For decades John W. Ruark has told the story at cocktail parties: how on a November night in 1977, as a student at what was then Towson State University, he took Truman Capote’s arm and led the inebriated, incoherent, profanity-spewing writer off stage.
“Mr. Capote,” he told him, “It’s time to go.”
A crowd of about 1,800 people had come to the university’s Towson Center to hear Capote read from his work, according to a report that week in The Towerlight, the school newspaper. Capote’s appearance–rambling and spiced with F-bombs–lasted only 10 minutes. The abrupt ending made for sensational headlines nationwide.
The Aug. 20, 1949, front page featured the aforementioned satanic scoop — headlined “Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil’s Grip” — along with more mundane articles about the Pentagon budget, the FCC and the prospects of home rule for the District.
And then there was this eye-catching headline below a three-column photo of what looked like the destroyed remains of an alien spaceship: “First ‘Saucer’ Is Located By Air Force.”
The story was about wreckage discovered in an Anne Arundel County, Md., tobacco shed. One broken machine looked like a primitive helicopter. The other craft was topped by two cloth-covered, saucerlike discs, 16 feet in diameter.
Promising to revolutionize aviation, Caldwell sold stock for his Gray Goose Airways, which he said would utilize unique technology. Government regulators were not impressed. The inventor left Maryland in a hurry, leaving behind experimental aircraft. (Evening Star Collection/D.C. Public Library via Washington Post)
Maryland state troopers had made the discovery, dispatched to Glen Burnie, Md., at the behest of investigators from Bolling Air Force Base. An Air Force officer told the Associated Press there was “a good chance” the craft were prototypes of the mysterious flying saucers that were bedeviling pilots across the country.
Chris Jensen takes a break from filming an episode of Atomic TV to fondle the Ravens’ 2001 Super Bowl trophy with David Modell.
How do you describe Chris Jensen? He was a community organizer and community activist, art collector and artist, plumber and model, unofficial mayor of Charles Village, Atomic TV cameraman… he was a pro and an essential part of what made our little-watched public access program Atomic TV so great and we’ll miss him. The last time I saw him (pre-rona) he brought me a case of Bud and I drank it like it was the 1990s at Memory Lane. The thing that impressed me most about Chris was how engaged he was with the community. Baltimore is losing too many cool people too soon – at least the memories survive. For some reason well over 20 years ago Chris gave me a CD full of of his glamor shots and plumbing ads. I was never sure why. Check those photos out — but first, a remembrance from Tom Warner!
Tom Warner:
Baltimore IS less without Chris. He was essential OG crew for early Atomic TV (along with Kelly Conway, Melissa Darwin and Todd Stachowski) – a guy who not only could hold the camera while Scott and I made asses of ourselves, but actually keep it in focus. He was a total pro and (like Adolf Kowalski and Dave Wilcox), a big, charismatic personality, the likes of which we’ll never see again.
Everything I know about camerawork I learned from the self-trained Chris, and I used to edit titles in his basement where he had a very effective, old school analog setup (two Panasonic S-VHS AG-1970s! I gave him one of mine when his died – you should grab that bad boy, Richard Yeagley!), the same setup he used to edit Laure Drogoul’s 14Karat Cabaret TV show with her (he also did camerawork for her because he loved crazy Art and Music of any sort!).
Good lord the man loved his art. Every time he did a plumbing job for me, he was willing to trade his time for art – he especially craved the framed R. Crumb “Tommy Toilet” poster I had hanging in the Porcelain Palace and the Yellow Submarine Toilet Seat an obsessive library fan gave me when I got married. I wish I had given them to him now.
He also helped me clean up the clutter in my old Townhouse Shabby in Rodgers Forge. “Tommy, I deal in shit & grime every day, so when a plumber tells you that you need to clean up your act, heed the advice!” Of course, he was the Felix Unger of plumbers, a neatnik who always obsessively cleaned up his work afterwards, just as he obsessively cleaned up the litter around his block in Charles Village.
He was one of a kind, the Joker Wild in the card pack, a loveable nut and loyal friend. I wish we had kept up more. The last time we saw Chris was December 2018 at Joe Squared, where he was out to support a show featuring The Jennifers and ex-Slickee Boy Marshall Keith. He had a cane (years of hard labor had taken their toll on his back and knees), but despite losing a step or two, he was as gregarious and energetic as usual. Time will not flush away memories of what a treat it was to know Chris Jensen.
