Oscar was chasing tennis balls again. He had been sick, but now he was better. I called my mother, “Mom! Oscar is playing with tennis balls again! He’s healthy! He’s happy!” And then I woke up.

When Oscar got sick, he made a hypocrite out of me. I’d always been a vocal supporter of canine euthanasia. I would say things like, “We should all be so lucky—to die peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, before the pain becomes unbearable.” I also confidently advised friends who were struggling with their own ailing dogs, “You’ll know when it’s the right time. The dog will tell you.”

And then Oscar was diagnosed with cancer. Two inoperable masses, one on the lungs, one on the liver, plus Cushing’s Disease, which affects the kidneys.

That was one year ago. I watched as my spry, 14-year-old terrier mix, with his comically expressive ears and obsession with squirrels and tennis balls, got weaker and weaker. He struggled with the stairs, so I would carry him up when it was time to go to bed (of course he slept in the bed with me). Our walks outside became shorter—and slower, as he dutifully smelled every tree, hydrant, and bush, both out of standard doggy curiosity and also, I realized, to catch his breath. Then he started falling—just toppling over out of the blue (it would’ve been funny if it weren’t so sad).

At some point, he could no longer walk. And then he could no longer stand. His appetite, never ravenous, was diminished. He drank a lot more, but was still dehydrated.

I work from home, so I put a dog bed next to my makeshift office in the kitchen and set up a “water station” (a bowl of water stacked on two books) to help him easily drink. Soon, he needed help pivoting his head. Sometimes, I would go out for a few hours and come home to find his head hanging over the edge of the bed because he didn’t have the strength to straighten himself up.

At this point, I’m quite sure that most people would’ve chosen to euthanize Oscar. But I loved this dog, perhaps to an unreasonable degree.

I’d gotten him when he was a puppy. Just four months old. I raised him. He was adorable—he had these ridiculous eyebrows that made him look like Wilford Brimley or Sam Elliott, depending on who you asked—and he was a little hyper. “He’ll calm down in a few years,” people told me. (He didn’t calm down until he was about 10.).

He was also hilariously, exquisitely weird. Oscar created all these arbitrary rules for himself, most that involved sitting. He would sit before I put his leash on. I never trained him to do this, but he did it like it was his job. He also would sit before he was fed—and sometimes, oddly, he would sit far away from the bowl, like 10 feet away, until I gave him the enthusiastic go-ahead. Again, I didn’t teach him this.

He had fears that waxed and waned—vacuum cleaners, thresholds, the spiral stairs in my sister’s house. Sometimes he forgot he was afraid of those things and would bound down the stairs, not a care in the world. Other times, he would get stuck on the third or fourth step, waiting to be rescued.

He was snuggly—loved being picked up and pet—and actually liked to have his picture taken. (He was enormously patient with me when I dressed him up like a daffodil or a prisoner or a cow.)

During the pandemic, he was a lifesaver, a lifeline. It might sound ridiculous, but we got even closer.

And now he was dying. But he was…still there. First of all, he was still eating—yes, I was hand-feeding him rare roast beef from Eddie’s ($15 for 8 slices!) and only his favorite dehydrated chicken liver treats (we taste-tested dozens of varieties until we found the ones he liked best). But he ate, happily. If I was eating steak or burger for dinner, he got some of that, too—and he gobbled it up.

Also, he still liked being pet. If we were sitting on the couch together and I stopped stroking him, he would give me the side eye: “What gives, ma?” Sometimes, in these moments just chilling on the couch, I could almost forget that he was sick.

I googled, “When do you know it is time to put down your dog?” There were check-off tests, with questions like, “Does your dog take pleasure in activities he used to love?” and “Is your dog happy to be around family?” I took a lot of those tests. Oscar always scored near the bottom, but not at the bottom.

He was so sick, so weak, but he wasn’t in pain. And he was still my Oscar. I didn’t have to make any decisions right away. Until I did.

My Uncle Richard, who lived in Manhattan, died in March. I was extremely close to my uncle, my mother’s younger brother. In some ways, he was like a second father to me—and a man I loved and admired immeasurably. So I was beside myself with grief. I also didn’t know what to do with Oscar.

I googled, “NYC hotels that accept dogs.” This seemed like a fairly reasonable solution. Oscar mostly slept anyway. Except that night at home, Oscar was making these moaning sounds and when I picked him up, he shat all over my corduroy pants, the couch, and the carpet. Not even a rock star on a bender could cause that much destruction in a hotel room.

I called Kelly, my longtime pet sitter, who loved Oscar and has such a natural ease around all dogs I call her the “Dog whisperer.”

“I know this is a lot to ask,” I prefaced. And then went on to explain how Oscar was essentially in hospice care and needed to be hand-fed and carried around like a little prince and propped up when he peed and pooed. She didn’t hesitate to say yes. (Moral of the story, one that I need to really internalize: Ask people for help.)

While we were in New York, Oscar got an eye infection and Kelly took him to the vet. They gave him medicine for his eye, and subcutaneous fluids for his dehydration.

I called the vet when I got home from the funeral. She recommended euthanasia, in no uncertain terms. I appreciated this, in a way. None of the wishy washy, “It’s up to you. I can’t make the decision for you.” She was clear. And maybe even a little scolding.

With a full head of steam, I called Peaceful Passage, a company that will come to your home and gently euthanize your dog. Lots of people had recommended them. It was Monday. I made the appointment for Thursday. I broke down on the phone.

Tuesday came. I looked at Oscar, curled up in his little bed, breathing evenly. I fed him two slices of roast beef.

By Wednesday, I was beside myself, in a panic. I called Peaceful Passages to cancel the appointment. “He’s not ready,” I moaned. “I’m not ready.” They understood. (Something tells me I wasn’t the first client to get cold feet.) The relief that I felt that day was immense.

Three weeks passed. I began to think my neighbors were gossiping about me, as I hovered over my partially paralyzed dog, positioning his legs so he didn’t pee on himself (usually unsuccessfully) three times a day.

“Why is she keeping that poor dog alive?” they were undoubtedly whispering. “It’s torture!” Of course, no one was saying this, or even thinking this. It was clearly my internalized guilt.

A week later, we were at my uncle’s memorial service in New York. Kelly watched Oscar again. (I started calling her my “angel.” I don’t even talk like that. But it seemed appropriate.)

On the way home, we got a phone call from a pet sitter. But not my pet sitter. My sister’s. Her dog Ruby—the same age as Oscar, but healthy, spry, smart as a whip, the picture of geriatric health—had had a series of seizures. It was likely a brain tumor. That night my sister, Felicia, had to put Ruby down. My sister loved Ruby—who I called “Little LuLu”—with the same fervor that I loved Oscar. The irony was cruel. As a family, we had spent months fretting over Oscar. And now Ruby was gone, just like that.

Felicia and I discussed which was worse—a dog dying suddenly or a dog slowly wasting away. We decided both equally sucked.

Meanwhile, there was Oscar. Kelly, who’d been down this path with her own beloved Rambo, taught me how to do subcutaneous fluids. It sounds harder than it is. The vet gives you a sack of liquid and a bunch of needles. You put the needle in the fatty part of the dog’s flesh, not internally. I hate needles and, what’s more, I am utterly incompetent when it comes to anything even remotely mechanical. (I’m the type who will be helplessly standing at the door to the Airbnb saying, “This key doesn’t work!”). But I learned how to do the fluids. Kelly knew someone whose cat lived an extra year thanks to daily fluids.

I had hope.

But Oscar got even worse. He had a hard time swallowing. He would gulp, hard, and sometimes throw up. I always told myself that I wouldn’t let him suffer. When he began throwing up his food, I knew it was time. I called Peaceful Passages and made an appointment for the next day.

A confession: I secretly hoped Oscar would die that night. That I wouldn’t have to make the decision. But that wasn’t the case. The morning of his appointment he was still alive. He helped me a bit by throwing up his breakfast. Groaning a bit in his bed. I gave him an extra dose of pain medication. I was doing the right thing.

My mother came over to give me emotional support and say goodbye to her grand-pup. The vet from Peaceful Passages came and asked if I was ready.

“No,” I thought.

“Yes,” I said.

The vet crouched by Oscar’s dog bed, gave him a sedative. Then an injection. And my boy was gone.

Almost right away, irrationally, I regretted it. Once I was alone in the house, I wailed. I wanted him back.

But of course, I didn’t want weak, immobilized, dying Oscar. I wanted him the way he was before he got sick—romping, silly, ridiculous. Letting him go took all the strength I could muster. People say he hung on too long for me. I arguably waited too long to say goodbye.

For both of us, a final act of love.

Shortly after losing his older sister, Chimere Faye Didley, to cancer, East Baltimore native fashion designer Bishme Cromartie found himself back on the set of Bravo’s Project Runway, this time competing as an All-Star. (He had come in fourth in Season 17, just missing the chance to showcase his collection in the finale.)

Returning to Project Runway so soon after Chimere’s death proved to be strange, even surreal timing, but it also offered Cromartie a distraction—a way to get his mind off his grief. He had been incredibly close to his sister and she had been the great cheerleader in his life—the person whose unflagging belief in him allowed him to believe in himself.

So the self-taught designer used Chimere’s life and her faith in him as inspiration, and dove into the competition with gusto. (He even re-read his 2019 Baltimore magazine profile to be reminded of her voice and words of encouragement.) He had a remarkable run, landing in the top or near the top for most of the challenges, and showcasing his boyish, warm, infectiously playful personality along the way.

Only in the tension-filled finale did some of his anxiety—and grief—rise to the surface. At one point, he stormed out of the workroom and threatened to give up. (Naturally, this being reality TV, they cut to a commercial.) Still, he regrouped, rolled up his sleeves, and presented a remarkable final runway collection, filled with the kind of edgy, elevated, and abundantly creative street style he is known for.

On Thursday, Cromartie was crowned the winner of Project Runway: All Stars. Shortly after, I sat down with him, via Zoom, to discuss his incredible run and what comes next.

So you’re in New York right now for New York Fashion Week, right?
Yeah, I’m in Brooklyn at the moment. Getting everything situated because my debut show is this Tuesday. Look out for a live streaming link on one of my social media platforms.

You had a little more time to prepare for a collection this time.
[Laughs] Yeah. A little bit more than eight days [like on Project Runway].

I feel like in Project Runway seasons past, they let the designers go home and spend more time on their collections?
Yes! Normally, they let you go home and rest a little bit and kind of refresh your mind and think of what it is that you want to present. But we were just running off of whatever adrenaline we had left to kind of come up with something in eight days. It was crazy.

Are you almost astounded at what you were able to do?
Yeah, but what cracks me up is that all my life I’ve had these gigs where I’m doing something with a crazy, hard deadline, so I think the universe prepped me in a way. You would be surprised what you can do in five minutes.

Throughout the run of the show, you seemed very laid back. But then in Thursday’s finale, you were seriously stressing, and I’m just wondering, to what do you attribute that?
Lack of sleep. [Laughs] The truth is, you’re not in the right mind frame. It’s a $250,000 on the line. Everything is on the line and you’re like, “Oh my goodness, if I mess up now, it could all go away.” But then another side of me was like, “What if I win everything and the only person that I want to see here to say congratulations at the end isn’t physically here?” It’s just a lot. You have to trust yourself as a human being because [until you experience it,] you don’t know how you’ll react to certain situations where you don’t have sleep. You don’t know how you’ll react to situations where you have to make this massive thing in 12 hours.

But it did seem like the final three—you, Laurence Basse, and Brittany Allen—were very close and sort of bonding. Was it a weird thing that you were close friends with your direct competition?
To me it wasn’t weird because I’ve always wanted to be amongst a crowd of people that reminded me of school. I never got the chance to go to FIT or Parsons anything—I’m self-taught. So I saw it as like the experience of being in college with friends. Also, I think the more mature you are and the more you do, the more you realize your competition is yourself. You have to make something better than the last thing you created. Now had there been another person named Bishme who designed like me…Or maybe his name would be Dishme or something [laughs] . . .that’s when I would be looking over [my shoulder]. But I think it makes you more confident in who you as a designer, your aesthetic, because there’s no second guessing. You have to kind of like, go with it, trust your instincts, and stick with a plan that helps you create the vision that you want.

And Brittany and Laurence seemed genuinely happy when you won. Of course, they wanted to win but I really got the sense that they were happy for you.
Yeah. Laurence turned to me after they announced the winner and she was like, ‘You know, I’m so happy that it’s you.’ And that made me cry even more.

Wow, that’s especially impressive because Laurence suffers no fools, you know what I mean?
Yeah, like, it’s funny because you don’t see it on camera, but when we are chillin’ and stuff, my silly side brings out the silly side of hers.

I want to talk about your relationship with Christian Siriano. I love Christian, but I would think that if I was completely stressing out and Christian was, like, flitting around my workstation, I would find him incredibly annoying! But you had a great way of playfully giving him shit. Can you describe that relationship a little bit?
[Laughs] Look, he’s my mentor and I’m always gonna listen to whatever he has to say, but I’m also going to joke around if I’m stressed. [I made jokes to] distract him. Also, realistically, I was the most sensitive I’ve ever been in my whole entire life while filming and the only thing that makes me not cry is to laugh. So if I can say something funny or weird, that helps me not go to a place of like, “Wow I can’t believe that my sister’s not here.” So yeah, it was like a defense mechanism for me not to cry or be so emotional.

In a way it was kind of a good thing that you got thrust into this environment so quickly after she died because obviously it’s a distraction. And then you can also feel like it’s something that you’re doing for her.
I would never put that pressure on anyone to do that, to do the show while they’re handling something that’s extremely difficult. But if it’s something that you have a passion for and it’s your first love, it’s actually the best thing to do because I don’t know how I could’ve ended up with a greater start of my grieving process. It was like, I love sewing. I love to sew on someone else’s budget! [Laughs]

I’m just going back to Christian for a second. He’s from Annapolis. You’re from Baltimore. Did you guys ever talk about Maryland or discuss that you had that in common?
Yeah, I like to mess with Christian and say, “Yeah, you’re from Maryland, but let’s go to the inner city of Baltimore so you can hang a little bit.” And he’s always like, “I’m good in Baltimore!” It’s funny because I do think a Marylander has a different type of hustle. I don’t even know how to explain it—it’s like when you’re hungry for something, you go for it in a different way. And everyone keeps saying, I feel like you’re going to do what Christian did—take this title and like run with it. And I’m like, Yeah, I have no choice.

