, onions, green beans, a spicy tomato stock and a generous garnish of crab meat. It is one of the best traditional Maryland crab soups I have ever tasted.

Wings of all varieties are also featured on the menu. From Old Bay to Kentucky Bourbon with southern sugar and spices. Strawser also serves wings so hot they are called “wings from hell.” They start at five wings for $4.79. Ten wings are $8.99, twenty are $16.99. The burgers are all fresh certified Angus beef, served on a toasted Kaiser roll with French fries and they start at $7.49 for “just a plain old fashioned burger.” A burger topped with crab dip, cheddar cheese, crabmeat and Old Bay seasoning is $10.99 and the double-stacked burger with American cheese and bacon is $12.99.

A sampling of the chef’s specials that Strawser serves — along with the enormous Bateman menu — is unusual. White corn, grilled and sprinkled with old bay and feta cheese is $2. Lobster and crab mac and cheese; jumbo lump crab mixed with lobster and a rich artisan cheese sauce, cavatappi pasta and a parmesan crust is $14.99. The trio of dips for $11.99 includes crab, Rueben and spinach and artichoke with tortilla wedges, celery and carrots.

I had Chef McClure’s chicken stuffed with roasted red peppers, spinach, bacon and pepper Jack cheese. It was served with roasted garlic mashed potatoes for $12.99. The chicken was tender and spicy with the warm, blended flavors of the stuffing. The potatoes melted in my mouth. Delicious.

Strawser, who began working at Bill Bateman’s in Towson seven years ago, opened three of Bateman’s restaurants before he bought the franchise in Perry Hall. He took a break to sit down with Christy Carpenter, his girlfriend, who helps with the bookkeeping. Strawser constantly scans the room; jumping up to help someone serve a dish or select a wine.

For me, he recommended the Blackstone Merlot, which was smooth and enjoyable at $6 a glass. From time to time, he would disappear into the kitchen, and reappear to reveal more about his restaurant. “We gutted this place and redid it, blew out the walls and gave it more freedom,” he said, pointing to the bar area that he expanded. Strawser added that he has spent twenty years in the restaurant business and smiled, obviously enjoying himself.

They live two houses apart in what they’ve coined “the compound,” adjacent row-homes with a joint backyard, where the generation gap is just a technicality.

Frahm, left, and Kanaras fine tuning their game in Greektown. Photo: Philip Edward Laubner

The respect between them is mutual.

“[Pete] is an incredible guitarist,” says Robert. “And he was always willing to show me a lick.”

“They’re both superb musicians and great guys,” says Glenn Moomau, who plays harmonica with both guitarists regularly.

Glenn first saw Pete play with the Nighthawks in Washington, D.C. over ten years ago, and has been playing with him regularly ever since. For the past two years, he’s been playing with Robert and is always impressed.

“[Robert] just gets better all the time,” says Glenn. “He’ll be world famous some day.”

The timelessness of traditional blues puts Pete and Robert on common ground. Both cite B. B. King as their supreme influence, and both realized their love of the blues in their early teens. Pete can pin down the specific moment when the blues hit him hard.

Pete Kanaras minding the grill. Photo: Philip Edward Laubner

Pete’s family, who owned a diner in upstate New York, discouraged him from pursuing music as a career.

He went to culinary school to respect his family’s wishes, but he never put down the guitar. He took off with the instrument, and about 20 years ago he had the opportunity to open for B. B. King with the band The Knockouts.

“My mom realized then that I was very serious about my…change in vocation,” he says of that night. “One of the greatest nights of my life.”

Robert’s love of the blues developed in Fairfax, VA, where he grew up. At home, he was exposed to artists like Chuck Berry and Robert Lockwood at a young age. His mother had a respectable record collection and played her favorites often.

Robert’s family didn’t resist his dream to be a blues musician. Despite his decision to drop out of high school to pursue music seriously, his parents were supportive. But Robert insists he could never have succeeded without mentors like Pete to show him the ropes.

“There are a lot of good players out there, but Pete was always looking out for me. He was always incredibly kind and generous with his knowledge.”

Speaking to Pete, it’s clear that Robert’s passion and determination encouraged the older musician to take him on.

Robert Frahm minding Kanaras minding the grill. Photo: Philip Edward Laubner

To Pete, Robert is proof that great blues music can transcend generations well into the future. As an experienced musician, he happily accepted his duty to mentor the next line of up-and-coming blues guitarists.

