Kevin Michael Walsh, aka "Frosty the Snowman," in his booking photo after being arrested at the Chestertown Christmas Parade.
A man who was arrested while dressed as Frosty the Snowman during a holiday parade has been charged again.
Chestertown police say 53-year-old Kevin Walsh of Chestertown, was arrested Sunday and charged with disorderly conduct and other offenses. He was released on his own recognizance.
Police say Walsh yelled profanities on the sidewalk and cursed at an officer who told him to quiet down.
On Nov. 26, Walsh, dressed as Frosty at Chestertown’s holiday parade, allegedly scuffled with police and kicked a police dog. Those charges with place on the inactive docket.
20-Year-Old Youth is Nearly Decapitated by Friend.
What was intended to be a happy event when a number of former high school students gave a bathing party, was turned into tragedy when Robert Turner, 20, 2102 Division Street, was nearly decapitated with a weapon by his chum and classmate, Leonard Smith, 1300 block Presstman Street, Sunday.
The two men with several others went to Turkey Point on the Back River Neck for a bathing party early Sunday afternoon. The group consisting mostly of former high school students were having a jovial time when Smith and Turner engaged in an altercation, said by police to have been over a Miss Della Thomas. Smith drew a knife and started slashing at Turner, who attempted to escape the fury of the man. With a swiping slash Smith struck Turner across the throat with the knife nearly decapitating him.
Rushed 20 Miles, Dead
The party was thrown in an uproar over the tragedy. The Essex police were called and had the injured man transferred to the Baltimore City Hospital, twenty miles from the shore, where he was pronounced dead.
Essex police authorities treated the matter with considerable secrecy and failed to disclose the major facts involved in the fatal quarrel. Smith is being held by the county officers on charge of murder pending a coroner’s investigation.
“On 8/8/39, at Bay Shore Amusement Park, Cloris Wears was frozen in 3500 lbs of ice for 17 minutes, as part of the festivities for a Walkathon. (Afterwards, she spent more than 125 minutes in the restroom.)” –North Point State Park’s “Fun Facts”
Bird’s Eye View of Bay Shore Park, Near Baltimore, Maryland
“Dear Mother,
We went out to bay Shore one evening from Baltimore. “We” raise gooseberries and asparagus for the city market here at Woods. We just sent off three crates of asparagus this morning. About fifty pickers picked a thousand pounds of gooseberries last week. Much love, Olivia.”
Twenty-five years ago, smiling profusely, exuding his ineffable English schoolboy cuteness, and sporting an aggressive mullet, Davy Jones parachuted into — of all places — Westview Mall on Route 40 West, not far from Catonsville, to hawk his just-published as-told-to biography, They Made a Monkee Out of Me. (Mind you, he didn’t literally parachute onto the premises — presumably, he was driven there by some factotum.)
A cooing legion of women — mostly middle-aged hausfrau hons with their understandably confused daughters in tow — rapturously greeted Jones, who obligingly charmed them with spirited patter, before settling in to sign copies of his exclamation-point-riddled, vanity-press book, dashed off one year after he reunited for a successful album and tour with former Monkees mates Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork.
Continue reading “The Day Davy Jones Did Baltimore” at Baltimore Fishbowl.
Unaired footage from Baltimore’s “Evening Magazine” interview with Frank Zappa, August 1985.
Related:
The Groupies and Other Girls (excerpt) — (Rolling Stone, 2/15/1969)
Frank Zappa: ‘Every band that travels carries either Cuprex or A-200 to kill the crabs groupies lay on them. “It’s sort of take your choice,” Zappa says. “Cuprex burns something awful; it’ll take the skin right off. But A-200 smells something fierce.”‘
By Michael Yockel (Baltimore City Paper, 11/14/1980)
City Paper photo by Barry Holnicker
The Place looks like the former residence of George and June Jetson before they packed Elroy up and moved to a high-rise, or something left over from the set of Earth Versus The Flying Saucers. In fact, that’s what Lou Simmons, the structure’s owner, says everyone calls it—the flying saucer. It stands approximately two stories high, supported by spider-like appendages, and houses a one bedroom apartment that Simmons rents out.
“I first saw the thing advertised in Playboy,” Simmons begins. But it was a friend of his, Wayne “Froggy” Glover, who eventually bought the flying saucer from the New Jersey-based Futura Company in 1971. Glover intended to use the saucer to help promote a hang-over remedy he was marketing, Simmons says, but that never came off; so Simmons bought the thing off his buddy for $12,000 in ’72 with an eye toward turning it into a space-age playhouse for his then 10-year-old daughter, Carol Lynn.
According to Simmons, the Futura Co. “was run by a bunch of odd people.” (Odd people, not pod people.) “30 of those things were ordered by Puerto Rico—they were going to turn them into motels.” That didn’t come off, either, and the Futura Co. packed it in.
The flying saucer, or module as Simmons sometimes calls it, first touched down in Essex at the intersection of North Point Rd. and Eastern Ave. right after Glover purchased it, but Simmons had it moved to a spot behind his home on Graceland Ave., not far from the Cross & Blackwell factory on Eastern Ave. For the record, the saucer’s address is 6831 Fait St.
Oddly, enough, the module rests entirely in the city, while Simmons’ house, only 20 yards away, is half in the city, half in Baltimore County. This caused him some headaches when he tried to land the thing on Fait St., but Simmons finally straightened out the bureaucratic snafus and obtained a permanent permit to use the saucer as a residence. There is another Futura saucer in Ocean City, says Simmons, but its owners only have a temporary permit, whatever that means.
