Joe Nawrozki, “The Pride of Belair & Erdman,” May 2014 in Mount Washington. (VoB Photo/Bill Hughes)

BALTIMORE ‘STORYTELLER’ RAFAEL ALVAREZ
READS FROM NEWLY PUBLISHED CHAPBOOK
ON EX-NEWS AMERICAN CRIME REPORTER

‘The Pride of Belair & Erdman’
 
[N.B.  Joe Nawrozki died late Friday night.  To read Baltimore Sun obit  click here.  —Ed.]
 
Longtime News American crime reporter and later Baltimore Sun journalist Joe Nawrozki’s career is scheduled to be celebrated Saturday as the city’s favorite “storyteller” Rafael Alvarez reads from his latest chapbook, The Pride of Belair & Erdman, at the 2014 Baltimore Book Festival at 12 p.m. in the Inner Harbor.

Alvarez has just published what he terms “a quick little history of the News American,” the Baltimore area’s oldest newspaper, which dated from pre-Revolutionary times until it folded in 1986.

In an interview Friday with Voice of Baltimore, he subtitled the book “a lifetime achievement award for Joe Nawrozki,” who grew up in the Northeast Baltimore neighborhood around Belair Road and Erdman Avenue.

Joseph Francis Christopher Nawrozki — “Our Pal Joey,” as he is described in the chapbook by his former investigative news partner Michael Olesker — was always “braver than anybody” in the News American newsroom, “even when the going [got] roughest.”

From facing down heroin dealers to covering corruption at the Baltimore courthouse, plus police spying and charity ripoffs, the two were at their best as a team in the mid-1970s, when what the world knows today as “investigative journalism” had its beginnings during and following the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration.

Olesker also credits Nawrozki with taking “the lead” in writing about “problems facing Vietnam [War] veterans on their return to the United States.”

Nearly 40 years later, Olesker reminisces about how Nawrozki “came off Belair Road and Erdman Avenue, and a Baltimore City College high school education, to find work… as a sports reporter under the News American’s John Steadman,” who for part of a seven-decade career attended and reported on every Super Bowl beginning with the game’s inception in 1967.

In an essay entitled “Nawrozki’s Greatest Hits,” Alvarez marvels about the creativity of his news ledes — “Mr. Diz whirled into the place like he was shot from a torpedo tube,” is cited as one of Nawrozki’s best — and describes his “banging out stories on dirty cops and idiot robbers,” along with “features on aging boxers down for the count against Father Time.”

Joe Nawrozki, from the Rafael Alvarez chapbook, The Pride of Belair & Erdman, 2014. (Photo/Jim Burger)

His mentor, Steadman, once described Nawrozki as writing everything “from ribbon cuttings to throat cuttings.”

Adds Alvarez: “Joe’s champions were prodigals — he may have profiled more middle-aged shoeshine boys than any reporter in history.”

He may well be the victim of the Army’s use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, where he served in the mid-to-late 1960s and reported on in later years. Nawrozki blames Agent Orange for his recent diagnosis of leukemia.

Born on D-Day, 1944, he grew up in Baltimore and came of age when the factory still ruled this Maryland city, “apprenticing the craft of journalism,” according to Alvarez, “on a blue-collar paper where an old police reporter, perhaps better suited to being a beat cop than a beat writer, once looked up from his typewriter and asked: ‘How many S’s in hisself?’ and was told by the editor, “Two, just two.”

Nawrozki has a similar offbeat sense of humor, along with a deep appreciation for working-class America.

As Alvarez tells it, Joe “once put on green overalls to haul garbage for a day to better understand the guys who rode the truck year after year.

“‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said Nawrozki.

“‘It’s honest work.’”
 
—Alan Z. Forman
 
alforman@voiceofbaltimore.org
 
EDITOR’S NOTE:

(See Joe Nawrozki’s interview with Voice of Baltimore regarding his coverage, along with Michael Olesker, of the 1973 murder of drug-dealing Maryland State Del. James “Turk” Scott — click here.)