Baltimore isn’t exactly the fashion capital of the world. Do you have to overcome that stigma?
Baltimore is the last place I tell people I’m from just because I love to hear them boast about my work and then when they go, “Where are you from?” and I say Baltimore, it shocks them. [Laughs] But I love it because I’m changing the narrative of what a Baltimorean is capable of doing. It sucks because I have friends I grew up with who have been locked up or killed from gun violence. And what I always tell myself is that like, gosh, if I never had fashion, like literally, I don’t know what I would have done. I had rec centers [in West Baltimore] that catered to the fact that I loved fashion by giving me sketchbooks. The rec center would literally subscribe to a fashion magazine for me.

It’s amazing the city nurtured you like that.
Super cool. And it’s cool because at any point, someone could’ve said, no, that’s not what boys do. But no one ever gave me any slack or raised eyebrows or anything like that.

You have to feel like you’re a role model to young Black creatives in Baltimore, and especially young gay creatives, to see you thriving and kind of being this cool guy on TV. Have you heard from any people like that?
Um, yeah, I get a lot of thank yous from people that say, “thank you for allowing me to feel comfortable in my skin.” But some don’t know I’m gay! A lot of people relate to my grieving process. So many people, when they contact me say, “I cannot imagine what it must have felt like to go compete a month and change after your sister’s transition.” So it’s a wide range of people. And what I think is so cool is that I have a way of not only communicating to my demographic, but connecting to people that may not look like me, but they probably went through something similar or they understand what I’m experiencing.

That’s such a good point. I mean, if somebody is going through grief, and they feel like they’re in this very dark place, what you showed them is yeah, you can sit in that dark place, but you can also step out of it and create something beautiful. Those things can coexist.
It’s like, you can’t explain grief. It could be a smell. You could be literally laughing at a joke, or at times I would be cutting fabric, and my mind would drift from my design into hearing my sister’s voice and I would just start crying. So it makes you discover something about yourself that’s truly beautiful. You have to just allow yourself to go through it.

Were your castmates supportive of you, understanding that you are going through something really difficult?
I didn’t tell a lot of my castmates. I’m not that kind of person. Like, I know we came here to work. I make everything professional. I don’t want anyone to know what problems I got going on. But as time went on, I opened up a little bit. They were really understanding. And then me and [fellow contestant] Kara Saun connected as well, because her mom passed before she came to film.

And of course you were often wearing that trucker hat that says Black Women Are Essential. Was that in honor of your sister?
Um, honestly, I love truckers. [Laughs] No, a designer who was a friend of Brittany’s gifted it to me. But it was kind of like anytime I wore that hat I felt like I was closer to my sister. And also my mom is a woman of color. And I’m a mama’s boy.

Speaking of people not knowing you were gay, how shocked were you that judge Brandon Maxwell did not know you were gay?
Yeah, I’m just like, what? I’m like, I have pearls on up here for God’s sake. And sometimes I put my hand on my hip and stand and put all the weight on one side! I mean, it was just funny. When I was young, I used to try to be closeted. But there was no point. I say gay stuff a lot! Everyone knows I’m gay.

How often you get home to Baltimore?
I have not been home since my sister passed away. So I think that’s been a year and some change. But I do want to. After this, I’m gonna have to come home anyway to celebrate with some people. But yeah, it’s still hard for me to visit Baltimore without having this weight. I love Baltimore but it reminds me of my sister too much. One day I’ll be back.

What have you learned since the win, because you’ve gone through a whole year of CFDA [Council of Fashion Designers of America] mentoring, right?
Nothing has kicked in yet. It all kicks in, like really, really, really soon. But what I have learned is that I can keep a secret for a year! [Laughs] But I’m also learning a lot about myself. I’m building my brand, my team, learning how to delegate, and making the transition from self-taught to actual fashion brand and putting the Bishme Cromartie name out there.

So has Christian continued to be a mentor?
It’s funny because I call him “Pimp C”—that’s my nickname for him, but in my phone I call him “Cheat Sheet.” No matter the time, it can be like like 12 or one o’clock. I’m like, Sorry, I have a question. He’s like [puts on Christian voice], “No worries: Do this, this, and this.” He’s just so helpful. He’s one of those people that when they believe in you, they want the best for you and they’re willing to help, but they’ll also give you that little bit of tough love if you need it.

Any closing words?
I’m just thankful. I’m thankful I’m who I am because of the people that I have been fortunate enough to surround myself with. I’m thankful for this journey. And I’m thankful that I’ll be able to inspire other people.

Two years ago, when the Maryland Terps were last in the NCAA tournament, they were a 10 seed with a tricky matchup against 7 seed U Conn.

I remember quite vividly that, at the time, a graphic was circulating on Twitter showing that every pundit was picking against Maryland, except for one—ESPN’s Jay Bilas. The disrespect!

Well, you know how the story goes. Maryland (handily) beat U Conn, 63-54 and had plenty of bragging rights.

In fact, then Terps guard Darryl Morsell even tweeted about it after the game, reposting the graphic with the word “Experts???” followed by two thinking emojis. And very briefly, Jay Bilas was a hero among Terp fans.

Fast forward to this year. The Terps got an 8 seed and were going up against a talented 9 seed, WVU. A similar graphic was posted on Twitter, this time showing that 25 of 26 experts were picking WVU, the lower seed!

According to this graphic, the only person who picked the Terps was Andy Katz, of the Big 10 Network.

After the Terps beat the Mountaineers (barely), guard Hakim Hart tweeted the graphic with a message strikingly similar to the one Morsell had posted two years earlier: “Experts????”

Now, there’s a well-known phenomenon in sports called locker room fodder. A team finds out they’ve been disrespected and it amps them up even more to prove the haters wrong. Us against the world, we can’t get no respect—you get the point. It’s a huge motivating factor.

And College Park alum and avid Terps fan Rudy Gersten knows that phenomenon all too well.

He is the mastermind behind both graphics.

“I’m always looking for ways to give my team that little extra edge,” he explains from Alabama, where the Terps will next play the overall No. 1 seed University of Alabama on Saturday. “And I’m a super passionate fan. I’m not saying it’s the reason we won the game, but it helps to have a little bit of extra motivation. And one of the biggest motivations in sports is the disrespect card.”

So what Gersten did was hand pick a select group of pundits who chose WVU—ignoring the many others who picked Maryland, just like he had done two years against U Conn.

Then he put it on a very official looking graph and tweeted it.

The crazy thing about Gersten’s Gambit, as I now like to call it, is that I fell for it—twice.

Like, maybe you could believe that a bunch of experts were picking a seven seed over a 10 seed. But every expert but one picking a 9 over an 8? That doesn’t pass the smell test. And hold up—aren’t there way more than 26 college basketball experts?

This, dear readers, is the power of the official looking graphic. It can convince even the most media savvy of observers, like me. (Fool me once…)

“I’m a straight shooter,” says Gersten. “I’m not somebody who is going to post incorrect information or dishonest information ever. That’s not what I’m about. But everything I put in there was true, right? It was just incomplete.”

Gersten says 2021 was a bit easier, as most of the pundits, in fact, were picking U Conn. This year was a bit more challenging, as the predictions were pretty evenly matched. In fact, if you check out his graphic, you’ll see that he had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find some of his experts: Iain MacMillan from BetSided, Ross Bentley from the Hartford Courant, Matt Postins from Heartland CS, whatever that is. Not exactly Dick Vitale.

The key, says Gersten, is picking the right expert to be pro-Terps. They need to have a high profile—and lots of Twitter followers, where they can crow to their fans about their superior analytic skills, which is exactly what both Bilas and Katz did.

“Andy Katz owes me a beer,” Gersten says.

So is Gersten responsible for the Terps win? He quickly says no—it was the coaches that had the great strategy and the team that executed it. But they only won by two points, so maybe Gersten’s graphic provided that little extra edge?

“I will say this,” Gersten says. “I talked to a player on the team after the game. He told me point blank that we talked about this in meetings and in our chat rooms this week, and [even] the coaches were talking about it. The players mentioned it after the game as something that helped motivate them. It was a really cool thing.”

Gersten considered creating another graphic for Maryland’s upcoming game against Alabama but there’s one problem—everyone really is picking against Maryland this time.

Terps against the world.

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for The Trace’s newsletters, here.

Baltimore’s 190th homicide victim this year was a 64-year-old man named Vaseles Nettles. He was shot on July 19 in Forest Park, a Northwest neighborhood lined with single-family homes, blocks away from where many wealthier Black professionals call home. Like so many killings in a city where violence spiked in 2015 following the death of Freddie Gray and has remained high, Nettles’ death attracted brief media attention before quickly fading from the news.  

Just as police found the man’s body in Northwest Baltimore, the City Council considered its latest strategy in beating back the steady pace of killings and shootings: cash rewards for any information that could lead to an arrest, through a bill introduced by Councilperson Isaac “Yitzy” Schleifer. “Right now the clearance rate is under 50 percent,” Schleifer said, “so you have over a 50 percent chance in Baltimore of getting away with murder.” 

That Schleifer would propose cash rewards, a strategy that has limited evidence of success behind it, speaks to Baltimore’s state of desperation to tamp down violence: People are willing to try something, anything, to stop the city’s record-setting pace of homicides—194, as of July 26.   

Caught in the middle of the fight is 37-year-old Brandon Scott, a former councilperson and longtime supporter of violence interruption programs who successfully campaigned to become mayor on a platform that emphasized “reimagining” public safety to rely less on police.  

On the right are old, entrenched rivals like Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, who recently told a local Fox television station reporter that the only way for the state to help “would be to declare martial law.” Former prosecutor Thiru Vignarajah, who ran against Scott for mayor in 2020, took to Twitter to launch a salvo at Scott for what he called the failed public safety plan. There is also pressure coming from small-business owners.

But the pressure coming from the mayor’s left flank, his own base, may be the greatest threat to the early days of his leadership. In Baltimore, political lines are drawn in shades of blue, separating moderate Democrats, progressives, and those farther left. Scott rose to power by tying these factions together with a central promise: To reform the Baltimore Police Department, an agency under federal consent decree, while shifting police resources to other agencies to combat the drivers of violence. Baltimore spends more per capita on policing than any major city in the country, far out-pacing New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and Scott’s pledge to change that won over far-left voters. 

His base actively pushed the mayor to continue making cuts to the police budget, reductions he successfully lobbied for as City Council president last year. But when budget deliberations came in 2021, and Scott proposed increasing the police budget by $28 million, those same supporters became outspoken critics of the mayor. “The mayor is no longer an ally,” Rob Ferrell, senior organizer with Organizing Black, a part of the Campaign for Justice, Safety and Jobs, said bluntly. “He is the target.” 

Scott has been in office only since December. Much of his strategy to make Baltimore a safer city— growing local community-based violence interruption groups; training the entire city staff in trauma-informed care; making every agency responsible for creating a plan to address public health and violence—is in its infancy. As the homicide tally rises, and the political attacks ramp up, criticism of the mayor has the potential to make it harder for him to get the support and resources he needs to fulfill his long-term promises in the next budget cycle. 

HOW ALLIES BECAME CRITICS

Each spring, Baltimore residents engage in a populist tradition through which they can sound off on the city budget. It’s called Taxpayers’ Night. Even as COVID-19 vaccines were rolling out, this year’s Taxpayers’ Night was virtual. And without the crowds, the chanting, the finger-pointing, the messy parts of democracy making can sometimes lack its dramatic flair. 

Still, even without the usual booming voices bouncing off the marble at the city’s traditional War Memorial building setting, the rage over this year’s police budget increase spilled from more than 80 computer screens. “It should not be possible for a moral mayor to claim he embraces the best highest possible use of precious and scarce revenue…while increasing the budget,” said Melissa Schober, a Baltimore resident, parent, and activist. She ended her spoken remarks, saying, “I regret my vote for you, Mr. Mayor.” 

The mayor’s proposal to add $28 million to the police budget made supporters wonder whether they had been played. “The question for the mayor is did you really want to [defund]?” said Ralikh Hayes, deputy director of Organizing Black, a group tied to the Movement for Black Lives. “Or was this a talking point to get votes?” 

Candidate Scott’s push to defund came in a watershed year for policing and public safety, after the national uprising that followed the police killing of George Floyd. Now that Mayor Scott has to govern, he’s left to make the case that his views and plans haven’t changed. He just needs time, he says. He says he still wants to change Baltimore from a city that relies on law enforcement into one that offers sufficient public services to address poverty, structural racism, insufficient housing, addiction, and joblessness. That degree of change can’t happen in a single budget, he says, but over the course of several years. “I have been consistent that reimagining public safety and the budget would not be overnight work,” Scott told The Trace.

Scott’s allies in City Hall, even those who support the idea of defunding the police, took their cues from the mayor that this was not going to be a year when the Baltimore Police Department budget would be pared back. “I have a relationship with a mayor [Scott] who’s in a hard position,” said Baltimore City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey, a consistent Baltimore Police Department critic and generally considered the 15-member council’s most progressive member.

PROMISES, PROMISES

Baltimore’s 2021-22 budget cut overall spending for services, including city public schools while increasing police spending—and, activists note, not investing enough in sectors that could address the root causes of violence. The section of City Hall responsible for growing the violence interruption programs central to Scott’s own vision for reducing crime received a $6 million bump, but the money came mostly from state and federal grants.

In justifying the proposed increases to the police budget, Scott said they were necessary to cover the city’s pension obligations and increased healthcare costs for the 2021-22 fiscal year. 

Of course, Scott has another authority to answer to, beyond the electorate. Looming over any proposed cut to police spending is the 2017 federal consent decree enacted after the death of Freddie Gray prompted by a federal investigation into the department. It found that police officers were sweeping corners and engaging in racial targeting, excessive force, stop-and-frisk arrests that violated some residents’ constitutional rights. The court order requires the city to retrain its officers, upgrade its computer systems, and maintain a certain level of police presence on the streets. The oversight from the consent decree monitoring team alone costs $1.5 million each year. The Police Department’s compliance bureau costs another $38 million annually. 

Critics of City Hall argue that the consent decree, and the politics around wrangling enough votes to reduce police spending are just cover for an administration that isn’t truly committed to overhauling public safety. “You would have to be a radical and bold dude to say [expletive] the consent decree,” Ferrell said. “We now know who [Brandon Scott] is. And going against the consent decree, that’s not who he is.”

But consent decree monitor Judge James K. Bredar has warned against making drastic changes to the Police Department while it’s under the federal court order. Too severe a cut to the department could trigger legal action by the judge. “The court can levy fines against your city and you’re forced to pay,” Baltimore City Councilmember Zeke Cohen said.

Scott has consistently supported the reforms the consent decree calls for. He recently met with President Joe Biden, who also supports federal interventions in local policing. “We are fully committed to the consent decree,” Scott said, “and that comes with responsibilities that we have to fund.”

