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Culture & Artsby Brew Editors10:47 amDec 21, 20100

Ghosts of Christmas Past: a Crabtown medley

Above: Christmas balls, perhaps of the same 1940s or 1950s vintage as the ones in the story. . . .

This is a holiday story about fish, a whimsical Dundalk boy named David Crews and a long-gone factory in Highlandtown that made Christmas ball ornaments.

Each tale has made its way to you through the streets and alleys east of President Street and south of Pratt.

The fish tale comes from my father’s memories of his father – Highlandtown by way of Galicia, Spain. The Crews memories are included to balance the old with the not-so-very-old.

And the Christmas ball factory?

It’s one of those stories an angler always hopes to catch, even if this one hasn’t quite made it yet from the drink to the dock. It comes courtesy of a woman I’ve never met, Loretta Husemann who called it in to the City Desk of The Sun many Decembers ago.  I scratched it across some copy paper and have kept it ever since.

I am telling it here for the first time.

But first, the fish.

Fish was Christmas for my grandfather, who apparently knew hunger in a Pontevedra village in a way he never did in Baltimore. Though Grandpop had broken with the Roman Catholic Church over its alliance with Franco during the Spanish Civil War, the old man and my Italian grandmother kept the European custom of fasting from meat on Christmas Eve.

Author's father - Manuel Alvarez -- cleaning rockfish on his 76th birthday, February, 2010.

Author

In the late 1940s, he and my father would take a streetcar downtown from Eastern Avenue to buy fish to fry, bake or put in empanada at the old city Fish Market near Pratt Street and the Fallsway. Sometimes they went to the Broadway Market, where fresh seafood is still sold.

By the 1950s, when paychecks at the Sparrows Point shipyard were a little fatter, Grandpop followed the lead of his larger-than-life friend Manuel Sanchez – a Canary Islander, waterfront legend and the father of a prize fighter – who lived a few blocks away on Rappolla Street.

Mr. Sanchez was a Jackie Gleason-esque man who dwarfed the other Spaniards who lived near City Hospital. In his opinion, the only fish worthy of the Christmas Eve table was red snapper. It became a staple of the feast throughout my childhood. Grandmom baked it with olive oil and slices of lemon and onion placed across its bright orange skin.

And there was always merluza, kin to the cod-fish and known in English speaking countries as hake.

On my father’s 76th birthday earlier this year, I bought him a nice rockfish (all produce, meat fish and dairy in my family only falls into two categories: “nice” and “not worth a damn”) and as he cleaned it — the February 2010 blizzard pounding Baltimore — we talked about la fruta del mar.

Author proudly showing the world that his father raised him right. (Photo credit: Macon Street Books.

Author proudly showing the world that his father raised him right. (Photo credit: Macon Street Books.)

“That’s the fish we fried on Christmas Eve and put in the empanada,” said my dad, who – given the choice of kings — would choose a properly cooked fresh fish over steak every time.

He then recited a casual sermon I’ve heard many times, one about the sin of wastefulness that seems especially poignant at Christmas.

“There’s a tremendous amount of meat along the jowls of a fish,” said Dad, who bites his tongue on fishing trips with men half his age, sportsmen who filet dockside, tossing away enough meat to feed a family for a month. “And you can eat across the top of the head down to the eyes.

“When I was growing up, they wouldn’t think of filleting a fish,” said Dad, who makes winter stew with the frozen heads of Spring rockfish. “The old man would say if you cooked a fish without the bones you’d lose the taste. So he’d steam the eyes out of the head and pick the meat clean from around the skull.”

Because nothing went to waste in a house where security was measured by food, the watery gray marbles on each side of a fish’s head were also not spared.

Just what a kid wants to see on Christmas Eve.

His grandfather sucking on fish eyeballs.

—-

The best Christmas David Crews can remember occurred in the midst of the Vietnam War in 1969.

