There’s a snapshot image of Mary Pat Clarke that’s stayed with me for 44 years, because it captures the city of Baltimore at its most vulnerable and Clarke at her most sensitive.
It was minutes after a deranged gunman named Charles A. Hopkins walked into the temporary City Hall of that era and opened fire, killing Baltimore City Councilman Dominic M. Leone Sr. and badly wounding Councilman Carroll J. Fitzgerald and secretary Kathleen Nolan, and setting off a heart attack in Councilman Joe Curran from which he never fully recovered.
I still see a breathless Clarke running down Calvert Street as cops and ambulances arrived, and chaos reigned all around.
“It’s Hopkins, isn’t it?” she said.
Somehow, she knew. She’d heard the word “shooting,” and she remembered this tormented little man from the night before when he’d shown up at a Council budget meeting.
Hopkins was a bent twig of a man. When he walked, his shoulders came forward, his leg hitched and his body bent forward into a question mark. He was a wreck in every way. But he had a gun.
He tried to interrupt the meeting the previous evening. He said he was about to be thrown out of his home. Most city officials tried to ignore him. Clarke didn’t. She saw the desperation in his face, and she stood up and told Hopkins, “I’ll try to help you,” and she took him out of the room and tried to comfort him.
The next day, when Hopkins showed up at City Hall with the gun, everybody found out the damage was too deep and the hour too late for comfort.
That awful moment comes back now because Clarke, after decades on the City Council, slips into retirement this week. And her heartfelt attempt to help this pathetic outsider seems symbolic of her entire career.
She was always looking out for people in trouble. She always tried to be a healer. She focused on street level problems, on families, on neighborhoods. In a city full of antagonisms, she looked for common ground and never let our most hurtful divisions, based on race or ethnicity, stand in the way.
What’s more, her arrival at City Hall, and the army of volunteers who helped her get there, signaled the breakup of political Baltimore’s “old boy” network in which women could be fringe players but rarely wielded power.
In this week in which the new mayor of Baltimore, 36-year-old Brandon Scott, assumes leadership, we can be certain Clarke has passed along words of wisdom to him.
At 79, she’s taking a breather. She was the first woman elected president of the City Council. She held the job for two terms, lost it when she ran for mayor in a bitter fight in 1995, but then got herself reelected to a Council seat.
Her biggest legislative triumph was helping the city get America’s first living-wage law. But most of her impact was gut level, the stuff where ordinary lives get a needed shot in the arm.
Nearly 40 years ago, I wrote a puckish column describing Clarke as a kind of chaperone at an old CYO dance, fervently hoping everyone will have a good time but making sure everybody plays nicely. She had that kind of raw enthusiasm and effervescence, but she was also the grownup in the room.
That was half her life ago. She’s still that person, still bubbly, still full of idealism, still smart and sensitive. And, to that end, looking out for the troubled souls who get overlooked by almost everybody else in government.
Oh, is this city going to miss her.
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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