Labor Day

If becoming an informed voter were easy, everyone would do it. It's not, of course. When it comes to choosing our next president, there's no shortage of information about the candidates. Some is critical, some interesting, some salacious, some irrelevant. All we can predict is that you won't learn enough about the major party nominees if we hold to the series of heavily scripted, play-not-to-lose, watch-what-you-say debates. Despite many good intentions, presidential debates offer little more than bland recitations of carefully calibrated positions and the occasional sound bite from a gaffe or putdown.

AS THE LABOR DAY weekend approaches, the news media will be filled with advertisements for back-to-school sales, reports on holiday traffic deaths and recipes for backyard barbecues.What we don't see much is reporting on the lives of people who labor in the nation's offices, factories and service industries. There isn't much coverage of how jobs are changing in America, or of the growing gap in wealth between those who do the work and those who profit from it.Issues of work and class are largely invisible in the American media, not just on Labor Day but year-round.

OCEAN CITY -- After an anxious week of weather watching, merchants and city officials at Maryland's beach resort think they have dodged another Atlantic storm.Now they are beginning to turn their attention to the bottom line -- how much the gray skies, high winds and pounding surf churned up by wayward Hurricane Dennis will affect the turnout for Labor Day weekend.Yesterday, as Dennis was downgraded to a tropical storm and meandered south, again threatening the North Carolina coast, Ocean City officials relaxed their vigil.

Not so long ago, Labor Day was the moment the cottage door twanged shut. For rentals at the beach, the long season began on Memorial Day, the short on July 4. But long or short, it was over on Labor Day, just before school started.Like many travel patterns in America, this one is changing. While no one has created the endless summer surfers dream of, September and October have become beach time for many.On Cape Cod, in New Jersey and at shore resorts elsewhere along the recreational vehicle flyway, officials all say yes, yes, there is a post-Labor Day influx of retired people, especially those taking a leisurely course to Florida.

Unscathed by back-to-back Hurricanes Dennis and Floyd, Ocean City merchants are worried that media sound and fury about disastrous weather in neighboring states could hurt attendance at this weekend's Sunfest -- for 25 years the resort's biggest "shoulder season" event.Last year, the four-day crafts and music festival -- which begins Friday -- drew more than 200,000 visitors, a number that business owners say they would like to see duplicated to help make up for their so-so Labor Day weekend.

THIS Labor Day, between your charred hot dogs and cold cups of beer, take a minute to pay tribute to the men and women who respond to 911 and 311 calls, train and take care of K-9 dogs, fly police helicopters over crime scenes, dust for fingerprints, mediate domestic disputes. Police officers are the glue that hold neighborhoods together.Just listen to Baltimore's mayoral candidates.They can't heap enough praise on the beat officers of the past, who evoke memories of simpler and more orderly times.

OCEAN CITY -- If money talks, you can't prove it by Frankie Lucas.The manager of a U.S. 50 convenience store, Lucas has been waving cold hard cash -- a $1,000 bonus -- from a banner hanging on the West Ocean City business. She has hired three of the two dozen workers she needs for the summer season."This is the second year we've offered it to anybody who stays through Labor Day," Lucas says. "We started out with $500, and that didn't seem to do it. It's so much worse than last year. You keep thinking it can't get any worse, but I'm working at least 60 hours a week."

The St. Mary's College men's basketball coach, charged with raping a 22-year-old woman at his Southern Maryland apartment, has been placed on administrative leave by the school.Coatlin Othell Wilson, 38, will be paid during the leave, according to Betty Clayton, St. Mary's spokeswoman."At this point, basically we are treating this as an incident between him and the young lady involved," Clayton said. "We are cooperating with local law enforcement personnel."Wilson, who uses his middle name, was a star player at the University of Virginia in the early 1980s.

Unscathed by hurricanes Dennis and Floyd, Ocean City merchants are worried that media sound and fury about disastrous weather in neighboring states could hurt attendance at this weekend's Sunfest -- for 25 years the resort's biggest "shoulder season" event.Last year, the four-day crafts and music festival, which begins tomorrow, drew more than 200,000 visitors, a nice round number that business owners say they'd like to see duplicated to help make up for their so-so Labor Day weekend.`Plenty of rooms'"There are still plenty of rooms available, and we've had an enormous number of calls about the weather," said Susan Jones, a spokeswoman for the city's hotel, motel and restaurant association.

CALENDAR-makers have a hard job. Not the ones who select the changing monthly pictures that adorn our walls and desks. Not the computer geeks who easily punch in a chart as the mood strikes them.Not even the people who make an extra effort to inform us, as my 1999 model does, that Feb. 5 is Waitangi Day in New Zealand (even though that would be Feb. 4 in Maryland because of crossing the International Dateline.)I mean the calendar-makers who are actually schedule-makers. They establish the unrelenting calendar of events for untold institutions and organizations.

