Leonard Lewandowski was as big a Colts fan as there was back in the days when blue horseshoes on a pure white helmet was iconography as hallowed as any family coat of arms.
Len was something of an athlete himself, having played for the semi-pro Canton Americans soccer team in the 1940s, when the games took place at Kahler’s Field.
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In 1950, he bought a neighborhood bar down by the canneries on the Boston Street waterfront in old Canton — a smoke-hazed gin mill with a tin ceiling and pinball machine called “Len’s” at the corner of Elliott and Bouldin streets, near Garrett’s barrel factory, where Four Roses bourbon was as close to the top shelf as it got.
The Lewandowskis — Len’s wife, the former Dolores Rykowski, whose family owned a hardware store at Hudson and Streeper streets, and their children Len, Chris and Mary Jane — lived upstairs.
“We weren’t allowed in the bar,” Mary Jane said. “But each night after dinner, if we were good, I could go down to the dining room, and my mother would bring me an eight-ounce bottle of Coke and a bag of Wise potato chips from behind the bar for a treat before bed.”
Len the younger –first-born, but not a junior — remembers players like Artie Donovan coming into the bar in the offseason to give talks, show a highlight film and have a beer with fans. Once, he got to shake Donovan’s hand.
“That’s what ballplayers did to make a few bucks before they became millionaires,” Len said.
The tavern cashed paychecks, and around this time of year and — in addition to cops from the Southeastern District going from bar to bar for a free jug of holiday booze — there were lots of giveaways: pens and pencils and calendars, and one year, a white penknife with “Len’s Tavern” engraved in red.
On Sundays, busloads of impassioned Colts fans would leave Len’s for games at Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street and, on this day 50 years ago, to Yankee Stadium in New York to see the Colts play the Giants for the National Football League title.
Chris Lewandowski was 10 years old in 1958, in grade school at St. Casimir, where a stained-glass window hangs in honor of his grandparents, the grocers Anton and Catherine Lewandowski.
Sometimes, when one of the working men — mostly stevedores — couldn’t make the game, Chris or Len would use the ticket.
“The stevedores on our bus would look for other buses of fans to fight,” Chris said. “If they couldn’t find one, the front of our bus would fight the back of our bus. It was a rough crowd.”
But there wasn’t anybody with a ticket to the big game that wasn’t going. Who would pass up a chance to see Johnny Unitas and Lenny Moore go head-to-head with Frank Gifford and Sam Huff for all the marbles?
It seems, however, that a few cold ones — and then perhaps a few more — got between Len Lewandowski and the Greatest Game Ever Played.
“His crew showed up early in the morning, honked the horn and banged on the door,” Len said, “but my father was unable to answer the call.”
The Colts won, and the ticket got tucked into the mirror on the back bar where years of smoke and heat turned it brown. It was there when Len, by now a widower, closed the bar in 1974 and was found in an envelope in his bedroom after his death in 2005.
“It was never used, never torn, but it fell apart,” said Chris, standing in his old house, now the renovated Canton home of Bruce and Robin Dewitt, who arrived in Crabtown this past fall when Bruce took a job at 1st Mariner Bank, just a few blocks away where the oil refinery used to be on Clinton Street.
A section of the cigarette-burned bar and the stained-glass window boxes that book ended it are preserved on the second floor. There’s a bit of tin ceiling left in the entry way and the taps, which once shot National Bohemian beer into clean glasses, have been replaced by Robin Dewitt’s kitchen faucet.
“I love Baltimore — the people come from all walks of life and they’re friendly,” said Robin. “I haven’t lived on less than 40 acres in 15 years, but now I like walking everywhere I have to go.”
And the unused ticket to the game that put the NFL on the map of the American psyche?
“The family sold it two years ago on eBay,” Chris said, “for $700.”
Rafael Alvarez can be reached at [email protected]
