2008 Requiem

Jim McKay 
Famed sports broadcaster rose to every occasion.

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sports, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, the human drama of athletic competition, this is ABC's Wide World of Sports." In a resonant voice devoid of any histrionics, Jim McKay spoke those words at the outset of each episode of the pioneering network sports anthology show that he hosted for more than 40 years, showcasing everything from golf to barrel-jumping to horse racing to gymnastics to boxing.

For 40-plus years, McKay, who died this past June at the age of 86, reported on sports for all three major TV networks, including a dozen Olympics, and in the process set the benchmark for his field by adroitly injecting an empathetic human element into unbiased coverage. That unwavering approach earned him 13 Emmys and the celebrated George Polk Award.

"Jim McKay had a very important quality," NBC sportscaster Bob Costas, who anchored this past summer's Olympics, once observed. "You never felt that what he expressed wasn't genuine."

Born James McManus in Philadelphia, McKay moved to Baltimore at age 13, graduated from Loyola High School and Loyola College, and then began his journalism career in 1946 as a reporter for The Evening Sun. A year later he switched to TV, uttering the first words ever broadcast over the local airwaves: "This is WMAR-TV in Baltimore, operating for test purposes."

He signed on with New York City's WCBS in 1950, working in a variety of roles before accepting the career-defining post of anchor for Wide World of Sports and ABC's Olympics coverage. During the 1972 games at Munich, McKay stayed on the air for a remarkable 16 straight hours tracking the events that led to the tragic death of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the hands of Arab terrorists. Famously, he announced to the world, "They're all gone."

Active as a commentator through the 2002 Winter Olympics, McKay spent recent years on his farm in Monkton, and avidly supported thoroughbred racing in the state, notably inspiring and shepherding the industry's annual Maryland Million.

McKay's death elicited hosannas from an extraordinary array of people, including broadcaster Walter Cronkite, Gov. Martin O'Malley, boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, and figure skater Dorothy Hamill. Even President George Bush honored McKay, announcing, "For a generation of Americans, Jim was more than the much-honored host of Wide World of Sports and ABC's Olympic coverage. He was a talented and eloquent newsman and storyteller whose special gift was his ability to make viewers at home genuinely care about more than just who won or lost."    

Grace Hartigan
World-renowned abstract expressionist also loved teaching.  

During her 60 years as a relentless artistic innovator and more than 40 years overseeing graduate students as director of MICA's Hoffberger School of Painting, Grace Hartigan, who died in November at the age of 86, cut a huge swath and left a lasting impression.

 "She was the epitome of the American artist who came up through the late 1940s and the 1950s and established herself in New York," notes Constantine Grimaldis, whose Charles St. gallery has hosted 18 solo exhibitions of her work. "But Grace was more than a painter: Grace was a mentor. She influenced three generations of artists in her role as head of the Hoffberger School."

Although celebrated as an Abstract Expressionist in the early 1950s, Hartigan also successfully incorporated figuration into her work, producing canvases inspired by commerce, street life, coloring books, cut-out dolls, the movies, and the works of the Old Masters.

"Among the Abstract Expressionists, Grace circumnavigated the tension between being representational and abstract," explains Jay Fisher, deputy director for curatorial affairs at the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Some artists were either one or the other, or stopped being one, and then became the other, but Grace always seemed to negotiate that [dichotomy] in her own unique way."

Born in Newark, NJ, Hartigan studied mechanical drafting and developed an interest in watercolor painting after high school. "I didn't choose painting," the largely self-taught Hartigan told The New York Times in 1993. "It chose me. I didn't have any talent. I just had . . . genius."

After marrying prominent Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Winston Price in 1960, Hartigan relocated to Baltimore, where in 1962 she began teaching at MICA. "Grace came out of a tradition where she really understood the importance of sharing," MICA President Fred Lazarus explains in the 2008 documentary film Grace Hartigan—Shattering Boundaries. "She gets as much satisfaction out of her role as a teacher as she does out of her role as an artist."  

Hartigan—who overcame alcoholism and suffered through nagging hip injuries—never stopped trying new techniques or exploring new subject matter. "The thing that's been incredible," she told The Sun in 2001, "is that one way or another I've been able to arrange my life so that I could paint every day."

