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Culture & Artsby Brew Editors10:05 amJan 5, 20120

True cousins of the “real” Baltimore

Doris Geng and Milton Farson were salt-of-the-earth emblems of a tight-knit city of neighborhoods.

Above: Cousins Milton Farson and Doris Geng.

A life doesn’t get more authentically Baltimore than the one Doris Geng lived for 87 years. Unless you put it alongside the one experienced by her first cousin, Milton Farson, who grew up with Doris on the same South Baltimore streets during the Great Depression.

Doris Connelly Geng died on September 16th last year, her mother’s birthday. Milton Grant Farson Sr., who regularly marveled that he had outlived all of his friends and most of their children, passed away on November 6.

“My mother was Sadie and her mother was Esther, they were sisters,” said Milton not long before he passed away. “Esther run a bar on Cross Street and she handled herself like a man. You didn’t mess with her.”

The bar was called Jenkins Cafe at 20 East Cross Street between Light and Charles. Doris’ mother ran the bar while her “gentleman friend” – Edward Jenkins, a handsome “eye-talian” bookie with an American name whom everyone called “Wop” – who did his business in the back of the saloon.

Doris was born at 140 West Ostend Street in 1923. Because her mother worked the bar from eye-openers to last-call, Doris and her sister were raised by an aunt named Blanche and uncle named Harry.

After the bar was sold in the 1970s, it became a hipster hangout called Lush’s.

“I grew up doing my homework in that bar. I have a big [backyard] thermometer from there – it says, ‘Compliments of Esther Jenkins,’” said granddaughter Denise Horn Domingo, whom Doris raised as a daughter.

“My grandmother could be a very stubborn woman who had to have her way. But I admired her for that.”

My Mother Ate Lard on Black Bread

Milton, born in 1919, spent his early years at his mother’s grocery in Elkridge and the long-lost farmland that surrounded it. When his father left the family, mom and kids moved to 936 South Paca Street.

More than once, he said, he had to go to the downtown courthouse as a kid to report that his father wasn’t giving the family any money.

The cousins were both goodhearted by nature, though Milton was more of a softie than Doris, who could be a rough customer when necessary. They grew up with the kind of want – sometimes true hunger, but more often the desire to simply have enough – that made them empathetic toward others.

“My mother ate lard on black bread,” said Milton. “We ate a little better than that.”

Doris – fond of steamed crabs, raw oysters and all-you-can-eat buffets – was a two-time cancer survivor who raised two sons by herself not far from where Milton grew up on South Paca Street.

If you were a relative or neighbor and came down with a bad cold or something worse, Doris was there with chicken noodle soup or a homemade cake. Sometimes both. She knew everybody’s favorite dessert and raffled off many a strawberry shortcake at the VFW No. 3217 on Washington Boulevard, where she belonged to the Ladies’ Auxiliary and played a mean shuffleboard.

Doris Geng, in Ocean City. (Family photo.)

Doris Geng frolicking in Ocean City. (Family photo)

If you were the person who delivered the mail or the crew that picked up the trash, Doris was there with a cold drink on a hot day.

And she paid for more than one family funeral, including her mother’s, when no one else stepped up, doling out money from a strong box in which Wop Jenkins used to keep his gambling receipts.

“Wooder” from a “Spick-it”

Longtime neighbor David Gale, 61 and a native of New York State, learned the essence of Baltimore through Doris, her kindness and her emblematic patois.

(Translation Note to Non-Natives: While other folks might vacuum the rug, Doris put her elbow grease into “val-culming” it. And in Doris’ world, “wooder” ran from a “spick-it” into the “zinc.”)

“She was a character, a treasure. Not much education but really knew people,” said Gale, whose home security system was the eyes and ears of Doris Geng.

“She would start out easy-going when she met someone, but she was savvy too,” said Gale. “Some people, sometimes family members, might get over on her because her heart was bigger than her tough image. No one got over on her twice.”

Milton’s was a scrappy childhood; a hand-to-mouth struggle not unlike the one Babe Ruth had a generation before on the same streets off the corner of Light and Pratt, a time when just about every bar had an upright piano against the wall.

“It was a big thing to walk through the Cross Street and look at all the things you couldn’t have,” he said.

