Mourning the Loss of a 'Treasure'

I met Ted Venetoulis in the summer of 1970, when he was running William Donald Schaefer’s first campaign for mayor of Baltimore and I was covering the race for a newspaper called The News American.

Schaefer looked like a stiff. The big word in politics back then was “charisma,” which you either had or didn’t. Schaefer didn’t. Back then, the whole country was still warming itself in the afterglow of Kennedy charisma.

But Schaefer had none of this aura. I told this to Venetoulis the first time we met, and I thought he was going to bite my head off.

“The hell with charisma,” he snapped. “This guy knows every brick in the city.”

He was right, of course. Schaefer went on to dominate political life for the next quarter-century, precisely because he knew every brick and every pothole in town. Venetoulis understood this before anyone.

And not to be minimized, it’s the only time I heard him lose his temper even a little bit, in half a century of friendship.

Venetoulis was a student of the game, and a player, and one of the Baltimore area’s wise men until his death on Wednesday afternoon, Oct. 6, at Johns Hopkins Hospital, at the age of 87.

But what a life he had.

He was Baltimore County executive for a term, and almost got himself elected governor. He bought some weekly newspapers, and then a magazine, and sold them for a lot of money. He did insightful political commentaries for years on WBAL-TV. He wrote books. He was best pals with Tommy D’Alesandro III, the former mayor, and he was close with Tommy’s sister, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

“I’m devastated by the news,” Pelosi said in a phone call Thursday morning. “We were friends for so many years, and he and Tommy were like brothers. My heart is broken for Lynn and the whole family.”

He was full of energy to the very end. For much of the past decade, he did his best to purchase a formerly great newspaper, The Sun, to pull it out of its barely smoldering ashes and breathe new life into it.

He saw no personal profit in it. It was just something nice he wanted to do for his old hometown.

“Ted was an endless source of joy,” said Bob Embry, chairman of the Abell Foundation, who spent several years with Ted attempting to buy The Sun. “He was a genuinely good person, a scholar, a public servant. His departure leaves a real void in my life, and more importantly in the Baltimore community. He was a treasure.”

“This is a huge loss,” added Stewart Bainum, who has spent much of the past year working with Venetoulis — first, in an attempt to buy The Sun, and more recently in an effort to start a daily local news website for Baltimore.

“The best way to maintain Ted’s legacy,” said Bainum, “is to continue what he started, and create a business model for robust local news, and help the city he loved.”

He was a man of ascending temperament. I can’t remember him ever expressing pessimism or negativity.

“This is how I know you haven’t got an ounce of Jewish blood in you,” I used to tell him. “Because you’re so optimistic about everything.”

Word came from Ted’s wife, Lynn, late Wednesday night that he died hours earlier at Johns Hopkins Hospital after a brief illness.

“The person you met was the person Ted was,” Lynn said. “Full of zest, optimistic, a joyful father, a kind person who loved helping a friend, a fiercely loyal Democrat, a Roger Federer wannabe. He was my best friend, and I’m going to miss telling him everything.”

“No one on this planet had a more loving father,” said his daughter, Teddie. “My brothers and I [Daki and Stelios] know how very lucky we were.”

It’s more than 40 years since Ted was Baltimore County executive. But he never really left the political game. He advised a few generations of state Democratic political leaders, such as Martin O’Malley and Brandon Scott. He and Lynn did serious fundraising for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. He never stopped writing about the game.

And I mention the “Jewish blood” joke because the great American ethnic game was one of the first things that made us friends, a Northwest Baltimore Jew and the Highlandtown Greek, like all minorities wondering about where our tribe fits into the bigger picture.

A young Ted Venetoulis is shown here shaking the hand of President John F. Kennedy. (Facebook)

“That was the thing about the Kennedys,” he said one time. “They understood ethnic politics. They understood the melting pot. We were all outsiders who wanted to get in.”

He understood that impulse from his earliest days growing up along Baltimore’s east side, where the great melting pot was Patterson Park and the public schools, where the essence of a young person’s America was the ballgame and the classroom.

By any measure, brain or brawn but especially by temperament, Ted seemed blessed by the gods of all nations.

When he became Baltimore County executive, he was following a fellow, Dale Anderson, who preyed on people’s biases. He did it in code, but everyone understood it. It was all about keeping the suburbs all white.

Ted brought a city kid’s sensibilities to the job. America was about the mix. It was about finding the best in each other, and learning from that overlap of cultures, and building on their best qualities.

We’ve had other leaders who embodied such beliefs. But few brought such joy, such energy, such life — and, for the record, such charisma, as Ted Venetoulis.

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.