Carl Stokes

Well, I got my man.After watching last night's televised debate among Carl Stokes, Martin O'Malley and Lawrence Bell, it's clear to me who should be the next mayor of Baltimore.Unfortunately, Kweisi Mfume isn't running.He only moderated last night's debate -- but such is his stature that each candidate, eager to show his intimate relationship with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader who walked away from his own sure shot at City Hall, declared, "Well, Kweisi," at the beginning of each answer with such lock-step response that viewers might have imagined Mfume held the only vote in town.

It is one of those strange, vague Baltimore summer days that wants to do everything at once. Raindrops are falling, even as rays of sunlight crack the sky, and a second wave of scudding black clouds gathers on the horizon.Inside a plain brick building on 25th Street, Carl Stokes also is promising to do everything at once, dangling a vision of Baltimore as mouth-watering as the Danish pastries served at this regular meeting of the 25th Street Area Business Owners Association.Just listen to him: The Baltimore of the next four years will be safer, cleaner, more efficient and more responsive.

SOME PEOPLE get it. Carl Stokes, for example, and Martin O'Malley, too. And legislators such as Clarence Blount and Jim Campbell and Tony Fulton who stand on one side of the street, and those such as Pete Rawlings and Joan Carter Conway standing on the other, but not so far away that they can't hear echoes of each other's heartbeats in the midst of political struggle.And some people don't get it. Julius Henson, for example, and Nathaniel McFadden, too. Henson tried to turn this mayoral campaign into the slummy revival of 1995.

THE CRITICS WISH us to unwrite what has already been written. Lawrence Bell never had trouble paying his bills, and Carl Stokes never dropped out of college. And so on. As though unwriting it would un-do the acts themselves. As though none of this connects with the business of running the city of Baltimore."You got any secrets you want to get off your chest?" Martin O'Malley was asked the other day."No," he said, laughing. "I pay my bills on time, and I have my college diploma."He sounded like a man delighted to be standing out of the line of fire.

CARL Stokes, who is running for mayor of Baltimore, made the following statement the other day: "I want to set the record straight and clear up any confusion. I would not want an error like this to create a misperception about me." What misperception? The misperception that Carl Stokes is a college graduate? I might be wrong, but it sounds like ole Carl has stumbled across a new campaign theme: The city of Baltimore has had 12 years of an Ivy League-Rhodes Scholar Mayor and what has that gotten us?

Don't look now but Carl Stokes is a credible and substantial candidate for mayor. Bill takes one look at Slobodan Milosevic and sees Ken Starr. Send more bombers. First Maryland, a subsidiary of Allied Irish, paid big bucks to think up Allfirst Financial for its new moniker, when it could have had free advice to adopt Allied American instead. If the Great One has retired, can the Iron Man be far behind? Pub Date: 4/21/99

Maryland should use psychiatric hospitals for learning, high-tech It is with great interest that I read JoAnna Daemmrich's front-page story "Maryland's psychiatric hospitals stand almost empty" (March 14). I find it impressive that modern psychiatry has rendered the intended use of these hospitals mostly superfluous. Why not take these underused buildings and grounds and make them into our next great campuses for technology, business and education? As suggested in the article, reserve one facility for psychiatric use. Make it the best one possible because we must surely take care of those of us so unfortunate as to require such treatment.

Today in history: Nov. 7In 1874, the Republican Party was symbolized as an elephant in a cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly magazine.In 1916, Republican Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to Congress.In 1917, Russia's Bolshevik Revolution took place as forces led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin overthrew the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky.In 1967, Carl Stokes was elected the first black mayor of a major city -- Cleveland, Ohio.In 1989, L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia became the first elected black governor in U.S. history; David N. Dinkins was elected New York City's first black mayor.

A PERSON LOOKING at predominantly black Cleveland now might wrongly discount the significance of the election of Carl B. Stokes as its first African-American mayor. But that Ohio city today isn't the same one that Mr. Stokes was elected to lead in 1967. Then, just as it was in most of America's big cities, the overwhelming majority of Cleveland's citizens were white.To become the nation's first black mayor of a major city, Mr. Stokes ran a race-neutral campaign that spotlighted his ability to run a big city.

It may take months before Baltimoreans fully grasp how much Tuesday's primary election whirlwind altered the city's political landscape.While Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke was renominated to a third term and is standing taller than before, other fixtures in the city's political life -- Mary Pat Clarke, Julian Lapides, Joseph DiBlasi, Vera Hall and Carl Stokes -- were swept aside.Here are some other measures of the changes:After November, when Republicans go through the motion of holding a general election in this heavily Democratic city, Mr. Schmoke could be the only incumbent remaining on the five-member Board of Estimates.