Former Mayor Sheila Dixon, who was forced to resign from the office in 2010 and then also ran against Scott in 2020, knows firsthand how hard it is to balance the impulse to use police to reduce violence, and the understanding that the long-term fight against crime is about addressing social problems. Scott’s problem is not execution, she said, but communication. While Scott says he’s been clear and realistic, Dixon says he has failed to convey the limits he would face. “I don’t make a promise I don’t keep,” she said, referring to Scott’s close work with the defund movement. “I am not going to bullshit people. Brandon knew the budget.”   

‘WHERE IS THE MAYOR?’

As spring gave way to summer, violence in Baltimore ratcheted up even more. Nine homicides occurred during Memorial Day weekend. By the following weekend, the popular Fells Point neighborhood, the waterfront district lined with restaurants and bars, saw two separate shootings that left three men injured. The incident sparked calls from the vocal business class to demand the mayor, top city prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, and the Police Department crack down on violence and petty crimes.  

Since COVID-19 restrictions were relaxed, there have been large informal gatherings in the neighborhood. Business owners have reported open-air drug sales, and in a letter signed by 37 Fells Point business owners, they claimed a “culture of lawlessness” has contributed to violence. The business owners threatened to place their taxes in escrow to punish the city if it didn’t act quickly.  

The city responded by hosting a virtual meeting days after the Fells Point shooting, for which 700 people logged on to hear how the Scott administration would address the recent shootings and nuisance violations. Suggestions filled the comment section of the online gathering. Could the city “constitutionally” use stop-and-frisk? Could it set up mobile metal detectors? Some blamed the consent decree for not allowing the police to be as tough on crime as they believed was necessary. When the comments got hot, the city disabled the chat function. But that didn’t cool the conversation. People went analog, holding up pieces of paper in front of their webcams. They asked, “Where is the mayor?”  

Scott’s absence (he had another engagement) enraged many on the call. His supporters weren’t upset that he had missed the meeting, but that the city had agreed to host it. 

The city’s response to the Fells Point violence ultimately involved more policing. Starting June 12, Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison delivered an expansion of patrols across the city. In Fells Point, the surge came with more cops on foot and in cars and helicopters. State Police and the Baltimore Sheriff’s Department also helped. In other hotspots, like Pennsylvania Avenue, in the heart of the Black community of West Baltimore, cops camped out by intersections.  

But even with more police, shots were fired in Fells Point in the early morning hours of June 13. Just hours earlier, Tavon Jenkins was shot and killed blocks away from where cops had set up additional posts in West Baltimore. The incidents only intensified calls from Scott’s base that relying on police wasn’t working. “Cops don’t stop crime,” Ferrell said. “They respond to crime.”  

On July 1, Safe Streets violence interrupter Kenyell Wilson was gunned down near the Cherry Hill neighborhood where he worked. Safe Streets had just celebrated a year without a single homicide at its site in the Cherry Hill neighborhood of Baltimore. Wilson’s death marked the second killing of a Safe Streets violence interrupter this year. Dante Barksdale, a close ally of the mayor, was killed in Baltimore in January.   

Scott reasserted his support for groups like Safe Streets in slowing violence in the city, but also vowed to use every resource available through the Police Department to solve Wilson’s killing. 

After weeks of heated debate about the future of public safety in Baltimore, on July 23, Scott rolled out what he called a “comprehensive violence prevention plan” that would fulfill his “commitment to deliver a holistic, comprehensive approach to combat gun violence.”  Scott said that community members got to shape the 32-page plan by participating in 36 listening sessions.

Highlights include the increased funding for Safe Streets. There’s also “expanded investment” in the nonprofit Roca, which focuses on interventions with at-risk youth and young adults; the city’s seven hospital-based violence intervention partnerships; and several other organizations. The plan will use American Rescue Plan Act money. Still, the city has not made a fiscal commitment to the plan beyond the federal dollars being spent this year. 

The plan also calls for holding gun traffickers and straw purchases accountable. Scott had previously traveled to the White House to discuss that and other crime prevention strategies amid rising homicide rates in many cities. It also calls for expanded services to gunshot survivors, victims of domestic abuse, and people reentering society after incarceration. 

“For the first time, Baltimore residents were asked what they wanted to see in a public safety strategy, and they spoke up,” said Scott in releasing the plan last week. 

Overall, the plan appeared, temporarily, to quell some fears among Baltimore’s activists. They said—at least on social media—that Scott had not abandoned his pledge. Whether he’s ultimately successful in transforming a city known for its past mass incarceration policies and corrupt police force into a model of policing reform remains to be seen. It likely hinges on whether he reaches his stated goal of reducing shootings by 15 percent over the next five years.

This story was updated to reflect the city’s goal of reducing shootings by 15% per year.

The Friendliest Town, a full-length documentary directed and produced by Real News journalists Stephen Janis and Taya Graham, is the culmination of five years of diligent reporting around the controversial firing of Pocomoke City’s first Black police chief—former Baltimore homicide detective Kelvin Sewell.

Janis and Graham made some 40-plus trips to the Eastern Shore to chronicle Sewell’s dismissal, which led to criminal charges and lawsuits, and eventually concluded with the town placed under a federal consent decree because of biased employment and policing practices.

Along the way, Janis and Graham began following the emerging activism of the town’s African-American community, which sprang from the dispute over Sewell’s abrupt dismissal.

Released nationally Jan. 19, the documentary cracked the iTunes Top 200 list. It’s also available on Blu-ray via Amazon. Recently, we asked director Stephen Janis about the film.

You’ve known Kelvin Sewell since your days covering the Baltimore police department for the Baltimore Examiner and wrote a previous book together on crime in the city, Why Do We Kill: The Pathology of Murder in Baltimore. Initially, what did you think when he retired from the BPD and took over as Pocomoke City’s police chief?
I was happy for him. When he retired, he was deeply troubled by the divide between residents and the Baltimore Police Department. It was clear moving to Pocomoke provided the opportunity he had sought to implement community-style policing. It seemed like the perfect fit.

When did you realize Sewell was being targeted—accused of a crime—by white political leaders, for what appeared to be his refusal to kowtow to their demands to fire a Black officer who’d filed an EEOC complaint?
After Kelvin filed his discrimination lawsuit, there were rumors that investigators from the state prosecutor’s office were combing through Pocomoke looking for something to charge him with. But it didn’t really sink in until I spoke with a resident who had been questioned by them several times regarding Kelvin dating back to 2012. And when she told me they’d hinted if she cooperated it might help her in a case of drug charges she was facing, I realized this was serious stuff. 

 

“The firing of Kelvin exposed injustice that had simply been ignored.”

 

One white woman in the documentary says she always considered Pocomoke City a kind of “Mayberry.” The Friendliest Town reveals something else.
I think it reveals there is painful history in Pocomoke that has not been subject to either truth or reconciliation. The firing of Kelvin exposed injustice that had simply been ignored. As the community fought back, we witnessed that past colliding with a present, which belied the idea that the town was some sort of idyllic, placid Mayberry-like ideal. In retrospect, the images of Mayberry’s halcyon days transmitted to our televisions were distinctly lacking Black characters, if memory serves.

If there’s something heartening in the film, it’s the political activism of Pocomoke City’s historically discriminated-against Black community. Ultimately, it leads to both personal and significant political change.
One of the reasons Taya and I traveled so many times to Pocomoke was that the firing of Kelvin was really just the beginning of the story.  A group of his supporters started Citizens for a Better Pocomoke and began attending city council meetings, organizing voters, and backing candidates. It was democracy in action seeking real change, and it was really a privilege to witness it unfold.

At one point in the film, Taya, your wife and project partner, says that, as a Black woman from Baltimore, she recognizes the history of segregation and discrimination underneath this story. What similarities or analogies did you come to understand?
I felt that many of the issues I had reported on involving policing and race were similar in that the African-American community has a healthy skepticism of the criminal justice system borne out of a nearly epigenetic sense of history, injustice, and self-preservation. I saw a microcosm of the problems of my own city of Baltimore being played out in this small town. The difference was that this faith-based and tight-knit community had an officer who respected and protected them, and they were willing to peacefully fight to keep this new approach to public safety.

 

“I saw a microcosm of the problems of my own city of Baltimore being played out in this small town.”

 

Were used to seeing confrontations around race and policing in big cities. But what do you think the story you document says about race and policing in small-town America?
I think it reveals how pivotal American policing has become. It consumes a disproportionate share of the budget in both cities like Baltimore and in Pocomoke. Therefore, it has outsized an often unacknowledged influence on the political process, a fact that became even more evident in Pocomoke as the story unfolded.

What do you think the film reveals about race and the criminal justice system?
That it is undeniably a tool for political repression, social boundary enforcement, and a means to retaliate against those who speak out against it or criticize its clear racial bias. Clearly law enforcement has a built-in mechanism to fight reform: retaliation.

Sewell has landed on his feet as an investigator in the Baltimore City State’s Attorney’s Office. Obviously, you and Taya formed some friendships in the community. Maybe some enemies? Are you still in touch with anyone there? What’s been the response to the documentary in Pocomoke City?
We keep in touch with almost all the people who comprise the core of the film. So far, they’ve told us they like the end result. It’s hard to describe the relationship we built with the people of Pocomoke. For five years, they invited us into their homes, their churches, their lives, and community despite the fight for equity and accountability that was painful for everyone. In many ways, they feel like family to us.

It’s an accolade of the highest caliber and, the way people eat these days, one you don’t hear much anymore: “They made the best pea soup of anyone next to my mother…”

“They” refers to the generations of cooks at the New Wyman Park Restaurant, late of 25th and Howard Streets. Mom is Audrey Soutiere Cimino, the 75-year-old mother of B. Thomas Rinaldi, pea soup connoisseur.

Rinaldi ate his last bowls of pea soup at the Wyman Park diner—a Baltimore landmark since the eve of World War II—before it closed for good the day before Thanksgiving.

“Their pea soup was yummy, stick to your ribs—thick with bits of ham,” said Rinaldi, known to friends as Tommy. “Not everyone likes peas so they didn’t always have it, but when they did I would get extra helpings and take some home.”

Rinaldi began going to the Wyman diner as a kid in the 1970s when his father, Dr. Robert T. Rinaldi, was assistant superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools. Back then, school headquarters was a few blocks east of the diner on 25th Street.

It was the kind of place, said one of the many longtime customers who stopped in for goodbye and one last meal, where you could eavesdrop on three disgraced alumni of the Maryland General Assembly breaking bread in one of the narrow diner’s eight booths.

The kind of place where you could stand front-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder with bus drivers, auto mechanics, school teachers, clerks at the neighborhood locksmith, and DJs from WYPR from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., six days a week.

“It was a great place to run into a who’s who of Baltimore,” said Rinaldi, recently retired from the Baltimore City Department of Social Services. “Judges, power lawyers, [and artists], all having cutting edge conversations about politics, sports, jurisprudence, and public policy.”

All complete with news-of-the-day schtick, with cooks cracking eggs and cracking wise at the grill behind a counter with nine deco swivel stools. The most legendary cook of recent memory was Bruce Purnell, who said he worked the grill for the past 17 years and didn’t see the price of an omelette go up more than a buck or so in that time.

Said Remington resident Lynda Gomeringer, who began patronizing the diner when she moved to the neighborhood in 2005: “Listening to Bruce expound on the world and hit zingers out of the park was delicious.”

Purnell was so charismatic that local poet Shirley Brewer wrote an ode to him: “His Royal Grillness.” “A spatula instead of a scepter, a king without a crown,” wrote Brewer. “…the menu sizzles, heads of lettuce ready to roll…hey sugar loaf, you want coffee in your cream?”

To see the show up close, you just squeezed in sideways at the counter when the place was packed, which was often. It was a six-day-a-week drama worthy of a soundtrack by Tom Waits.

“You could get a bacon sandwich—not a BLT, just bacon,” said Steve E. Estes, an artist living nearby.

Adds Lynne Heneson, a longtime customer: “My father owned a drugstore at Charles and 25th, it’s now a junk shop. When he was trying to lose weight he’d order a plain burger with no bun every day for lunch. And it worked!”

The diner dates back to 1939, when it was founded along a streetcar line as the Wyman Park Restaurant by Michael Nikoludis and the former Mary Gianoulis—Greek immigrants who arrived separately from the island of Chios about the time of the First World War.

Through three different owners, all Greek or Greek-American, business was brisk, as it was right up to the end.

“My mom would come home from Eastern High School when she was about 13, put her books on the back steps leading upstairs where they lived, and help out in the restaurant,” said Michele Andriotis Tsonis, granddaughter of the founders. “My grandparents had a red-headed waitress for years who didn’t take no stuff from anybody. If she saw a regular crossing 25th Street, she’d have their coffee waiting the way they like it when they walked in the door.”

After the Nikoludis family left in 1982, they sold to the late Michael J. Fochios, whose father, Nicholas, had worked alongside the original owners. Nick had married one of Nikoludis’ daughters, Evelyn. The other Nikoludis daughter, Eva, was Michele Tsonis’ mother.

“So many of [my grandparents’] grandchildren and cousins worked there,” adds Tsonis, a longtime Lutherville resident who has been absent from the diner for many years. “I remember heaping plates of roast turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy.”

Ah, that classic brown diner gravy, which oldtimers used to say was delivered to Greek restaurants throughout Baltimore—from the long gone Crown Steak House at Eastern Avenue and Newkirk Street to the still percolating Sip & Bite in Canton—by tanker trucks. Gravy on turkey, on french fries, on roast beef.

“On meatloaf,” enthused musician Robert J. Friedman, who not only stopped in for a final meal on the last day but brought his daughters along to experience a historic event. “Meatloaf, green beans, mashed potatoes, lots of gravy—always the gravy!” said Friedman, a veteran Baltimore musician known as “Beefalo Bob.”

Friedman’s daughters, Julianne, 20, and Sarah, 16, he said, “took home leftovers and loved the crazy finality of the last day. I thanked the crew for all their years of excellent work and left a big tip. It was a heartbreaker.”

The guy who locked up for the last time on November 25—after posing for photos with customers who would have talked him out of it if they could—is Spiro Conits, 55. Conits took over the restaurant with his late father in 1989, christening the joint “New Wyman Park Restaurant.”

The decision to sell, Conits said, was not related to the COVID-19 pandemic. He’s simply ready, he said, not to do much of anything at all.

A resident of Dulaney Valley and graduate of Towson High School, Conits was both willing to answer questions while not having much to say regarding the new owner of the business. It is believed that the location will remain an eatery of some sort and that it will not be operated by Greeks.

