The author’s vision of what Deuteronomy Graves, a worker at the Vulcan Tire Co. in 1930s Baltimore, would look like, were he not a fictional character.

A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

     ROOBY TAWR, a novel in progress
     set in mid-20th Century Charm City
 
                             By Joel Foreman
 
When Deuteronomy Graves told Reuben Michael he would mitigate, he didn’t say noth’n ’bout the vortex.

Ruby wouldn’t have paid it no mind — D had all kinds of wild imaginings. Harmless stuff that Ruby listened to semi-seriously with one cocked eyebrow.

So there wasn’t any point in D sharing the bad feeling he got about the doctor Ruby was going to see up the Circle.

D had been up to Park Circle himself. Once! To mount a rush order of retreads on a used Chevy waiting for its new owner to drive off the lot at Park Circle Motor Company.

When D finished the task, he figured it’d be OK to spend a few minutes taking in the suburban neighborhood.

He’d read about it in the Jewish Times — read for-sale notices for the porched two-story row houses that lined the streets of Cottage, Towanda, and Park Heights Avenues.

Read ads for the strip on the 3500 block where you could get challah and sticky buns from Holtzman’s Bakery; corned beef, whitefish, and kishke from the Lapidus Delicatessen; and yahrzeit candles from Bertha Friedman’s dry goods store, to commemorate the Jewish dearly departed.

D had always thought of Park Heights as being way way out, a neighborhood he was never likely to visit. Yet here he was, taking it all in from the cab of the Vulcan Tire pickup truck.

He drove slowly around the Circle so as to contemplate the exotic entranceway to Carlin’s Amusement Park, with its twin towers, pagoda windows, ornate architectural details, and the façade of the skating rink, Iceland, looming above.

He drove past the green edge of Drew’d Hill (Druid Hill) Park, past the corner where the No. 5 and No. 33 streetcars stopped before splitting off to glide up the major arteries of Park Heights Avenue and Reisterstown Road, and decided to head north a few blocks.

He wanted to see the new synagogue — Shaarei Zion — that his and Ruby’s fellow Jews had built. It looked like a Greek temple with its triangular pediment and three columns in front.

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The popular black&white TV show from 1950s and the 60s is a crowd pleaser again in 2014.

THEN AND NOW, THE TWO REFUSED TO LOSE,
DEFEATING THE RUTHLESS AND POWERFUL
WITHOUT HAVING TO RESORT TO VIOLENCE

Timeless entertainment starring Raymond Burr & Peter Falk,
resurrected for viewing pleasure on current Baltimore TV
 
By David Maril
 
It’s been almost 50 years since CBS cancelled the weekly “Perry Mason” (1957-66) show. However, the program remains alive on Baltimore television.

WBAL offers the legendary legal series, along with a lineup of classics, and a few creaking losers from yesteryear, through MeTV (Memorable Entertainment Television) on Digital SubChannel 11.2, Comcast Channel 208 and Verizon FIOS Channel 460.

On weekdays a Perry Mason fanatic, here in the Land of Pleasant Living, can watch two different episodes. One is on at 10 a.m. and the nightcap is presented at 11:30 p.m.

But the survival of Perry Mason isn’t just a local oddity. A few years ago a Brockton, Mass.-based national office supply company, W.B. Mason, was using courtroom clips of Raymond Burr from the classic series in television commercials.

And if all this isn’t enough, one of the nationally syndicated Sunday mailbag columns recently featured a letter inquiring how many members of the cast from the Perry Mason show are still alive. The answer, as most “Mason” fans know, is Barbara Hale, 92, who played Della Street, his trusted secretary.

It’s true that interest in the show was revived when Burr, who was also popular as the star of “Ironside,” a crime drama that ran on NBC from 1967-75, teamed up with Hale to make 26 two-hour Perry Mason movies between 1985 and 1993.

But while those lengthier productions drew decent-sized audiences, they have not generated the lasting power of the 271 original weekly episodes, a top-rated show for its 10-year run.

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   The BoatHouse Canton is an upscale eatery at Tindeco Wharf.

NEW BOSTON STREET RESTAURANT
ON SITE OF THE FORMER BAY CAFE
 
By Eddie Applefeld
 
It opened in April of this year and enjoyed a great summer. It was difficult not to, with its prime location on the Canton waterfront.

It’s The BoatHouse Canton at 2809 Boston Street, Tindeco Wharf, the site of the former Bay Cafe.

When you walk up to the front door, after getting out of your car in the adjacent free parking lot, the first thing you’ll see is the fabulous view: The harbor, the boats and the buildings fronting the water.

For me, that would be a restaurant I’d want to visit.

This time of year, outside dining is not offered, but once inside you’ll be able to view the harbor from almost every seat.

