Frederick Rasmussen

1 week ago | baltimorefishbowl.com | Frederick Rasmussen

“During busy seasons, there are often three or four Rivers Chambers groups playing their soft, swinging Negro jazz simulateneously for seperate congregations.”A Baltimore Sun society note, 1957. For nearly 40 years, no society gathering, wedding reception or debutante party was complete without the music of Rivers Chambers who could always be counted on to enliven a social gathering.

2 weeks ago | baltimorefishbowl.com | Frederick Rasmussen

When Broadway and Hollywood actress Talullah Bankhead swept into a room with her rouged lips, encased in her trademark full-length fur coat, and leaving a wreath of smoke in her passage from an ever-present cigarette and mouthing in her steamboat whistle baritone husky voice, the word “Dahling,” she owned that space, and everyone in it.

2 weeks ago | baltimorefishbowl.com | Frederick Rasmussen

Meteorological summer isn’t until June 20, but don’t tell that to the lightning bugs or fireflies as they are also called, because they don’t read calendars. They come when it’s time and on their own time. I first noticed them this past Thursday evening as they darted up and down in their artful aerial ballet of seduction over my yard with their flickering yellow-greenish lanterns desperately seeking amore in the gathering dusk.

2 weeks ago | baltimorefishbowl.com | Frederick Rasmussen

I recently mentioned in a story about Olympian Jack Turnbull, a decorated World War II Army Air Corps pilot who didn’t survive the war, that he learned to fly in the late 1930s at the old Curtiss-Wright Airport on Smith Avenue in Northwest Baltimore, which today is the site of the Greenspring Shopping Center.

3 weeks ago | baltimorefishbowl.com | Frederick Rasmussen

It’s official!With Memorial Day behind us, America is on the move as summer vacations get underway and folks take to the interstates. In my childhood in the 1950s, in the pre-interstate highway age, road trips were long and quite boring, especially when you’re a kid. Our car for the annual Jersey-to-Florida trek each July was a 1954 two-tone Ford station wagon that had three things missing: a radio, clock and air conditioning.