Make Baltimore

SOME people help others realize their dreams but never realize their own. One of them was Eli Hanover, who in the 1960s and '70s ran a gym over the Jewel Box club on The Block and trained boxers for short fights on long nights at the old Steelworkers' Hall in Dundalk.Hanover was a legend in his time -- and beyond. He was a dream merchant, but he sold only dreams he believed in. He promised seamen and steelworkers and bums down on their luck that if they trained in his gym, he would get them the fights, and they could punch their way to glory.

Last Saturday afternoon my brother Eddie and I landed at his Poultney Street home. We put down our shopping bags for a minute, and he said: Don't get too comfortable or even think about taking a nap. There was still some time left to go out and enjoy the pleasures of a cool Baltimore 4 o'clock. On foot. And hurry up. Within a few seconds we were at the Cross Street Market, walking the main aisle, going over the late summer's offerings. The market, like the city in which it's located, is full of simple pleasures.

It's not over till it's over. Mayor Kurt Schmoke invoked the old cliche Tuesday night after the National Football League put off a decision on the second new franchise. He's right. It may be third down and 20 to go with the clock running out. But winning touchdowns have been scored in the last seconds, and that can happen in this competition.Perhaps not even the NFL owners know all the reasons they awarded one of the new teams to Charlotte but failed to agree on the other. Probably there was a mixed bag of reasons.

Baltimore should consider holding an international symposium on ways to attract accomplished young people and boost economic development, Akio Matsumura, an expert who has brought together such thinkers as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Mikhail S. Gorbachev and Carl Sagan, said yesterday. "You can learn from the success and failure of other cities around the world," said Matsumura, founder and executive director of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival in New York.

The other day a friend remarked that she still has a working 1940s Western Electric telephone in her home. It's as heavy as granite. The rotary dial is metal, not plastic. People under 40 ask, "Does it work?"This phone shouldn't be considered an antique but a status symbol. It takes its place with our lump-meat crab cakes and shad roe suppers as some of the things that make Baltimore the town it is.If you look around the town, you can spot other things that serve for status symbols on the shores of the Patapsco:Your name on an outdoor homestretch box at Pimlico not far from the finish line.

BALTIMOREANS ARE a prideful lot. They love their city and have a tendency to brag about its unique culture, artistic venues, economic rebirth, close-knit neighborhoods, ethnic ties and yes, even its eccentricity and general funkiness. They don't call it Charm City for nothing. But with Mayor Martin O'Malley's official entry into Maryland's gubernatorial race yesterday, the long knives are out. The Baltimore-bashing season is now open. Politicians from Arbutus to Rockville are only too happy to make sweeping and ill-informed condemnations of a city that deserves better.

Conversations about race relations in Baltimore have been much too polite over the years, Johns Hopkins University political science professor Matthew A. Crenson said at a University of Maryland session yesterday attended by a diverse array of about 100 people, mostly nonprofit workers. Because Baltimore is a meeting point between Northern and Southern culture, it has produced "a pervasive culture of avoidance" toward race matters, where outward civility covers festering wounds, Crenson told the conference sponsored by Baltimore Neighborhoods Inc. and the UM School of Social Work, site of the forum.

Baltimore's chameleon-like qualities, its home-grown film-production expertise and a fledgling wage-rebate program helped pump a record $158 million into Maryland's economy last year. And that success is helping state economic development officials realize their goal of keeping local film crews busy and attracting more middle-budget films to be shot here. "This was a great year for the Maryland Film Office and for feature filming in Maryland," said Dennis Castleman, the state's assistant secretary for tourism, film and the arts.

SYLVAN LEARNING Systems, the Baltimore-based tutoring and testing company, has grown so rapidly that it is now one of the world's five largest private providers of educational services, with 1997 revenues projected at more than $200 million.Hardly a month goes by without news that Sylvan has entered another niche in the relatively small for-profit education industry. The company employs more than 8,000 part-time teachers directly or through its network of franchised tutoring centers, and it is the world's largest computerized testing firm.

Mayor not doing enough to make Baltimore safe Anyone who respects human life can only be appalled at the slayings of Angela Dawson and her five children. And it is certainly time for elected leaders, law enforcement, community leaders, religious leaders and all citizens to join together to make all parts of Baltimore safe ("Suspicious house fire kills 6," Oct. 17). But while Mayor Martin O'Malley and Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris are correct about the shared responsibility of the entire city to fight crime, the fact is that they are part of the leadership of a city that, as The New York Times reported last week, "is the most violent of the country's 20 largest cities."