Back when I was a kid reporter on Calvert Street, about the time the Ramones released “Road to Ruin,” I wrote an essay damning the place where I grew up: Linthicum, Exit 6B off of the Beltway.
I don?t regret the article, overheated juvenilia lauding the brio of the city over the safety of the suburbs. But I need a good night?s sleep these days and see things a little differently.
I’ve been in Baltimore, with all its troubles, since leaving my parents? home down the street from St. Philip Neri some 30 years ago. For the past 20, I?ve lived happily in the Macon Street row house where my father was raised, just a short block to a bowl of lemon rice soup and a plate of dolmathes at Samos.
And a seemingly much shorter mile to the problematic methadone clinic at the Johns Hopkins? Bayview campus.
I am much older now than my fatherwas when we moved to Linthicum in 1966, and I’ve come to understand the place as quiet becomes more important to me. When I?m between gigs in Los Angeles, I spend as much time on Orchard Road with Mom and Dad as I can.
I am grateful for the cul-de-sac childhood my city-bred parents worked hard to provide for my brothers and me. And I doubt I’d be so keen to romanticize city life if I’d actually been raised in Baltimore instead of just going “in town” every weekend for dinner with my grandparents.
So I am happy to report that Linthicum ? old dairy land where my Polish grandfather and immigrant families from Canton came to pick beans and strawberries at the turn of the 19th century ? is celebrating a centennial in all of its Mayberry glory.
The land grant establishing a village in what is now northern Anne Arundel County was awarded from Great Britain in 1649. Abner Linthicum bought a big chunk of it in 1801.
In 1908, Abner?s descendents sold off a good portion of their farmland to build houses and launch the Linthicum Heights Realty Company. Thus, the centennial.
Irma Eastland, one of our good neighbors who taught mybrother Danny in the third grade at Linthicum Elementary and played a fortune-teller when her kids put on Muscular Dystrophy carnivals, has made a memory quilt in commemoration.
Her husband, Frank, a retired Westinghouse engineer like so many of the area breadwinners (and the corniest when it comes to bad jokes), used a computer to transfer photographs to sheets of cotton. Their daughter Julie, who recently made her way back to Homewood Road after decades in California, helped select 20 photos from hundreds provided by Linthicum historian Oscar “Skip” Booth.
“I did it all on a machine,” said Mrs. Eastland, who somehow turned 78 years old when I wasn’t looking. “The whole thing took four months to finish, mostly research.”
The quilt is on display at the Linthicum library on Shipley Road, named for the community?s other landmark family. Built in 1967 (replacing a reading room in an old train station visible from the Light Rail), the library is where my rock ?n? roll buddies Armand Citroni and Terry Hesse and I would distract high school beauties like Melanie Kavanaugh, Laurie Janis and Denise Wallnofer from their homework.
[Where are you now, girls? Still upon this Earth, I pray, unlikemy Linthicum Elementary School class of 1970 friend Loren Kraft, who passed away just a few weeks ago in his 50th year.]
Panels on the quilt include images of Turkey Hill, the original Linthicum family home built in 1822; the old stone Methodist Church at the corner of Maple and Camp Meade roads, whose basement was a hippie-wannabe “coffeehouse” called the “Hungry Ear” when I was young; the circle “W” logo of Westinghouse, now Northrop Grumman; and Chuck?s Drive-In, a 1950s milkshake joint where we used to ask for “mistakes,” wrong orders they would give away if you asked at the right time.
For the Eastlands, a wonderful family of girls on Gayle Drive named the Goeberts, my parents and thousands of others who have raised families on the old strawberry fields since Teddy Roosevelt was president, Linthicum made good on its promise.
“It worked out beautifully,” said Mrs. Eastland, who landed on Shipley Road from Michigan when Julie was born in 1957 and to the newer development on Homewood Road in 1963. “I’d move here and do it all over again.”