Over the years, Pete has helped guide other aspiring musicians like Pat O’Shea and Chris O’Leary, who both played in Levon Helm’s blues band.

“Super fine musicians both, and they’re like kid brothers to me,” says Pete.

Kanaras’ optimism about the future of the blues stems from the successful young artists that he’s influenced. But he admits that there’s something special about Robert.

“He has developed his own distinct voice on guitar, which is not an easy thing to do at all in a tradition-based music. I’m as proud of what Robert has accomplished as a parent would be, and he’s only just getting started.”

Robert and Pete both play regular gigs at the Cat’s Eye Pub and Bertha’s in Fells Point. The Pete Kanaras Blues Band will be at the Cat’s Eye on September 4th and the Robert Frahm Trio gigs there on September 17th.

Frahm’s debut CD — “The Robert Frahm Band” – was released when he was 18. It is available online or from the bandleader at any of his gigs.

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:

An illegally lit cigarette did not ignite the fire. The fire started in the electrical breaker box in the basement. Smoke alerted the only person still up at 3 a.m.; the bartender. “He saved our lives,” said March who lives above the bar with her husband, Knotty Pine co-owner Fred “Coach” March. “The smoke was almost in our faces on the second floor and we got out just in time.”

Alice March reported that “the whole building caved in. The fire went through the roof.” They had to rebuild from the walls up. March discovered that the knotty pine paneling had hidden a brick wall of windows that have now been restored.

The Knotty Pine is a charming bar and restaurant that has no knotty pine! The only thing that survived the fire was the oak bar and the trough that dates back to 1936 when the Knotty Pine’s first liquor license was issued. Originally a stag bar, a wall divided the ladies from the men. The wall had a window through which the bartender delivered the ladies’ beverages. They entered through a back door and could not see the men who stood by the bar, above the trough, “so they could spit or urinate,” Alice March explained.

We sat at a table where the stag wall had divided the room. The Knotty Pine’s menu is reasonably priced. A half pound cheeseburger or a turkey wrap is $6.50. Fries are $2.75; with gravy or cheese, add a dollar. Pan fried pork chops are $10; an open faced roast beef sandwich with gravy is $5.75. On Wednesdays and Fridays at 6 PM or Sundays at 2 PM steamed crabs are sold for $2 each while they are in season.

I ordered the crab cake for $11.50 and a house salad for $5. The crab cake was six ounces of tender, tasty crab meat with little filling. It was broiled and evenly crusted; good.

The house salad was large with romaine lettuce, tomato, green and red peppers, red onion and croutons served with shavings of parmesan cheese. I chose the creamy pepper parmesan dressing and the salad was hearty and satisfying. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Alice March

Alice March has owned the Knotty Pine for twelve years. She was a social worker who helped “the homeless and families to get back on their feet.” March established a non-profit, Emergency Food Ministries. She has raised three daughters, Jennifer, Dana, Joy and a son, Kevin. The Marches sold their seven bedroom house in Catonsville to move into the second floor of the Knotty Pine.

“This is still a little like social work,” March said. “I empathize with my customers who have problems.” She added that she can tell the time of day by who walks through the Knotty Pine’s door.

Her biggest day of the year is St. Patrick’s Day. “I will serve 350 pounds of corned beef and 200 pounds of colcannon (mashed potatoes with cream, butter, cabbage, kale, spring onions).” March has been known to engage her customers in the chore of peeling and mashing the potatoes in preparation.

Chicken Panini

My companion ordered one of the evening’s specials, the Knotty Pine Chicken Panini for $8. The chicken breast was served on a bun with Gouda cheese, avocado, roasted red peppers and Chipotle mayonnaise. She declared the sandwich, “Superb! The avocado adds just the right touch and the mayo has a spicy kick to it.” The panini was served with French fries which were seasoned with Old Bay. “Perfect. The fries are hot and I like the Old Bay,” my companion said.

Alice March, who graduated from St. Benedict’s School and St. Michael’s Business School, is one of eight children. “That’s where I got the idea of being a social worker,” she explained, adding that she has studied at Goucher, Catonsville and the University of Maryland. “With seven siblings, I was always helping someone.”

When the fire destroyed the building, it was one of Alice March’s customers who recovered her mother’s china. She packed it up and stored it for March until the Knotty Pine opened again five months later.