Chris the Plumber Turns 50 By Tom Warner “A week or so ago I got a flyer in the mail from Chris Jensen, Baltimore’s wackiest plumber (what other respected tradesman has the slogan, “Your Poop Is My Bread and Butter” alongside a picture of an exposed buttcrack boldly displayed on the side of his work van?) and all-around nutjob (his rooftop Christmas Negativity Scene depicting Jesus with a space alien is notorious) showing a picture of him with his long-suffering assistant Shawn “The Beav” Sapp (pictured below right) adjacent to this text: “I asked my helper the Beav how I could have a really cool 50th Birthday Party. He told me not to come.” Ha, that sounds about right, I thought!” Continue reading
Chris Jensen – WJZ “Hard Look” with Richard Sher Baltimore’s best plumber Chris Jensen is heartbroken when thieves abscond with Uncle Buck’s flag.
Everyman Art Collector
Colorful Charles Village plumber covers his house with art by Brennen Jensen (Urbanite Magazine, 9/10/2010)
Chris Jensen grew up appreciating art, thanks to boyhood visits to Haussner’s — the much-missed Highlandtown eatery whose walls were famously chockablock with canvases — and time spent with his late uncle Jack Butler, a painter who owned a gallery in Mt. Vernon. Ultimately, Jensen (no relation) picked up a pipe wrench, not a paintbrush. He’s a plumber by trade. But when not snaking out a sewer line, he pursues his interest in art through collecting.
Jensen’s trim Charles Village home brims with more than a hundred framed paintings and sculptures. Works spill down the stairway walls and crowd a small bathroom. Art abounds, and little of it of the mass-produced reproduction variety. If there’s a short, sweet moral here, it’s this: to appreciate, buy and surround yourself with original art, you don’t need a hedge fund manager’s salary or an art historian’s diploma. “Just buy what you like,” Jensen says. “I’m not rich enough to spend a lot of money.” Jensen describes the core of his collection as “original oil paintings,” but that’s a pretty broad brush. He’s the first to admit there’s little rhyme or reason to his tastes or display aesthetics. And so there are abstracts, next to nudes, next to pop art, next to fiber art, next to … what exactly is that?
“If I get a new piece, then something has to go,” Jensen says. “Stuff cycles in and out and I give a lot away.”
Over the years he’s come to discover a real value to admiring art in the intimacy of the home, rather than in museums or books. “You have to live with a painting before you really get it,” he says.
Most of the works are by local artists, including multiple works by Daniel Schiavone, who co-founded what’s now the Creative Alliance, and Nick Rusko-Berger, one of whose works takes up an entire dining room wall. Uncle Jack is well represented too, including with a stylized self-portrait.
Works have been acquired at Maryland Art Place, Artscape, barroom exhibits and street fairs, usually for no more than a couple hundred bucks. Then there’s his special source for some of his favorite paintings, one where the pipe wrench is a key to entry: Baltimore basements.
“I’ve been called ‘the plumber to the arts,’” Jensen explains. “Artists are my customers and I’m in people’s basements all the time. I see all this great stuff. They may have a hundred pieces of crap but I’ll find one good. I have an eye, apparently.”
A larger-than-life-sized rendering of a nude woman at the top of his stairs came from a basement where he was fixing pipes. Seems it was an image of the customer’s ex-girlfriend. “I don’t think his wife was thrilled about it still being down there,” Jensen says. “I think I got it by taking $100 off the bill.”
Jensen has dabbled some at creating art, applying his welding and pipefitting skills to create sculptures, such as the fountain of sorts fashioned from copper piping and spigots that gurgles away on his sun porch. He is perhaps best known for his rooftop Christmas display, familiar to anyone who’s driven his stretch of Howard Street around the holidays. Call it an “installation” if you will. It’s a vintage, internally illuminated plastic manger scene where the wise men are joined by a bright green alien. What’s it all about? Jensen doesn’t know. He says the idea just came to him one year.
“If people think of me as a stereotypical plumber they have no clue,” Jensen says with a smile.
Outside Looking In: Mary Rizzo looks at Baltimore beyond the charm and the harm
What do outsiders imagine when they think of Baltimore? Mary Rizzo’s absorbing new book, Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and the Wire (JHU Press, 2020), examines what she considers the two primary portrayals of the city. Rizzo, an Assistant Professor of History at Rutgers University, looks at several of the more well-known cultural productions that have depicted Baltimore over the last sixty years, finding contrasting themes that have emerged from a highly segregated city. According to the author, we are given two dominant portrayals: incompatible, incomplete, and only one seen as usable by a city government intent on constructing an image of Baltimore attractive to tourist dollars and investment in a post-industrial economy.
