Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-05-06 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

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.

“Only take a minute,” the nurse said.

“Young lady,” said a nearby kibitzer, “do you know who this man is?”

She was very young, and she gave Blatchley the once-over and shook her head no.

“This is Robert Leo Blatchley,” said the kibitzer. “He was one of the great newspaper reporters of this town, and a great broadcaster, and a great lawyer.”

“Really?” said the nurse.

“Yeah,” Blatch said wearily, “I’m a regular Renaissance man. You know what that means? It means I’ve been fired from several different professions.”

The self-deprecating sense of humor never went away. He was hours from some very rough heart surgery the other day and backtracking through the years, most of them filled with hoots of laughter, and late nights and clocks ticking toward deadlines.

He was a terrific reporter at the old News American who brought a lifetime of street smarts and love of language to the game. Once, covering the criminal trial of a local political figure who’d gone bad, he described the man’s electoral future “falling faster than a bowling ball tossed from a Clinton Street pier.”

You’d see Blatchley march into the middle of that cluttered old Lombard Street newsroom with his notes scribbled on crumpled copy paper in his fist, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip, his hair askew, his tie undone and his belly gently overhanging his belt as a kind of campaign ribbon from too many late nights in corner saloons.

That’s what life was all about in those days: chasing the good stories, and then hanging out with your pals for a few after-hours rounds, and comparing notes, and feeling you had a stake in the actual life of the place where you lived. 

As a broadcaster, he was a familiar voice freelancing for WBAL radio in Baltimore and WTOP in Washington. Then, giving up all contact with work he considered joyful but impossibly underpaid, he became an attorney. He was beautiful to watch, especially when he worked for the Public Defender’s Office.

Once, he delivered an impassioned presentencing plea for a client who’d just been found guilty by a Baltimore district court judge.

“Your honor,” Blatchley said, “my client is salvageable. He’s a military veteran who served his country and was honorably discharged. He’s worked from time to time. He’s been bedeviled by alcohol, and your honor is aware of the problems that alcohol causes. So we ask for mercy from the court.”

“Mr. Blatchley,” the judge replied, “I admire your arguments. You’re trying to do all you can for your client. Frankly, I used the same kind of arguments when I was a defense attorney many, many times. But I’ve got to treat him the way I’d treat any man who’s assaulted and robbed his own mother.”

When he wasn’t writing, or working the courts, he was refereeing. Over much of a half-century span, Blatchley, now 68, refereed thousands of high school and college football and lacrosse games.

“I’d get nostalgic every time I worked a game at Edmondson,” he said. “I’d look over the fence and see my mother’s grave at New Cathedral.”

He’s a Baltimore lifer who jokingly called himself “the last Renaissance man of lower Greenmount Avenue.” That’s where he grew up. He was old enough to remember big family parties at the plumbers’ union hall on Harford Avenue when his uncles came home from World War II.

“Gunther Beer by the keg, and Four Roses on all the tables, and baloney sandwiches and potato salad,” he’d laugh. “In my neighborhood, it was mostly Irish and some Italians and a few Germans. All you needed was rosary beads and your own shot glass. My grandmother was 87 and asking for a beer on her deathbed. On Ilchester Avenue.”

He was a collector of small pleasures, and a man who offered the large one of shared laughter. Now his family — his wife, Terry, and his three children — gather by his bed and hope he can pull through a rough postsurgical ordeal, and friends call regularly to offer best wishes.

“I’ve been going to Mass every Sunday,” Blatch said a few hours before surgery. “Kinda like buying life insurance.”