“We celebrated the Knotty Pine’s rebirth on July 11th,” March said. For the 2009 Super Bowl, the Knotty Pine was selling, “the hottest ticket in town!”

Photos: Caryn Coyle

Downtown Fredericksburg.

All I have is a jar of peanut butter, a drug store notebook and all the time in the world.

“It’s a long, long road,” sings Johnny Winter of life along the white-lined asphalt. “And it don’t never end …”

I keep moving — driving from one end of the country to the other and back again (and again and again and again as 2008 moves through the seasons) — and try to forget, that I never made these journey when I should have.

Who is the King of Should?

Should – where our lost years coagulate into maps printed on onion skin– is a planet unto itself.

When?

The Carter Administration, when I was young enough to get into the kind of trouble that really sets the pot a boiling.

Age 18, 19, and 20 when I was going steady with the prettiest girl I’d ever met, the kindred “I’m gonna be a writer one day too” Deborah Rudacille of 7872 Harold Road in Dundalk.

By the time we were 22, it was too late — married with one on the way.

And then one more and then – with the birth of our youngest, the playwright Sofia Alvarez – old Flat Top had dropped the middle class hammer, declaring: One and one and one is three.

I wouldn’t begin taking the classic cross-country trips with all the kids in a station wagon until after the 1989 divorce.

One of the last stains on the marital death bed was a summer 1988 blues journey I took through Mississippi – from Baltimore on through Tupelo to Vicksburg and back via the Delta — with friends Tyrone Crawley and Art “The Living Legend” Lien.

It was not a suitable journey for a family vacation.

-o-
Absent the body part of a famous person — the most heralded example being the genius brain in the 2001 memoir Driving Mr. Albert, by Michael Paterniti – road trip narratives are enhanced when you have someone to spar with.

The insufferable Neal Cassady – Moriarty to Kerouac’s Paradise, perhaps named as Jack passed through Moriarty, New Mexico –was a champion sparring partner. His rival is surely Sancho Panza.

I am grateful, however, to have my own brain along for the ride – “every voice in my head wants to talk to you, baby” – given the punishment it took from adolescence to early adulthood.

The older I get, savoring a contentment that hovered invisible and beyond my reach during the years of self-inflicted battery, I don’t enjoy talking to people for more than 15 minutes. Or wish to be trapped in a car with them for a thousand miles.

Thus, it’s just me and not a whole lot happens.

Do the other road trip books leave out the boring parts?

Maybe I’m lucky.

Traveling by thumb or Greyhound provides ample flint and friction for narrative.

The Baltimorean Mary Carol Reilly, a hearty wanderer who first went cross country in 1963 – “I’d just come out of the convent,” said the 1960 graduate of Seton High School – travels almost exclusively by bus.

“In 1999 I was on a bus to California for my niece’s graduation. We were in Kansas when I found out my mother had died,” said Reilly, who turns 69 on August 9th. “I rented a car and drove back across the country [for] home.

“I planned my mother’s funeral from a table at McDonald’s.”

In the caballo blanco – a 2006 Tacoma with a mattress in the back — it’s just me, a kneeling figurine of the Blessed Mother super-glued to the dashboard [salvaged from a crèche in the attic of a girlfriend’s mother when her Mom passed away] and enough money for gas and used books at yard sales.

I cruise and daydream, writing ideas for stories on index cards ala Tom Nugent, tossing them in with the dirty laundry in the back as I roll from Sheffield through Ozona and some 40 miles east into Junction, which straddles the Llano River darn near the dead-center of Texas.

In Ozona – first known as Powell Well upon its founding in 1891 and then named for the air itself – I met a couple from Denmark who were canvassing the United States in a rental car and sleeping in a tent. I gave them one of my unopened jars of peanut butter, sent an email to the address they provided and never heard a word in return.

Pulling into Junction after dark, I slept in the back of the truck on the parking lot of a truck stop serviced by a combined Chevron gas station and McDonald’s, close enough to the drive through to hear “How can I help you?” rattle through the squawk box all night.

National Museum of the Pacific War

In the morning, now January 16th, the same things that bedeviled my chilly slumber – bright lights, noise, 24-hour commerce – became the convenient place to brush my teeth, wash my face, use the toilet and get a hot cup of dollar coffee for the ride east.

n Fredericksburg, I decamp at a Main Street coffee and write in the back of the store, deadlines for $75 and $100 a pop stories — two phone calls, an Internet search, and a thousand words — one of the reasons I often cover less than 200 miles on any given day.

