Bar Odyssey: Dundalk to Fells Point

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Scott Huffines

By Tom Nugent (The Baltimore Sun, 3/10/1978)

Friday night, Marie’s Tavern, and Shotgun Hank is getting into the Pabst.

“Listen here,” says Shotgun, swiveling around on his bar stool, grinning wide as an Oklahoma freeway beneath his blue, Peterbilt trucker’s cap, “I got me a wife in every state I got women up and down the Eastern Seaboard. These broads call me up on that CB-19, say, ‘Let’s go get us a coffee.’ Well, they don’t want no coffee, you can bet on that….”

Marie’s Tavern, Friday night. Long, narrow bar with a dozen swivel stools before it; the bowling league score sheets taped to the wall; the velvet painting which shows some dogs playing poker, the jukebox crooning “You Are My Special Angel,” and the big, hand-painted sign above the bar:

CREDIT MAKES ENEMIES
LET’S BE FRIENDS

And Shotgun Hank. “Trucking,” he sighs, this red-bearded, broad-shouldered man with 22 years and two million miles of the long haul behind him, “It’s bacon and eggs, man, it’s nothing but bacon and eggs… You hate it when you got it… but when you ain’t got it, you hate it more.”

And then he spins on the stool: “Hey, baby,” to the barmaid, “when you get out of jail?” And she’s popping another top, PFFAFFF, and Shotgun’s talking about the trucker who left his rig on the railroad tracks, and he’s talking about how Baltimore’s Boston Street is the biggest killer of truck drivers on the Eastern Seaboard, a real kidney-slammer, and he’s telling about how they used to pay him $200 a shot to run suitcases full of uppers into New York.

Marie’s Tavern. There are a thousand places like it in Baltimore, and there are a thousand guys like Hank. They are the regulars, the steady customers, the ones who keep the small, neighborhood bars in operation, the ones who spend two or three nights a week guzzling the cold brew, complaining about work, making jokes at the barmaids, and playing pool, throwing darts, dancing, dreaming, fighting, crying, bellowing two-fisted, gone weepy-eyed as the long night drifts and Dolly Parton sings, endlessly sings, on a thousand jukeboxes: Here you come again…

And when it comes to neighborhood bars, the big action is on Eastern avenue.

Take a look at the map. Take a look at the 2.7. mile stretch of Eastern which runs between Broadway, in Fells Point, and Dundalk Avenue, out near the city limit. Patterson Park, Highlandtown, Greektown — these are ethnic neighborhoods, mainly Greeks, Poles, Bohemians, Italians, Germans. Here it’s block after block of polished brick and gray formstone rowhouses and lots of corner grocery stores and ethnic restaurants and chopped-down Chevys and windows with painted screens on them.

And bars. The map won’t tell you this but there are 23 of them — small, dark, crowded, smoke-filled — on that 2.7  mile stretch of Eastern.

That’s a lot of bars. So many, in fact, that it took two nights, one afternoon and a cast-iron stomach to visit each one of the.

—0—

Chaos. They’re all crazy: the noise, the smoke, the nonstop, 95-mile-an-hour  yammering, and the shouts, grunts, belches, the back-slaps, the beer sloshing on shoes, the hammer of the jukebox and clack-clack at the pool table.

HEY, HEY, BABY DOLL,
WHAT YOU DOIN’?
GETTIN’ LOADED, MAN,
WHAT YOU THINK?

And the dumb jokes: the Polish pencil (erasers at both ends) above the bar, and the night the two gays waltzed into the Hilander, both of them going to the ladies’ room, and the crazy stories nobody believes anyway.

Larry McAdams, for example, at Ducky’s Tavern, way out on the Avenue, telling about the time he ate 17 pounds of french fries—and still lost his bet because he couldn’t eat 25. And a man named Bill, at the 2 Friends in Greektown, explaining how he fell through his own kitchen window awhile back (he was hurrying home to the 10 women he claims to sleep with), and he nearly bled to death, except he was too drunk to notice.

