D Alesandro

ALL OVER Maryland, the lines are forming and the job seekers are putting in their claims. It's a beautiful thing to see. The job seekers claim to know somebody, or they claim to have been generous when it counted. Sometimes, they even claim to have skills. This gets us to the mayor named Tommy D'Alesandro Jr. and the political boss named Jack Pollack, who were smart enough to know better. D'Alesandro was mayor for three terms, and Pollack was a political boss forever. You can still hear the echoes of their conversations today, from a distance of no more than half a century.

By all accounts, Thomas J. D'Alesandro III had had his fill of City Hall by 1971. He'd been mayor for a single but tumultuous term, marked by the 1968 riots, racial strife and strikes by city laborers, bus drivers, even symphony musicians. "It's all over," he told reporters as he left office to resume his private law practice. "I'm all through." But three decades and four mayors later, D'Alesandro is back -- as an informal adviser to Mayor Martin O'Malley, who consults him on some of the stickiest City Hall issues and appointed him to serve as a Housing Authority commissioner, a volunteer post.

One of my favorite movies is the 1974 version of The Front Page, Billy Wilder's adaptation of the play of the same name by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Set in the 1930s, it is the story of a Chicago tabloid reporter named Hildy Johnson who has decided to get out of newspapering - nobody called it journalism in those days - marry a nice girl and get into advertising in New York. His editor, Walter Burns, is desperate to keep Hildy. The story revolves around a hot news scoop about an escaped anarchist who is supposed to be hanged.

JOHN PICA Sr. lived a life of minimal editing. To call him a great character is to minimize the term. He was our emissary to a world where fearless people act on impulse, and everybody watching nervously from the sidelines comes out of hiding afterward to figure out how it happened. Once, Pica was asked, "This instinct to march to your own drummer -- where did it come from?" "I marched to my own drummer in the Army," he said. "I was a machine gunner. They told me, `Don't fire until we say so.' Hell, if a leaf moved, I shot it. I wasn't gonna listen to them."

THE sentimentalists around here brace for the destruction of a wall on 33rd Street in the next few days, but students of cold arithmetic worry about a dark spirit emerging from the rubble that once was Memorial Stadium: the return to an era when Baltimore baseball was a financial trouble spot and not just a sweet pastime. Last week, in a scene that felt like generations embracing across a ghostly half-century expanse, former Mayor Tommy D'Alesandro III opened a time capsule placed in the stadium cornerstone by his father, former Mayor Tommy D'Alesandro Jr. Tommy the Younger's voice quivered a couple of times as he reached into the box left there in September 1954, of the summer the Orioles returned to big league baseball after a 50-year absence.

Former Baltimore Mayor Thomas J. D'Alesandro III watched over the opening of the Memorial Stadium time capsule yesterday - just as his father presided in 1954, when the small lead box was tucked in the cornerstone for posterity, brimming with baseball souvenirs, business cards and the hope, as a note suggested, that the new structure on 33rd Street would stand forever. The opening of the box yesterday was a clear sign that it would not. Demolition of the last remnant of the stadium - the 10-story memorial wall - is expected to begin late next week.

FOR MARYLAND, Rep. Nancy Pelosi's rise to the second-highest office in the Republican-controlled House had a bittersweet quality. On a vote of 118-95, she became Democratic whip at the expense of another talented Marylander, Rep. Steny H. Hoyer. Mr. Hoyer would certainly have had more power to wield on behalf of this state had he won, but his value to the House and to his Southern Maryland district should be undiminished. Although this is the second time he has failed to win this post, he would not have drawn 95 votes without considerable respect from his colleagues.

Now comes Martin O'Malley, mayor of Baltimore, cussing again in print, even though his mother said she'd talk to him about it. The cause of O'Malley's latest aggravation is the same as before: Patricia C. Jessamy, state's attorney of Baltimore, and her failure to get things done the way the mayor wants them done. The mayor was miffed recently because Jessamy wasn't succeeding with the idea he supported for an early disposition court to get petty criminal cases out of the way. The mayor said he didn't care how the cases were resolved early, so long as they were out of the way: "I don't give a rat's ass; as long as it ain't on the docket, it's accomplishing the goal."

In Baltimore City Planning Commission OKs subdivision in Northwest Baltimore The city Planning Commission unanimously approved last night final development plans for a 24-home subdivision in Northwest Baltimore. The Hillsdale Heights Neighborhood Association Corp. plans to extend Hillsdale Road and build the homes that would sell for an average of $230,000. Residents of nearby Dickeyville oppose the development and plan to appeal, said their attorney, G. Macy Nelson. "Our goal is to try to purchase the land, pay the developers fair value and add it to [Leakin Park]

The dedication of Baltimore's new Friendship International Airport on June 24, 1950, coincided with Baltimore Mayor Thomas D'Alesandro Jr.'s first airplane ride. Scheduled to fly to Baltimore from Washington, D.C. with President Harry S. Truman and his official party, the mayor made no attempt to hide his nervousness about being airborne. A week earlier, D'Alesandro told reporters that flying was "strictly for the birds" and he was making the flight only because the president had asked him to. With temperatures soaring into the high 80s by mid-morning, the expected crowd for the dedication of 150,000 was whittled down to some 10,000 because of heat and fears of massive traffic tie-ups.