Dr. Victor McKusick
Groundbreaking physician and researcher linked genetic mutation to disease.

Almost single-handedly, Dr. Victor McKusick conceived of the field of medical genetics, transforming the way that countless human disorders are identified and treated by showing the irrefutable link between genetic mutation and disease. For more than 60 years at Johns Hopkins University, he doggedly researched and documented the association between inheritance and disease, kick-starting the eventual mapping of the human genome (the Human Genome Project), completed in 2003.

"I doubt that anyone would have conceived of the human genome project if he had not shined the light on the value of genetics in so many human conditions," Dr. Myron Weisfeldt, the William Osler Professor of Medicine at Hopkins, told the Los Angeles Times in July, when McKusick, age 86, died.

Born in rural Maine, McKusick enrolled at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in 1943, ultimately became its chief of medicine from 1973 to 1985, and retired only in December 2007.

Initially working as a cardiologist, McKusick took a sharp career detour in the mid-1950s while assessing patients with rare hereditary conditions, notably Marfan syndrome, which elongates the body's connective tissue and causes various abnormalities. At the Hopkins medical genetics department that he established in 1957, he meticulously studied the medical histories of families living in self-contained communities (Pennsylvania's Old Order Amish, for example), and discovered how a mutation in a specific gene resulted in a distinct physical disorder. Ultimately, in 1966, he published his findings in a groundbreaking book that catalogued 1,500 such genes; since then, it has been updated to include more than 20,000 genes.

Additionally, for the past 45-plus years, McKusick mentored thousands of medical geneticists through the two-week short course he co-founded and taught in Maine. His pioneering work earned McKusick the Albert Lasker Award, medicine's top honor, and the National Medal of Science. As Dr. Edward Miller, dean and chief executive officer of Johns Hopkins Medicine, put it: "His influence and legacy reach around the world."

Khia Edgerton, "DJ K-Swift" 
Beloved local radio host and DJ always brought the party with her.

As host of the city's most popular program on the local airwaves' most popular radio station, and as the frequently top-billed DJ at Baltimore's most thronged clubs, Khia Edgerton commanded attention, admiration, and, not incidentally, respect. Of course, her legions of fans on 92Q (WERQ-FM) or at the Paradox nightclub knew her not as Khia Edgerton, but, rather, as DJ K-Swift the Club Queen, who celebrated and revived interest in the kinetic, gritty, and unapologetically potty-mouthed sound known as Baltimore Club. 

"Not only was she great at what she did with mixing and creating her mix tapes, but just her personality was really special," Howard Mazur, 92Q general manager, told WJZ-TV News this past July after K-Swift died in a swimming accident at her Northeast Baltimore home at age 29. "And she was loved by people in Baltimore, really loved by people at the station."

Born in Baltimore, K-Swift graduated from Randallstown High School, and, after briefly attending the Catonsville branch of Baltimore County Community College, joined 92Q as an 18-year-old intern in 1998. Almost immediately, she began producing shows at the station, and, in 2000, became the DJ for its Ladies Night. Increasingly, she assumed greater responsibilities, eventually landing a gig as co-host of Off da Hook in the coveted evening slot.

Simultaneously, K-Swift developed a devoted fan base as a club DJ, cited by City Paper from 2004 through 2006 as ne plus ultra in that regard. "She mastered those wheels," her mother, Juanita Edgerton, related to The Sun. "When she would put her fingers on that turntable, you knew that DJ K-Swift had arrived."

Something of a one-woman cottage industry, K-Swift also released numerous mix CDs—six volumes of the Club Queen series, 14 of The Jumpoff —while operating her own graphics company and a production/management business.

"K-Swift is definitely a woman that the music industry doesn't want to sleep on," Edgerton once wrote on her own MySpace page. "She conquers any and all obstacles that come her way, and her drive should let you know that she can't stop, and won't stop, until she's done it all."

Kenneth Harris Sr.
Dynamic young leader advocated for public safety. 

As a member of the City Council representing North and Northeast Baltimore from 1999 to 2007, Kenneth Harris Sr. scored a handful of legislative victories on issues ranging from education to housing. But he made his most significant impact as a relentless advocate for public safety, taking to task, without hesitation, then-Mayor Martin O'Malley's administration and its revolving door of police commissioners. That effort only underscored the tragic irony of 45-year-old Harris's murder this past September outside a Northeast Baltimore jazz club during a robbery.