And the Wild Ones who haunt the Hilander Lounge: Donald Quack-Quack, and Moonlight, and Ruthee-Baby, and Hoghead, and the Mole, and Tony Wop. “We got the biggest indoor zoo in Highlandtown,” says the owner, Melio Rosadi, and he’s only got one customer with any class, the one they call Sharkey, the “contemplative thinker” who sits all night gazing at his shoelaces, dreaming.

Stories. Goldie Glavas, at the Glavas Bar in Highlandtown—she’s been running this place since 1960 (before that she ran a construction crane). She remembers the night a customer stood up, pulled out his handkerchief, walked down the bar, and started cleaning another customer’s ears. “They were complete strangers,” says Glavas, “I didn’t know what to think.”

Stories. Mike Winchester, who runs the Silver Dollar Go-Go Club, remembers how one of his customers jumped onstage awhile ago, cut loose with a high-speed Funky Chicken, flew right through the plate-glass window and out on the street.

And Don the Slobberer, who’s driving them crazy at Smitty’s Place, with his cheap women. “He keeps bringing these trashy women in,” the barmaid bitterly complains, “hanging all over them. slobbering on them… You hear about last night’s beauty? She went in the men’s room five times….”

“Yeah,” agrees a patron who’s seen this from Don many times before, “You know what his trouble is, man? He gets one of these [a can of Pabst] in him, and right away he wants two. He gets two in him, and he wants three. Then he wants eight! And then he gets after the women—it makes me sick—he’s all over them, like an octopus.”

But it’s all in fun. It’s a nice neighborhood—that’s what they tell you, in bar after bar. “Listen,” says Cal Puppe, retired from Baltimore Gas & Electric, as he guzzles a draft at Regan’s Tavern, “these bars along here, they’re okay, you know? No violence, no fights. Hell, I could take you places so bad, so tough when 9 o’clock comes, they take out all the glass, it’s paper cups from then on. But this Highlandtown—good people around here.”

All In fun. But there’s a darker side to the Eastern avenue bars. And its name is not violence. It’s loneliness.

—0—

Jack says he’s not going to let it kill him.

He’s sitting In the 2 Friends Bar, 14 minutes past noon, Saturday. He’s drinking Pabst. His problem: He and Penny split up three days ago. Jack’s hurting. He knows he’s hurting, and he’s worried. The last time this happened (he lived with a woman five years, then one day she took off with no explanation), Jack nearly went under.

“I lost 70 pounds in six weeks,” he remembers, “I couldn’t eat a thing. The doctor looked at me, he said, ‘Forget her or die!’ Well, it’s not going to happen again… it’s all in the mind… I’m gonna whip it, don’t worry about me!”

But it’s on his mind. He can’t shake it; he can’t forget the other night, at another bar: “Guy in there, he told me his wife had just left him. Said he was going to blow her away with a shotgun. I said, ‘Hey, man, don’t be crazy. That’s crazy talk!’ Stuff like that—shooting people, like that —what good does it do?”

Jack’s hurting. And so is the old woman at Pogo’s, back down in Highlandtown, as she sings along with the jukebox—a high-pitched shriek, a desperate sound: “Bobby Darin was the greatest, honey. The greatest. It was bad the way he went. Bad heart. He had a bad heart. But listen, I’m gonna make it—I think.”

And a moment later, turning to a younger woman beside her, who’s wearing a formal evening gown “You should cover your shoulders, honey— it’s no laughing matter!”

And a solitary drinker at the Friendly Tavern lays it right on the line. “Loneliness. That’s the toughest one of all. That’s the one nobody can handle.

—0—

Finally, of course, they all begin to run together: Tom’s Bar, with the pro wrestling blaring on the tube; the Mertz Bar, where they’re throwing darts and screaming at each other; the Mustang Inn, where the five Franks who come in regularly have different nicknames (Frank the Hat, Frank the Cook, Shopping Bag Frank, Polack Frank and Frankie-Baby), so the bartenders can tell them apart; the Silver Dollar, where a crazed customer recently grabbed a go-go dancer’s bikini top and ran out the door with it; Connolloy’s, the place for sports nuts, and Mike’s Tavern, where the first $10,000 “instant rub-off” lottery ticket in the history of Maryland was sold, and the Kitty Haven and Jan’s Place and Joe’s and the Red Room (a go-go place for the kids, where the only black person to be found on the entire trip made his appearance), and the Club Stabile’s, featuring Dave Nicely and the 301 Country, who whang out the country and western to big, enthusiastic crowds.

