Bawlamer

I've been reading Laura Lippman's early crime novels, and she's bringing back all kinds of Baltimore memories.  I loved the city and lived there a total of nearly twenty years from the time I entered grad school in 1964 until I left in 1988, with some interruptions in the late sixties and early seventies.  Since I worked at the city's public library and was also a musician, I visited a great variety of Baltimore places and lived in a number of very different neighborhoods from Forest Park, lower Pennsylvania Avenue, and Charles Village to the northwestern edge of the city, a couple of blocks from the Baltimore County line.  I played in an amazing collection of places, once splitting the afternoon with an Al Jolson imitator who actually sang in black face.  I played at black social clubs in the West Baltimore ghetto and at the Baltimore Country Club and the Baltimore Museum of Art.  At one point or another I visited every one of the then 30 branches of the library and walked their neighborhoods.  And I stood in the Board Room at the Central  Library one afternoon and took a call from the Hollins-Payson branch, telling me that neighborhood kids had driven every stray dog they could find into the library, driving the staff in turn onto the table tops.

What a town!