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1 week ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
I went to Patterson Park over the weekend to join all those telling Donald Trump to stop being such a bully. He wants to rid the country of immigrants of color. It’s part of a plan: Make America White Again. There was a wonderful crowd at the glorious east-side park, a big and peaceful gathering although virtually all white. This figures. Any time you get people of color gathering in one place, Trump sends out armed men in uniform to snatch them away and their families are left bereft.
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1 week ago | 
baltimorepostexaminer.com | Michael Olesker
BALTIMORE – As he moved through the big, peaceful gathering Saturday afternoon at one of this nation’s many “No Kings” rallies vilifying President Donald Trump, the guy handing out free American flags stumbled to find a place to maneuver, so crowded was this rolling Patterson Park hillside. “You want a free flag?” he asked Joe Compton, who had a spot in the grass. “Should I fly it upside down?” Compton asked. “No,” the guy with the flags said.
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2 weeks ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
One-hundred-and-sixty years after the dastardly deed, you think you know the entire story of Abraham Lincoln and his assassin, John Wilkes Booth. But it turns out you don’t. In “John Wilkes Booth: One Night Only,” now playing through June 22 at Baltimore Center Stage, we’re offered some secret Booth family lineage.
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3 weeks ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
That was a lovely crowd gathered the other day to bid farewell to Jim Henneman, who left us, at 89, after covering every sport around here — except maybe quoits — from the dawning of the Kennedy White House years until recently. He covered the Orioles for so long, and so well, that the ball club named the press box at Camden Yards after him.
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1 month ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
On this Memorial Day Weekend, I’m thinking about my old friend Joe Nawrozki, who got cheated when he came home from his war. Joe never phrased it that way, but I will. He was one of the thousands who served in Vietnam and came home to a country that gave him the cold shoulder instead of the warm embrace. There were no cheering crowds for Vietnam vets. At best, there was indifference; at worst, there was blame for a hideous war that was out of their control.
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1 month ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
With thousands gathering for this weekend’s 150th running of the Preakness Stakes, I thought I’d drive past Pimlico Race Course and keep on going along lower Park Heights Avenue. No crowds were gathered on Park Heights, but there’s been plenty of running. The running has been going on for about 60 years. It’s running from, not running to.
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1 month ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
So where do we go for leadership and smarts and the fullest understanding of Baltimore historic nuance now that Bob Embry’s walking out the door at the Abell Foundation? Nobody’s irreplaceable, but Embry’s pretty close. Without a lot of fanfare, he’s been the brains and the moving force behind some of Baltimore’s grandest triumphs, from the dawning of the William Donald Schaefer mayoral renaissance years to the education of a young Brandon Scott.
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1 month ago | 
baltimorepostexaminer.com | Michael Olesker
Baltimore – Eighty years ago this week, the organized killing ended in Europe and the boys began packing their bags to come home. My father was one of them. He was stationed in Foggia, Italy, with the U.S. Army Air Force. Years after the war ended, I asked him what he did on VE Day. “Volunteered to go to the Pacific,” he said. The war wasn’t over yet, no matter what President Donald Trump imagines. My father got lucky.
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1 month ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
On the evening of May 4, 1964, when I turned 19 years old, I began to dread turning 30. I didn’t want to leave all my dreading for the last minute, like some kid who knows he’s got a history exam somewhere down the road but waits until the last night to cram in every nuance of the Battle of Hastings. So I had an 11-year dread of turning 30. Now, as I turn 80, I’ve given up lamenting the passing of time for sheer wonder at its relentlessness. How can I possibly be 80? There must have been a miscount.
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2 months ago | 
jmoreliving.com | Michael Olesker
It’s the distinction of my generation of Baltimore baseball fans that we’ve been watching our Orioles since the very beginning of time — April of 1954. In other words, we’ve witnessed the entire history of the “modern” Orioles, through good times and bad. So it behooves at least one of us, with our sense of history and perspective, to officially declare the following:This is the single most disappointing start to a season in Baltimore Orioles history.
