Why We Need More Politicians Like Jack Lapides

July 19, 2021 Michael Olesker

When Sen. Julian “Jack” Lapides died the other day, at 89, it made me think of a former TV news anchor who floated through Baltimore for a few years, and hopefully took his mispronunciations with him when he drifted off to some other town.

The anchor’s name was Ken Matz. He worked at WMAR-TV for about five years in the late 1980s. He arrived here from a station in Southern California and thus prided himself on his ability to pronounce Spanish names.

On the air one night, he announced a story about Sen. Lapides. At that time, Lapides had only been a state legislator in Maryland for about a quarter of a century. Apparently, though, Matz had never seen the name before, nor heard it, and hadn’t bothered to check with anybody on the pronunciation before going on the air.

But it looked Spanish to him. And so, drawing on his vast experience broadcasting in Southern California, he brought to Julian Lapides’ name what he imagined was the full Spanish lilt.

“State Senator HOO-lian LA-pidez,” he pronounced it over the airwaves.

I didn’t see that broadcast, but the story was told to me by a couple of WMAR veterans, Susan White and Jack Bowden. And so, the next time I saw Lapides, I asked him about it. He hadn’t seen it either.

“All I know,” he said, “is that all of a sudden I’ve been getting regular mail from the Spanish Embassy.”

For the next 30 years, every time we saw each other, I didn’t even have to ask.

“Still getting that mail,” he’d say, chuckling a little.

Well, Jack Lapides was good for a smile, all right. But as many who heard about his death last week pointed out, he was even better for doing the right thing.

The conscience of the General Assembly, they called him.

He was a smart, sensitive, decent man with a gentle exterior and a tough fighting spirit when it counted. His conscience counted for him even more than politics, which counted a lot for him.

In my reporting days, he was one of my mainstays when I needed somebody to cut through the histrionics of the moment to explain what was behind all the political in-fighting.

I knew he’d explain his side of the story – and give a fair shake to the other side’s opinion, too.

In the current climate, who else is around — locally or in Washington — to give us the same straight deal?

So when so many people called him the conscience of the General Assembly, I thought it was pretty nice, but kind of troubling, too.

If one person was the conscience, what does that tell us about everybody else’s moral compass?

It tells us we’ve had a lot of troubles with a lot of our political leaders for a lot of years.

It tells us why, in American politics, we’ve learned to embrace cynicism as part of our survival equipment. And why not?

We’ve now got an entire political party casting aside its conscience and denying that the last presidential election was legitimately decided — half a year since the numbers were conclusively added up.

We’ve now got that same party casting aside its conscious to deny all the vivid, murderous evidence of the climate crisis threatening the entire planet.

And we’ve now got that same party casting aside its conscience to turn a killer pandemic into a political disgrace.

If Julian Lapides were still in politics, he’d cut through such shamefulness. He’d unleash that powerful conscience. And he’d make himself understood whatever the language or the pronunciation it might take.

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.