There’s also a heated enclosed patio waterside, so if you arrive about 5 p.m. — or even earlier in the winter — you can watch the sunset. If you’re inside you can pretend it’s 80 degrees on the water.

If you’re the adventurous type you can arrive by boat. Either your own or the water taxi which stops about a five-minute walk away.

When I dined there recently it was my first visit. I was lucky to get a tour
from Hanly, the Marketing Manager. If not for her I might have never known
there is an upstairs used for overflow dining and private parties.

From there you can look down at the water. However during the holiday season I can imagine that space is used very often, so obviously you need to call in advance to book it. Hanly is your contact.

Before I went there, the restaurant was described to me as “sophisticated casual.” Still, your imagination can run wild when thinking about what the Canton residents who frequent the place might wear. But I think you’d be comfortable in anything, anything appropriate for a night out, that is.

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Gene Oishi autographs his autobiographical novel, Fox Drum Bebop, at Mount Washington Conference Center. (VoB Photos/Bill Hughes)

GENE OISHI WAS NINE YEARS OLD
WHEN HIS AMERICANIZED FAMILY
WAS INCARCERATED BY THE U.S.

Suffered trauma in adult life as result

MAIN CHARACTER IS AUTHOR’S ALTER EGO
 
By Alan Z. Forman
 
Former Baltimore Sun reporter Gene Oishi’s premiere novel, Fox Drum Bebop, offers a fictionalized account of the emotional and psychic repercussions of the Japanese-American experience brought on as a result of his forced incarceration by the U.S. Govern- ment in the Arizona desert during World War II.

Oishi is now 81 years old and this is his first publication, other than short stories, of a fictionalized account of what it means to be Japanese in America, based on his own life experience.

He, his parents and 120,000 other Americans of Japanese birth or descent living on the West Coast of the United States were rounded up and sent off to government-run internment camps following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces.

However the novel is not Oishi’s first attempt to tell his story in book form. That came with In Search of Hiroshi, an autobiographical memoir he wrote in 1987 and which became a basis for Fox Drum Bebop.

Hiroshi Kono, a fictional reporter for the Baltimore Herald newspaper (read: Baltimore Sun), is based on Oishi himself, although the author maintains that while “my family and I served as models for the fictional Kono family and Hiroshi, we are different.

“The Oishis are not the Konos, and I’m not Hiroshi,” he says, despite the identical name used for his 1987 memoir — which began as a novel but morphed into a work of nonfiction when he discovered that the factual telling of his personal story precluded any leaps into the world of imagination and he “had to give up the pretense that it was a work of fiction.”

Fox Drum Bebop is his attempt “to tell a story that was bigger than myself, to tell a tale about the Japanese in America….

“Hiroshi is my fictional alter ego who appears in nearly all of my short stories,” he explained in an email interview with Voice of Baltimore.

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Schadenfreude/Roman Holiday — Other people’s travails make us feel good by comparison, that the bad luck they’re experiencing is happening to them, and not us.

FROM THE PRESIDENT TO THE LT. GOVERNOR,
ANOTHER PERSON’S TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS
CAN MAKE YOUR OWN ‘ROMAN HOLIDAY’
SEEM NOT TOO TERRIBLE AFTER ALL

Schadenfreude in the Friendly Skies

NONE OF US IS IMMUNE FROM HAVING A DAY
WHERE NOTHING SEEMS TO WORK OUT RIGHT
 
By David Maril
 
Ever think you are having a bad day and things couldn’t get any worse?

Take Barack Obama.

On Thursday the President delivers the most controversial decision of his presidency, issuing an executive order, bypassing Congress, to weaken the rules of immigration deportation, and he can’t even get the speech broadcast live on major network television.

Critics of the President’s decision, however, had plenty of access to airing their attacks on the Commander-in-Chief live the next day on the ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox television networks.

How about Anthony G. Brown?

If it wasn’t tough enough getting clobbered by Republican Larry Hogan after being heavily favored to win the election for Maryland Governor, he had to deal with the news coverage that he hasn’t repaid a penny yet of a $500,000 loan from the Laborers’ International Union.

We all have bad days where things don’t go exactly the way we want or expected.

As we head into the start of the often stressful five-week, end of the year holidays travel period, an airport scene I witnessed a couple of years ago, comes to mind.

Moments before the hatchway was closed for departure on a flight out of Providence, R.I. headed for Baltimore, a husky man — in his late 50s and wearing a business suit —  rushed on board  the packed airplane.

His hair looked as if he’d walked through the wind-tunnel drying-section of a carwash.

Huffing and puffing, all out of breath, he was dragging a carry-on bag that appeared heavy enough to be loaded with rocks.

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