"He was out front as a council person in wanting our city to be safe, challenging all of us, the Police Department, in doing the best job that we can do," Mayor Sheila Dixon said at a press conference the day after Harris's death. "He was a strong advocate for those who didn't have the voice to speak up for themselves."

Born in West Baltimore's Sandtown neighborhood, Harris graduated from Dunbar High School, and then earned a degree in business administration from Morgan State University. After college, he worked as an executive with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Maryland, the Downtown Partnership, and Comcast, while also becoming civically active as president of both the Leith Walk Elementary School PTA and the Glen Oaks Community Improvement Association. Those experiences propelled Harris to a slot on the City Council representing the 3rd District (1999 to 2004) and then the 4th (2004 to 2007); he surrendered his seat to run for City Council president in 2007, losing in the primary election to Stephanie Rawlings-Blake.

"Ken has always been a tireless leader of our community," Paula Purviance, who formerly led the Hillen Road Improvement Association and the Northeast Community Organization, told The Sun. "Any time we've asked him to look into something for us, he's always come through."

Rebounding quickly from his unsuccessful bid for council president, Harris was on the short list for the post of lobbyist for Morgan State University when he was killed. "Kenny was part of the new wave of folks on the scene," City Councilman Robert Curran confided to The Sun. "He filled a leadership void. He was a young, dynamic leader."

Remembering others we’ve lost this year

Dr. Frank Ayd Jr. 
In the early 1950s, when the extremes of psychoanalysis and electroshock were accepted as standard treatments for mental illness, a young, iconoclastic psychiatrist, Dr. Frank Ayd Jr., began testing medications, notably Thorazine, on his patients with schizophrenia at the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Perry Point, finding that they experienced dramatic improvement. 
Ayd, who died this March at the age of 87, went on to conduct numerous clinical studies of various antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs, mindful of both their salutary and detrimental effects; helped establish the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology; launched the International Drug Therapy Newsletter; wrote the definitive Ayd’s Lexicon of Psychiatry, Neurology, and the Neurosciences; and helped move his field into the mainstream for treatment of psychiatric disorders internationally.
Born in Baltimore, Ayd obtained his medical degree from the University of Maryland in 1945, and after working in posts in the U.S. and Europe, served as director of professional education and research at Taylor Manor Hospital from 1969 to 1986, never forgetting his mission to mitigate suffering.
"This wasn’t theoretical for him," Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo, chairman of the psychiatry department at The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, told The New York Times. "This was about treating the patient with something that would help them."

Chester Wickwire
Chester Wickwire operated as an equal-opportunity social activist, advocating for freedom and justice locally and globally. While employed as chaplain at Johns Hopkins University from 1953 until his 1984 retirement, Wickwire protested Baltimore County’s Gwynn Oak Amusement Park barring blacks (1963); railed against Soviet oppression (1962); staged the city’s first racially integrated concerts, featuring jazz greats Dave Brubeck and Maynard Furguson (1959); championed academic reforms in El Salvador (1978); and took up the cause of migrant workers’ rights on the Eastern Shore (1982). And that merely hints at his numerous endeavors.
"Dr. Wickwire was a consummate humanist," the Rev. Marion Bascom, pastor emeritus of Douglas Memorial Community Church, told The Sun after Wickwire died, age 94, this past August.
Born in rural Nebraska, Wickwire was ordained a Congregationalist minister in 1946, and then earned a doctorate degree from Yale Divinity School after successfully battling polio. At Hopkins in 1958, he founded a groundbreaking program—ultimately called the Tutorial Project—that matched white JHU students with black high school kids in the city. Affectionately known as Chet the Jet, he continued his social justice work even after his formal retirement.
"My feeling is that you don’t separate religion and social action," Wickwire explained to Johns Hopkins Magazine in 1970. "The two form a joint enterprise. There is a certain Old Testament emphasis in which one relates to his neighbor. This is how to show the love of God."           