The neighborhood bars. If Eastern avenue is any indication, they’re noisy, smoky, funny at times, lonely at times, boring at times, full of friendly people unwinding after work, full of lonely people dreaming off into space over a 45-cent draft of Schlitz.

They’re alive.

They’re us.

But I don’t want to see anymore of them for awhile.

Posted in 1970s, Baltimore Babylon, Baltimorons, Beer, Booze, Dundalk, Fells Point, Highlandtown, Neighborhoods, Nightlife, Nightspots, Strip Clubs, Vices | Tagged | Leave a comment

Now Playing in Baltimore: Saturday, June 6th, 1972

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Scott Huffines

(The Baltimore Sun, 6/6/1972)

Posted in 1970s, Decades, Films | 1 Comment

The Peabody Book Shop: One for the books… Or Not.

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Scott Huffines

The Peabody Book Shop was ‘a place where respectable people could come for a sandwich and a glass of beer.’

By Mary K. Zajac (Style Magazine, Sept/Oct 2009)

Come in,” the sign above the basement door at 913 N. Charles St. invited. “Visit our Famous Beer Stube serving Cocktails - Beer - Food.”

There’s no counting how many Baltimoreans descended the dingy stairwell into the Peabody Book Shop and Beer Stube to share a beer at the communal wooden tables, hear poetry read aloud, participate in sing-alongs or watch as the Great Dantini performed his magic tricks. But everyone who passed through, it seems, has a story to tell, and one rarely about books.

My father still talks about one evening when he saw film star Veronica Lake and another when crooner Rudy Vallee walked in (he was in town performing at one of Baltimore’s theaters). Cockeysville resident Morry Wexler (father of Style senior editor Laura Wexler) recalls glimpsing his future wife, Trudy Ricker, there for the first time (though they didn’t actually meet until later). This was in the 1960s, when the Peabody was in the hands of the formidable Rose Boyajjian Smith Pettus Hayes (the lady loved— or perhaps didn’t love— her husbands), who owned and ran the two-story brick storefront at 913 N. Charles from 1957 until she died in 1986.

“Rose Smith [as she was once known] was a tough lady,” Wexler remembers. “She could deal with people. If she wanted to she could have picked them up by the seat of the pants and thrown them out.”

A 1968 Baltimore magazine article describes Rose as “an amiable but hard-headed woman with Streisand-like features” who tried hard to maintain the Peabody’s original aura of conviviality, if not the book inventory. Wexler remembers bachelor nights with friends at the Peabody when the proprietress would usher pretty female patrons to the long community tables where he and his friends were drinking. It was that kind of chummy place.

Founded by Austrian immigrant Siegfried Weisberger and his brother Hugo, the Peabody started life as a bookshop around 1927. When Hugo Weisberger died in 1931, Siegfried, who with his circular framed glasses, bow ties and inky mustache bore a slight resemblance to Groucho Marx, maintained the business, keeping the bookshop stocked with the kind of inventory he thought was important: an esoteric collection of art books, literature (in French, German and English), music and medical texts. In 1933, he transformed the building’s garage into a beer cellar as “a place where respectable people could come for a sandwich and a glass of beer,” he recalled in a 1974 article in The Alternative magazine. “Beer and books go together like balls and bats,” he opined in another publication.

Over the years, Weisberger’s “respectable” clientele included medical students, Peabody students, out of town visitors, and most famously, H.L. Mencken, with whom Weisberger was known to share conversations and glasses of beer (it was also rumored that F. Scott Fitzgerald drank there once— but then he drank at a lot of places). There was food, including sausages made by Weisberger himself, and there was nearly always music, especially singing, led from the upright piano that sat snug against one of the paneled walls.

Continue reading “One for the books” at Style Magazine.