Regulars, who fear that the days of split pea soup and open-faced roast beef sandwiches are gone for good from the corner, will have to wait to see what will take its place.

“I spent many hours at the counter, always an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee,” said Jerome C. Gray, a Baltimore architect and watercolor artist. “Only a few places left in town like it. Whether it was a politician or just somebody who needed a bite while trying to get from Point A to Point B. No pretense and no posing. Just a joint.”

John Brothers ate his last meal at the New Wyman—two eggs sunny side up with toast—the day before it closed.

“What made this place so special is the same [secret] sauce that makes Baltimore special,” he said. “I just felt extra-Baltimore there. Good people, all the time.”

Nearly five months after Baltimore’s Christopher Columbus statue was dumped into Baltimore’s harbor, a local group is working to recreate it—using funds from the Trump administration.

In one of its last acts before the 2020 elections, the Trump administration awarded $30,000 to repair or recreate the seven-foot-tall statue that was ripped from its pedestal on July 4.

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded the funds as part of a countrywide effort to restore or rebuild statues of “iconic historical figures” that have been damaged or vandalized. The goal of the program, called the “A More Perfect Union” initiative, is to spark public interest in American history leading up to the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026. According to the NEH, it’s a source of funds that chairman Jon Parrish Peede can use at his discretion to provide “fast-track funding in response to urgent institutional needs.”

Under previous administrations, the federal agency has allocated money to repair statues and other monuments that were damaged in floods, hurricanes, or by some other natural disaster. President Trump has been using the program in a different way, however.

Last summer, he signed an Executive Order that condemned the destruction of historical monuments during recent protests around the country and directed that federal funds be made available to repair or replace them. In his order, Trump called the destruction of statues an “assault on our national collective memory.”

Baltimore is one of four cities where groups were chosen to receive grants of $30,000 each from the NEH to assist in the restoration or recreation of statues or monuments. According to the federal agency, the $30,000 targeted for Baltimore is intended to “aid in the restoration of a Christopher Columbus statue that previously stood in Baltimore’s Little Italy neighborhood, and that was toppled and severely damaged during protests in July 2020.” The recipient of the money is Columbus Celebrations Inc., a private group that is leading the local effort.

Bill Martin, an accountant who is one of the leaders of Columbus Celebrations, said the money will go a long way toward recreating the statue—which was made in Italy and presented as a gift to the City of Baltimore in a 1984 ceremony attended by then-President Ronald Reagan. The location for the statue was a newly created plaza along President Street just south of Scarlett Place, between the Inner Harbor and Little Italy.

Martin said the estimated cost of creating a replica is $70,000 to $75,000, and that Columbus Celebrations is still raising money. He added that the group hasn’t determined where the replica will be placed, but said it won’t be where it was. He said suggestions have included sites in Frederick County, Harford County, and Baltimore County, as well as various locations in and around Little Italy.

“The goal is for it to stay in Maryland, hopefully in Baltimore, so that the Italian community, and obviously the groups that spent time and energy on this project and brought it here, can still enjoy it,” he said.

Martin said options include placing the statue on public land or private property—outdoors or indoors—and that security is a prime consideration. Given what happened to the statue in July, he said, the group wants it to be “somewhere where we know there’s a guarantee that it will be protected.” 

Columbus Celebrations was formed in the early 2000s and organized the Columbus Day parade in Baltimore for many years. Its president is attorney and former State Sen. John Pica, a longtime leader in Baltimore’s Italian-American community. 

The group hired unarmed security guards to watch over the Columbus statue before July 4, when there were warnings that it might be damaged. It subsequently hired a diving company and crane operator to retrieve the broken pieces of the statue from the harbor on July 6. It now has full possession of those pieces, after Baltimore’s Board of Estimates agreed to transfer ownership in September.

The 17-ton statue was carved out of white marble in Italy and donated to the city of Baltimore in 1984 by a group called the Italian American Organizations United (IAOU), which shares some officers with Columbus Celebrations.

Martin, who is an officer of both the IAOU and Columbus Celebrations, said the groups originally hoped to repair the original statue, so it could again be put on display. But when they got the pieces out of the water, he said, they realized it was so damaged it couldn’t be put together.  “I pictured somebody with a chisel and hammer trying to fix it,” he said, “but given the situation, it can’t be done that way.”

Fortunately for Columbus Celebrations, the original sculptor had created scale replicas of the statue to hand out as mementos at the dedication, including one that was given to Reagan and is now in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in California. Using 3D scanning technology, Martin said, it’s possible to scan the small version and digitally rescale it to create a full-size copy.

The damaged statue was carved out of marble, and the sculptor has since passed away. To keep costs manageable and avoid shipping problems during the pandemic, Martin said, the new one will be made of a marble resin that pours into a mold and hardens to look and weather like stone. He explained that data obtained from the 3D scan of the souvenir replica can be used to create the mold.

According to NEH public affairs specialist Paula Wasley, Columbus Celebrations is working on the project with Will Hemsley Fine Art, located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Hemsley is the artist who created a sculpture in White Marsh last year to honor the late Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz. Martin, the treasurer of Columbus Celebrations, said work has begun on the Columbus statue and information about making contributions is available by contacting him. 

Trump signed his Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes on July 3, one day before Baltimore’s Columbus statue was toppled. Besides providing funds for the restoration and preservation of existing historical monuments, the order called for the creation of a “National Garden of American Heroes” by 2026.

Other recent recipients of $30,000 grants are the state of Wisconsin, to repair two vandalized statues at the State Capitol in Madison; Rochester (New York) Community TV, to support creation of a bronze monument to abolitionist Frederick Douglass that will commemorate the years he lived in Rochester; and Bronx Community College in New York City, to digitize photographs of 98 busts in the college’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans—which is currently off-limits because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We cannot expect our youth to know about our history if we don’t provide them with educational materials—whether it’s films, books or statues—to tell them about our history,” Peede said in announcing the funds.

As part of the nationwide demonstrations triggered by the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, protesters in many cities sought the removal from public property of statues and other symbols associated with the Confederacy, as Baltimoreans did in 2017.

In recent years, statues and monuments honoring Christopher Columbus have also become a target of protesters who argue that the 15th-century explorer shouldn’t be celebrated because his actions harmed Native Americans. In Baltimore, the City Council passed a bill this year to change the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day, and that bill has since become law. 

Martin said he’s fully aware of the controversy surrounding Columbus and his legacy. But he said Columbus is still an important figure to many people, especially in the Italian community, and his group believes it should honor him by recreating the statue and finding a suitable home for it.

Many people in Baltimore’s Italian-American community want it back up,  he said. “Yes, everybody jumps on the fact that he didn’t discover America…but he did discover the path here and led the way for other people.”

For many Italians who immigrated to America in the last century, Columbus was a figure that they could look up to, Martin said. “It was just that he was an Italian guy who crossed this big ocean and started a different world,” he said. “A lot of people are passionate about Columbus mainly for that reason. There are people who look at him as a hero.”

Columbus Celebrations isn’t “looking to do anything against any other group,” he said. “We’re just trying to think about history, the Italian community, and how they feel about the statue.”

Martin said his group is aiming to select a site and have the new statue in place by the end of January. He talked about the possibility of displaying the new statue with the broken pieces of the old one, to make a point about destruction and trying to wipe away history. 

He adds that there were some angry members of his group who wanted to retaliate against the protesters who tore down the Columbus statue, but he doesn’t agree.

“To me, that’s not the way to find a solution,” he said. “ I just hope things get back to normal and we can all just communicate. It’s about respecting people. Everybody needs respect.”

Voters in Maryland and around the country went to bed Tuesday night not knowing who will be the next president of the United States.

That hasn’t changed as of Wednesday afternoon. The election between incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden will likely take days, and possibly even weeks, to finalize after recounts and legal challenges are completed. Largely because of the record-breaking number of absentee mail-in ballots, driven by concerns around in-person voting as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to spread, the initial results in several key states continue to be tallied.

With the country on edge as the first round of ballot results continue to roll in, numerous battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada, and Arizona have yet been to be decided.

In Maryland, as expected, Biden won in an overwhelming fashion, garnering 62.9 percent of the vote to 34.9 percent for Trump.

As of Wednesday afternoon, with mostly outstanding mail-in ballots—which have tilted Democratic this year—Biden appeared to have a clearer path to victory with slight leads in too-close-to-call Arizona, Wisconsin, and Michigan, which would all represent red-to-blue flips since Trump’s 2016 electoral college win over Hillary Clinton. As in 2016 when Clinton won the popular vote by several million ballots, Biden is projected to win the 2020 presidential popular vote by several million ballots. If Biden loses, it would mark the third election in the past two decades that a Democrat nominee would have captured the popular vote in the country, but lost the presidency to a Republican.

If the Biden and vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris ticket is ultimately declared the winner, Harris, the U.S. senator from California, would be the first woman elected to the second-highest office in the country.

Both candidates addressed their supporters early Wednesday morning with the election still hanging in the balance. Trump attempted to prematurely declare a reelection win and made the false claim that efforts to steal the election were underway, even as legally cast ballots across the country—as well as those of overseas members of the military—were still being tallied. Biden asked for patience as votes continue to be counted and the results certified by state election boards.

No matter who wins presidential race, Democrats will not achieve the big win they were looking for given Biden’s larger edge in the polls going into Tuesday. Nor does it look likely that they will flip the U.S. Senate.

After 2016, when polls in key states underestimated Trump’s support—although his upset wins in key states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania fell within the margin of errors—polls in several states now appear to have been misleading. Again, polls that underestimated Trump’s support in key states will be one of many topics of debate after everything is decided.

In a tweet, Goucher College associate professor of political science Mileah Kromer, founder of the Goucher Poll—which focuses on Maryland politics and accurately modeled the presidential outcome in the state—said “pollsters worked to correct the mistakes of 2016.” She added, however, that despite a good 2018 cycle, and even if Biden secures an election college victory as polling predicted, the industry as a whole “clearly did not.”

While people all across Maryland went to sleep not knowing the winner of the presidential election, most other races in the Old Line State were largely settled on Tuesday night—even if there were some hiccups counting ballots in several jurisdictions. Here in Baltimore, City Council President Brandon Scott, 36, won the race for mayor, becoming the youngest person to secure the city’s top job. The state’s delegation in the U.S. House of Representatives remained unchanged, seven Democrats to one Republican. There will be five new faces on the Baltimore City Council, Councilman Bill Henry will become the new comptroller, and Delegate Nick J. Mosby will be sworn in as City Council President—outcomes that were more or less sealed during the primary election.

Even so, there were significant developments in local politics following the election. Here are four takeaways from the results.

High-profile races fail to deliver upsets
While most of the council races were effectively settled after the primary, one incumbent received what appeared to be a strong challenge: 12th District Councilman Robert Stokes. The Green Party ran local teacher and organizer Franca Muller Paz, and she soon grew an enthusiastic following online and raised a formidable war chest. In the end, voters in the heavily Democratic district stuck with the incumbent, handing Stokes a comfortable win, 59 percent to 36 percent.

Similarly, independent mayoral candidate Bob Wallace and Republican Congressional candidate Kim Klacik, both of whom had considerable funds and spent accordingly, couldn’t make much of a dent against the favorites. Scott, who won a tight race for the Democratic nomination, beat Wallace by more than 50 points. In the 7th Congressional District, covering parts of Baltimore City and Baltimore and Howard Counties, Klacik couldn’t gain ground on Kweisi Mfume in a rematch of the special election to complete the term of the late Elijah Cummings.

Turnout appears to be in line with past elections
As of Wednesday morning, more than 474,000 people reportedly went to the polls on Election Day, according to an unofficial count from the Maryland State Board of Elections. Combined with mail-in votes and early voting across the state, some 2.8 million Marylanders cast ballots, and officials reportedly anticipate another 300,000 mail-in ballots postmarked on Tuesday to arrive and be counted.

According to data compiled by WMAR’s Mallory Sofastaii, that raw vote total would top the last four presidential elections.

However, there are 4.1 million eligible voters in the state, meaning the percentage of the electorate who went to the polls or mailed in a ballot is in line with recent history. Figures are still incomplete. The five largest jurisdictions in the state stopped posting results from Election Day because the data transfer was reportedly taking too long, but more information should be finalized soon.

Voters choose to remake city government
When Scott takes over as mayor, he will do so without some of the power his predecessors enjoyed. Voters overwhelmingly backed a series of questions weakening the city’s strong-mayor structure of government and giving more tools to the City Council. Don’t feel too bad for Scott, though, because these were many of the reforms he pushed for in his role as president of the council.

Here’s a rundown of some of the major changes: Question F gives the City Council greater authority over the budget, allowing members to increase spending in the general fund. Previously, the council could only cut from a proposed budget, but it could not reallocate any of that money.

Both Question G and Question H give the council great power to override a mayoral veto. The former measure lowers the threshold from three-fourths of the council to two-thirds, and the latter gives members more time to take up an override. Outgoing Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young vetoed legislation to put both questions on the ballot, but the council successfully overrode him.

Question K creates the position of City Administrator to oversee day-to-day operations of municipal government.

With an eye toward future changes, Question E establishes a commission to review the city charter every 10 years and suggest new additions or deletions.

Sports betting is legalized
By a vote of 66 percent to 34 percent, voters overwhelmingly approved a measure to legalize sports betting in Maryland, joining nearby jurisdictions Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Delaware and the District of Columbia.

It wasn’t always a foregone conclusion. According to a Goucher poll released in February, Marylanders were lukewarm about the idea, with 47 percent of respondents supporting sports betting and 43 percent opposing it.

Unfortunately, sports fans won’t be able to place a bet anytime soon on a Super Bowl run for the Ravens. The Maryland General Assembly now has to figure out some pretty important details, such as which companies and casinos can offer wagering, whether bettors can use apps, and just how much of revenues would go toward education. As of this writing, the legislative session is scheduled to begin on Jan. 21, 2021.

Franca Muller Paz sets a punishing pace striding uphill east on Orleans Street. Neither the oddly muggy October evening, nor the fact she’s decked out in a face shield and surgical grade face mask, slows her stride.      

She doesn’t have time to dawdle. Despite her days starting at 4 a.m., time remains an invaluable commodity as she balances her obligations as a teacher at City College with running a campaign for Baltimore City Council. On this recent autumn evening, after teaching classes all day, her canvass starts with feeding volunteers, briefing them on COVID-19 safety measures, and then covering what she wants emphasized to voters at doors.   

After that, it’s time for Muller Paz to speed from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School up a few blocks to the Douglass Homes to visit housing rights activist Rev. Annie Chambers. Once she checks in with Chambers, Muller Paz pushes onto the primary reason she’s hoofing it up and down Orleans Street in the heat—to introduce herself to as many voters as possible before dark. 