Elane Stein
Given her height at six-feet, one-inch (sans heels), statuesque physique, enormous eyewear, and swept-back mound of dark hair with dangerous-looking widow’s peak, Elane Stein regularly turned heads. Even more impressive were the cultural commentator’s omnivorous intellect, uncompromising interviewing technique, and occasionally prickly wit, all of which she unabashedly displayed over nearly four decades on television (MPT and WJZ)  and radio (WCBM and WBAL). Stein could just as easily flummox as charm the array of artists, musicians, writers, and sundry celebrities she questioned on-air. Famously, psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers stormed out of a session with her.
"Not only was she intimidating to those she interviewed," WBAL vice president and general manager Jeff Beauchamp told The Sun after Stein, age 85, died in September, "but also to her co-workers and those who managed her."
Born in Baltimore, Stein obtained a degree in drama from Columbia University, and launched her broadcast career in 1962 on WCBM. She defected to WBAL in 1975, continuing her on-air chats, memorable for their probing nature and her distinctive, if not entirely melodious, voice.
At MPT’s The Critics’ Place, she reviewed TV shows, while on WJZ’s public affairs program Square Off, she evinced a liberal, feminist philosophy. After retiring from the airwaves in 1996, Stein relocated to Santa Fe, NM. "For women in local broadcasting," Beauchamp pointed out, "Elane was truly a pioneer."

Howard "Chip" Silverman
A beguiling dualism defined Howard "Chip" Silverman: As an adolescent in the early 1960s of Northwest Baltimore, he was one of the freewheeling young men vividly depicted in Barry Levinson’s 1982 film Diner; as an adult from the 1970s until his death in March, age 65, he was director of the state Alcohol and Drug Abuse Administration and established the nation’s first publicly financed program for compulsive gambling. 
An accomplished writer, Silverman chronicled his experiences in eight books, most notably 1989’s Diner Guys, about the tight-knit group of male chums—Silverman, Levinson, Merry-Go-Round clothing stores boss Boogie Weinglass, and others—who came of age hanging out at Baltimore’s Hilltop Diner. Levinson writes in the book’s foreword that Silverman "keeps the memories better than anyone else . . .  and instigated and initiated a lot of things that happened."
From 1970 to 1990, Silverman worked in public health for the state. Additionally, while serving as an administrator at Morgan State in the 1970s, he founded/coached a lacrosse team—a milestone for a historically black college—that upset powerhouse Washington & Lee. He wrote about this in 2001’s Ten Bears.
Throughout everything, Silverman coordinated periodic reunions of his Hilltop buddies, events Levinson filmed for his charming 1999 documentary homage, Original Diner Guys.      

Charles Benton Jr.
An unsung hero of the so-called Baltimore Renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s, Charles Benton Jr. devised and executed the devilishly difficult financial details essential to enabling the urban blossoming. As then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer’s finance director, Benton deftly held sway over a $200-million civic kitty, divining the mysteries of the tax code to streamline the rebuilding process for developers. In effect, he functioned as an Oz-like "man behind the curtain" in what came to be known, somewhat pejoratively, as the city’s "shadow government."
"He bordered on genius," Schaefer told The Sun in March, when Benton, 91 died.
Born in the city, Benton obtained a master’s in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park in 1940, and, after teaching at the school, joined city government in 1956 as budget director, before rising to the post of finance director. When Schaefer became Governor, Benton followed him to Annapolis, working as state budget director from 1987 to 1994.
"Without him, I don’t know what the city would have done all those years," veteran Schaefer confidant and supporter Lainy LeBow-Sachs related to The Sun. "Whatever the needs were for the people in the community or for the city, he was able to figure it out, turn the numbers around, and figure out how to do it."

Setting Sun

In what now seems like an alternate universe, the once locally owned Baltimore Sunpapers—The Sun, The Evening Sun, The Sunday Sun—teemed with exuberant, erudite, genteel, and mordant writers and editors. Four former Sunpapers’ mainstays met their final deadline in the past 12 months: Carleton Jones (84), Elise Chisolm (83), John Dorsey (69), and John "Jack" Lemmon (80).

