Somewhere out there is Bob Dylan, who hasn't heard the latest news: William Zantzinger just got himself into trouble again.
The other day in Charles County, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to collecting more than $64,000 in rent on slum properties which he didn't happen to own -- properties the government took away from him five years ago because he failed to pay taxes on them.
If this isn't the stuff of musical folklore, it's at least a postscript. The last time Bob Dylan looked at William Zantzinger, he wrote a song about him that helped give an entire generation a social conscience:
"William Zantzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll/With a cane that he twirled 'round his diamond ring finger/In a Baltimore hotel society gathering . . ."
The song was called "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," and for people caught up in the great civil rights movement of this nation, it seemed to sum up a basic truth about American racism of the time: The death of an innocent black woman was worth almost nothing compared with the life of a guilty white man.
Remember?
It was a formal affair at the old Emerson Hotel, Feb. 8, 1963. Zantzinger was there, drunk and loud, decked out in tuxedo and top hat and a cane in his hand. He'd rap the cane when he wanted service, and when he didn't get it fast enough, he started hitting people with it.
One of the people was Hattie Carroll. She was 51 years old, the mother of 11, and a part-time barmaid. Zantzinger told her he wanted a bourbon. Then he called her racist names, and then he hit her with his cane and strode off.
"That man has upset me so," Hattie Carroll told co-workers. "I feel deathly ill."
Somebody called an ambulance: Too late. Eight hours later, she was dead of a stroke, and Zantzinger was charged with murder.
"Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace/And criticize all fears/Lay the rag away from your face/For now ain't the time for your tears."
Remember?
The time for tears, Dylan wrote, came later. He meant months later, when sentencing was pronounced. But he could have been looking 28 years down the road, to Zantzinger pleading guilty this week to 50 counts of collecting rent on properties the government took away from him for failing to pay five years of taxes on them.
The properties were awful. They were wooden shacks with no running water, no toilets and no outhouses. But, even after the properties were taken away, Zantzinger, with breathtaking nerve:
