Native Son

I'm from the part of Baltimore that was knocked down. I grew up with a clear line of sight to the giant white letters spelling "Johns Hopkins" on the hospital's Monument Street campus. It was like my neighborhood's version of the Hollywood sign: tall, prestigious and distant, despite being just blocks away. This was the '80s, years before large sections of Baltimore's Middle East were seized under eminent domain and leveled after being scouted as the setting for a biotechnology park.

I'm from the part of Baltimore that was knocked down. I grew up with a clear line of sight to the giant white letters spelling "Johns Hopkins" on the hospital's Monument Street campus. It was like my neighborhood's version of the Hollywood sign: tall, prestigious and distant, despite being just blocks away. This was the '80s, years before large sections of Baltimore's Middle East were seized under eminent domain and leveled after being scouted as the setting for a biotechnology park.

I have often wondered why Maryland has never fully commemorated its greatest native son, Frederick Douglass. Is the old free-line state embarrassed by its slave heritage? Is it still a slave to the racial prejudice that produced slavery? Or are we just indifferent to the quintessential democratic ideals that this heroic American embodied?These principles -- liberty, freedom, equality, justice, opportunity were all partially rooted in the soil of Maryland and more deeply embedded in the soul of Douglass, its greatest champion.

The high school culinary arts teacher who taught Bryan Voltaggio how to put together a good bearnaise watched him "deconstruct" the sauce on national TV. The guy who's known Voltaggio and kid brother Michael since they hung their toques at Frederick's Holiday Inn has been tuning in to "Top Chef," too. The city immortalized in poetry for its "Clustered Spires" is clustered these days around the TV. Nearly everyone in Frederick - foodies and non-foodies,...

EMMITSBURG -- With a 21-gun salute and the reading of a poem about war that Army 1st Lt. Robert A. Seidel III had written in the fifth grade, this small town and hundreds of flag-bearing veterans laid to rest a native son yesterday in a funeral service that many said was all the more poignant on Memorial Day. Lieutenant Seidel, 23, who grew up in this Frederick County town of 2,300, had wanted to serve in the military since he was 10 years old. He...

Attention must paid -- and better late than never -- to Harold Sparck, a man who grew up in East Baltimore, moved to Alaska and made a huge difference in the lives of thousands of America's poorest people, along the coast of the Bering Sea. It was Harold Sparck's doing, his drive, his prodding, his spirit that made something good and important happen. Just last week, more than a year after Sparck's death, his spirit reached the Oval Office. Tell you how in a minute. First, some background.

BIGGER THOMAS lives. He lives in our prisons, he lives in our cities' drug-infested neighborhoods and he lives in the hearts of nearly all black men -- regardless of status and income -- who've been lashed by racism.Several generations of Biggers have been born since "Native Son" opened with the "Brrrrrrriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinng!" of an alarm clock in a rat-infested tenement on Chicago's South Side.Society ignored the alarm clock in 1940 when the novel appeared and today the alarm still goes unheeded.

Flanking Leon's Triple L Restaurant, the Arbutus landmark known as a place to find generous bowls of crab soup and political wisdom, is a bargain market and antiques emporium where a visitor can pick up a pair of used camouflage pants or a nice reflecting lawn ball. On the other side sits the Vet Dry Cleaners that the three Matheson brothers opened when they returned home from World War II. With one foot in the past and the other very much in the present, Arbutus finds itself in the glare of the national spotlight -- native son Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. is Maryland's new governor-elect.

WEST ISLIP, N.Y. - In much of New York, he might best be known as what's-his-name. Rick A. Lazio, the Republican congressman from Long Island running in perhaps the most-watched Senate race in history, has some introductions to make. First off, he is describing who he is not. The man who will challenge the first-ever first lady Senate candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, wasted no time over the weekend drawing sharp contrasts - branding her an interloper and himself a native son, calling her "far left" and himself moderate.

