Olesker: 'Schaefer Made Things Work'

On the day he was laid to rest, William Donald Schaefer would have enjoyed the last laugh.

There they were, many hundreds gathering in the muggy Wednesday morning on North Charles Street outside the Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church for Schaefer’s funeral service when the dreaded words wafted through the crowd: the church’s air conditioning is on the blink.

This was followed by a phrase, repeated affectionately and often: This never would have happened if Schaefer were still alive.

And there you had the lasting impression as respects were paid to Schaefer, 89, the former mayor, former governor and former state comptroller: He made things work, even in the habitually dysfunctional city of Baltimore. Clean the alleys, fill the pot holes and, while he was at it, he’d have made sure the air conditioning was working, too.

As they filled up the big church Wednesday, they all remembered Schaefer and his pugnacious insistence on getting things right—Tommy D’Alesandro and Ted Venetoulis, Barbara Mikulski and Martin O’Malley, Dutch Ruppersberger and Elijah Cummings, Don Hutchinson and Kweisi Mfume, Mary Pat Clarke and Carl Stokes, and so many more political figures who’d loved him and fought with him—and those who’d been his brain trust through the years, like Bob Embry and Sandy Hillman and Mark Joseph and Lainy LeBow-Sachs and Bob Douglas, and those who’d linked arms with him through the years, like Lenny Moore and Bishop Robinson and Allan Charles.

It felt like the last roundup for a generation that cheered Schaefer on as he brought the city of Baltimore back from the edge of the grave, and restored its will to live, and spent half a century in public service in Maryland and in utter denial of a personal life.

"You want my last memory?” Bob Douglas asked.

He was standing there on Charles Street, minutes before services started. Douglas was an attorney and ex-News American newspaper reporter who served as Schaefer’s press secretary a few decades ago.

“What I’ll remember is that last motorcade through the city,” Douglas said, when Schaefer’s remains did the farewell municipal tour, “and people are lined along the street, and we’re moving along slowly, and they’re talking to him. They’re saying, ‘I love you.’ They’re saying, ‘We’ll miss you,’ they’re saying, ‘You were the best.’ And you know where we saw it the most? Some of the most troubled neighborhoods in West Baltimore. They’re still troubled. But they knew he cared, that he did his best for them.”

Here’s a piece of irony. Forty years ago, when Schaefer first became mayor, I asked him if he had a mayoral role model. The hot name back then was John Lindsay, the charismatic mayor of New York. Nah, Schaefer said, not Lindsay. His guy was the tough mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, a man whose legacy—and family name—was so firmly fixed that his son, Richard M. Daley, served half a dozen terms as mayor.

And now, on Charles Street, here was Thomas Wilcox, president and CEO of the Baltimore Community Foundation, and he was recalling a visit to the younger Mayor Daley.

“Was your father your role model as mayor?” Wilcox asked.

"No,” Daley said, “my role model was the guy from your city, William Donald Schaefer.”

They both took care of the details. Lainy LeBow-Sachs, the former aide who looked after him in his last years, remembered Schaefer telling her, “The flags at Harborplace are looking frayed. Call the Rouse Company and get ‘em fixed.” There were new flags flying, she said, the next day.

It was Schaefer who championed Harborplace, and Schaefer’s ex-housing commissioner Bob Embry who’d gone to Jimmy Carter’s White House who helped fund it from Washington, and Jim Rouse who built it, and it became a city’s Main Street and its primary draw for millions of tourists every year.

But Sandy Hillman, who ran the city’s Office of Promotion and Tourism under Schaefer, knew that Harborplace was more than a tourist spot.

"Schaefer,” she said, “understood the idea of making downtown everybody’s second neighborhood. Baltimore’s neighborhoods are great, but they don’t bring us all together. Downtown brings people together.

“That’s what Schaefer did his whole life, and he’s doing it again.” She swept a hand around the big funeral crowd. “In death, he’s doing what he did in life. He’s restoring the spirit of the city, he’s reigniting it, making people think, ‘What can I do to help?’ And that’s a powerful legacy.”

He left a lot of them. Some are made of iron and brick, but many are not. He took a defeated city and taught it to believe in itself again. He helped reduce the terrible racial fear that utterly paralyzed the city in the post-riot years. He brought pride to a lot of neighborhoods. He looked after the details most political leaders never even think about.

And, speaking of details, inside Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church Wednesday, the air conditioning was working just fine.

The spirit of William Donald Schaefer must have insisted on it.