Posted in Baltimore Babylon, Baltimorons, Beer, Dining, Nightspots, Uncategorized, Vices | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Towson Priest Busted With Pants Down in Adult Theater

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Scott Huffines

Father Stew was stewing in his own juices sans pants at Bush River Books & Movies in Abingdon

By Evann Gastaldo (Newser.com, 1/23/2012)

Father Mark Stewart Bullock went from priest at the Church of the Immaculate Conception to creepy guy standing around pants-less in a porn shop, Baltimore cops say. Police say they responded to complaints of indecent exposure and found Bullock, nude from the waist down, inside a movie theater at the store. He has since been removed from duty at his church, the Baltimore Sun reports.

Bush River Books & Video Snack Bar (WBAL-TV)

Bullock was on a couch, “his pants completely off,” according to a police report; he “was not wearing any underwear and [was] exposing his penis” in a public area. He was arrested and charged with indecent exposure. The Baltimore Archdiocese removed Bullock’s “faculties to function as a priest and initiated an investigation to learn more about the incident,” reads a letter to parishioners.

Was Father Stew a "Birds" fan?

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The Original Flagpole Sitter (Alvin Aloysius “Shipwreck” Kelly)

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Scott Huffines

Shipwreck Kelly Standing On Pole, May 1932. © Corbis Images

1929: `Shipwreck’ Kelly inspired 20 Baltimoreans to engage in what Cosmopolitan termed `competitive imbecility.’

By Frederick N. Rasmussen, (The Baltimore Sun,11/20/1999)

It was perhaps the last giddy excess of the Jazz Age when, during the summer of 1929, Baltimore for some unknown reason became the flagpole sitting capital of America.

During one week in 1929, the city had 20 flagpole sitters (17 boys and three girls), who were no doubt influenced in their lofty pursuits by the famed Alvin Aloysius “Shipwreck” Kelly.

Earlier that summer, Kelly, who called himself the “Luckiest Fool on Earth” and who was credited with starting the craze of flagpole sitting that swept the nation, had established a record by sitting on a flagpole for 22 days and six hours above New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Shipwreck Kelly

In June, Kelly arrived at Baltimore’s Carlin’s Park where he promptly mounted a 60-foot flagpole and sat for 45 days. He managed to survive a horrific heat wave and strong thunderstorms before coming back to earth.

“The top of a flagpole is the only safe place for a married man to be,” he told The Evening Sun.

Kelly, who was a popular writer on dieting and fasting, explained his dining habits in the interview.

“While up on the pole I eat mainly liquid food, but manage to get away with a solid meal every day or two,” he said.

He also confined his daily ablutions to what he called a “sailor’s bath” but promised reporters that he would continue to “shave while in Baltimore.”

“I did a turn of flagpole sitting here when the business was its best. The late Harry Van Hoven sponsored, and we put on a great show. They had a `Keep Kelly Awake Club,’ and the members used to come out at night and raise a racket just to keep me from sleeping,” he told The Evening Sun in a 1942 interview recalling his Baltimore engagement.

Baltimore Mayor William F. Broening called the local epidemic of flagpole sitting that followed Kelly’s Carlin’s Park triumph a demonstration of “the old pioneer spirit” and said it showed “the grit and stamina so essential in life.”

Cosmopolitan Magazine countered by calling it “competitive imbecility.”

Continue reading “The Original Flagpole Sitter” at The Baltimore Sun.

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Was David Franks the Poe Toaster? Mystery his last performance piece, perhaps

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Scott Huffines

By Jason Policastro (Baltimore Brew, 1/20/2010)

David Franks, "Friends of Footlong", davidfranks.ning.com

Artist and poet David Franks was found dead January 14 (2010). The famed “Poe Toaster” failed to show up on January 19 (2010). Coincidence, or the final flourish of a dedicated prankster?

The article continues…

The duality of Franks’ nature was such that even though he was capable of making you feel like the only person in a crowded room, his penchant for the “grand manner”, as he often put it, endured.

It would be just the sort of duality needed to keep secret a very public tradition: the identity of the Edgar Allen Poe toaster, who failed to show up at the writer’s grave this week for this first time since 1949. There is a theory afoot that Franks was the famed anonymous visitor to Poe’s grave.

Rafael Alvarez, president of the Edgar Allen Poe Society of Baltimore, appeared on WBAL AM the morning of Jan. 19 to discuss the possibility.

