When Dick Gelfman’s mug appeared on Baltimore television screens, all other business stopped. Housewives put down the meatloaf they were serving their noisy kids. Husbands looked up from box scores they were studying in the daily newspaper. Gelfman was about to deliver the goods, all right: a consumer rip-off here, a legal scam there, night after night on the TV news.

But there was something else, which compelled thousands who normally let the TV chatter away, quite unnoticed in a corner of the room, to stop what they were doing and actually pay some attention.

This guy spoke with authority and with enormous heart. It translated right through the screen. Behind the digging and the discovery, you sensed the passion that went into his reports. He delivered them, first at WBAL and then across TV Hill at WJZ, for better than two decades, until that awful car accident in July of 2002.

He hasn’t returned to TV news since. But he’s still showing his heart in extraordinary ways.

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What started, back in the 1990s, with Gelfman and a few buddies riding their motorcycles out to Western Maryland’s Deep Creek Lake for the weekend has now become the annual Ride Across Maryland, with a few thousand folks in all manner of vehicles zipping off to a weekend’s destination to raise money for the fight against breast cancer.

“It used to be me and two or three other guys riding out for a weekend in Amish country or Virginia or the Eastern Shore,” says Gelfman. “We’d always put a few bucks away. And, at the end of the year, we’d give it away to some charity. But the thing kept growing.”

He means the number of riders — and the money. Somebody got the idea to stage an event. A 35-member advisory board was formed from people across the state. They linked up with the Susan G. Komen cancer foundation.

“That first year,” says Gelfman, “we expected to give ’em $10,000 if we were lucky. We raised $150,000. It scared the hell out of me that we raised so much. I called our treasurer at 3 o’clock in the morning after I heard the figure. I said, ‘Are you absolutely positive you didn’t put a decimal point in the wrong place?’ ”

Over the last six years, says Gelfman, they’ve donated $885,000. Now they’re gearing up for this year’s run, the weekend of June 2, from Columbia to Ocean City, with registration set to begin within days at metro area cycle shops and banks and subway stops. Registration is $30 — but each participant has to raise at least $70 in outside contributions as well.

“One individual,” says Gelfman, “raised $12,700 in tens and twenties last year.”

For Gelfman, it’s a small miracle that he’s back on a bike. He and his wife, Howard County Circuit Court Judge Nori Gelfman, were hospitalized for weeks after their car crash that killed a young woman who’d apparently fallen asleep at the wheel and driven her car into the Gelfmans’ lane. Gelfman had to be dragged from his vehicle by a passing motorist. He underwent several operations and has titanium rods in his legs. His wife needed hip surgery.

Today he owns radio station WCTR-AM on the Eastern Shore and helps publish Corridor Inc., the monthly business and political magazine.

But it’s not his accident he wants to talk about; it’s the fight against breast cancer.

“What family hasn’t been touched by it?” he says. “So this is people riding in memory of a mother or a sister or a friend, and trying to prevent it for the next generation. When you see the presentation of the check, I tell you, it makes you cry.”

That’s the Gelfman people know: not just the reporter, but the guy with a heart pounding right through your television screen.

Michael Olesker is an award-winning newspaper columnist, author of three books and former commentator on local radio and television. He can be reached at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com