Stephanie Esworthy: Nancy Pelosi?s training ground

Does she think about those summers of our youth in Ocean City or the times she organized our crabbing expeditions to the Chesapeake Bay coves and shallow inlets that surrounded us?

The weathered brown shingle D?Alesandro home on the ocean at 12th Street stood within walking distance of mine.

I looked up to Nancy. Always pleasant, she was kind with the special patience a girl with five brothers develops.

She found interesting things for us to do on cloudy nonbeach days and evenings on this not-so-populated Barrier Island.

Her idea to venture forth like Lewis and Clark to catch our own blue crabs was exciting. I imagined being a young pioneer surviving by hunting for food from bay waters, as did the Pocomoke Indians.

For the impending battle with the feisty Maryland Blue Crab, Nancy gathered supplies and made sure that her brothers and I were ready.

After judging the distance between our position on the bridge or pier and the water?s surface, she cut each of us the correct length ofheavy string.

Her mom, Nancy Sr., filled the bait bucket with saved fish parts or steak fat. Most important was the tightly-lidded basket to secure a catch sure to scratch and climb the sides. We carried a crab net, a splintering and grayed wood pole with rust-stained, drooping webbing.

Nancy was expert in the art of crabbing. I was an eager student. She lowered her baited string in a likely spot close to underwater pilings. I learned fast.

At first nibble ? do nothing. Then patiently and ever so slowly, pull the string until the distracted crab can be seen just below the surface.

Hopefully, it?s not undersized or a pregnant female to be thrown back, but a large male, clinging and feasting unaware. With quicksilver speed, sweep him up in the net.

This is the stomach-churning moment. He will square off with you, pincers extended, ready to attack. Many times the fearsome fighters drew our blood.

Some crabs would win, cleverly sidestepping, then dropping off the dock.

We assumed they never made the mistake again of taking bait humans offered.

At one dozen we stopped, to hunt for food again another day.

To fill our evenings, Nancy would call and ask her dad, Mayor Thomas D?Alesandro Jr., to bring us movies.

He?d arrive late Friday night when porch rails were wet with ocean mist.

He seemed wrung out after four hours of driving plus a four-mile ferry crossing of the Chesapeake Bay at Sandy Point.

Nancy would roll out the small bright white screen, which flexed on its rickety tripod. She fiddled with the ponderous, cranky projector.

It always made a rhythmic ticking sound like a car with bad valves.

Her father would call out from the kitchen, “Will somebody please get me my broom and milk?” I quickly responded for I loved this ritual.

Into a white glass bowl, I daintily dropped three huge, tough-looking squares of 1950s shredded wheat. Each would hit the bowl bottom with an unappetizing “thunk.” The mayor strategically added milk, always the optimist, expecting this would help.

He?d poke and prod these monsters in a 5-minute “broom and milk massage” which never succeeded in softening them up. Still he ate.

I watched with complete admiration.

When all was ready in the living room, we?d eagerly take our positions on the floor to enjoy the flawed, grainy and flickering but handsome young face of John Wayne.

Mayor D?Alesandro would stretch out with us and then promptly fall asleep.

It was a great time to be a child in Ocean City.

Stephanie Esworthy was director of Media and Public Relations and the Baltimore City Film Commission for former Mayors William Donald Schaefer and the late Clarence “Du” Burns and served as head of Baltimore City?s Bureau of Music in every city administration since Mayor Theodore R. McKeldin. Her personal experiences in local politics started in the early 1950s as the daughter of state?s attorney and chief judge of the Circuit Court for Baltimore City, Anselm Sodaro, now deceased. She can be reached at [email protected].