Since Jim Burger’s only been in Baltimore for the past four decades, some lifers around here will think of him as a newcomer. That’s the nature of provincial Bawlamer. Give him another 20 years, and if he sticks around maybe he’ll get full citizenship.
I joke, but only to make a larger point. We all seek some semblance of home, and Burger gives us the specific moment when he truly felt like a Baltimorean.
He tells us the story in his lovely new book of photographs and background text, “What’s Not to Like: Words and Pictures of a Charmed Life.” The book, which was self-published and available online through Jim Burger photography (burgerphoto.com) opens with a sweetheart of a lead sentence and then gets even better.
“I’ve had so few disappointments in my life,” he writes, “I can practically name them all.”
And so “What’s Not to Like,” gives us snapshots, visual and verbal, of a life not only well lived, but well loved. The book is charming and funny and sweetly sentimental.
Burger grew up in Uniontown, Pa., around Pittsburgh, where his father owned a bar, Lenny Burger’s Hillside Inn. As Jim grew up, he “carried more cases of beer than I could count, cleaned the restrooms, mopped the floors, and shoveled the sidewalks.”
Also, between all of this and schoolyard ballgames and adolescent dating, he discovered enough of an artistic bent and a passion for photography that he came to Baltimore to attend the Maryland Institute College of Art.
There, he not only graduated cum laude but did his senior thesis on the Baltimore City Fire Department. This was 1981, “the very end of an era when civilians would even be considered to ride on fire apparatus.”’
Some of the photos from that assignment will stop you in your tracks.
He’s spent the past four decades here taking pictures — first for the City Paper, then for The Sun, and along the way lots of freelance stuff all over the metro area (including for Jmore). He knows Baltimore in its bricks and its bones.
As he writes, “I came to love the city’s forgotten corners, the faces of strangers seen only for a moment, the beauty of buildings whose work was through, the shadows of industry long past.”
But it’s one specific moment that makes him feel like he belongs here. It’s the longest essay in the book, and it’s lovely. It’s called “A Piece of the True Cross.”
It’s about trading a symbol of hometown Pittsburgh’s past for a symbol of hometown Baltimore’s, a straight-player swap of one classic piece of sports memorabilia for another. Each is not only a rare sports relic, but an emblem of a self-conscious city’s grandest moment in the sun.
So long, Pittsburgh Pirates of 1960 World Series triumph; hello, Baltimore Colts of 1958 Sudden Death championship triumph.
“Until then,” Burger writes, “I was a displaced soul, a student just passing through Baltimore. I was either going to go back where I came from, or go somewhere else — and it didn’t really matter which. But with that transaction I traded away a useless relic of my boyhood for a literal shard of history.”
“What’s Not to Like” is full of such grace notes, in print and picture. Jim’s there when the Orioles open their brand new ballpark. He’s there when John Unitas strides onto the old one near its demise. He’s photographed comic National Boh nudes and Blaze Starr, too. He’s got old newspaper legends like Mike Lane and Mike Bowler and Vida Roberts, he’s got the Christmas lights on 34th Street in Hampden and Mount Vernon in pristine snow.
Also, he’s got his own parents, Lisa and Lenny. There they are, just before Lenny on his deathbed slips away. And there’s Lisa, in her youth, just before she slipped from Hitler’s grasp. Each photo’s accompanied by lovely memory.
In fact, “What’s Not to Like” is a love letter in words and pictures — to a life well lived and well appreciated.
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.
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