With a recherché refinement and beguiling narrative voice, features writer Carleton Jones chronicled the city and its inhabitants, both past and present, from 1968 until his 1992 retirement. 
Born in Columbia, MO, Jones grew up in that city and in Washington, D.C., signing on in 1952 as a general assignment reporter with The Sun until 1955, when he defected to advertising/public relations work. Back in journalism with The Sunday Sun, he wrote about real estate development in the city and state, with especial attention to historic preservation; ultimately, he expanded his purview to include culture, the arts, history, and only-in-Baltimore tales as a Sunday Sun magazine staffer, served as that paper’s perceptive restaurant critic, and continued examining the urban landscape.
In his 1993 book Lost Baltimore, Jones rhapsodizes about the city’s numerous "vanished buildings," writing of them, "No one in his right mind, confronted with the evidence in this study, could claim that our victims have been negligible. . . . There is something more than mere pride of place, however, in preservation, the fact that the voices of the pre-electric past are preserved there as in no other medium." 

Over at The Evening Sun, the most raffish of the company’s trio of publications, columnist Elise Chisolm documented altogether entirely different matters in an altogether entirely different writing style. First under the heading "Woman Power" and then "Etc/Elise T. Chisolm," she tracked visiting celebs and, more significantly, the joys and woes of family life in a breezy but thoughtful manner, functioning as a bridge from newspapers’ 1950s fashion-food-and-family "women’s pages" to the sisters-doing-it-for-themselves dynamic of the 1970s and 1980s. Not that her work ever gave off a whiff of gender-studies dourness. 
"She believed that love and laughter would trump pretension," her son, Emmy Award-winning cinematographer Richard Chisolm, told The Sun this past February. "She was a fun writer who thought you didn’t have to be macho and boring. She believed, slowly and surely, about emerging feminism."
Born in Jackson Heights, NY, and raised in Bryn Mawr, PA, Chisolm joined The Evening Sun as a society reporter—she had been a deb herself in Philadelphia—in 1967, and then branched out into depicting domestic bliss and bother in thrice-weekly essays, eventually retiring in 1990.        

A cultural polymath, John Dorsey covered the arts and humanities—music, books, architecture, visual art, dining—for almost 40 years at The Sun and Sunday Sun magazine, imparting to his prose clarity, purposefulness, and linguistic distinctiveness. But within this wide-ranging bailiwick, Dorsey gained particular notoriety as the papers’ restaurant critic during the 1970s, and, in the 1980s and 1990s, as their art critic, guilty of neither elitism nor boosterism in either role.
"He was a graceful and prolific writer," James Dilts, a veteran city newspaperman and co-author with Dorsey of 1973’s A Guide to Baltimore Architecture, told The Sun in April. "He was a gentleman of the old school."  
A city native and son of a Sun managing editor, Dorsey began working for the newspaper fulltime in 1962 after graduating from Harvard University. He brought to his criticism equanimity and panache, scolding without rancor and praising without unctuousness, qualities that earned him both admiration and respect: "He expected something and kept the bar high," artist and MICA educator Raoul Middleman confided to The Sun. "For him, being an art critic wasn’t a job. It was an act of pure conscience."
Dorsey retired in 1999, remaining active in the arts (via the BMA) and urban issues (via Friends of Mount Vernon Place), while writing the insightful and engaging text for 2005’s elegant Look Again in Baltimore, a collaboration with photographer James DuSel.

As the somewhat crusty managing editor of The Evening Sun from 1979 to 1991, Jack Lemmon could have been plucked from central casting—the real-world embodiment of Superman comics’ Perry White and the title character on TV’s Lou Grant. Lemmon tenaciously defended afternoon newspapers in an era when that journalistic subspecies gradually disappeared, emphasizing solid, enterprising reporting of news pertinent to city residents.
"He realized the importance of local news light-years before the industry did," William E.N. Hawkins, who worked as an editor with Lemmon at The Evening Sun and now serves as executive editor of The Post & Courier in Charleston, SC, told The Sun this past April. "We were one romping and stomping newspaper."
Lemmon was born and raised in Mount Pleasant, IL, and obtained a journalism degree from the University of Illinois in 1949. After establishing his bona fides at The Washington Star and The Washington Post, he joined The Evening Sun, guiding the paper to a Pulitzer Prize.
"Jack was an old-fashioned newspaperman," Ernest Imhoff, who took over from Lemmon as Evening Sun managing editor in 1991, told The Sun, "fighting for his paper against other sheets, anxious for reporters to embarrass politicians, ornery when dealing with the company budget people . . . [and] skeptical about the alleged holy mission of journalism (‘Let’s get the paper out on time’)."