“It fit David’s love of the prank and the practical joke,” Alvarez said. “Particularly stunts that involved literary high wire acts.”

Continue reading “Was David Franks the Poe Toaster?” at Baltimore Brew.

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Poe fans call an end to ‘Toaster’ tradition

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Scott Huffines

By Sarah Brumfield (Associated Press, 1/19/2011)

A flashlight shines on items left on the gravestone of Edgar Allen Poe by people who pretended to be the mysterious "Poe Toaster" in Baltimore, early Thursday, Jan. 19, 2012. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

BALTIMORE (AP) — Edgar Allan Poe fans waited long past a midnight dreary, but it appears annual visits to the writer’s grave in Baltimore by a mysterious figure called the “Poe Toaster” shall occur nevermore.

Poe House and Museum Curator Jeff Jerome said early Thursday that die-hard fans waited hours past when the tribute bearer normally arrives. But the “Poe Toaster” was a no-show for a third year in a row, leaving another unanswered question in a mystery worthy of the writer’s legacy. Poe fans had said they would hold one last vigil this year before calling an end to the tradition.

“It’s over with,” Jerome said wearily. “It will probably hit me later, but I’m too tired now to feel anything else.”

It is thought that the tributes of an anonymous man wearing black clothes with a white scarf and a wide-brimmed hat, who leaves three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac at Poe’s original grave on the writer’s birthday, date to at least the 1940s. Late Wednesday, a crowd gathered outside the gates of the burial ground surrounding Westminster Hall to watch for the mysterious visitor, yet only three impersonators appeared, Jerome said.

The gothic master’s tales of the macabre still connect with readers more than 200 years after his birth, including his most famous poem, “The Raven,” and short stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is considered the first modern detective story.


Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” as performed by Vincent Price

Jerome, who was first exposed to Poe through Vincent Price’s movies, believes people still identify with Poe’s suffering and his lifelong dream to be a poet. He has kept a vigil for the “Poe Toaster” each year since 1978 and built up a team of other dedicated Poe fans who stay awake all night to scan the shadows of the burial ground for the visitor.

“I’ve been part of a ritual that people around the world read about,” he said. “I’ll miss it.”

One Poe tradition may have ended, but Jerome said a reading of tributes by Poe fans at the gravesite planned for Thursday night may develop into a new ritual to mark the writer’s birthday.

Jerome says that wherever he travels, he’s asked whether the “Poe Toaster” is real. He believes the mystery of the “Poe Toaster” tradition will remain in the public consciousness despite the end of the visits.

Continue reading “Poe fans call an end to ‘Toaster’ tradition” at Associated Press.

Posted in Baltimorons, Edgar Allan Poe, Museums, Obituaries, Pranks, Urban Legends | Tagged | Leave a comment

A Bar with a View

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Tom Warner

Unflappable Esther Martin Has Run the Club Charles Since 1951. Who Better to Tell of Her Block’s Boom, Bust, and Possible Rebirth?

By Brennen Jensen (Baltimore City Paper, 2/16/2000)

“There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
– Samuel Johnson

It’s the sprawling, penciled scrawl of a young sailor. A lonely sailor. A serviceman on the eve of shipping out to an uncertain fate in the Pacific waters of World War II.

“To a swell girl,” he writes, “I’ll remember you always and hope we meet again soon–real soon. Your tops, Hun, I only wish I could spend more time with you. Please think about ‘Pinky.’ ”

Esther Martin squints down at the message and the accompanying black-and-white photo, now turning sepia with age. It shows a radiant young girl with a Colgate smile and brunette tresses tumbling over her shoulders. This much she recognizes–it’s herself, 55-odd years ago when she was barmaid at the Band Box, a nightclub that once enlivened the 1300 block of North Charles Street. Across the bar from young Esther perches a grinning, fresh-faced seaman in dark sailor suit and neckerchief.

Continue reading “A Bar with a View” at the Baltimore City Paper.

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Club Charles History: Esther W. Martin

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Tom Warner

Esther Martin t-shirt design, late 1980s, by Alix Tobey Southwick.

