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Columns - Michael Olesker
Holocaust survivor wants everyone to hear his cry
- In the springtime of his 87th year, Leo Bretholz and his wife, Flo, left their Northwest Baltimore home last week and went to Vienna, Austria. It was their fifth such trip to that haunted city, and each time it delivers an implicit message: Leo’s still alive. He’s been living on borrowed time for the past 70 years.
Tear down barriers to honor our greats
- We begin today by putting William Donald Schaefer and Frank Zappa and Brooks Robinson in the same sentence. This may be a first in all of recorded history but shouldn’t be the last.
Sarah’s Hope hangs on eleventh-hour efforts
- In Baltimore County, the homeless will just have to find some new place to sleep. A doorway maybe, or some nice spot beneath a bridge. Yeah, the children will like that. They can lull themselves to sleep each night to the soothing sounds of 18-wheelers backfiring just above their little heads.
What’s race got to do with it?
- Kevin Bernhard was heading toward Santoni’s Market, on the 3800 block of East Lombard Street, when he spotted the kids. Maybe a dozen of them, 8 to 12 years old, all wearing purple like a bunch of pip-squeak gang types.
Meet Baltimore’s Renaissance man
- He had the usual newspapers spread all over the bed when the young nurse walked into the room at Union Memorial Hospital. She wanted to check Bob Blatchley’s blood pressure, but Blatch wanted to read about the Orioles and the Kentucky Derby and the presidential race and the latest criminal figures computed at the gas pump.
1968 Army-Navy game marked end of proud era
- Forty years ago, when Army-Navy football still presented itself as a passion and not a marketing technique, Bill Elias looked into the future and saw that it ended in about 10 minutes. He was Navy’s football coach, and he had just lost to Army. In Annapolis, this is considered a sin without human parallel.
Censor Board’s outrage put Waters in spotlight
- Somewhere in the Great Beyond, where no curse is ever uttered and no bloomer ever dropped, Mary Avara holds her head in her hands and wonders, “Where did I go wrong?” John Waters is back on Broadway — New York’s, not Fells Point’s, and poor Mary’s up there singing with the angels and no longer down here to stand in his way.
The good, bad and ugly of this poet’s inspiration
- When Katherine Cottle was a little girl in kindergarten and decided to run away from home, a wonderful thing happened. She wrote a farewell note and discovered a different kind of running away. She landed in a valley of words, which placed her closer than ever to her whole family and led to a lifetime’s devotion to writing.
The bitter truth: Can one talk about the issues?
- Across Maryland, housing foreclosures are up 343 percent from a year ago. You could close the front door and drive the family to the poorhouse, except the cost of gas has now gone to $3.49 a gallon at that nice little South Baltimore station that used to be considered the last bargain spot in town.
Are slots in Maryland the wave of the future?
- Brace yourselves, everybody. The battle over slot machines has commenced once more, with Martin O’Malley and Peter Franchot taking swings at each other. Innocent people could get hurt. Somebody around here should talk to Ted Venetoulis, who might have been 30 years ahead of his time.
Maybe somebody knew something, maybe
- And so, just when everybody thought the news out of certain parts of East Baltimore couldn’t get much worse, it does. Maybe. Tacked on to the routine violent crime and needles in arms and blighted housing around the Johns Hopkins Hospital and the Kennedy Krieger Institute, we can now add the hazards of sewage sludge. Maybe.
Life’s ‘priceless gems’ worth writing down
- Old educators never die. The best of them don’t even lose their faculties.
A decade too late to the punch
- In the good old days, we used to tell unruly kids, “Pick on somebody your own size.” This meant the big kids shouldn’t bully the little kids. But, in the modern context, the line’s taken on new meaning: The children shouldn’t pick on the poor, outnumbered teachers, who have been wondering for years whether anybody out here is on their side.