“I’ve always been a marcher,” Muller Paz says during a brief pause waiting for a traffic light to change at Aisquith and Orleans streets as she heads toward her canvassing turf at Pleasant View Gardens.  

The setting sun isn’t the only factor pushing Muller Paz’s tempo. After roughly three months of campaigning—an extremely short period of time for electioneering—her bid to serve on the City Council has entered the home stretch. In-person early voting began this week and runs through Nov. 2, with Election Day itself slated for Nov. 3.  

If Muller Paz sways enough votes before polls close on Election Day, she’ll make history as the first Green Party candidate elected to city office. She’d also likely join Odette Ramos, the Democratic nominee in District 14, as the city’s first Hispanic elected officials.  

At the moment, however, that’s all hypothetical. Muller Paz and her turquoise clad troops still must clear more obstacles than an Olympic hurdler.

While there’s anecdotal evidence the campaign’s momentum has shifted her way, based on fundraising and campaign activity, Muller Paz remains a heavy underdog.   

A major reason Muller Paz’s bid is considered a long shot is the candidate, who has never sought elected office before, only had a relatively short time to introduce herself to the district’s voters after kicking off her campaign in July. 

In recent instances locally, where upstart candidates defeated incumbents, those challengers previously held elected office and started campaigning long before the election.  

Arguably the biggest obstacle in Muller Paz’s path to victory is party affiliation in the district. Democrats in District 12 make up about 81 percent of registered voters, and she’ll need to convince a large chunk of voters to reject their party’s nominee, Councilman Robert Stokes Sr. 

In the past three presidential General Elections, district voters cast a median of roughly 13,000 votes. If turnout is in that ballpark, and the makeup of the electorate reflects party affiliation in the district, about 10,500 Democrats will cast ballots in District 12.  

In that scenario, Muller Paz—assuming she overwhelmingly wins the 15 percent of voters in the district registered as unaffiliated, or with a third-party—will need to pull more than 5,000 votes from Democrats to earn a majority. That number drops if Republican candidate Eugene Boikai overperforms, opening the potential to win with a plurality of votes.   

Green Party officials say there’s too many variables to project precisely how many Democratic voters they’ll need to convert to win, but agree Muller Paz will need to earn “thousands” of Democratic votes to emerge victorious. That’s still a tall order considering Ian Schlakman, the Green Party’s candidate for City Council in District 12 four years ago, received 1,827 total votes.  

City operatives and activists familiar with the district all doubt Muller Paz has a path to victory. That’s predicated on the expectation that Democrats will back the party nominee.  

They’re also skeptical the district’s majority Black voters will support a Latina candidate, especially when she’s running against a Black incumbent. Politicos skeptical of Muller Paz’s electability cite the results of the 2011 Democratic primary.  In that race, Ramos, who is of Puerto Rican heritage, ran a serious campaign, but only earned about 23 percent of the vote. She lost to then Councilman Carl Stokes, no relation to Robert Stokes Sr., who carried the day earning nearly 50 percent of ballots in the crowded field. 

Conventional wisdom is that once Carl Stokes decided at the last moment against running for mayor, Ramos’ bid was doomed regardless. Nonetheless, her heritage, various politicos say, served as a liability in the contest. They expect a similar dynamic to play out in 2020.    

Mueller Paz’s campaign, however, does have some advantages. 

Arguably, its biggest leg up stems from a dramatic shift in the Green Party’s election strategy, which provides her candidacy with resources previous party efforts lacked.

Following the 2018 election cycle, when the local Green Party failed to win a single race after fielding its broadest slate of candidates ever, party loyalists decided to go a new route. 

Baltimore Green Party co-chairman Owen Silverman Andrews says watching third-party candidates in Philadelphia, Minnesota, and Seattle win races in recent years sold the party on the strategy that worked in those cities. That blueprint calls for pumping all of the party’s resources into a single contest. It’s what Silverman Andrews calls going, “narrow and deep.” 

By focusing its efforts into Muller Paz’s campaign, the Green Party provides her with an unprecedented level of organization and fundraising support. Bolstered by the party’s ability to tap into a national network, Muller Paz’s campaign has raised more than $100,000 from 1,400 donors since July. 

“We’ve funneled it all into one City Council race, and given that we’re a smaller party than the two corporate-funded parties, we have to be strategic in how we deploy our resources,” Silverman Andrews says.

By comparison, Robert Stokes Sr., who did not return multiple phone calls seeking comment on this story, has essentially eschewed electioneering. 

The few pieces of campaign material featuring the incumbent’s name, such as signs or mailers, have come from City Council President Brandon Scott’s mayoral campaign. His most recent campaign finance filings reported the campaign raised $0 ahead of the general election.

At the same time, the incumbent has dealt with a personal tragedy that would understandably make campaigning difficult. His older brother, former Councilman Edwin Johnson, died in September. Johnson gave Robert Stokes Sr. his start in politics when he hired his brother as a campaign coordinator in 1984. 

While the incumbent’s lack of campaigning seems a curious choice at first, and would seem to portend an upset this fall, there’s a rationale behind the decision. It’s a strategy often used by candidates with a substantial edge in factors like voter registration. Actively campaigning in those scenarios, the reasoning goes, only helps the challenger by drawing attention to the fact there’s an alternative in the race. 

Another edge for team Muller Paz is their candidate has proven to be an energetic, if raw, retail campaigner who’s leveraged relationships she’s built in the community as a teacher at City College, and through her involvement with the teachers union.

By comparison, her opponent has not proved himself a particularly dynamic campaigner. That’s reflected in the fact Robert Stokes Sr. won both his primary races by a combined 576 votes despite being raised in the district, attending Paul Laurence Dunbar High School—which boasts a powerful alumni network—and having worked in East Baltimore politics since before Muller Paz was born.      

All of this is making some of Robert Stokes Sr.’s allies uneasy.   

During a recent appearance on WEAA’s “Real Questions with David Brown,” Carl Stokes said he was aggravated at the number of his fellow Democrats supporting Muller Paz. 

He called that support for his successor’s challenger, along with organizations that generally support Democrats, such as the AFL-CIO, The Sierra Club, and Clean Water Action, “politricks.” 

“I think the present council person is being targeted…as a test to see if, and… I’m really measuring my words, because I do want to invoke race,” Carl Stokes said. “His challenger, I guess by some, could be called brown, but in truth is white, and it is the white portion of the 12th District that is supportive of this candidate.” 

During a recent interview, Muller Paz, who was born in Perù and whose family moved to the U.S. when she was a child, steered away from directly addressing the role of race and identity in the campaign.

The residents she speaks with while canvassing, Muller Paz says, routinely express the same concerns. The most common anxieties all voters share with her, she says, can be divided into two “buckets.” At the top of the list are intertwined issues of crime and youth investment. The second bucket, she says, consists of frustrations about lack of constituent services, such as trash collection. 

If elected, Muller Paz says she will help to address those issues by supporting a $15 minimum wage, backing increased funding for schools and recreation centers, and pledging to adopt a constituent services model like the one used by Councilman Zeke Cohen in neighboring District 1.    

But those are all concerns for after the election. For now, Muller Paz, the Baltimore Green Party, campaign staff, and volunteers must stay focused on winning the election. 

While one city political operative said it would take “a miracle” for Muller Paz to win, the candidate, party activists, and volunteers alike are more optimistic, and give her a puncher’s chance to flip the deep blue district green.  

A drive around the district, which stretches from lower Charles Village to Upper Fells Point, shows why there’s growing optimism in Muller Paz’s campaign, and provides reason to believe a victory will take slightly less than divine intervention. 

Her distinctive turquoise signs—featuring the candidate’s smiling bespectacled face and “¡FRANCA!” in white letters—are ubiquitous in the district, hanging on doors, windows, and yards rather than jammed on light posts, in median strips, or slapped on vacant buildings. 

But signs are not votes, and a Muller Paz win would rank among the greatest underdog stories in the long, if not august, annals of Baltimore political history. 

As the campaign heads to a close, there’s more uncertainty than certainty. But one thing the candidate does know for certain, if she loses, it won’t be for a lack of hustle. 

“I feel like I can say we put everything on the table,” she says. “Everyone that has worked on this campaign has done it with their whole heart.” 

Following the departure of founder Paul Jay, the Baltimore-based Real News Network announced the appointment of John Duda as executive director after a national search earlier this year. Duda joins The Real News—a progressive, nonprofit online news organization—after nine years as the director of communications at The Democracy Collaborative, an international research institute working to develop practical models for a post-capitalist economy. Duda also holds a Ph.D in Intellectual History from Johns Hopkins University.

We caught up with the new executive director to discuss his background, reaching wider audiences in the age of COVID, and the publication’s commitment to on-the-ground reporting.

You come out of both an academic and research background, and a worker-owner experience as a founding member of Baltimore’s long-running bookstore-café Red Emma’s. What convinced you it was time to move into journalism?
To some extent, it’s a bit of a return for me. Most of the activism I was doing around the turn of the millennium was around digital media—trying to take advantage of the new possibilities that were emerging for journalism as the Internet was first becoming something more and more people had access to. But it’s also a continuation of the same conviction that led me to help start Red Emma’s, and which I had been focusing on in the think tank policy world—namely, that you can’t have effective long-term movements for social change unless you build and sustain the infrastructure that supports those movements. A key piece of that infrastructure, of course, is the kind of movement journalism that The Real News produces.

It’s been a strange time to start a new job.
Yes, absolutely! My first day on the job, and every day since, has just been on Zoom and email. I haven’t even really properly met my co-workers yet. And trying to step into a leadership role at an organization while also helping care for a three-year-old stuck in the house for months on end has been, let’s say, interesting.

Obviously, it has also been a fraught time for fact-based reporting. What was supposed to be The Information Age appears to have become The Disinformation Age. What’s your understanding about how social media—and Facebook, in particular—has become an engine of propaganda?
What makes the giant social media platforms like Facebook so powerful is the algorithms they are based on. They want to sell as many ads as possible, so the more you “engage,” the more money they can make. And because they have access to so much data, the algorithms can pick the content that’s most likely to keep you “engaging.” Not the content that’s most important, the most true, or the most likely to make you reflect critically on the world, but the content that is statistically most likely, based on their record of your behavior and millions of other people, to keep you scrolling through your feed.

The problem is that fear and hate and paranoia are these incredibly powerful emotional drivers that these algorithms can latch onto and amplify, by design. So, the propaganda problem with algorithmic media isn’t just rogue actors unethically abusing the platform, it’s baked into the way the platforms work. And at the same time, these platforms are dramatically siphoning off the advertising revenue that many traditional media outlets have depended on to do journalism. Ultimately, I think we are going to have to have a conversation, as a society, about the kind of communication networks and journalism we need to have a democracy, and whether these necessary public goods are things that we will be able to continue to rely on the market to deliver.

As the new executive director of The Real News Network, how do you plan to cut through the noise and reach bigger audiences?
It’s a good question, especially since I think that some traditional assumptions about the value of independent media have shifted in recent years. It used to be the case that you just wouldn’t hear about certain ideas or certain perspectives unless you were consuming alternative media. But today you can find quite radical left scholars and experts getting a platform in places like the New York Times op-ed section. So I think that our role as an independent left media outlet needs to evolve. While we are still going to be working to present critical analysis and stories that you might not hear elsewhere, one of the really important and effective things we can do is to give a platform to everyday people working for a more just world in our coverage, so that we start to create feedback loops on the platforms we publish on that are based in hope and an expanding sense of collective agency, not just in despair or cynicism. We want to do journalism in a way that you makes you feel the world can be changed, and that you can play a key role in making that happen.

We’ve always appreciated The Real News Network’s commitment to on-the-ground reporting in Baltimore, including its focus on the people most impacted by the city’s politics and policing. What does that commitment look like going forward?
We are committed to Baltimore for the long haul, and there’s going to be some exciting developments on that front that we’ll be announcing soon that I think a lot of people are going to be really excited by. Longer-term, when the pandemic is over, one thing we are extremely interested to explore is how we can partner more intentionally with young people in Baltimore, who are continuously giving me hope for the future of the city and the world. How can we put the tools and platform we have at our disposal to help them tell their own stories?

Locally, The Real News Network employs a number of journalists with deep institutional knowledge in the city, including Marc Steiner, Lisa Snowden-McCray, Stephen Janis, Jaisal Noor, Eddie Conway, and Taya Graham. Are there staff changes or additions in the works?
One big recent change is that Lisa Snowden-McCray is now officially our managing editor and Baltimore editor. Lisa is amazing, and I really can’t think of anyone else I would rather have setting the agenda for our Baltimore coverage. She will be joining our new editor-in-chief—Maximillian Alvarez, formerly an associate editor at The Chronicle Review—to play a central role in our leadership team.

How has the pandemic and isolation affected your Baltimore coverage?
Our best Baltimore work takes advantage of the fact that this is our home—where we can really connect with other people, having conversations in our studio or out where people are doing the work in their community. We’ve still been able, say, to come out to cover a socially distanced demonstration in person, but a lot of the more intimate conversations we’d liked to have had just haven’t been possible.

Many journalism organizations have been struggling to remain financially viable, a situation made worse during the economic fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak. How has The Real News Network, as a nonprofit, viewer-supported venture, been affected?
There’s a lot of reasons why I am excited about nonprofit models for media, and this pandemic has added a new one. Because we aren’t dependent on advertising in the way traditional for-profit media is, we didn’t immediately take the same kind of hit that other outlets did when the current crisis started. Even though we’ve had to go almost entirely remote because of COVID-19, because our money comes from donors who believe in our mission, we’ve actually been in an okay place financially compared to many other media outlets. We haven’t had to lay off or furlough anyone so far. My hope is that we will be able to continue to be able to rely on existing and new donors to get through this crisis, and be even stronger on the other side.

After opening doors to guests last spring at 30 percent capacity—and implementing a series of safety measures including timed ticketing and mandatory masks for guests six and older—folks at Clark’s Elioak Farm in Ellicott City are gearing up for their biggest month yet. We caught up with sixth-generation owner Martha Clark to talk about agritourism in the age of COVID and a fall season set to be one for the books.

