![]() ![]() Another reporter, white, answered to the unforgettable name of Garrett Bang. He was a native of Somalia, who came by the way of Ethiopia. When The Sun hired its first black reporter soon after my arrival, his byline read Abdulkadir N. The less prestigious Evening Sun had hired reporters without college degrees for some years – and even a few African Americans - but in order to join the morning paper, one had to be a college graduate and white. ![]() When I joined the paper, my distinction was not that came from Finland but that I was the only reporter in the city room who had not gone to a private college. He never could, but it made entertaining copy. During heat waves, an eccentric former Marine, David Maulsby, was sent downtown to see whether he could fry eggs on asphalt sidewalks. Every New Year’s Day, a box on the front page touted a hangover cure that consisted of various nasty-sounding ingredients. There were occasional attempts at levity, though. The Sun in those days was even greyer typographically than The New York Times. ![]() Another fixture was a janitor named Johnson who came by the city room every afternoon, asking gentlemen reporters whether they needed a shoeshine. ![]() The newspapers’ paternalistic owners made bets in his name at racetracks and elsewhere, and he died a wealthy man. Mostly, though, he just stood in the lobby, greeting visitors and employees as an institutional mascot of sorts. He had operated The Sun’s front elevators since 1925.Īlthough automatic elevators were installed in 1950, Barney was still on duty when I arrived in 1969, making sure that the publisher got to his office without stops. Standing guard near two lobby elevators was a diminutive African American named Bernard E. (It has since been covered with a false wall). A mural in its lobby depicted a plantation scene at the flagship paper’s founding, complete with manacled and shackled slaves. The Sun was a mighty peculiar institution. Owned by establishment families, the company also published The Evening Sun, the paper of H. Making this journalistic enterprise possible was The Sun, Baltimore’s venerable newspaper of record, founded in 1837. Once in Africa, they confided, they would frag the officers and loot diamond mines. My fellow recruits, though, had a clear game plan. I never quite figured out what CORE’s motive was in this effort that quickly flopped. I even joined a rag-tag army of mercenaries that the Congress of Racial Equality was recruiting for a civil war in Angola. I eye-witnessed civil rights protests, reported on two Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, covered school desegregation, anti-war actions, religion, community organizing, City Hall and Baltimore County, a separate jurisdiction that was overtaking the city. Those couples made things happen Jay was soon to become the city’s housing commissioner, an important economic development official and eventually a neighbor. and Georgene Brodie and Stuart and Paula Rome. One of my first reporting assignments for The Sun involved covering a kite festival in Druid Hill Park, where I met M. Yet even among the gloom and doom there was a sense of excitement among those who saw the potential. Racial tensions flared, white flight to the suburbs continued smokestack industries kept shutting down. The city and many of its residents were in a defeatist funk. degree in journalism from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, I found an urban observatory in Baltimore, a declining but still-great city trying to recover from the 1968 riots that followed the assassination of Dr. Another relic was the steam bath, with its black owner, a professional masseur, at Madison Avenue and 122nd Street. One vestige still remaining was a hat shop on 125th Street belonging to an elderly Finnish woman, who had stayed after other whites ran. Rival socialist halls, including one with an indoor swimming pool and a bowling alley, were long gone, as were Finnish churches. Few traces of that population of several thousands survived. It had been a popular gathering spot among residents of the Finnish community, which thrived in Harlem from the 1910s until the 1950s. While reporting one day in Harlem, I found myself naked and sweating in an old Finnish steam bath operated by an immigrant from Jamaica. New York’s polyglot metropolis stunned and seduced me. No blacks lived in Finland in those days, and only fifteen hundred Jews. I came from a country so homogeneous that eye and hair color marked the chief differences among its four and a half million people. Johnson’s re-election campaign, civil rights strife and of the New York World’s Fair – that I worked my ways across on a freighter. I was a twenty-year-old aspiring journalist from Finland wanting so badly to spend that summer in the United States - the summer of Lyndon B. I first saw America’s shores in May 1964 from the deck of the M/S Finntrader. ![]()
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