From the Club Charles web site:

Esther W. Martin, longtime owner of a well-known Charles Street bar that evolved from Tenderloin to trendy, died Sunday at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center of complications after surgery. She was 80.

She retired about five years ago from active management of Club Charles, which she had owned since 1951 – and operated for several early decades as the Wigwam Bar, with a sign outside depicting a teepee and offerings of “Grub and Firewater.”

She was born Esther West to Native American parents in Asher, Okla. Family members said she attended schools there before moving in the 1930s to New York City where her sister, Mary Lou West, was a Stork Club hatcheck girl. She worked at the fabled Manhattan nightspot briefly before moving to Baltimore in 1940 with the goal of studying nursing at Johns Hopkins Hospital. To support herself, she tended bar at the old Airport Grill near Harbor Field – then the city’s airfield, and now Dundalk Marine Terminal. But she soon relinquished the idea of becoming a nurse, instead holding a succession of jobs along a midtown stretch of Charles Street that was home to bars and restaurants often filled with World War II servicemen and their dates. She worked at the original Club Charles, at Charles and Preston streets, and at the nearby Band Box tavern.

In 1951 she bought her own place, a restaurant and bar called Charles Seafood, in the 1700 block of N. Charles St., which she soon renamed the Wigwam. It was, at times, a rowdy place. By the 1970s, city police reported 82 calls in an eight-month period to the Wigwam, and the city liquor board threatened to close it.

About that time, Mrs. Martin bowed to neighborhood pressure for improvement of her establishment. She brought in her children to oversee the business. They took down the Wigwam sign, renamed the spot Club Charles, brought in decorator Vince Peranio and aimed for a younger, more affluent clientele.

“What a great Baltimore character she was, a tough lady with a heart of gold,” said filmmaker John Waters, a frequent visitor before and after the change. “When she owned the Wigwam it was the scariest bar in Baltimore,” said Mr. Waters. “It was the reverse of Studio 54 – you had to be scary or you wouldn’t be let in. It was so amazing how the scariest bar became the coolest bar. It’s been the anchor for the creative community in Baltimore. I loved talking to her. … She had one of the wildest, foulest mouths. She was the kind of Baltimore character that is getting rarer and rarer. She was an inspiration to me.”

“She was part Native American and was very proud of her heritage. She had a beautiful collection of Native American artwork,” said Patrick Kahoe, a former business partner. “She was like a profane Gertrude Stein. She said curse words in unusual combinations and in repetitive patterns that no one else could come up with. She was good-natured about it and would then cackle and laugh afterward.”

“She had that Baltimore personality that involves no pretense,” said film casting agent Pat Moran. “She was a good old soul and was kind to people – but she didn’t suffer fools.”

Family members said she always believed in the neighborhood and purchased adjoining real estate. Over the years, she acquired seven properties near Pennsylvania Station .

“She was very excited to see Charles Street come back,” said a daughter, Joy Martin, with whom she had lived in Roland Park in recent years after moving from her longtime Charles Village home.
Services are private.

In addition to her daughter, Mrs. Martin is survived by two sons, Kent Battle Martin of Little Rock, Ark., and Dick S. Martin of Westminster; another daughter, Kim Martin of Stoneleigh; and two grandchildren. Her 21-year marriage to Kent Martin ended in divorce.

Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun, January 22, 2003

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Esther Martin (1923 – Jan. 19, 2003)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Tom Warner

By Brennen Jensen (Baltimore City Paper, 1/29/2003)

Esther Martin, owner and founder of the Club Charles bar on the 1700 block of North Charles Street, died Jan. 19 following surgery to correct the debilitating effects of diabetes. The 80-year-old Oklahoma native spent the lion’s share of her life in the Baltimore nightlife business–she went from hat-check girl at the tony nightclubs of the World War II era to being at the helm of her own watering hole for decades. Through an exhaustive chain of 12-hour days, she made innumerable friends, amassed a trove of outrageous stories (and blue jokes), and fashioned a life best described as an enigmatic study in contrasts. A roomful of celebrated novelists couldn’t conjure up such a character.