Orioles right-hander David Hernandez said he isn't tired and doesn't believe he has hit the proverbial rookie wall in this, the longest season he has pitched in his pro career. The numbers say otherwise. Hernandez lasted just three innings and allowed five runs in the Orioles' 8-4 loss to the Tampa Bay Rays, who had limped into Camden Yards as losers of their past 11. It was the second consecutive outing in which Hernandez failed to get at least 10 outs and the third straight in which he has allowed at least five runs.

The Dorseys are at it again, ordering stunning quantities of chicken, corn and green beans, preparing to convene once more on the hilly spot in Sykesville where family roots go deep. The reunion T-shirt order ran to 170 this time for the Dorsey family's 60th Labor Day gathering. The 2009 cryptic T-shirt motto - "From Yuka Purl to York Imperial" - tells a story, but so does most everything connected to the event, because what else is family but one large ball of narrative twine. "My mother always impressed upon us, 'Remember you're a Dorsey,' " said Rosie Hutchinson.

Many fewer Marylanders are expected to travel this Labor Day weekend compared with last year - a phenomenon that has as much to do with a fluke of the calendar as the state of the economy. AAA Mid-Atlantic is projecting a 14 percent drop from last year's Labor Day travels, which reached the highest levels in a decade. Ragina Averella, a spokeswoman for AAA, pointed to this year's late Labor Day, which falls on Sept. 7. "With the Labor Day weekend falling a week later than last year's holiday and many school districts opening as early as two weeks prior to Labor Day, it seems Marylanders are skipping the long weekend trip this year," Averella said in a news release.

If it were up to some budget-conscious Marylanders, state employees wouldn't get paid on their birthdays, and they would work in offices with thermostats set as high as 80 degrees in the summer. And while the citizens of the Free State are at it, they would raise money for state coffers by taxing commuters and collecting additional gun permit fees by easing restrictions on who can legally carry handguns. Gov. Martin O'Malley solicited ideas from the citizenry as he puzzles over how to slash another $470 million from a state budget that has already been whacked several times in recent years.

For more than 50 years, Jo McNally has spent every Labor Day the same way - at the Maryland State Fair. When she was a girl, her family packed a picnic lunch of freshly fried chicken that they ate on the grass parking lot and, if her father won at the racetrack, spent the afternoon on the rides. As a teenager, she accepted a "steady ring" on the bleachers of the Cow Palace from the boy who would become her husband. And yesterday, as a grandmother, she led a brood of youngsters around the fairgrounds to pet the pigs, milk a cow and enjoy the traditions that have meant so much to her over the years.

On Labor Day weekend, Maryland divides into two camps: those who jump into their cars and join the teeming, sweltering masses headed down to the ocean and those who think fighting all that traffic is insane. Guess which camp I'm in. Does the translucent Irish skin give it away? Oh, go ahead, beach people, have your fun down there in Ocean City or Rehoboth or wherever you are. Splash in the surf, cruise the boardwalk, play your miniature golf at the erupting volcano place, stuff your fat little faces at your Dough Rollers, your Dumser's, your Bulls on the Beach, etc. But there'll be a price to pay for all that, won't there?

Labor Day was conceived by America's labor unions as a testament to their cause. In 1898, Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor, called it "the day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed ... that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it."...

Most workers say they have little to celebrate this Labor Day. Several recent surveys depict a general malaise among workers and depression about the job market and the economy. A survey of 1,000 Americans released yesterday concluded worker confidence about the economy is lower than during the recession of 2001 - even though the unemployment rate now is below 2001 levels. The nation's unemployment rate is 5.7 percent, higher than Maryland's 4.4 percent. The researchers also point out concern over declining home values and rising gas prices.

Summer's not officially over when Labor Day hits. But it may as well be. More than winter, more than autumn, more than spring, summer is a state of mind, existing not so much because of the calendar, not so much because of the temperature, but because we close our eyes, exhale and let it happen. After Labor Day, as we become about less vacation and more school, more work, more wearing shoes, summer fades. It evaporates like condensation on a glass of lemonade. But before it's gone for another year, there's one weekend left - a long one. Make it good.

T.S. ELIOT's J. Alfred Prufrock would have had to deal with more questions and philosophies over last Labor Day than wondering whether he should wear his trousers rolled. If he'd been near the Long Island beaches where I was, he'd have heard that Hillary Clinton couldn't win the presidential election and then that she is the only one who can! ... That Rudy Giuliani is considered a bad man and an erratic personality by many, but that he would make the best administrator executor of all the candidates.