In the 1962 edition of the Baltimore City College yearbook, The Green Bag, there’s a photograph of Jerome “Jerry” Schnydman in one of his greatest moments on a lacrosse field, where he’s battling four players from St. Paul’s School for a loose ball.
The only thing that’s missing from the picture is Schnydman’s helmet, unaccountably missing from his head.
Everybody else in the photo is fully outfitted, but not Jerry. He’s down on one knee, and so are several other players, and sticks are swinging back and forth, and somebody’s about to get clobbered.
Schnydman’s oblivious to his missing helmet, and to his own vulnerability. And a good thing, too. For on this June afternoon at Homewood field, City is playing St. Paul’s for the championship of the old Maryland Scholastic Association, and it looks as if things are about to get awful for City.
They were heavy underdogs against powerful private school St. Paul’s, but they’d somehow taken a 6-3 lead in the final period when St. Paul’s came storming back. Now the lead was down to 6-5. St. Paul’s seemed unstoppable. City desperately attempted to nurse its slim lead.
Then, with one minute left to play came this mad scramble at midfield. The ball was loose. Here came Schnydman, and suddenly there he went, scooping up the loose ball, somehow dodging and ducking every St. Paul’s defender to race the length of the field, and firing in the goal that cemented City’s championship 7-5 victory.
Sixty years later, that moment remains vivid for all of us who were there that day. But whenever I’d mention it to Jerry, he’d smile and shrug his shoulders modestly. Yes, the goal was big.
But it was only the start of big things for this diminutive fellow, five-feet-one-and-three-quarters-inches tall, who used to begin speeches by joking, “Can everybody see me?”
He died the other day, at 77, and several hundred mourners gathered at Beth El Congregation on Thursday, Oct. 28, to say goodbye. He was remembered, by Rabbi Dana Saroken, as someone who “lifted up everyone he encountered.”
That final goal for City College, 59 years ago, was the last time any Baltimore public school won a city lacrosse championship. But it was only the start of big things for Schnydman.
He went to the Johns Hopkins University, where he was an All-American lacrosse star and captained the Blue Jays’ 1967 team that won a national championship. He was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
Then he spent the next several decades at Hopkins. He was admissions director, alumni director, executive assistant to two university presidents and secretary to the board of trustees.
Hopkins President Ron Daniels said, “There was simply no one like Jerry Schnydman. … Bringing unceasing optimism and joie de vivre to every situation, Jerry could and would talk to anybody, freely and generously giving his wise counsel to generations of Hopkins students, colleagues and, of course, presidents.”
He could poke a little fun at them, too.
Once, we bumped into each other after seeing the Russell Crowe movie, “A Brilliant Mind,” based on the life of the troubled Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr.
“That movie really shows the thin line between genius and madness,” I said. “You got anybody like that over at Hopkins?”
“Oh, sure,” Jerry laughed. “The entire math department.”
A joke, of course. He had a ferocious pride in Hopkins. He sometimes recalled people telling him he wasn’t cut out for such a prestige university. Or he’d remember those who told him he wasn’t good enough for college lacrosse.
He proved them all wrong. He led a grand life, with a beautiful family and a storybook career. He turned out to be the biggest guy in just about any gathering.
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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