Martin was a driven businesswoman in the age of Father Knows Best. She was the salty-tongued proprietor of what was once dubbed “the scariest bar in Baltimore,” who served up selfless acts of generosity as readily as whiskey shots. She mixed easily with both the rich and famous and the down-and-out. She put on no airs and pulled no punches. Calling her a tough lady with a heart of gold sounds a bit cliché. But so be it.

“She’s my heroine,” filmmaker and frequent Club Charles patron John Waters said of Martin in a 2000 City Paper interview. “A great, great lady who was a huge influence on me.”

“Esther had this insane, crusty exterior, but inside she was one of the kindest, most sympathetic people I’ve ever met,” says Patrick Kahoe, one of Martin’s former business partners. “She was always able to put herself in another person’s shoes.”

Martin came to Baltimore in 1940 with the intention of studying nursing, but instead found work in the city’s jumping nightclub scene, then fueled by anxious, cash-flush soldiers and sailors. She worked at all the bygone big names: the Band Box, the 21-Club, even the original Club Charles, a swanky supper club at Preston and Charles streets. As hat checker, waitress, or barmaid, she met–and often became pally with–the likes of Ella Fitzgerald, Joe DiMaggio, and Billie Holiday.

She bought what would become her own Club Charles in 1951. The bar and restaurant at 1724 N. Charles St. was then called Charles Seafood, but Martin soon rechristened it the Wigwam, as a nod to her Native American ancestry. A tepee-shaped sign outside advertised grub and firewater.

She and her late husband, Kent Martin (whom she divorced in 1972), had two solid decades of success with the Wigwam. But as the ’70s wore on, the environs decayed–and so did the clientele. “Bums” and “winos” were how many described the Wigwam’s patrons, but Martin saw them as something else: human beings. Many were troubled veterans left friendless and forgotten.

Alix Tobey Southwick, a longtime friend of Martin’s, recalls helping her deliver groceries and clothing to these lost souls. She recalls, too, when a young bar employee with no family in town was struck with a brain tumor. Martin provided her with a free apartment.

“She just did things like that–it was never anything she would have told you about herself,” Southwick says. “Really generous people never think they are doing anything unusual, and being generous for Esther was like breathing.”

But as the 1980s dawned, community groups and the liquor board–both of whom accused of Martin of drawing “undesirables” to the area–rallied to yank the bar out from under her.

“She was in a corner at that point,” Kahoe says. “She loved that business. Other than her family, that was her whole her life. She knew she had to do something.”

What she did was take on Kahoe as a partner, and he helped her redesign and remarket the bar toward the young, boho crowd drawn to the art flicks screening at the nearby Charles Theatre. The Wigwam was reborn as the retro-chic Club Charles in the fall of ’81. “She changed it from the scariest bar in Baltimore into the coolest,” said Waters.

Kahoe, who sold his share of the business back to Martin in 1988, says she “got along great with the arty crowd.” Indeed, he recalls in the club’s nascent days, it was frequented by some of Martin’s old-school friends–including a veteran stripper.

“You’d have guy in tuxedo who’d just come from a museum opening, next to a punk rocker with a leather jacket and mohawk, and then you’d have a 60-year-old stripper dancing on the bar,” he says. “The club was wild.”

People of all stripes were drawn to Martin, not only for the depthless warmth lurking just beneath her scrappy facade but for her ready supply of back-in-the-day tales. Southwick remembers Martin telling her of the time she saw Billie Holiday, clad only in a loosely tied robe, chase a dog down Charles Street. Seems the mutt had made off with the singer’s rubber makeup sponge.

“And Esther always ended that story with, ‘Honey, that was wartime–you couldn’t get rubber,’ which was really the best part of the story,” Southwick says.

Martin’s eldest son, Battle, who along with his three siblings spent time working in the family enterprise, has nothing but admiration for his mother’s work ethic and her escape from Depression-wracked Oklahoma. And though he says his mother was far too conservative to ever refer to herself as a feminist, “she was someone that the women’s movement could take a lot of pride in.”

By the 1990s, Martin’s fading health sent her into semi-retirement. Her daughter, Joy, assumed day-to-day management of the club–and of the Zodiac restaurant that later bloomed alongside it. But as recently as three years ago, Martin told City Paper she wanted nothing more than to get back behind the bar. To mix drinks and swap stories.