I am writing for the Baltimore Examiner, a struggling but slowly catching on free daily. By year’s end, the tough little tabloid will be thrown out on Pratt Street by owner Philip Frederick Anschut and shot in the head.

But now – on deadline in the back of a coffee shop in Fredericksburg, Texas — I don’t yet know this. I’m an out-of-work screenwriter in the third month of a bitter strike with the Writers Guild of America. When I make it back to Baltimore, at least I will be broke among friends.

Sipping coffee, I read recent correspondence from the poet Madeleine Mysko. At first, she makes small talk, asking if I took time to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg.

“It was sort of depressing,” she wrote, “but I looked up stuff about my father, who served on an aircraft carrier.”

Then she mentions a bowl of Texas chili so big she took a photograph of it.

And then addresses the alchemy – perfected by masters such as Borges, Saramago and Bolano — of sprinkling fairy dust [silver gelatin if you’re Gene Smith or Arbus] over mere fact to make magic.

Like taking Mary Carol Reilly’s heartache out from under the Golden Arches and minting the durability at its core.

“Certain stories become opportunities to discovery and that opportunity is there for the storyteller as much as the reader,” said Mysko. “By releasing myself from the worry of remembering exactly how it really was I tend to the story in a way that is somehow more pure … they aren’t really our stories anyway.”

“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.

Herbert Sentz

A couple years ago, I watched Chris Jensen struggle to get up off the bathroom floor and out from underneath a stinking, dirty, rusty, wet sink, tendons and ligaments feeling as if they had exploded behind each knee cap.

If you hung around guys like those for hours and days you would never, ever want to do hard labor, no matter what the payoff.
In the documentary film The Tradesmen Richard Yeagley honors the overlooked, the forgotten ones who put in place the underpinnings of our world, so we can go about doing what we do. The Parkville native holds the camera up close in what he has subtitled “Making an Art of Work.”

We see Jensen, a Baltimore plumber, leaning, slumped against the doorway to a bathroom where he battled a drain for hours. The look on his face tells the tale, the years and years and years of wear and tear and moving four-hundred-pound cast iron bathtubs.

I love this documentary. I love it because of its subject, the forgotten, the overlooked, and under appreciated, the pushed to the margins.

Yeagley’s film is a study in class and class division — that it exists, despite what we tell ourselves. It’s an 88-minute, courageous effort to bring to our attention a conflict we ourselves have created. The Tradesmen goes by in no time. I didn’t want it to end, like not wanting to finish a good book.

I’ll save you time: Buy it. Watch it. Watch it with your children. Watch it with your friends. Watch, and take responsibility.

Yeagley’s documentary focuses on the work, and the working day, of a plumber, a stone mason, carpenters, painters, auto mechanics, and a woodworker. And what he shows — at close range, right up on workers’ hands and lined faces — he quickly places in a context. He adds statistics, as well as interviews with those who’ve studied work.

The opening images and sound you see and hear come from Baltimorean Mike Rowe, host of the Discovery Channel series Dirty Jobs.

Rowe is giving a presentation and says: “We’ve declared war on work. We didn’t set out to do it but we’ve done it. The way we portray working people on TV, it’s laughable. If there’s a plumber, he’s 300 pounds and he’s got a giant buttcrack. We turn them into punchlines..

We’ve waged this war on Madison Avenue. So many commercials that come out — in the way of a message, what’s really being said? ‘Your life would be better if you could work a little less, if you didn’t have to work so hard, if you could get home a little earlier, if you could retire a little faster, if you could punch out a little sooner.’ It’s all in there, over and over, again and again.”

Filmmaker Richard Yeagley

“And so the collective effect has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs,” Rowe says toward the end of his talk — and, Yeagley clearly argues, the marginalization of tradesmen and the work they do.

This is a complex subject and that does not escape Yeagley. He knows, as many of us know, that this is work few of us want to do, or would do. Some of our fathers and grandfathers did it, and they usually looked to building a future where their children wouldn’t have to work such long hours so hard under such physically demanding conditions.

It’s the dream of many generations of immigrants and poor: that the latest do better than the previous.

“Better” is what we’ve come to believe it is: to move up financially and socially. If we were Irish bricklayers from Philadelphia we worked hard so our children might land in advantageous circumstances, a daughter becoming a princess only an unusually extreme example.

What we’ve produced, Grace Kelly notwithstanding and despite our good intentions, is a country where money is in the hands of the few. Yeagley notes in the opening minutes of The Tradesmen that as recently as 2007 ten percent of the population earned almost half the nation’s income. One percent earned nearly a quarter of it.

“Economically decimated,” he asks, “will the blue-collar middle-class individual lose his political voice, social relevance, and access to a comfortable and commensurate wage?”

Having conceived of the documentary in the summer of 2009, Yeagley had no way to know how prescient his consideration would become in the late winter and early spring of 2011: We’ve seen and heard the answer to his question in state union battles.

When he moved to California four years ago, away from the working city he knew, Yeagley gained the kind of perspective only distance and time provide.

“I began to notice a pervasive bias against work that required any form of manual labor and described as blue collar,” he said. “In principle, this sentiment without any firsthand experience was unfair and disparaging.”

Kay Gibbany

Yeagley succeeds. The segments of the film devoted to the workers have moments of poignancy and beauty.

“I’ve done this for twenty years steady,” says Kay Gibbany.

He’s a weathered, dusty stone mason from Sparks, and he’s kneeling on his work and on his livelihood, rubber hammer in hand, tapping and fitting his raw material into position.

“My mind says I can, but my body says I can’t, do a lot of the things I want to do,” Gibbany adds. “And so I have to find another employment of some kind.” Right then, in his voice, you hear what wistful sounds like.

“When you’re a carpenter your number one tool is your body,” Herbert Sentz says.

He’s framing in a ceiling. “That’s what’s going to get this done, even though we got nail guns and things like that to make it a lot easier. You still have to take care of your body. Everybody always says, ‘I’m not going to be doing this when I’m fifty, I’m not going to be doing this when I’m sixty.’ And they’re doing it when they’re fifty and they’re doing it when they’re sixty. So you got to take care of yourself.”

“There are longstanding cultural biases in the United States about blue-collar and service work,” says Mike Rose, an academic Yeagley interviewed for outside commentary and perspective.

Rose, on the faculty of the UCLA graduate school and the author of The Mind at Work, goes on to say: “We pride ourselves on being an egalitarian, democratic society, and certainly in many ways we are. But we still hold a lot of these biases, and they go far back in the republic — the distinction between blue-collar and white-collar work, the distinction between work of the hand and work of the mind.”

In order of their appearance, the tradesmen are: Kay Gibbany (stone and brick mason), Herbert Sentz, (carpenter), Chris Jensen (plumber), Shawn Sapp (plumber), Greg Overland (carpenter), Eric Michaelson (carpenter), Steven Shuman (auto mechanic), Jeff Millman (auto mechanic), Brent Crothers (carpenter and sculptor), Kelly Walker (painter), Tim Phebus (painter) and Todd Hebb (woodworker).

Rose points out that these notions we carry in our heads trail bagfuls of implications about status and intelligence. “We think that people who work with their hands are just not as bright. That’s just a cultural prejudice. It may not always be conscious but that doesn’t make it any less real.”

And while Rose articulates what many of us think privately but won’t admit in public, there on the screen is Jensen, twisting himself beneath a drain and telling the truth.

“Many of the lawyer types and people like that,” he says, “they kind of look down on us. But I just have to laugh, because they have no idea who I am.”

I’ll say this: Go to 22:00 on the DVD and watch the twelve and a half seconds of Jensen’s face as he looks down at a particularly demoralizing piece of a day’s work. In those few moments, you see much of what you need to in his eyes and in how gravity and resignation have pulled his entire face southward.

Then skip back to 17:40 and take in the next three minutes and ten seconds of reality with Jensen and his trusty associate, Shawn Sapp. It’s an unflinching look, and worth the price of admission to this important piece of social commentary and thank you note to the contemporary blue-collar craftsman.

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!”

DiPasquale’s Marketplace, an attractive brick building at 3700 Gough Street, is the result of Joe DiPasquale’s passion. The entrance to the marketplace is lined with green plants: herbs, tomatoes, figs and peppers that are all used in the marketplace. They grow in bins and old wine barrels alongside the brick steps to the double glass doors.

Inside, Frank Sinatra sings The Way You Look Tonight. The scent of tomatoes and spices waft pleasantly. “Whatever we are cooking — tomato, garlic, fennel — filters through the store,” Joe DiPasquale said. The crowd of fifty or more is eating, chatting, laughing, browsing the vast display of Italian products and waiting for orders at the counter where you will find Joe DiPasquale.

There is passion inside the walls of DiPasquale’s Marketplace.

The Food Network’s Guy Fieri figured that out on a segment of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives. DiPasquale’s four minute segment can be accessed on their website.

Fieri placed DiPasquale’s Marketplace up there with “the best Italian food ever.”

So I tried one of the features on the Fieri segment: the arancine, a Sicilian rice ball. Arancine is offered with meat or vegetables for $4.95; shrimp or crab for $6.95. Thinking they were probably small, I ordered two, a meat and a shrimp arancine.

Anna Marie DiPasquale

“The arancine is made with aborioria rice, an Italian rice that absorbs without breaking,” Joe explained. “We cook it with parmesan cheese, butter and saffron. We form them into balls before we deep fry them.”

Joe’s sister, Anna Marie, recommended the eggplant caponata. Made of Italian eggplant, capers, olives, peppers, it is sold with tomato, prosciutto and served on toasted Italian bread as bruschetta for $6.95. The eggplant caponata was sweet, a delightful blend of the ingredients.

Anna Marie also recommended San Pellegrino limonata to drink with my meal. It was tart and bubbly. Good.

Anna Marie is the second oldest of the six DiPasquale siblings: Louis, Anna Marie, Angela, Donna, Joseph and Robert.

“I eat everything, bread, pizza, anything,” the slight, dark haired Anna Marie smiled. She added that her grandparents, Luigi and Anna, opened DiPasquale’s in 1914. Her father, also named Luigi and her mother, Mary, took over the business that her brother, Joe, now operates.

“They boiled pasta on a two burner stove,” Joe DiPasquale explained of the store he inherited. “We expanded the kitchen and opened up some space in the back so people can eat, socialize, shop. They come here from out-of-town to meet, catch up, listen to some Italian music and eat some good Italian food.”

Joe will take an Italian recipe and put an American twist on it. “Meatballs are not Italian,” he said. “But we will take them, experiment with them and put them out there. I feel like I’m on a mission. Food is what keeps me going.”

Joe DiPasquale

“The children could go home for lunch, then,” Joe added. In 1988, DiPasquale’s moved to its current location on Gough Avenue, one block south.

Joe DiPasquale married an Italian, Sabrina Parravano, two decades ago. His partner in life and business, Sabrina cooks many of her family recipes for DiPasquale’s Marketplace. She is prominently featured with Guy Fieri making pasta from scratch for lasagna. An enthusiastic Fieri declares, “Now that’s old school Italian!”

In the Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives segment, Joe DiPasquale shows Guy Fieri how he makes mozzarella and adds that they use two hundred pounds of their home made mozzarella each week at DiPasquale’s.

My companion had DiPasquale’s cheese ravioli for $9.95. It was beautifully presented on a large, white porcelain plate with a piece of warm, Italian bread. The bread was fresh, soft. It had a delicious, crunchy crust. The cheese in the ravioli was smooth, rich. The pasta was thick and the tomato sauce slightly sweet. The ravioli tasted homemade and it was excellent.

DiPasquale’s serves a couple of hundred people on Saturdays. The marketplace is open six days a week, Monday through Saturday nine a.m. to six p.m. On a weekday, they will serve an average of one hundred and fifty customers. DiPasquale’s Marketplace also caters.

“A lot of people want to hold onto traditional foods, but they don’t have the time. We will make it for them,” said Joe DiPasquale. He and Sabrina work side-by-side. “It’s a good and bad thing,” he laughed. It is difficult for Joe to leave; he and his wife can’t get away just to spend time together. The DiPasquales have four children, Marcella, Domenico, Ivana and Luigi DiPasquale V.

Back outside amongst the potted plants on the steps, I carried the aracine I could not eat in a take-out container and asked my companion what she thought of DiPasquale’s. “I had no idea this place was here!” she said. “And it’s got great food. Reasonable prices.”

“I just enjoy it,” Joe DiPasquale said about the business he was warned by his father who had been warned by his father to “get the hell out of the business, because you work all the time.” When Joe sees something new, at a food convention or another trip to Italy, “It’s like Christmas to me. Exciting!”

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