Let’s start with COVID-19. What were those early days like for the farm?
We open up on April 1, so in the middle of March we were doing what we always do—cleaning the place up and getting it ready to open. I had 2,200 goodie bags for Easter in my living room. When the weather was decent, we were painting because we have all the Enchanted Forest attractions [remnants of the old storybook park that opened in Ellicott City in August 1955] to keep up. We were just starting to bring the animals over. And then the middle of March came around and all of a sudden we knew that we weren’t opening up on April 1. So all of those goodie bags are still in my living room, except for the ones that I donated to the Howard County Food Bank. When we didn’t open up April 1, we also didn’t have any of the school tours that were scheduled to come. But through all of April and May I made good use of that time by painting all of the Enchanted Forest things—the Cinderella Pumpkin Coach, Willy the Whale, and Mother Goose—and I refinished the floors. At the same time, we’re a diversified farming operation, so we sell meat and vegetables year-round. The whole time the petting farm was closed, we were open for business doing drive-ups.

For Clark’s Elioak, this season marks more than 200 years of farming in Howard County. Has there ever been a time quite like this?
Well, we’ve only been doing agritourism since 2002. I would say up until the point of the pandemic, the thing that has impacted us most as an agritourism business—which has affected us for the last 200 years—has been the weather. Our big season is fall. We do the majority of our business in the month of October. In 2009, it rained every weekend, which just wiped out our entire fall season. 

What are some exciting things that guests can look forward to this season?
Obviously the animals are the main attraction here at the farm. It’s what people love coming to see. We’ve got the farm full of all kinds of different animals—goats, sheep, pigs, cows, chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, emu, horses, ponies—and we’ve been able to social distance and use the opportunity to clean between rides, so we are running some of our rides. And it’s just fun to see people come and pick up their pumpkin and enjoy just being outside.

We’ve actually been staying open an hour later on the weekdays because we thought that with the kids all cooped up all day in front of the computer, when they finally are able to free themselves around 3:00 or 3:30 in the afternoon, the 5:00 closing time didn’t give them enough time to hop in the car and come over and run around a little bit before dinner time. So we’re now staying open until 6 p.m. If you get here between 4 and 4:30, you can get those legs movin’, get those lungs filled with oxygen, get some fresh air, pat a goat, pick a pumpkin, and hopefully get some exercise after sitting in front of the computer all day. That’s fun, and we’re hoping people take advantage of coming in the afternoons now.  

That must be a lifesaver for parents—having that little bit of extra time.
Yeah. And the one thing, of course, that makes us sad is that because of limited capacity on the weekends, we won’t be able to accommodate everybody who’s used to coming to the farm. We’re a tradition where people come and get their pumpkin every year at the farm, and not everybody’s going to be able to come because we’re at 30 percent capacity. So we’re hoping some people can come during the week. I always say there’s a silver lining to everything. 

In terms of this fall season, is there anything that excites you most?
We’re so pleased to be a place where people feel like they can come and enjoy being outside. The way we’ve got it set up with the timed ticketing, it’s been very nice because people come consistently throughout the day. We have a lot less people than would normally come in on a fall weekend, but we really enjoy seeing our visitors and we’re just so happy when they come in.

Baltimore’s place in American horse-racing history is so cemented that tomorrow’s Preakness Stakes will actually mark the second time the race will be run on Pimlico Race Course’s hoof-trampled dirt oval during a once-in-a-century pandemic.

Things were a little different than they were today. First off, news and the Spanish Flu of 1918 didn’t travel nearly as fast as information and COVID-19 seem to today. As World War I was still being fought—and about two months after reports first surfaced in U.S. newspapers about a flu outbreak at a military base in Kansas—fans were present at Pimlico on May 15, 1918 to watch the 43rd running of the Preakness.

And the race was run on a Wednesday afternoon, which evokes a different impression than the pageantry and excitement of the third Saturday in May that we (usually) see today. Though, like then, this year’s race will be run at an unusual time—at 5:45 p.m. on the first Saturday of October. And it will happen at a largely empty venue void of fans, something we had similarly never imagined.

But here’s the fascinating kicker about the last time the Preakness was run during a global pandemic. Back in 1918, for the first and only time ever, the race was so popular that it was split into two divisions. And because folks back then couldn’t decide one true winner, there were actually two. One was a 3-year-old appropriately named for the time, War Cloud, and the other went by the speed-invoking moniker Jack Hare Jr. To this day, the 1918 Preakness is the only classic race—that’s what the Preakness, Kentucky Derby, and Belmont Stakes were known as before the Triple Crown label was invented—to be so-called, “split.”

It happened because William Riggs, then secretary of the Maryland Jockey Club, hatched a marketing idea to increase the Preakness prize money to attract a strong field after the Kentucky Derby winner from 11 days earlier dropped out. So many horse owners wanted a piece of a then-record $25,000 of prize money (roughly equivalent to $470,000 today), that 26 horses entered. Rather than run them all in one race, officials decided to split the money and the race into two heats.

Today, another marketing genius might come up with a way to determine a Preakness winner in an NCAA basketball-style tournament over a few weeks for television purposes, but back then, two races—and two winners—was evidently a satisfying solution.

The Preakness that year was represented by the fourth and sixth races of a seven-race card at Pimlico. A jockey named Johnny Loftus rode War Cloud to a win in the first division. And Jack Hare Jr. took the second heat in 1 minute, 53.4 seconds—which was 0.2 seconds faster than War Cloud’s time in the earlier race.

That’s just about a photo finish if there was such a thing. If this were happening today, NBC might superimpose each horse into video of a single race—like the Discovery channel did when Michael Phelps took on that shark a few years ago—and show us the real winner in slow-motion to satisfy our curiosity and the betting public. (Or you could enter their data into a computer and run the horses against each other digitally like a Race-Horse Keno game, and crown Jack Hare Jr. the ultimate winner after everyone sees the result.)

But back then, according to a story from horse racing website PastTheWire.com, “Neither A.K. Macomber, owner of War Cloud, nor William Applegate, owner of Jack Hare Jr., could agree who should take temporary possession of the Woodlawn Vase for the year, as was tradition, so the trophy remained in Baltimore.”

At some point, though, a trophy went to the Applegate family (known for its Kentucky-based distillery), as a descendant, Missie Rennie, described in this video a few years ago…

A little more than hundred years later, the Preakness will be run again during a pandemic. It’s grown into an event that attracts tens of thousands of people to Pimlico each year (and thanks to an agreement reached just before the shutdowns in March by the state, city, and the track’s owners, The Stronach Group, one that will continue for years to come). The purse is now $1.5 million.

But tomorrow, there will be no fans. Only the horses, jockeys, trainers, officials and some media will be there. (We’ll be one of them, fortunately.) When track announcer Dave Rodman announced the post positions for the field of 11 horses earlier this week, he did so while wearing a mask, while those pulling the cards were seated nearby—socially distanced. That’s the protocol for race day, too.

The betting machines won’t even be active at the track tomorrow. No Black-Eyed Susans poured either, nor plethora of big hats to be found. In short, there will be no buzz on any part of the property in Northwest Baltimore, be it the grandstand or infield. If you want to bet, you’ve got to do it online. If you want to watch, you have to do it on television or your phone. (To that point, the Stronach Group, the race’s operator, has partnered with The Greene Turtle to host watch parties at their restaurants around Maryland.)

Like people were in 1918, in the early days of what became a years-long pandemic, we’re happy to have a race at all. Sports, even those in which horses are the celebrity participants, are a welcome distraction in times of chaos. That was as true more than 100 years ago as it is today. And this year, only one winning jockey will be handed a big trophy.

Local children’s book author Miranda Mittleman has always loved poetry. In 2017, she turned that passion into a children’s book series, PAWS and THINK!, which teaches kids meaningful lessons through the adventures of the protagonist—her playful mutt, Weaver. In advance of the launch of her fourth book, Be a Good Sport (available for presale now), we caught up with Mittleman about the inspiration behind the series, her virtual school visits, and using the stories as a platform to give back. 

What was the inspiration for the PAWS and THINK! series?
We adopted my rescue dog, Weaver, back in 2015, and I was inspired to write some fun poems while walking him through Baltimore City. When I showed them to my husband, he loved them and convinced me to look into getting published. That’s kind of how the idea of PAWS and THINK! started, and when I decided that I wanted to actually look into getting published, I realized that I wanted to do more than just create poems. I wanted them to be meaningful and have important lessons for children. 

Was writing children’s books something you studied and have always wanted to do?
I actually never intended to be a published author, but I’ve always loved poetry. And when I wrote these poems, I really had no intention of ever doing anything with them, just writing them for fun. I have a creative mind, and I went to school for marketing. I always knew I wanted to do something with marketing, I just never imagined that I would actually get to market my own product, so it’s been a crazy journey. I’ve loved becoming a children’s author. I can’t imagine it any other way.

How did you come up with the idea of telling these valuable stories through Weaver’s eyes?
When I was walking Weaver, I was trying to write things from his perspective—just kind of looking at things that I saw when we were walking and imagining how he would see them and what he would be saying if he could talk. I thought about all of the places we saw and the other dogs that we met from Weaver’s point of view. Personally, I think that a lot of the children’s books that really bring value are the ones that children can put themselves in the main character’s position and relate to the most, and Weaver is the perfect subject to do that.

Can you talk about some of the lessons you highlight in your books? How did you choose them?
When I decided that I wanted to create the books, I had four different poems written, each one being a different lesson. At the time I didn’t have children—now I have two—but I wanted to take lessons that I knew one day I would want my children to grow up learning. We’re All Different, the first of my books, is all about inclusion, diversity, and friendship—things that I think are so important to teach children at a young age. I Am Important is about self confidence and finding your place in the world. The lessons are taught in a very lighthearted, relatable way for children. 

In the books, Weaver introduces himself as a downtown dog. Does living in Baltimore inspire any of his adventures?
I used to live in Federal Hill, in the heart of Baltimore City, and when we would go on walks, we saw so many interesting things. I think that triggered me to start writing poems. We would go to places like Federal Hill Park and Riverside Park, and we would meet so many other people walking dogs and see so many neat things around Baltimore City, like the unique buildings and the homes. We used to live just about a block or so from the Federation for the Blind, and we would actually see a lot of seeing eye dogs, so I incorporated that into, I Am Important. Weaver is around other dogs all the time that have different types of jobs, and a seeing eye dog was one of those jobs. So getting inspiration from things that we actually saw, in places we went in the city, helped me write the poems. Baltimore is such a unique and beautiful place.

How are you adapting with COVID-19 in regards to your usual book tours in local schools?
School visits are my absolute favorite part of being an author. I love going into schools, meeting hundreds of children, sharing my books, and bringing Weaver with me a lot of the time. I have not been able to physically go into schools since the school year started, but I’ve found other ways to connect. I’m currently offering free virtual visits for teachers who want to have an author visit the classroom. I really want to still be able to reach as many children as possible during this time and create some normalcy for them. I also created a free resource on my website for teachers or parents with different fun lessons, worksheets, coloring pages, and all sorts of things to go along with my book that they can print at home or print for schools. 

In the past, I’ve held launch parties for each book that came out in my series. So this time, I’m doing a virtual launch party for the new book. That will be on September 29, and it’s going to be a way for me to reach as many people as possible and read the new book for the first time. I’m hoping next school year, or later in the school year, I’ll be able to visit more schools.

I know your books also have a philanthropic mission. Do your donations typically benefit local children’s organizations?
I created a “Charity of the Quarter” program so a portion of the proceeds from every PAWS and THINK! book I sell goes to a different charity or nonprofit. I believe we’re on our 13th charity, and we’ve raised over $8,000. From the beginning, I knew I wanted to do this with a bigger purpose. I saw this platform as a way to give back to my community, and I know I want to help organizations that either help animals or children in some way. I’ve worked with a lot of local animal shelters like the Baltimore Humane Society and Maryland SPCA, and other local organizations like the Maryland Book Bank that help with literacy. 

What can people expect from the latest installment of the series, Be A Good Sport?
A lot of people hear Be A Good Sport, and they automatically think of sports, but it is not just about sports. It’s about being a good sport on and off the field. Not just simply playing by the rules, but being respectful to others, treating others the way you want to be treated, showing kindness, and supporting each other. And I think those are all really important things that children and adults alike need to understand. In this book, Weaver learns what that means, and he sees how our behavior and attitudes can impact the lives of others. And we even meet a new character.

What are your hopes for Paws and Think! as it continues to grow in the future?
I obviously would love to raise as much money as possible for these nonprofit organizations, and I would like to try to give back to organizations all over the country, not just local ones. I have so many other ideas for books that I would like to pursue in the future, so I’d love for PAWS and THINK! to be a household name and to get these important messages into the hands of as many children as possible. 

Last Friday night was Erev Rosh Hashanah—the eve of our holiday celebrating the beginning of a new year. I had just finished watching a beautiful service—on my laptop—surrounded by my four kids. The air was crisp and the sky was beautiful, so I took my glass of wine and sat outside on the porch while my daughter did skateboarding tricks in our front yard.

Suddenly, my phone buzzed. I looked down to a link to an article and a simple expletive word with a lot of k’s and even more exclamation marks.

“No,” I simply said to myself. I took a deep breath and opened the text. “No.”

A Jewish teaching says those who die just before the Jewish New Year are a “tzaddik”—a righteous person. They are the people God has held back until the last moment because they were needed the most.

“And so it was,” tweeted NPR Supreme Court reporter Nina Totenberg, also Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s bestie, “that #RBG died as the sun was setting last night marking the beginning of Rosh Hashanah.”

I knew Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn’t live forever. But it sure felt like she should.

We are big fans of RBG in our house. Not just because she was a kick-ass woman (and a kick-ass Jewish woman) but because her selfless contributions were endless. She was someone my daughter Willa, 11, looked up to in infinite ways. Our infatuation with RBG has ramped up the last few years as Willa has become more aware of her role in this world and the injustices that women still face. For many Halloweens, Willa chose as her costumes (maybe with a little nudging from me) strong women: Rosie the Riveter, Frida Kahlo and two Halloweens ago—Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

She wore the costume to the Great Halloween Lantern Parade and Festival in Patterson Park—the big glasses, black robe, gray bun, and jabot. A woman on the hay ride smiled at Willa, “Are you Judge Judy?”

Last January, the day before Willa’s 11th birthday, we headed to see Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a retrospective at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia that traced her career and rise to icon status. (I really hope this wonderful exhibit resurfaces post-pandemic.)

We have books about RBG, bobble heads, and we’ve seen all the movies and documentaries. Our holiday card one year was an illustration of RBG. “Hope your holidays are supreme” one side read, and the other “Merry Resistmas.” A few years ago, Willa returned from a visit to Austin, Texas with a prayer candle with RBG’s face on the side. We would burn it every time her name was in the news—from court decisions to cancer battles to hospital stays. Last month while in Rehoboth Beach, I spotted another RBG prayer candle. I mentioned to my mom that my original candle was almost finished, and I was worried what would transpire if it burned out. “We can’t let that happen,” she said, before buying me the replacement. (“The candles didn’t work,” my friend Talley texted me as soon as the news broke. Everyone knew about the candles.)

