One long-ago morning when the future Baltimore City Councilman Keiffer Mitchell was 7 years old, and spending the day at his grandparents’ home on Druid Hill Avenue, the telephone rang. The voice on the other end said, “This is the president, calling for Clarence Mitchell.”

“The president of what?” said young Keiffer.

“The president of the United States,” said Gerald Ford.

He was calling to ask Mitchell’s grandfather, Clarence Mitchell Jr., to represent America at the United Nations. Whenever Keiffer went to Washington, he could visit his grandfather, the chief lobbyist for the NAACP and one of the great figures of the American civil rights movement.

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While there, young Keiffer could also visit his Uncle Parren, the first African-American congressman from Maryland. When he went to Annapolis, he could watch his Uncle Clarence in the House of Delegates, and later his cousin Clarence IV, and he could watch his Uncle Michael who served in the Baltimore City Council.

As a child, Keiffer suffered from dyslexia. At Yorkwood Elementary School, it sometimes reduced him to tears. Once, his grandfather took him to Washington. “I want you to meet a man,” he said. It was Nelson Rockefeller. “You know,” said Rockefeller, “I’m dyslexic, too. And I’m vice president.”

Mitchell’s life has been a mix. He’s had the blessings of a close-knit political family, once dubbed the black Kennedys, who later fell on difficult days. He’s also carried knowledge that, for so many blacks in America, the blessings of family and education and economics are not nearly so abundant.

One day, probably this month, Mitchell will announce he’s running for mayor of Baltimore City, just as Sheila Dixon barely moves into the chair vacated by Martin O’Malley. The line of challengers is forming. But Mitchell, 39, married with two children, has been preparing this run for a long time.

While serving in the City Council, he taught history for seven years at his alma mater, Boys Latin. When he gave up teaching, he went into banking. He was prompted, he says, by a chance meeting with a man in West Baltimore with a common complaint for that part of town: He couldn’t get a bank loan to start a business. Starting as a teller at Harbor Bank, and working his way up, Mitchell got a look at such complaints at street level.

But he’s seen the same streets, even closer, as a councilman. At a stop light one day at Pennsylvania and Laurens, a young man approached his car. “You want a red top or a blue top?” he asked. “What?” said Mitchell. He was stunned to see drug dealing so open and unafraid.

Mitchell wanted a closer look. So he started taking his work to some of the city’s toughest drug corners, with a card table, a pad of paper and a sign saying, “Office of Councilman Mitchell.” He says a 17-year-old approached him on one of those outings with a wad of drug money in his hand.

“I don’t want to do this any more,” Mitchell recalls the kid telling him. But he didn’t know how to break the cycle of drug selling and using. Mitchell says he signed up 20 people for drug treatment the first day on the corner.

Baltimore is a city of great mixes: the glitter of downtown, and the poverty of some street corners; the well-connected, and the unconnected. Mitchell has seen the contrasts his whole life. In ways he didn’t even realize, he was preparing to deal with them.

Michael Olesker is an award-winning newspaper columnist, author of three books and former commentator on local radio and television. A resident of Baltimore since the age of 4, he is a graduate of Baltimore City College and the University of Maryland at College Park, where he majored in journalism and was sports editor of The Diamondback. He can be reached at molesker@baltimoreexaminer.com