In a more innocent time than this, before any talk of sweetheart book deals allegedly devoted to helping needy children, former Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh sat at a little corner table of a downtown restaurant and talked lovingly about her years growing up on the west side of Philadelphia.
She had a mother who taught her reading and writing, and a father who worked every day in a rubber plant, and a Santa Claus who showed up at midnight every Christmas Eve for her and her six brothers and sisters.
She tried contrasting her story with today’s children. This was long before any talk of Pugh’s “Healthy Holly” books, or half-million dollar payments nobody was supposed to find out about, or federal raids on the mayor’s home and office. And long before resigning in disgrace.
From the first revelations of her blatant conflicts ofinterest, Pugh has maintained she wrote the books to help raise theconsciousness of so many children who eat improperly and don’t get enough exerciseand aren’t getting the kind of parenting Pugh once got.
It was a very compelling story she told that day. She saidher childhood family had little money but plenty of stability. Every morning,she said, her mother kissed her father, handed him his lunch bucket and senthim to work.
Today in the city of Baltimore, we have nearly two-thirds ofall children living in single-parent families. Sometimes, it’s just theexhausted grandmother who’s running things. The city’s child-mortality rate isfar higher than the rest of the state’s, and so is the school dropout rate,which is another form of death.
Long before “Healthy Holly,” Pugh had a storybook childhood.She talked about her parents bathing each of the children, and going for longwalks with them, and spending what little money they had to buy the World BookEncyclopedia.
“Every Sunday,” she said, “we went to church, and then wevisited cousins. And every Christmas, we had a visit from Santa Claus. Theyhired a Santa every year, and we peeked down from the top of the stairs.” Sheseemed swathed in the aura of those years.
“I believed in Santa Claus,” she said, “until I was 12 yearsold.”
Imagine such a thing, and then contrast it with a mayor whoseems to have played Santa Claus for herself. This is not the woman many of usthought we knew.
Pugh always seemed to have a sense of proportion. For muchof her political life, she represented the city’s west side, with its pocketsof awful poverty and drug trafficking and crime, and the shadow of race hangingover so much of it.
But she wasn’t fixated on victimhood. She’d talk aboutpersonal responsibility, about businesses investing in neighborhoods, aboutcommunity associations buying homes when seniors moved out, about communitypatrols to offer comfort in anxious neighborhoods.
That word — “community” — kept coming up, and it led herto talk about Israel, where she’d spent some time years earlier and fell inlove with the kibbutz system and theidea of “a community of people working and sharing and living together. Theyeat together, they learn together. I sat up all night talking to them, saying,‘Tell me how this works again.’”
At such a moment, you sensed the hunger in Pugh to makethings better. She talked about the thousands of troubled kids here, many infamilies that move every few months to stay ahead of the bill collectors, manywith drug-addicted parents.
“Why not look at a kibbutz type of setting for thesechildren?” she asked. “Not as punishment. More like a boarding school thing, sowe can catch the trouble before it happens and give these children a fairshot.”
There’s the tragedy – not just so many lost children but awoman like Pugh, who had such hunger to help them that she wrote a little bookabout it, and then blew the whole thing with a deal every child would know waswrong.
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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