Late Friday night—as I waited for my apple bundt cake to bake—a Baltimore friend messaged that she was at the Supreme Court. There were Hebrew prayers, and someone had blown the shofar, she reported. “I should have gone,” I told her. “You still can,” she gently nudged.

I barely slept that night. At 6 a.m., I slipped out of bed and went into Willa’s room. “Do you want to go say goodbye to Ruth?” I whispered. We were in the car by 6:20 and pulled up to the Supreme Court at 7:15.

The air was cold. The sky a baby blue. Under normal circumstances, I’d be home getting ready for Rosh Hashanah services, forcing my boys into button downs, and trying to remember to bring our yarmulkes. But nothing is ordinary anymore. Instead, I was standing in front of the Supreme Court mourning RBG.

National media gathered in one area, while local news stations wandered amongst the visitors. When we arrived, there were already piles of flowers, illustrations, notes, American flags, prayer books, love letters, and lots of candles. We tried to take it all in.

Many posters read: “May her memory be a blessing” and “Rest In Power.” Another: “These flowers are from our wedding. Without RBG we wouldn’t have been able to get married. Thank you for being our champion.” And another: “I will pass the bar for you.” Tears slid down my face. The flag hung at half-mast over our heads and the impressive 16 marble columns loomed behind a police barricade.

A TV reporter from the local Fox affiliate approached and asked if she could speak to us. We said yes. A reporter from The Lilly—a women’s publication from the Washington Post—asked us questions about why we had chosen to come that day. Another reporter from the local ABC affiliate came over and asked if she could interview us on air. “Everyone here must be able to feel how much we loved RBG,” I told Willa. (Before also wishing I hadn’t gotten dressed in the dark.)

People wandered around—all wearing masks—snapping pictures and shaking their heads, crying, hugging. There were babies in strollers and dogs on leashes. Willa and I quietly read the Mourner’s Kaddish—a Jewish prayer said during the bereavement period of loss. I read it in Hebrew and Willa read the English.

Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei raba.

We took our original RBG candle—the one from Austin—held it in our hands and then placed it amongst the growing shrine.

After an hour, we left to seek warmth and coffee—our cheeks pink from the cold air.

Later that night we celebrated Rosh Hashanah as good Jews do—with food and family. We brought our bobble head Ruth, the second candle, and an RBG paint-by-number to decorate my parents’ holiday table—each item nestled amongst the Manischewitz, challah, pickles, and matzo ball soup.

“Let’s toast Ruth,” my mom said. Willa stood up and raised her glass of grape juice, “She was my hero.”

Governor Larry Hogan announced Tuesday that based on the state’s flattening COVID-19 positivity and hospitalization rates, Maryland will begin to move into the state’s next phase of reopening.

As with earlier stages of reopening, individual jurisdictions are empowered to make decisions regarding the timing of the reopening of movie theaters and live entertainment venues, as well as increased capacity at restaurants, retail stores, and religious services.

Baltimore Mayor Jack Young said Wednesday that the city is not yet ready to fully move into the next phase of the reopening guidelines put forth by the Hogan administration. But Baltimore will loosen restrictions in some areas, including restaurants and movie theaters. The city will allow restaurants to open indoor dining to 50 percent capacity next week, Young said during a Wednesday press conference at the War Memorial Building.

Late Wednesday, City officials said movie theaters will be allowed to open Friday at 25 percent of their capacity, according to reporting by The Baltimore Sun.

Baltimore County Executive Johnny Olszewski Jr. said in a statement that the county will align with the state and move into the next phase of the Hogan Administration’s coronavirus recovery plan, allowing theaters to reopen and retail and religious facilities to expand indoor capacity.

“Baltimore County has taken significant steps to combat the COVID-19 pandemic while gradually and safely reopening our economy,” Olszewski said. “Thanks to our efforts, and the efforts of county residents to protect themselves and their loved ones, we’ve seen continued progress. This dangerous disease is still with us and I urge all our residents and businesses to continue to follow the best public health guidance. In the days and weeks ahead, we will continue to strictly enforce state laws and guidelines—any businesses found to be violating face-covering or social distancing mandates will be held accountable.”

According to state metrics, Baltimore County’s positivity rate has remained below 5 percent since July 7, 2020 and is currently 4.4 percent. Baltimore County’s case rate is 1,800 cases per 100,000 residents—35 percent lower than Prince George’s County, 22 percent lower than Baltimore City, and 2 percent lower than Montgomery County.

Face coverings are still required under state and local order. Individuals aged 5 and up must wear face coverings in any indoor business, service, organization, or establishment that serves the general public. Individuals aged 5 and up are also required to wear face coverings when outdoors and unable to consistently maintain at least six feet of distance from those who are not members of their household.

Individuals are not required to wear a mask if eating or drinking while seated, but face coverings are required when otherwise moving in or about a restaurant or bar premises.

“As we move into this third and final stage of our recovery, I want to sincerely thank our doctors, nurses, and public health officials, our small business community, and, most importantly, the people of Maryland who have pulled together over the last five months to respond to this unprecedented challenge with incredible courage and perseverance,” Hogan said.

Last week, Hogan implored local school boards to immediately take action toward reopening schools for in-person classes.

Although the rate of cases has flattened in Maryland in recent weeks, new cases continue to accumulate in the state with 3,833 positive results over the past seven days. Overall, there have been nearly 110,000 confirmed cases in the state. To date, there have been 3,623 coronavirus fatalities in the state, with another 143 probable tests, according to the Maryland Department of Health’s tracking program. Maryland ranks 12th in per capita deaths, tied with Delaware, and just ahead of Pennsylvania.

As part of the state’s new guidelines, the following gradual reopenings are allowed in Maryland:

• Indoor theaters where live performances occur or motion pictures are shown may open to the general public at 50 percent capacity, or 100 people per auditorium—whichever is less—with appropriate health and safety protocols in place.
• Outdoor venues where live performances occur or motion pictures are shown outdoors may open to the general public at 50 percent capacity, or 250 people—whichever is less—with appropriate health and safety protocols in place.
• Capacity for retail establishments and religious facilities may increase from 50 to 75 percent.

Meanwhile, the Stronach Group—which owns the Preakness Stakes—and the Maryland Jockey Club announced Wednesday that the 145th Preakness will be run will without fans in attendance at Pimlico Race Course on Oct. 3.

“The Stronach Group and the Maryland Jockey Club have been working closely in consultation with local and state health and governmental authorities for the past several months to thoughtfully and safely plan for Preakness 145,” Belinda Stronach, chairman and president of The Stronach Group, said in a statement. “While we had hoped to be able to welcome fans as we have for the past 145 years, the health and safety of our guests, horsemen, riders, team members and the community at large is, and will always be, our top priority.”

In another previous post, the 44-year-old Love, a longtime GOP operative who previously worked for former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele and the Republican National Committee, added a comment linking the portrayal of LGBTQ characters on television to pedophilia.

State Del. Eric Luedtke was among the first to call for Love’s firing after seeing the post supporting the teenager accused in the triple shooting, describing them as “horrific” and “supporting extrajudicial murder.”

U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin also weighed in as the outcry grew on social media Saturday. He tweeted: “It took a lifetime of buying into twisted viewpoints for Mr. Love to spew such filth in this moment. How long will it take for @MDGOP and @LarryHogan to renounce them?”

Prince George’s Del. Darryl Barnes, chairman of the Legislative Black Caucus, told Maryland Matters that he was shown Love’s social media posts Saturday morning and described them as “highly disturbing.”

“There’s no sense for it,” Barnes said. “There’s no reason someone like this should be part of our state government.”

By early Saturday afternoon, Steven McAdams, executive director of the Governor’s Office of Community Initiatives, issued a statement saying that Love had been dismissed.

“These divisive images and statements are inconsistent with the mission and core values of the Office of Community Initiatives,” McAdams said. “Earlier today, I relieved this employee of his duties. Kevin Craft, administrative director of the Governor’s Commission on African Affairs, will assume these duties effective immediately.”

Shareese DeLeaver-Churchill, a spokeswoman for Hogan, released a statement supporting Love’s firing.

“These posts are obviously totally inappropriate,” DeLeaver-Churchill said. “We fully support the immediate actions taken by Director McAdams to address this matter.”

Love is the second Hogan Administration official to land in trouble this month.

Two weeks ago, Roy McGrath, Gov. Hogan’s longtime associate, advisor, and former chief of staff, resigned following criticism over a nearly $250,000 severance package—first reported by The Baltimore Sun—that he received after leaving Maryland Environmental Service, a nonprofit state agency, to work directly for the governor. The Sun also reported that McGrath submitted more than $55,000 in old Maryland Environmental Service expense reimbursement requests in early June, some of which dated to January 2019.

McGrath said in a statement after his resignation that the uproar around his case was “simply the sad politics of personal destruction.”

Former Baltimore City Councilman and state Del. Keiffer Mitchell Jr. is currently serving as Gov. Hogan’s acting chief of staff.

Citing lowering coronavirus positivity rates in the state, Gov. Larry Hogan implored local school boards to immediately take action toward reopening schools for in-person classes at a press conference in Annapolis Thursday afternoon.

All 24 school districts in Maryland will begin the 2020-2021 academic year with online instruction only. Hogan repeatedly pointed out that 16 districts currently have plans to bring some students back this fall in hybrid models, but other school districts have decided to wait until the start of the second semester to physically reopen—a cautionary timeline he does not support.

Baltimore City—which welcomed back teachers and staff this week—and Baltimore County,  as well as Anne Arundel, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George’s, and Calvert counties issued statements that they have no intention of foregoing their virtual opening. During a virtual meeting Thursday, Baltimore County Public Schools community superintendent Christina Byers said that while the county school system acknowledges the governor’s recommendations, it is not in a position to immediately address in-person instruction.

Byers said that local superintendents and boards did not receive any advanced notice about the details of Thursday’s announcement.

Hogan, taking a strident tone at times, alleged those boards, as well as administrators, teachers unions, and associations, have failed to do the “hard work [that] lies in developing the safe reopening plans.” “This is simply not acceptable,” the governor said.

“As a result of our improved health metrics, every single county school system in the state of Maryland is now fully authorized to begin safely reopening,” Hogan continued. “Nearly everyone agrees that there is no substitute for in-person instruction. It is essential that we all work together on flexible hybrid plans to safely get some of our kids back into classrooms and into healthy and supportive learning environments.”

By law, the governor of the state does not have the power to mandate when schools open, which is a decision left to local school boards.

In his remarks, Hogan noted encouraging reports that the statewide positivity rate has dropped to 3.3 percent from a peak of 26.9 percent in mid-April.

The benchmark for generally safe reopening of public buildings, according to the CDC, is a 5 percent positivity rate. Maryland’s overall rate has been below 4 percent since August 8, according to state health department methodology. Hogan also stressed that the positivity rate among Marylanders under the age of 35 has now fallen below to 3.79 percent.

That said, Towson University, like other colleges around the country, has already been forced to cancel in-person learning and close residence halls after a concerning number of students tested positive for the coronavirus just before classes resumed this week. In Baltimore City, the Department of Public Works announced Thursday it was suspending curbside recycling pickup because of staff shortages due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Maryland Senate Majority Leader Bill Ferguson, a former teacher, said he appreciated the Hogan Administration’s publishing of new health metrics for school reopening statewide, but also stated that the new information comes late in the process with schools so close to reopening. 

“These metrics are critical for Maryland schools to have the framework for in-person reopening,” Ferguson tweeted. He added, however, that “expecting districts, administrators, educators, and families to flip the switch in 10 days is simply unreasonable.”

Cheryl Bost, the president of the Maryland State Education Association, expressed frustration with the governor’s rhetoric in a statement late Thursday.

“At a time when educators are focused on working hard to make the best of this year for students, the governor and [state Superintendent of Schools Karen Salmon, who joined Hogan] are focused on throwing school communities under the bus,” Bost said. “We need collaboration and problem-solving, not political theater.”

Bost stated that Gov. Hogan and the superintendent had previously “abdicated responsibility for creating reopening standards and told districts to come up with their own plans, indicating appropriate confidence that local school systems would do what is best for students.”

“In the continued absence of adequate state and federal funds to help schools open safely—to include measures such as rapid testing, certified ventilation systems and needed PPE—this is a recipe for chaos, confusion, distrust, and deepening the inequities that too many of our students face,” Bost said.

Salmon announced the state is making $10 million in grant funding available to help systems that are able to move toward in-person instruction.

“While adherence to these metrics for re-entry into classrooms are not considered requirements, I am strongly encouraging local school systems to utilize our improving numbers and the provided metrics as the driving force for the decision to return to school buildings,” Salmon said. “Health and safety precautions must remain in place once we begin to bring more students back into schools, and school systems should continue to work in conjunction with local health officials to monitor trends in the metrics and any outbreaks at area schools.”

The issues around school reopening are complicated. Educators are concerned about student safety, as well as their own health and that of their families, while also scrambling to address the digital divide. Economists are also worried about the impact on economic recovery if schools don’t reopen. Without schools reopening, many parents will have trouble returning to work.

Hogan dismissed partisan concerns around his push to reopen schools, noting that the Democratic governors of New York and New Jersey, Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy, have issued similar statements about reopening classrooms.

Dr. Jinlene Chan, acting deputy secretary for public health services at the Maryland Department of Health, who also spoke at the press conference, sounded a more measured approach than the governor. She said that the new metrics and the guidance being offered at this time by the state is designed to aid in decision-making rather than serve as prescriptive policy.

“There is flexibility that schools have to make decisions about how to best meet the educational needs of their students while taking into account the level of community spread and their capacity to implement the guidelines,” Chan said.

Working mom Jennifer Nolley loved to paint when she was growing up, and she wanted art and creativity to be part of her children’s lives, as well. But the logistics of it all—finding the right supplies, getting prepared, cleaning up—were both challenging and stress-inducing. They took a lot of the fun out of it.

Unhappy with products already on the market, Nolley came up with a solution. She started Tiny Easel, a company that provides art in a box for budding artists—and the busy parents who want to encourage them. The goal, she says, is to make art fun and approachable for children, without being stressful for anyone else.

“I wanted activities that would hold their interest,” Nolley says. “Things that they could enjoy and that I could enjoy without hovering or worrying about the mess.”

Nolley, 37, launched the company this month, both online and with a pop-up shop at Whitehall Mill in Hampden. Its motto is: “For little hands with big ideas.”

