That was a pretty nice ceremony they held down at Patterson Park’s Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro Ice Rink the other day. It’s 40 years since the rink was named after the late city councilman, and the occasion was marked by face painting, balloons, figure skating and a nice speech by Mayor Sheila Dixon, who naturally remembered DiPietro.
“Whenever he’d see me at City Hall,” Dixon said, “he’d call me ‘little girl.’”
Everybody who remembered Mimi chuckled at the recollection. He was a third-grade dropout who rose to become a city councilman for a quarter-century.
For Mimi, everything was reduced to basics: If you were a young woman, you were “little girl.” It was easier than trying to remember names, that’s all. If you were hungry, he’d help get you a job. If you were president of the United States, it didn’t matter. He’d still talk to you in the language of the streets.
Among those gathered at the ice rink the other day was Mimi’s niece, Leonora “Peachy” Dixon, a waitress at Sabatino’s Restaurant, in Little Italy, who still lives near her uncle’s old house in East Baltimore’s Highlandtown. Her memories of her uncle are deep and textured and enormously affectionate.
But, standing there now, 14 years since her uncle’s death, at 89, Peachy found herself wondering: How many people still remember DiPietro? How many understand the great flavor he brought to Baltimore, and the hard work he offered his constituents?
Here’s an answer: Memories of Mimi will live as long as there’s a citizen in trouble who turns to a city council member for honest help.
And as long as there’s a piece of the English language waiting to be fractured.
“I would never tell a lie,” Mimi once said. “If I have to lie to you, I’ll deviate from you.”
If you’re still trying to figure this one out, here’s another:
“I have been to half a dozen political affairs lately, and each time I get a standing evasion.”
Or this, when asked about problems in the criminal court system: “Too much flea bargaining,” Mimi explained.
Here and there, the whole country got a glimpse of Mimi. Ted Koppel had him on his ABC-TV “Nightline” program years ago, along with then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer, to talk about that era’s great city renaissance. It happened to be the week that the Mount St. Helen’s volcano erupted.
“What makes Baltimore such a great city?” Koppel asked on national TV.
“’Cause we ain’t got no volcanoes,” Mimi replied.
Once, when Jimmy Carter was president, he had lunch at Chiapparelli’s Restaurant in Little Italy, along with some of the state’s top politicians. Schaefer was there, and U.S. Sens. Paul Sarbanes and Charles “Mac” Mathias, and former Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro Jr.
And Mimi.
And what did the councilman from East Baltimore discus with the leader of the free world?
“You gotta do something about them pot holes in Highlandtown,” said Mimi.
See, Mimi believed in that old political adage: All politics is local. His grammar might go astray, but his mind rarely strayed from the fundamentals of the job. Other council members might take a powder for days at a time, and then take the floor on Monday nights, with TV cameras around, to pontificate about great issues of international politics.
But not Mimi. He was always on the job, dealing with the mundane stuff for which he felt he’d been elected: cleaning up neighborhoods, taking care of school yards, making sure the pot holes were filled.
And making sure people who needed a job were helped as much as possible.
In a time such as now, that kind of effort resonates. He was old enough to remember the Great Depression of the 1930s, and how tough it was then to find jobs. He never forgot it.
He’d spent his adolescence in the Sparrows Point steel mills, working in heat so intense that nobody could work more than 15 minutes at a clip.
One day, driving along Eastern Avenue, he remembered, “It was so hot, you had to wear a mask. I had burnt eyes, burnt cheeks, a burnt chin. Then my old man got me a job in the hot mill until they went out of business. My father had to pay 50 bucks to get me my job. Then he slapped me across the face with the back of his hand and busted my mouth.”
“Why did he hit you?”
“Why? ‘Cause I saw him pay the money,” Mimi said. “He was humiliated in front of me. And I never forgot it, ‘cause everybody’s got a right to a job.”
For such sentiments and the hard work that followed, they named an ice rink for Mimi DiPietro 40 years ago. Maybe they should have named an employment center for him, too.
