Baltimoreans

OVER THE YEARS, I've watched Baltimoreans grow anxious and fretful at the whisper of that nasty phrase: out-of-town travel.We just don't like to move about. We stay glued in one place. I think of my own family. It's resided in all of three Baltimore zip codes since 1760.But our passports aren't entirely blank. I speak of the hot-weather exemption, the summer vacation.Baltimoreans aren't real happy about this one -- even if it's just the three hours it takes to drive to Ocean City, Ocean Pines, Fenwick Island, Bethany or Rehoboth Beach.

David Miller plans to address the high rate of violence among youths in the Edmondson Avenue corridor of West Baltimore.LaTanya Bailey Jones is teaching children to be critical consumers of the electronic media and how to produce media messages.CeremonyMiller, Bailey and eight other Baltimoreans were recognized last night at the Tremont Plaza Hotel for winning 18-month community fellowship grants worth $48,750 each. The awards will enable them to help make a difference in their neighborhoods.

On the same day the Greater Baltimore Committee unveils transformative plans for a new downtown arena, we receive word of a shooting of a 12-year-old boy who was watching an NBA playoff game on a television set perched in the window of a house on Cliftview Avenue — and this just a day or so after the FBI again affirmed Baltimore as one of the most violent cities in the country. On Thursday, the boy, Sean Johnson, died of his injuries. That's the way it goes around here: Big visions and bold ideas for buildings in the places attractive to tourists, violence and frustrations out in the neighborhoods where Baltimoreans of modest means reside, along with their children.

Baltimoreans persist in referring to institutions by delightfully archaic names. I still hear people saying Baltimore Transit when they want MTA. The NationsBank tower (10 Light St.) will ever be Maryland National, the Mathieson Building or the Baltimore Trust Co. Take your pick.The recent news that the old downtown Hecht Co. building, southwest corner of Howard and Lexington streets, may be made into apartments started my tongue stumbling over the names I've heard the place called: Bernheimer-Leader, the May Co., Hecht-May and lastly, the Hecht Co.It was the first name, Bernheimer's, a name that I often heard in my youth, that brought a smile and a laugh to a vintage Baltimorean.

William "Billy" Young is among the last people who can give a firsthand account of the time Hollywood came to pre-World War II West Baltimore -- a moment when "the town was turned upside down," he says.During the Jim Crow era in Baltimore, long before filmmaker Barry Levinson's "Diner" and "Tin Men," the area around Pennsylvania Avenue and Dolphin Street drew black people as a place to live, shop and be entertained.And for several weeks in spring 1937, it also was a movie set.Though local Black History Month events don't celebrate it, many black Baltimoreans of a certain age say the filming of the movie "Children of Circumstance" was a milestone for the community, helping change the way many residents saw themselves and prompting some people to reach higher than they might have.

Citizen Schaefer. Even with the Orwellian, William Randolph Hearst overtones, the title of Maryland Public Television's new documentary seems just right. Yes, William Donald Schaefer was a councilman, a four-term mayor, a two-term governor and comptroller. But these were just titles. He never stopped seeing himself as Don Schaefer, homeowner, a Baltimorean like his father who planted flowers in the backyard, who swept the alleys and wanted garbage collected on time. He thought the city could be greater than its citizens dared to hope, but he knew a greater city would be built from the alleys up. When he saw efforts that made a Baltimore neighborhood brighter, he inducted the homeowner into what he called The Order of the Rose.

You'd be hard put to find a more ardent Baltimorean than Carolyn O'Keefe, a savvy city stalwart who helped develop the city's Police Athletic League and co-created the "I LOVE City Life" campaign with her husband, Kevin O'Keefe, managing director of Shandwick International, a Baltimore-based public relations firm. O'Keefe, a senior consultant for Shandwick and mother of Grace, 6, and Maire, 3, is also a board member of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association. O'Keefe, a 43-year-old Guilford resident, has a knack for elegance, but she's not afraid of dressing down.

Since my family and I made the decision to leave New York and come back home to Baltimore, I have been fascinated by the reaction of so many of my friends and family who still call Charm City home. For them, the response can be summed up in one word: "Why?" Many, not sure why I would leave New York to come back to Baltimore, have asked me if everything was all right. The wonder doesn't stop at my immediate circle; even the underwriters for my mortgage asked me to write a letter of explanation.

Forty-three years ago, Baltimoreans were talking about the Dec. 27, 1954, closing of O'Neill & Co., the venerable downtown department store that had stood on the southwest corner of Charles and Lexington streets since 1882.It had survived the Great Fire of 1904, the coming of suburban shopping centers and competition from other department stores. only shuttered its doors after its management had been unable to negotiate new leases on its buildings.Today, there are still Baltimore homemakers who proudlyproduce at holidays and other occasions linen tablecloths and ,, napkins bought by their mothers and grandmothers at O'Neill & Co. a half-century or more ago. O'Neill's, as Baltimoreans always called the store, was known as the purveyor of the finest linen goods in the city.

Phillies@Nationals 7 p.m. [MASN] Baltimoreans are stuck in the middle of this matchup between the champs and the chumps. So, which are worse, the Phillies' obnoxious fans or the Nationals' apathetic ones?