Dressed in jeans, thermal under-shirt, short-sleeved red sweat shirt, and work boots (he was pouring cement for a huge pool he’s building directly in back of his house), Simmons doesn’t look like the kind of man who’d be interested in sophisticated kitsch. After the novelty of the saucer wore off for his daughter, he and his wife, Mary (“It’s alright but I don’t want to live in it”), decided to rent the place. Since 1974, the flying saucer has been home for several people, including a Pennsylvania schoolteacher and his wife, and now Lou Edwards, formerly part-owner of the infamous Bedroom Lounge in Essex.
Edwards has lived there the three years. “It’s comfortable for a bachelor,” he says, “and it gives you a little privacy. I enjoy the solitude.”
Except for the time three years ago when someone crashed into the module’s base in the middle of the night, Edwards is only bothered by occasional curiosity seekers, who are given a quick tour of the craft if he’s in the mood.
The interior is rather small, but includes electric heat and central air conditioning. There’s also a fireplace that burns fake chemical logs, and it is bathed in ceiling-affixed multi-colored lights, not unlike the kind that bathed the go-go dancers at the Bedroom Lounge. Some of their pictures are propped up against the inside wall. But the saucer’s most prominent piece of furniture is a long sofa which is contoured to the curve of the inner wall–10 guests could occupy it comfortably.
“There’s also a fireplace that burns fake chemical logs.”
Originally, electric stairs descended from the module when a key was placed in an outside electronic lock. After climbing the five steps and getting inside, one pressed a button and the stairs ascended into the saucer again (“like the space ships in Buck Rogers movies,” says Simmons). But the owner decided that the set-up was too dangerous for his children and has kept the stairs in a permanent down position for a couple of years. Entry is presently gained through a shed-like structure with a conventional front door, spoiling the overall cosmic effect.
After eight years of exposure to the elements; the Futura home is showing signs of external wear and tear. Two long cracks developed in the module and have since been filled in with fiberglass by Simmons. And the original gleaming color has now faded to an institutional blue-green, that shade that was so popular in Baltimore County schools during the 1960s. The numerous oval-shaped windows are grimy, and the curtains that hang in them give the impression of futuristic domesticity.
But the Saucer is a one-of-a-kind item in Baltimore, and Lou Edwards swears that there can’t be more than seven or eight of them left in this country. Outside the mother ship are two small red versions of the saucer built by Froggy Glover as playthings for children; they resemble nothing so much as complicated barbeque pits. Simmons adds that Glover also built a small mother ship as a dog house, but it was stolen. The total nuclear family.
Although he’s turned down several offers for the saucer, Simmons doesn’t seem sincere when he says that he’ll probably sell it one day for more than $12,000. His son, Lou Jr., now 12, says that he wants to live there when he turns 16, but for the time being, Lou Edwards calls the flying saucer home. –Michael Yockel
By Shirley Grace (Maryland Life Magazine, 4/25/2012)
Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
“According to what I found in the glorious Maryland Room of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, George Washington gets the credit for Maryland being known as the Old Line State. But did you think, as I did, that it had something to do with the Mason-Dixon Line?
Wrong. Completely unrelated.
Rather, it’s directly linked to Maryland’s contribution to the Revolutionary War. General Washington appealed to the states at that time to send men to help the Continental Army fight off the British. These groups of men were called a “line”—thus, the Maryland Line…”
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“Maryland’s other popular nickname, the Free State, is steeped in Prohibition. The Maryland government at that time refused to pass a law explicitly outlawing alcohol. This cheesed off Georgia Congressman William D. Upshaw, who made a long speech in 1923, accusing Maryland of being reprobate for not supporting going dry…”
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“Anyway, those two nicknames are the biggies, but there are others, such as the Cockade State…”
Animal-rights group PETA doesn’t shy from controversy — in fact, quite the opposite. So I suppose it’s no surprise that when Baltimore City Councilmember William “Pete” Welch floated the idea of including ads on city fire trucks as a way to raise funds for trucks that would otherwise have to disband, PETA saw it as an opportunity. While the Baltimore Brew imagined what our city would look like with a Food4Less or Big Boyz Bail Bonds fire truck, PETA’s proposed ad continues the organization’s long history of using hot women to promote animal activism.
Continue reading “PETA’s Vegan Bikini Girl on Baltimore’s Fire Trucks?” at Baltimore Fishbowl.
IN THE 1930′s, shortly after the 18th amendment was repealed, two distilleries were built in the countryside east of Baltimore. The area is known as Dundalk. The topsy-turvy shuffling of market positions that marked the post-prohibition scramble is well illustrated by these two plants, located virtually next-door to one another.
One distillery was built on farm land just off Sollers Point Road in the 1930s. It’s hard to believe today, but the population of Dundalk at that time was less than 8,000, mostly employees of the Maryland Steel Company at nearby Sparrows Point.
The distillery was the Baltimore Pure Rye distillery, and the brick smokestack bearing its name still stands. But the distillery it stands over is known to most people as Seagram’s. Baltimore Pure Rye closed in 1957, and Seagram’s purchased it to produce Paul Jones and Four Roses. This is somewhat confusing, since Seagram’s bought these brands as part of their purchase of Frankfort Distillery in the early 1940s. Frankfort Distillery was not single plant, but a Louisville-based company owned by the Paul Jones Company, which owned a number of distilleries and brands. Among the brands was Four Roses, and among the distilleries was the other Dundalk plant, located on Willow Spring Road, around the corner from Baltimore Pure Rye. Of course, the purchase of Frankfort Distillery included that site as well, and they were already running their original Baltimore distillery, Calvert, not far away.