Tiny Easel sells art activity kits that contain everything families need to make watercolor paintings, drawings, and sketches. (Think 36-color palettes, brushes, sponges, spill-proof cups, coloring pages, activity guides, and, of course, a tiny easel.) All they need to add is water.

Nolley said she chose watercolors over acrylics because they’re easy to work with and clean up. She added watercolor crayons and pencils to give a variety of mediums.

“Watercolors are amazing for kids,” she said. “They’re washable and non-toxic. Acrylics can dry out, but watercolors last forever.”

Watercolor painting also reminds her of her childhood: “One of the things I remember as a child is doing watercolors with my mom when we would go on vacation,” she says. “She would bring a little set of watercolors and we would paint together.”

That led to other arts-related interests.

“I have always been taking art classes at MICA on the weekends,” she says. “I went to film school. Everything I’ve done has been art-based. I wanted to be a film production designer for years, working on sets. I did en plein air classes. I think everything in my life just keeps coming back to that moment with my mom doing watercolors.”

This is the first retail venture for Nolley, a Baltimore native who graduated from Friends School and got a masters degree in interior architecture from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C.

She started Tiny Easel in addition to her full time job as Developer and Designer for Terra Nova Ventures, a real estate company that was started by her father, David Tufaro, and specializes in the adaptive reuse of historic buildings, including Whitehall Mill and Mill No. 1 in the Jones Falls Valley.

She’s married to Dawson Nolley, a real estate agent with Cummings & Co. Realtors. They live in Ruxton and are raising three children: Elizabeth, 7, Kathryn, 4 and George, 1. She volunteers at Riderwood Elementary School in its Smart Art program, which introduces kindergarteners and first graders to art.

Nolley said she’s had the idea for Tiny Easel for some time, but really started working on it while on maternity leave with her third child last summer. She spent more time developing it while the family was in quarantine during the pandemic. “Being stuck inside with the kids was helpful,” she says, “because it gave us time to try out more things.”

Many of the line drawings in the coloring books grew out of trips she and her children took to the National Aquarium, the Maryland Zoo, and Cylburn Arboretum.

“I’ve been going around Lake Roland a lot during the quarantine, so a lot is also inspired by nature,” she says, flipping through the watercolor book. “This drawing is inspired by my daughter, who always wants more sprinkles on her ice cream. This is inspired by Hilton Carter. He’s a big plant guy. This is a still life. This is a drawing that I created to teach my kids than when you overlap colors, you can get new colors. Jumping in puddles is a big thing for my kids.”

Even the rocket ship on the box, she said, is “inspired by the Maryland Science Center and elements of outer space.”

The target audience for Tiny Easel is children aged 3 to 10, although there’s nothing to prevent older children and adults from buying the boxes, too. The instructions are general enough that users can go in any number of directions. And while Nolley doesn’t promise that Tiny Easel will turn every kid into the next Picasso, she says the idea is simply to introduce kids to painting and let them take it from there.

“My hope is that kids just enjoy painting at an early age and take that into whatever aspect of life they want to,” she says. “Maybe it’s becoming an architect or an interior designer or a graphic designer. Maybe it’s not even specific to design. My hope is that they develop some creative skills from what they’ve learned at an early age, and have fun with it.”

Earlier this month, the Nolleys celebrated Tiny Easel’s debut by turning a merchant space at Whitehall Mill into a pop-up shop for the day.

Andrea Griffin, a real estate agent, bought six Tiny Easel Painter Boxes as gifts for clients and friends. Rachel Tranter bought a box to use herself. Lauren Prendeville said she bought two travel kits for her daughter, Madison, because they were going on a car trip.

Prendeville said she likes Tiny Easel because the paints are watercolor, and that’s different from the usual acrylic or tempera paints.

“It’s something that parents don’t even think of,” Prendeville said. “We buy chunky Crayola paint because we think that’s all kids can handle. This actually teaches them watercolor, which is a more sophisticated form of art.”

Nolley plans to eventually sell each item in the kit separately, so it’s easy to get refills. She said most of the sales will be online, but she’d like to do more pop-up events to spread the word.

In many ways, Nolley said, Tiny Easel represents everything she loves in life and is good at—kids, painting, drawing, design, sparking creativity. If it’s a success, she said, she’d like to devote full time to it. “That would be my dream.”

Most years, my mother, Leslie, and I go all out in planning a birthday extravaganza for my daughters Blair, 8, and Harper, 6. Growing up, “Nana,” as the girls call her, never missed a beat, and she’s still in a perfect rhythm now. In the early ’90s when most of my birthday parties took place, there was no expense spared. I often find myself questioning where she found the time and energy as a single mother to plan it all. In my eight-plus years of motherhood—baby showers included—I’ve subconsciously competed with that early-’90s version of my mother.

This year’s challenge, when my daughter, Harper, turned 6 on May 16, was merely finding the energy to get out of bed to shower after a week’s worth of intense distance-learning, work-related calls, and not nearly enough wine amidst the COVID-19 lockdown.

We kept it simple, but I did miss all the fuss. (Don’t tell my mom.) The overachiever and arts organizer in me wanted to phone in a last-minute call to shut down a full city block in celebration of Harper’s sixth birthday.

But, this year, I’ve lived vicariously through badass creative moms like Rebecca Teaff, founder and chief creative officer of Baltimore-based marketing firm Redstart Creative, and Raina Tyson Smallwood, co-founder of Cedar and Cotton in Southwest Baltimore—who have both gotten creative in making their little ones’ special days memorable despite the restrictions of the pandemic.

Teaff’s son, Liam, who is an only child aside from his furry brother, Edward, recently turned 8. Smallwood’s son, Noah, turned 10 this year and is one of three boys alongside his brother, Jonah, and their family’s newest addition, Maximus—who was born just days after Governor Hogan declared a State of Emergency in mid-March.

“We were a little nervous about how everything was going to be with the lockdown starting up,” Smallwood says about giving birth shortly after stay-home orders went into effect. “We got to St. Joseph’s Hospital and my partner, George, jokingly says, ‘They can take me to jail, I’m coming with you.’”

These powerhouse Balti-moms have found time to work from home while planning epic birthday parties, parades, and puppet shows. They’re tenacious, just like my mom in her early-’90s birthday party planning prime. Here are four valuable lessons I learned from speaking with them about making kids feel special on their solar return under these circumstances:

Go Big, But Stay Home

Invite your family or friends to a socially distanced fête, but add your own tried-and-true traditions for added nostalgia.

“The idea of family and friends gathering was always a big thing for me—I like to keep that up for Liam,” Teaff says. “My mom would always put the china out. We have a family tradition where you get to eat what you want on your birthday. Over the years, I picked things like steak or tacos, which I’m sure at a younger age was pizza.”

Smallwood remembers similar traditions on her special day—all of which can be recreated at a small celebration at home.

“I remember turning four and getting a rainbow-bright birthday cake and some friends coming over,” she remembers. “We did birthday gifts. We’d play pin the tail on the donkey. There weren’t a lot of decorations, but just cake, candles, and everyone singing ‘Happy Birthday,’ that sort of thing. I loved it. Each birthday reminds me that I’m gifted with another year, another lesson, and another chance. That’s the true gift.”

Party Favors or Bust

Use your favorite online sites to deck your home out with your favorite streamers and party favors. Decorate like it’s Christmas in July (or any other month leading up to the winter holidays). You may have to come up with something crafty to occupy the kids while you set up, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.

“This year, pre-coronavirus, my husband, Rob, goes, ‘Let’s have him do like a fun, bouncy house,’” Teaff shares. “We had it all booked and we were really excited. Then we realized a lot of disappointments were going to come in pretty quick succession. We thought, ‘How can we make this an amazing weekend for Liam?’ So I ordered a bunch of swag and we threw up decorations in every room. For Liam, it was like coming down on Christmas morning. I made a Facebook post about how different this b-day would be for him and asked that folks send cards. We got cards from current friends, my old college friends, family, Liam’s sports teams, and he had a lot of stuff to open during the day.”

Go With the Flow

If you’re not feeling a big party this year (I know I wasn’t) that’s more than okay. If you’re expecting or just brought a new child into the world, like Smallwood, err on the side of caution using video conferencing for visits and celebrations.

“I gave birth two and a half weeks before Noah’s birthday,” Smallwood shares. “And my follow-ups with the doctor after delivery have been virtual, which is interesting—most of the baby’s visits are him being held up to the phone. My mom has taken some time off of work to be isolated and has since been able to visit, as well as my partner’s mom, and my best friend, of course.”

Gather From a Safe Distance

Virtual ideas are your friend! Zoom calls and drive-by’s are fun ways to celebrate with loved ones without physically being in the same room.

“Initially we told Noah that everything was closed, so there wasn’t going to be a birthday party,” Smallwood shares. “We told him that maybe in the summertime he could celebrate his birthday with his brother. Noah did not like that! He was really upset. I felt a little bit bad, but it paid off in the end because we snuck around and got gifts and cupcakes. George and I told him that we had a meeting so we sent them all upstairs so that we could bring out the gifts and set up a Zoom. And then once we had everything set up, we called him down. He was so surprised it was totally worth it. We had everyone he knows on the Zoom call waiting for him!”

Teaff went the parade route for Liam: “A friend of ours organized the whole thing for Liam and all we had to do is get him outside,” she says. “But he wanted to play in the backyard and didn’t want to come out. After a few minutes we started to hear the horn-honking from the parade. Liam was saying, ‘What’s happening?!’ He legit had no idea. It was adorable. It was a bunch of school friends, family, his indoor soccer team, and the coach.”

What’s more? Teaff’s father-in-law, an amateur ventriloquist, put on a private puppet show for Liam via Zoom. “You just want your kid to be excited and happy even though it’s kind of crazy circumstances right now,” she says. “So if you can do that, I say mission accomplished.”

Shortly after sunrise, on most mornings during this peculiar pandemic-stricken summer, strollers, joggers and dog walkers in Baltimore’s Roosevelt Park go about their routines to the odd rhythm of maple, polyurethane, and aluminum repeatedly cracking against concrete.

The awkward beat is augmented by a unique fusion of frustrated grunts and exasperated exhales followed by the occasional profane exclamation spicing up the cadence. That odd mix of sounds may seem exotic, but anyone who has spent time on city streets, suburban cul de sacs, or in public parks, should recognize the cacophony as the sound of skateboarding.

In the early morning hours, however, it’s not the stereotypical teenaged, mayo boy, Mountain Dew enthusiasts, who create the clamor.

It’s a gaggle of early-morning pushers consisting mostly of professional men in their 30s and 40s. Guys who, prior to COVID-19, spent early-morning hours commuting to work, coaxing reluctant children to get dressed for school, and queuing for Starbucks.

Jarret Jeffery, 35, a married father of three who teaches in Prince George’s County, is among the most dedicated of Hampden’s early-morning skaters. Since schools closed, Jeffery has used the time he would’ve spent driving to work on his board.

“That huge chunk of time that I have now, I’ve been throwing that into spending time with family and skateboarding,” Jeffery says.

Fittingly, Jeffery, bespectacled, about five feet, five inches tall, and wearing a pair of mid top Vans with duct tape on the left front toe, approaches skating with the methodical nature of a science and math teacher.

He occasionally heads to the skatepark with a list of tricks he’s working on, and checks them off as he practices. Doggedly, and adroitly, Jeffery works on moves repeatedly, tweaking his technique after each failed attempt until he lands the maneuver.

On a recent morning, he skated alone on an elevated ramp, diligently practicing his front-side boardslide. Over and over, Jeffrey cruised up the nearly vertical wall of the ramp, pushed his board’s front wheels over the ramp’s metal coping, and used the slick bottom of his board to slide along the ledge before rolling back down the ramp “fakie,” aka with his dominant foot on the front of the board.

“These last few weeks things have just been clicking, and I think that’s because I’ve been consistent with my practicing, and taking breaks too, because I’m an old dude,” he says with a laugh.

John Rohrer, 42, a nurse, and married father of a toddler, skated as a child and again as a teenager before picking up the sport again about six months ago.

An avid biker and Hampden resident, Rohrer says that, as a result of the pandemic, the convenience of the skatepark—especially with a baby at home—has turned skating into his current exercise of choice.

“It’s a good core workout, and it’s quick and easy cause it’s right up the street from my house,” Rohrer says. “I’ve done a lot cycling my whole life, but a lot of fun bike rides, for me, take a lot longer. So this is a lot more conducive to get my activity itch scratched, and it reminds me of being a kid, I guess.”

Rohrer’s not too interested in pursuing the board flips and grinds associated with street skating. Riding a wider board with larger wheels, he focuses on cruising the skatepark’s banks and maintaining momentum over obstacles because he enjoys the speed.

“The park is a lot different from where I skated in high school so it’s a big learning process,” he says, “and way more balanced than I remember. It’s just really fun to go fast, simply put.”

At the other end of the park, 48-year-old Ben, who asked not to use his last name, skates the park’s “bowl” in near isolation.

The discipline of skating in a bowl dates back to the sport’s early days in the 1970s, when pioneering pushers—particularly in drought-stricken southern California—cruised along the walls of empty swimming pools like surfers riding a concrete wave. Cruising in bowls, however, has taken a backseat to other styles of skating in terms of popularity, particularly street skating.

Ben, who said he first began skating between 1985 and 1991, is one of the few pushers at the park who prefers to coast in the bowl, which is set on an elevated perch above the rest of the park.

He rides a wide board, with a single kicktail, and larger wheels—a style popular in the 1980s when “vert” skating was the sport’s most popular discipline that went out of vogue about the time Ben stopped skating.

Ben, who arrives at the park via white BMW crossover, started skating the bowl in Hampden about three years ago, he says, primarily for the same reason most men his age start getting active again.

“I needed to get exercise, and I didn’t grow up with such a wonderful bowl in my backyard,” says Ben, a Massachusetts native.

If there’s been an increase in the number of guys his age skateboarding since the COVID-19 outbreak, Ben says, he wouldn’t know. He chalked that up to his type of skating, which encourages social distancing by default.

“I skate the bowl. No one [else] skates the bowl,” Ben says. “Everyone’s over on the other side.”

Back on that side of the park, John Shea, 43, is one of the more accomplished skaters among the early arrivers.

Shea is one of the few skaters his age who never dropped the hobby for a prolonged period of time, and it shows in the aggressiveness and speed of his skating.

While dynamic with his feet on the board, Shea will never be accused of being loquacious. He’s friendly, and answers questions, but it’s clear being interviewed makes him uncomfortable.

Still, Shea explains what he wants to accomplish by continuing to skate, and the reticent Catonsville resident may have summed up the goals for all the early-bird skaters: “Just roll around and try not to get hurt.”