Baltimore? She's crazy as hell!

After I returned from Germany, I reunited with my high school sweetheart and we planned to get married before I began college in 1957. One day, as we sat down with my future mother-in-law, Doris, to discuss the wedding, we were told something that was hilarious to us.

Earlier that day, Doris had made her weekly trip to her favorite Gypsy fortune teller. The fortune teller said to her: "I see that you will be taking a long trip in the future to visit your daughter and her new baby in Baltimore, Maryland."

When we heard this, my future bride and I laughed until our sides hurt. What a ridiculous prediction!

However, four years later, in October 1961, that ridiculous prediction came true.

Let me tell you the steps that took place to get us to Baltimore.

I attended Boston University until June 1960, when I received a degree. Jobs with the National Security Agency and the Secret Service did not work out, but since I still wanted to work for the Federal Government, I decided to take the Federal Service Entrance Examination. I received several job offers. The two that sounded promising were both in Maryland.

One was as a Budget Analyst at someplace called Indian Head. We asked my wife's uncle what that area was like because he had been stationed there during World War II. He said that it was a "hellhole" stuck out in the middle of nowhere. I turned the job down.

The other job was as a Claims Authorizer for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore. The Social Security Act had been amended recently and millions of disabled people would now be eligible to receive monthly benefits. They needed lawyer types to examine benefit applications to make sure that the applicants were truly eligible according to the amended law.

Unfortunately, lawyers in the Baltimore area did not want to take pay cuts to go to work for the Federal Government. Social Security then changed the requirements so that people with investigative experience could qualify for the jobs, and shifted their personnel search to New England, which was having some unemployment problems. Since I had done some credit investigation work while attending college, I met their new requirements.

I decided to try the job at Social Security and was interviewed in Boston by two recruiters. Only two questions were asked at the interview:

Question: "What do you think of the Orioles?" Answer: "I like them."

Question: "What do you think of the Colts?" Answer: "I like them too."

(I'm ashamed to admit that I thought they were talking about birds and horses.)

The recruiters slapped me on the back and welcomed me to the Social Security Administration team. Now, we had to get a map and figure out how to get to Baltimore in our ailing Ford, and with very little available cash.
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Baltimore? Mencken? Willy?

Where the hell is Baltimore? Growing up in Massachusetts, I had only a vague idea of where Baltimore was. I knew it was "down south", somewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line, but I wasn't sure exactly where. I loved geography in grammar school, but my interest was limited to South America. I knew where Lima, Peru was, but Baltimore? I had no clue.


If I thought about Baltimore at all, it was when I read newspaper accounts of the medical breakthroughs being made at the famous Johns Hopkins Hospital. And, I had also heard about H.L. Mencken, who lived in Baltimore. I had read about his reporting during the Scopes "Monkey Trial" and believed him to be a wise curmudgeon whose criticisms of hypocricy expanded on some that I had been developing during my short life.


During the Korean War, the Air Force felt that they needed my expertise in Germany instead of Korea. I don't think that I was disappointed about that. I spent over three years in West Germany from 1953 to 1956. For 18 months of that time, I froze on a mountain top in the Schnee Eifel near Belgium. As a radio operator, I was able to get in a lot of reading and studying in between messages and also in the barracks while blizzards were swirling outside for ten months of the year.


That was when I discovered Mencken's famous work: The American Language. Interspersed betwen scholarly observations were snippets of Baltimore lore. My interest in the City was tweaked.


During the last two years of my service in Germany, I was stationed on a former German army base near Nuernberg. It was the home, at the time, of Radio Free Europe and a lot of intelligent people who made the programs work. Smart people need libraries, and there was a good one on the base. I was able to find several works by Mr. Mencken. My interest and curiosity about Baltimore was increased. But, it was still only a casual interest.


For this period of my Air Force life, my working area was a converted army truck turned into a "crypto van", an office holding cryptographic machines and a cryptographer, namely me. The van was located just outside of a remote German village on the edge of a secret radar site. For security, the van stood next to an Air Police hut and I was required to keep a "burp gun" near at hand, in case the Communists overwhelmed the Air Police and attacked the van. I was ordered to "shoot to kill" any Russians or East Germans entering the van.

My ability to 'shoot" was equated with the fact that I had been certified as a "sharpshooter" when I did practice firing as part of my Air Force basic training. Someone had obviously mixed up everybody's scores on that day, because I could not even see the targets, much less hit the bullseyes. Now, I had been handed a scary "burp gun" that shot 45mm shells! I sure hoped that the Red Army did not try to capture my van and force me to use that damn weapon.

Back at the barracks, there was a room where we could kill time by gambling. The main games we played were Blackjack, Poker, and Pinochle. I became fairly good at Blackjack. Enough so that I was able to supplement the black market sales of my cigarette ration with enough money to be able to go on monthly trips on the Orient Express. Almost all of my salary went home to help support the grandparents who raised me, so this extra money was very important to me.

During one of the Blackjack games, I noticed an almost imperceptible half-moon indentation on one of the cards. The value of the card was two. Looking closely thereafter, I noticed other indentations on cards with the value of three and four. Somebody was marking the damn cards!

By carefully watching the handling of the cards by the players, I soon found out that the marks were being made by the long fingernails of an Air Policeman named Willy. Willy's hometown was Baltimore.

Willy was quite a character. He had a number of "talents". One was the ability to fart at will. He also had the ability to please both heterosexuals and homosexuals. And, he could tell great jokes. Let me tell you about a typical "night on the town" for Willy.

At 7 pm, Max, would drive his BMW taxi to the base to pick up Willy. Max liked to smell farts, so he would give Willy a free ride into Nuernberg and then take him back to the base at the end of the night. Willy's only requirement was to drop his drawers and break wind upon demand.

In Nuernberg, Willy would service and be serviced sexually as needed, receiving free drinks and food as desired, while entertaining one and all with extremely funny jokes. At midnight, Max would pick Willy up and drive him back to the base, perhaps stopping for just a couple of minutes along the way. At the end of the night, Willy would have had what he described as a "wonderful evening" with only minimal outlay of funds on his part.

I knew about Willy's many peccadilloes, but I still was shocked that he was cheating at Blackjack. Some of my fellow Airmen also cheated at cards in a special way, and made no effort to conceal it from us. But their cheating was confined to poker games on the trains that went from West Germany through East Germany into Berlin. Two of them would get on the train separately and casually work their way into a poker game. They had a series of signals worked out and the poor Army guys who started the game would not have a chance. By the time they got to Berlin, they were cleaned out and would have to go to the Army assistance office set up to help soldiers who had lost their money through theft or gambling. The cheaters knew that if they were found out it meant being beaten up and thrown from the train, but they took that chance.

However, these guys had their own set of scruples, and would definitely not cheat their fellow servicemen like Willy was doing, so I had no compunction about using my knowledge to good effect to beat Willy at his own game. In fact, I took Willy "to the cleaners," one night, and when he ran out of money, he put up his designer "shades" as a bet.. and I won them as well.

Willy didn't care about losing the money, but he did care about losing his beloved sunglasses. He was very unhappy with me. Shortly thereafter, on a lonely Sunday night, when I was working alone in the Cryptographic van and Willy was on duty alone in the Air Police hut, I felt a massive thump against the van. I reached for my burp gun and peeped out the tiny window in the door. It was Willy shooting his 45 at the van. I decided to wait and see what happened. The van was supposed to be bullet proof.

After five minutes and several shots, Willy must have gotten it all out of his system and stopped firing. Neither I nor Willy mentioned the incident and we kind of became friends for a while. But I did wonder.. is everybody who lives in Baltimore like Willy?