A little bit of everything
Michael Olesker, columnist for the News American, Baltimore Sun, and Baltimore Examiner has spent a quarter of a century writing about the city he loves.He is the author of several books, including Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home, Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore, and The Colts’ Baltimore: A City and Its Love Affair in the 1950s, all published by Johns Hopkins Press.
We’re sensitive souls around here. We don’t like it when people in power fail to tell us the whole truth. We saw it happen precisely 40 years ago this week with our pro football team, and now a few questions linger about our baseball team.
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I was a freshman at the University of Maryland, College Park, walking through Cole Fieldhouse on my way to a required freshman phys ed lecture on personal health and hygiene. As I got to class, the news from Dallas was still unclear: Was Kennedy really shot? Was he still alive?
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The first time my father took me to a major league baseball game, at the old Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street, I thought I was entering a kind of holy place.
Read moreThe South lost that war but got to keep all its flags, which sympathizers wave about as if taunting the winners, declaring, “Hey, we’re still here.” And they built statutes to those turncoats who tried to tear America apart.
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They’re saying what our better angels have been saying for years: America wasn’t created to “dominate” one another, but to learn from each other, and to find each other’s better selves, whatever we happen to look like.
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As pieces of America burn, this city instinctively winces. This time the anger follows a Minneapolis man named George Floyd, murdered in front of everyone’s eyes. But here we still remember five years ago and the televised rage and rioting that followed the death of Freddie Gray.
Read moreThe sign said, “Reach for the World.” It was there when those two remarkable political figures were students at Notre Dame, and maybe it remains. But now there’s no one reaching for their checkbooks, and so goes the school, and so goes a marvelous history.
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BALTIMORE – The first time I took my wife to that oasis of humanity known as the infield on Preakness
Read moreIf you think America’s angry and divided in the age of Donald Trump, you’re right. If you think we’ve never been through such bitterness before this, you’re wrong.
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BALTIMORE – There’s an ancient Jack Benny routine that allegedly drew the longest laugh in all of radio history. But
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