Good ideas to put a spring in our step

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Where are the good ideas in this town?

Next Thursday, March 20, is the first day of spring. In Maryland, that could mean snow or the arrival of the white-throated sparrow. Or both at the same time. As roses begin to bud in Arbutus and thoroughbred foals are born at Shamrock Farms in Woodbine, what ideas are coming to life?

Not the biggest or even the brightest. Just the good ones, remembering that, like beauty, ideas exist in the mind’s eye of the beholder.

My current favorite comes from Carminantonio Iannoccone. Carminantonio is owner and baker-in-chief at Piedigrotta on Bank Street, a world-class bakery just east of Central Avenue near Little Italy. The other day he was talking about starting an apprenticeship for smart kids from rough backgrounds — more or less half of Crabtown’s youngsters — in the hope that the smell of baking bread may ignite ambition.

Carminantonio grew up east of Naples immediately after World War II. At 10 he was learning the pastry business and at 12 lied about his age to get a job in a Milan gelato factory. Now 61, his desire to share 50 years of experience with hard-luck kids willing to learn the art of making pies and cakes and pane comes from his heart and his brain.

Intellectually, he knows that one more kid laying a lattice of crust over a macaroni pie of tomato sauce, meatballs and boiled egg — see the movie “Big Night” if you don’t know what I’m talking about — is one less kid on the corner. And that helps everybody.

Emotionally, he wants to extend an unbroken chain going back to the octogenarian masters who taught him in Avellino.

“I want to do it because somebody did it for me,” said Carminantonio. “The artist doesn’t always [survive] regular school.”

(Note to the various do-gooder foundations around the Beltway: Carminantonio is willing to sit down and talk to anyone about getting this idea off the ground. And the espresso is on him.)

Not all the ideas bouncing around are as poetic as turning lost kids into bakers. That doesn’t make them any less valid.

Edith Goldman, of Columbia, would ask every student and retired person in Maryland to pitch in for one day to plant trees and grasses in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

“People who couldn’t do labor could make sandwiches for volunteers or work the phones,” said Goldman.

Bill Reuter of Ridgely’s “Don’t Call It Pigtown” Delight has an insanely unpopular idea that complements Goldman’s.

“Let gas prices continue to skyrocket out of control and keep adding taxes so people would think twice before they drive,” said Reuter. “It would cut down on suburban sprawl, cut pollution in the Bay, and people might get healthier if they walked more.”

He suggests the extra tax money be used for mass transit, the inevitable and unrealized future of a nation that laughed when Jimmy Carter told us to turn down our thermostats 30 years ago.

I’m for Sheila Dixon’s idea, an avowed priority of her young administration, of adding an east-west Red Line to the Metro from Dundalk to Woodlawn.

Of course, it will cost a ton of money, probably two tons, but capital projects only get more expensive while eggheads “study” them. Why spend years debating something that has served other cities well since London launched its Underground in 1863?

As Willie Don Schaefer liked to say before he crossed the line from eccentric to cuckoo: Do It Now.

And then there are the ideas that are purely personal, in which the improvement of the individual has a chance to echo through others.

“I recently made something [just] because it was fun,” said Tony Shore, the fabled paint-on-velvet artist of Baltimore. “And I’ve been allowing myself to say no to people. I’ve always spread myself too thin. Today, I politely decline.”

These thoughts barely make a dent in the collective cranium. What’s your big idea? Anything from an invention that would change the world forever, like the pressure cooker, conceived in Baltimore by A.K. Shriver in 1874, to ways to save and redirect public revenue. I’ll publish the cooler brainstorms in future columns.

And hey, if you know an honest kid who doesn’t like school and needs a break, take him or her down to the corner of Bank and Eden streets to see Signor Iannoccone. He’s a sweetheart.

Rafael Alvarez is an author and screenwriter based in Baltimore and Los Angeles. His books — fiction, journalism and essays — include “The Fountain of Highlandtown” and “Storyteller.” He can be reached at ralvarez@baltimoreexaminer.com.

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