KRAKOW, Poland - Eyes glinting with tears, throats hoarse with grief, the Polish faithful numbly absorbed the news last night that the man they regarded as their spiritual father and political liberator was dead. "All the people of my village? How can I explain how they feel?" asked an anguished Slowik Wojtik, a 35-year-old fur and hide trader who lives near Wadowice, the hamlet where Pope John Paul II grew up. "This was a person who was for us like a father. All of Poland is crying now."

In 1963, 13-year-old John Rothman watched and listened intently as his father and several other prominent Baltimoreans sat around the family dining room table planning a crucial element in the city's cultural life. "They were talking about how Ford's Theatre was being torn down and how there would be no professional theater here," Rothman says. "So they were going to found one." The result was Center Stage. Donald Rothman, a prominent lawyer who died in June at age 86, guided the creation of the company and its move in the early 1970s to its present location on North Calvert Street.

South Baltimoreans from the old Sharp-Leadenhall neighborhood hold their community in high esteem. It is a historically African-American part of the city, revered by those who grew up there in its heyday. Some moved away. Others stayed. And parts got torn down for an interstate highway. I got to talking to one its proudest sons, Thomas D. Gillard, who is a 63-year-old retired Baltimore County substitute teacher. He was born at 900 Bevan St. and later lived in Hanover.

Mitt Romney stopped John McCain cold yesterday with a favorite-son victory in icy Michigan that threw the Republican presidential race wide open again. No clear front-runner has emerged after the first four state tests, and at least four Republicans have a credible chance to become the nominee. In the Democratic primary, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton finished ahead of "uncommitted" but the vote had no bearing on the delegate count. Michigan was not among the four states authorized to hold Democratic primaries before Feb. 5, and Barack Obama and John Edwards removed their names from the ballot.

William Henry Rinehart, the 19th-century sculptor whom residents consider Union Bridge's most famous son, has come home in the form of one of his many works -- a neo-classical statue that graces the town square on Main Street at Broadway. The conclusion of a 14-year Main Street Revitalization project -- the installation of the statue atop a three-tiered granite base and pedestal -- took place Thursday morning under gray skies as revitalization committee members, townspeople and Rinehart descendants looked on. "My grandfather was Israel Rinehart, a relative of William," said Sue Wantz, as she and her father, Clarence Leppo, watched the granite bases being set. Wantz's late mother was Ellen Rinehart.

MOZART WAS NOT A NATURE lover. On all his youthful travels by horse-drawn coach throughout Europe as a prodigy, he rarely commented on the landscape that he passed through in letters to family and friends. He loved cosmopolitan cities such as Paris, London and Vienna. Yet the closest I felt to Mozart on a recent trip to Austria came in a bucolic setting, the Monchsberg, a forested ridge above his hometown of Salzburg. I had spent the previous day and a half wandering around churches, cemeteries, a mansion and a fortress, all with connections to the composer.

The results on the field may have been disappointing during their four seasons of existence, but at the gate the Aberdeen IronBirds have ranked as one of minor league baseball's all-time leading success stories. From the first Opening Day, when owner Cal Ripken's mother, Vi, tossed out the first pitch, the Orioles' affiliate in the Single-A New York-Penn League has crammed Ripken Stadium with fans because of the star power of Aberdeen's native son, a first-class facility, free parking, low ticket prices and big league concessions.

In the late 1940s, architect Alexander Cochran built himself a house on Lake Avenue in North Baltimore. It is no exaggeration to say that North Baltimore was shocked.Because instead of the usual, comfortably conservative building, Alex Cochran's house was -- gasp -- modern; it was low-lying and flat-roofed, with floor-to-ceiling windows that let the indoors and outdoors flow into one another. Moreover, Cochran and his wife, Caroline, filled the house with modern furniture and art, and they spent the next several decades there championing causes from integration to world federalism.

EMMITSBURG -- With a 21-gun salute and the reading of a poem about war that Army 1st Lt. Robert A. Seidel III had written in the fifth grade, this small town and hundreds of flag-bearing veterans laid to rest a native son yesterday in a funeral service that many said was all the more poignant on Memorial Day. Lieutenant Seidel, 23, who grew up in this Frederick County town of 2,300, had wanted to serve in the military since he was 10 years old. He...