What a lovely touch it was, one sunlit afternoon last August, naming a city playground after Mary Pat Clarke, who always had the air of youth and fun and laughter about her when she wasn’t going after somebody with both skinny little hands curled into fists.
She died on Sunday, Nov. 10, at 83, but not before spending decades as a fighter for all the right causes in her adopted city of Baltimore.
The main cause was to treat everybody as if they belonged. She did this as the first woman president of the Baltimore City Council, and she did it for years representing her North Baltimore district.
In a city that sometimes tortures itself over racial divides, she made sure everybody had a seat at the table and felt comfortable once they got there. She was, above all else, a healer, the first one to reach out to the most troubled among us.
Including Charles Hopkins.
Nearly half a century ago, Hopkins, a bent twig of a man, hunched over, scrawny, walked into the temporary City Hall on Calvert Street and pulled a gun from a paper bag and started shooting people.
He’d been there the night before, at a city budget meeting, and tried to tell people he was about to be thrown out of his home. Nobody wanted to listen to him, except Mary Pat, who saw his desperation and said, “I’ll try to help you.”
But it was too late for Hopkins, who was already out of his head with rage. When he showed up at City Hall the next day, he shot and killed Councilman Dominic Leone, and wounded Councilman Carroll Fitzgerald and Kathleen Nolan, a mayoral aide.
The picture that has stayed in the mind ever since: Mary Pat Clarke, racing on foot along Calvert Street, into the chaos of cops and ambulances and people flooding the sidewalk, and she knew right away.
“It’s Hopkins, isn’t it?” she cried. “I knew it would happen. I knew he was going to shoot somebody.”
Let’s remember her in better times.
She had energy spilling out of her, and a sense of enthusiasm even in the roughest times. We’ll get through this, she kept saying, until you found yourself believing her. And when forced to fight, she was always one to side with working people, and rarely with the old-line political bosses whose days were fading as hers were just beginning.
It’s a low bar, but she was always one of the City Council’s brightest lights: idealistic, bubbling with enthusiasm, committed to a hodge-podge of causes that sometimes left cynical colleagues looking down their noses at her, partly in fatigued self-defense and partly because they’d long since lost their own belief in the city’s salvation.
So it was natural, over the summer, when Mayor Brandon Scott and city and state officials renamed the old Lake Montebello Playground as City Council President Mary Pat Clarke Playground. She had a feel for playgrounds. Anybody’s. She held onto her inner child, her sense of youth and joy, and brought it to her job for such a long time.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” (Johns Hopkins University Press) and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home” (Johns Hopkins University).
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