The Club Charles is famously rumored to be haunted–rife with the spirits of those who sought refuge in the storied bar. Who’s to say Esther won’t now be among those lingering, benevolent specters? After all, it was her club. She made it. And she will always be there.

Posted in Baltimorons, Club Charles, Nightspots, Obituaries | Tagged | 2 Comments

Club Venus

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Scott Huffines

photo from the collection of Markella Mihalos

By Don Lehnhoff, baltimorejam.org

The Club Venus opened in May of 1966 in the Perring Plaza Shopping Center. It was much anticipated and very popular. Club Venus represented the evolution of Mihalos’ success in presenting name entertainment to Baltimore audiences at his previous night club, Hollywood Park. Where HP was funky and low-rent, Club Venus was just the opposite … total class all the way.

The talent presented at HP was always first class, but it was something akin to today’s Tribal casino circuit — great up and coming acts (like the Temptations), and established career acts with great history and recognition (like the Platters and the Rhonettes). These shows were backed up and supported by some of the best and most popular bands of the time (like Tommy Vann, the Echoes, the Elegants, the Admirals and others). But at Club Venus, they upped the ante.

Club Venus continued the tradition of featuring the very best Baltimore bands, but the name acts started to include some of the headliners of the day, like the Four Seasons, broader musical acts like the Buffalo Bills (a hugely popular barbershop quartet at that time, thanks to their role in Broadway’s “Music Man”) and non-musical acts like comedians Sid Ceasar, Rodney Dangerfield, Frankie Fontaine and Totie Fields.

Continue reading at Baltimore Jam.


Club Venus Memories – Mark Mihalos has produced a wonderful montage of Club Venus photographs, autographs and advertising from her personal collection.

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Memories, music and a meal for Morris

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Tom Warner

From the Morris Martick slideshow, at the Charles Theatre memorial. Photo by: Jennifer Bishop, of Katie Brennan’s original shot in slideshow.

“Oh, Mon Dieu! Those mouse turds, too!”

by Fern Shen and Mark Reutter (Baltimore Brew, Jan. 16, 2012)

The people Morris Martick screamed at, cooked with, cooked for, fired, rehired, insulted and nurtured – in other words, the people who really knew and loved him – gathered yesterday at the Charles Theatre to remember the one-of-a-kind restaurateur, who died last month.

For a couple of tender, ribald hours, this crowd of nearly 300 people brought Morris, and the bohemian boom times of Baltimore in the 50s, 60s and 70s that he personified, back to life.

Some of the speakers, like his brother Alex Martick, did it largely by virtue of shared DNA.

“If Morris were alive today, Morris wouldn’t be here,” the 83-year-old baby of the family said to the assembled memorial crowd. “He’d be at my house, eating good healthy sandwiches and watching the goddamn football game!”

Wearing a knitted hat like his brother, Alex Martick delivered the remark (tweaking the organizers for scheduling the memorial at the same time as the Ravens’ AFC divisional playoff game) very much as his brother would have done it.


Morris Martick Memorial Slideshow

But the Sunday gathering largely belonged to the former employees of Martick’s Restaurant Francais, who came from as far away as California and Texas to participate in the service for “the boss,” who died of lung cancer on December 15 at 88.

The house was asked: how many here worked for Morris? Half the room raised their hands.

Marveling at the turnout – how many people would travel across the country to pay tribute to their employer? – Alex Martick put it to the audience: “What was it about Martick’s personality” that inspired “this kind of feeling?”

It was hard to explain all that affection to those who didn’t know Morris, because, as the youngest Martick sibling put it, the man could be so gruff and irascible: “When he got nervous and tense – I don’t have to tell the people here – it was out of sight.”

Continue reading “Memories, music and a meal for Morris” at Baltimore Brew.

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See also Baltimore Brew’s tribute to MM in his own words mostly:
Part 1. “If it wasn’t for my bad attitude, I wouldn’t be here today.”
Part 2. What was the best dish at his restaurant? “Confusion.”

Posted in 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, Baltimorons, Deaths, Decades, Dining, Events, Food, Nightlife, Nightspots, Obituaries, Roadside Attractions, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment