Schaefer's new roommate
William Donald Schaefer has a new companion, a cat named Willie IV.
The bachelor ex-mayor, ex-governor and ex-comptroller has had dogs over the years - Willies I, II and III - but this is his first cat, unless you count the stray that used to hang around Schaefer's house when he was mayor.
"The cat's crazy," Schaefer said when I reached him by phone a few days ago at his home at the Charlestown retirement community in Catonsville. "He's a brown-and-white. He's a pretty little thing. He keeps himself absolutely, perfectly clean."
Where'd he get it?
"He just wandered in," Schaefer said. "He said, 'Can I stay here overnight?' I said, 'Yeah, but after that you'll have to pay rent.' So he's paying - a dollar a year."
Willie IV's owner, by the way, is the subject of an hourlong documentary titled Citizen Schaefer. MPT will air it March 30, but VIPs and some Charlestown residents will get a screening tomorrow night at the Charlestown auditorium.
The filmmakers had trouble finding footage of Schaefer taking his famous dip in the seal pool, since stations used to reuse lots of videotape back then, said Mike Golden, a longtime aide who's at MPT these days.
After scouring University of Baltimore archives, they turned up the old WMAR tape. They also found old black-and-white newsreel footage of Schaefer from his City Council days.
Connect the dots
Bumper sticker spotted on an SUV parked one day last week outside the Target at Mondawmin Mall gave a shout-out to two other targets. "SOS. Save Our Sisters SHEILA and HELEN." Authority line: Maryland Minority Contractors Association. Mondawmin was redeveloped with help from minority subcontractor Ron Lipscomb, who figures prominently in the indictments of Mayor Sheila Dixon and City Councilwoman Helen Holton. ... I wrote the other day that a reader had called me a "Yiddish expletive." That piqued the curiosity of another reader, Angela Channing. "Did he call you a shikseh? A kuppe drek? A kurveh or shlooche? I hope he did not call you a shmuck!?" Since this is still a family newspaper, all I can say is it was none of the above.