The delicacies he craved included fresh sauerkraut, limburger cheese and dark rye.

“Sometimes we might have some,” he said. “If you could get the limburger past your nose you were alright.”

Once he made a quarter for telling a man on Hamburg Street where to find the neighborhood speakeasy. Another time, he watched foreign sailors make turtle soup at a German bar in Pigtown.

“I never seen a turtle so big,” he marveled.

Needle and Thread and a Waitress Apron

He dropped out of grade school to help his mother, the former Sadie Connelly who more-or-less raised Milton and his siblings, Walter and Jack, with little help from their Arabber father.

“I sometimes felt ashamed that I didn’t have an education,” he said. “It makes you feel funny, but what can you do?”

Doris Geng's birth certificate lists her father, Luis Reynolds, as a 21-year-old electric welder.

Doris Geng's birth certificate lists her father, Luis Reynolds, as a 21-year-old electric welder.

Doris had a public school education that stopped short of a high school diploma. Her learning involved needle and thread, street smarts and a waitress apron. She learned to sew as a girl and made her own curtains and table cloths along with outfits for her grandchildren – some from old curtains – and Halloween costumes.

One of her first waitress jobs was at Jenkins Cafe. She waited tables from the World War II era of the 1940s on through the hippie years of the Sixties. In the 1960s, she managed a bakery where she met Carl A. Geng.

Carl would come in for coffee before going to work. Kibitzing over the doughnuts, flirting a bit, they got to know each other, marrying in December 1966.

Though fiercely independent – the kind of woman who got along just fine without a man (Carl was her second husband) – things got easier for Doris. She enjoyed sitting on the front porch of her house at 2802 Carroll near Washington Boulevard, shooting the breeze with friends and neighbors or finding a bargain at Value Village.

Nothing made her happier than a can of cold domestic beer and a pile of steamed crabs on a newspaper-covered table. The talk might turn to gossip but it wouldn’t be cruel, just yakking with friends and family about good old days that often only looked good in hindsight.

Motorman for the Bone-Tired

Milton Farson loved talking about those days when he and I would drive  down Hollins Ferry Road through Lansdowne and Arbutus to his dialysis appointment. Once he pointed out a corner gin mill and said, “I haven’t been in there since 1934!”

By then, Milton was already 35 years old and had been a streetcar motorman for almost a decade, beginning at 60 cents an hour.

“I was 27 when I started, but looked 16,” laughed Milton not long before his death. “I stopped on this corner to pick up passengers and a woman backed away from the door. She said, ‘Are you old enough to drive this thing?’”

Milton Farson’s life spanned the American Century and there was little of its rich pageant he didn’t experience.

An early memory was going with a neighbor who used a small rifle to hunt blackbirds in the marshes near Patapsco Avenue. The old-timer bagged enough birds for a pie.

I had thought such things were mere nursery rhymes – “four and 20 blackbirds, baked in a pie” – but not so. Milton had been there, had sung a song of sixpence.

Milton served in the Navy during World War II. His long career as a schedule-driven transit driver in Baltimore – two minutes to the next stop, eight minutes to the junction, no margin for tardiness with bone-tired working people who depended on him – explained his need to be on time no matter what the destination. He enjoyed a long marriage and fatherhood in Morrell Park during the prosperity of the 1950s and 1960s.

Seeing What’s no Longer There

By the 1970s, the grandchildren started to come along and a man whose smile came naturally began to grin a little wider.

On our weekly drives from Linthicum to Arbutus for dialysis, Milton would look out the window at places that were gone. It was like he was staring at an old map.

“How come I’ve lived so long and everyone else I grew up with or worked with is dead?”

Milton knew the question had no answer but for some reason he enjoyed asking it.

I bet he knows now – understands why people were privileged to know him from the pre-Depression age of Silent Cal to the post-recession days of the first African-American president of the United States.

Milton knows because he’s hanging out with Doris, the cousin who was like a sister, and all the other good people he outlived.

In the last year of her life, Doris suffered with Alzheimer’s and struggled to remember people she had known for years. The folks she left behind aren’t having such problems.

Said David Gale, “We think of Doris every day.”

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