On the one hand, we have “Charm City,” a vision of Baltimore which stars “the Hon,” a fun stereotype of white, working-class, Southern womanhood that is “friendly, quirky, charming, and sassy.” This is an image that fits well with city promotional efforts and so has been bear hugged by the powers that be. The irony that an image drawn from working-class culture would be used to attract professionals and capital to a city whose working class had been devastated by the destruction of blue collar jobs in a period of globalization is not lost on Rizzo.
The other image is of Baltimore as a dangerous place. “The city that bleeds.” “Bodymore, Murdaland.” This is an image that was purveyed by shows like Homicide and The Wire and by an indigenous form of music – club music – which found popularity beyond the city limits and so shaped perceptions of Baltimore. The local establishment strove to suppress this image.
The city that bleeds
Rizzo’s analysis of filmmaker John Waters’s local meaning is particularly interesting. Rizzo points out that Waters has been looked at in the context of queer studies but not in the context of urban studies. However, in the 1960s, a young Waters took advantage of Baltimore’s urban renewal machinery by filming norm-violating acts in lightly surveilled areas of the city that had been abandoned to imminent urban renewal. His whiteness helped him get away with it. Often the shocked (or at least surprised) expressions of black bystanders served as a foil for his actors.
Hairspray (1988) was the first film in which Waters tackled racial inequities, but even so, the civil rights effort portrayed there was spearheaded by a white person: Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake). Hairspray celebrated the underdog: the black dancers who were excluded from the Corny Collins Show (based on Baltimore’s real Buddy Deane Show) and Tracy herself, who was overweight and ridiculed by the other dancers.
Hairspray’s “Corny Collins Show”
According to Rizzo, however, many critics and fans seemed drawn more to the quirky early 1960s Baltimore set than to the racial struggle pictured, especially as the subsequent iterations of Hairspray hyperbolized Baltimore’s white working-class cultural characteristics more and more. In fact, the image of Charm City presented by Baltimore planners and promoters drew heavily on John Waters just as the Hon stereotype drew on Waters’s character Divine. While Waters’s initial intent was to violate social norms, his vision of Baltimore was eventually co-opted by the marketers of the post-industrial city. Transgression became quirkiness in this travel magazine version of Baltimore.
Meanwhile, a parallel misapprehension occurred over in deadly “Bodymore.” Fans of The Wire were often more focused on its portrayal of the glamorous gangster lifestyle than on the show’s depiction of structural racism and political corruption. And by neglecting to showcase positive efforts by community organizations in the Baltimore ghetto, the show shaped an exaggerated view of a dangerous city, broken beyond repair.
Rizzo finds a truer picture of Baltimore in the street magazine Chicory – published beginning in 1966 by the Enoch Pratt Free Library and initially funded by the federal War on Poverty initiative. Chicory contained poetry and snippets of conversation collected from black community members between 1966 and 1983. Rizzo analyzes the purposes served by the publication for its liberal supporters as well as the purposes met for its contributors. For its funders and sponsors, Chicory provided a window into the black ghetto as well as a pressure release valve. For its contributors, Chicory provided a public forum where ideas and visions could be shared.
Chicory magazine (1966-1983)
The author looks at the role history plays in the creative works she examines as well in the city’s promotional campaigns. Hairspray, while being the first popular film produced for a white audience to deal with Baltimore’s racist past, ultimately whitewashes it by changing the outcome of the actual struggle on which it was based. The Buddy Deane Show eventually went off the air rather than integrate while Waters’s Corny Collins Show integrates in a made-for-Hollywood happy ending.
Whitewashed Pop: Buddy Deane
Other films from the period with depictions of Baltimore, such as Barry Levinson’s Diner and Tin Men, ignore the existence of racism and, according to Rizzo, nostalgically portray the early 1960s as a golden era. Likewise, city planners and boosters pushed racism out of sight, emphasizing historical artifacts that fit with their image of Charm City. Rizzo writes that in these types of city promotional efforts, “history, at best, can be mobilized to give symbolic value, but it is not truly valued.” History lay in the path of “a municipal hype machine that swept growing racial inequality under the rug of marketing campaigns, inoffensive art, and stories about eccentric white people.”