“It was in 1969, a white Christmas in Baltimore,” he said, eating pizza last week at Vinny’s Café on Holabird Avenue. “Completely white with a half-foot of fluffy snow covering everything by the middle of the afternoon on Christmas Day with more falling.”

A tender 19, Crews was home in Dundalk during a break in Army basic training.

“Because of bad feelings toward the military caused by Vietnam, Christmas Day in ‘69 was the only time I wore my Army uniform at home for friends and family,” said Crews, now 60 and a photographer and historian of the steel town where he grew up.

So, there was Crews – sporting a crew-cut behind the wheel of his father’s white Ford station wagon through the snowbound streets of the magic triangle of Dundalk, Edgemere and Sparrows Point. He was determined to visit as many friends and relatives as possible before heading back to the barracks.

Dundalk historian David Robert Crews at corner of Park and Mulberry in downtown Baltimore, a storefront that was once Sherman's Book Store.

Dundalk historian David Robert Crews at corner of Park and Mulberry in downtown Baltimore, a storefront that was once Sherman's Book Store. (Photo credit: Macon Street Books.)

“I was on top of the world,” said Crews, whose rounds took him to the home of the Krocheski family, whose daughter Carmello was a high school friend.

“From all of the delicious foods on their buffet table, I created and ate a potato salad sandwich for comic effect,” said Crews, who, like the best Baltimoreans, can always find the fun side of a good thing.

“Somewhere,” remembered Crews, “some friend of mine had eaten a potato salad sandwich in front of me and said his family always ate them at get-togethers whenever potato salad was served.  I have only eaten two in my life – the last one in 1969 at the Krocheski family Christmas celebration.”

Baked fish eyeballs and potato salad sandwiches.

It’s beginning to look a lot like a menu.

—-

The last slide in our Kodak Christmas carousel – the Highlandtown ball factory of yore — has nothing to do with food. But it is rather tasty.

“We lived in Greektown on Oldham street, across from the [streetcar] barn that is now an [MTA] bus terminal,” said Husemann according to my yellowed notes. “My mom worked at the old Christmas ball factory [nearby] in Highlandtown.”

The undated notes I took from Husemann are at least 25 years old. At the time, she said her mother had been dead for five years and she was unsure if anyone else who worked there would still be alive.

“The ladies who worked there wore dresses, not slacks. One lady never wore panties and told everyone about it.  There was a fire one night. Mom worked the 4-to-12 shift and the firemen and bystanders got an eyeful when the lady without underwear was brought down the ladder.”

Apparently – in the way that enough steel to build a battleship found its way out of Sparrows Point over the years — the Christmas ball factory had a bit of an in-house theft problem.

“They checked the ladies’ bags when they left to see that they didn’t ‘accidentally’ put Christmas balls in them,” said Husemann. “So one enterprising person slipped a couple of them into her bra.

“The boss’ secretary was checking that night and figured this certain lady wasn’t that
well-endowed, so she squeezed the lady’s front and said, ‘YOUR BOOBS ARE HARD AND LOOK — THEY JUST GOT SMALLER!”

Ho Ho Ho. Have a Christmas ball!

Ho Ho Ho. Have a Christmas ball!" Baltimore Brew

[While copping a feel, the secretary had broken the hidden Christmas balls.]

“Mom enjoyed working there, painting the balls was creative,” said Husemann. “I still have a number of them we put on the tree every year.”

A few months ago, in anticipation of the demand for holiday stories, I sent a handwritten note to the only Loretta Husemann I could find, a woman listed in Jarrettsville with the middle initial of W.

I guess I could have called, the way any other reporter might have, but the story’s vintage seemed to call for a letter, a stamp and an envelope. I never got a response.

If anyone out there in cyber-land knows Loretta Husemann or tales of an eastside factory that made Christmas balls, please call me at 310.413.4616.

I’ll be shoving a potato salad sandwich in my face and talking with my mouth full.

Rafael Alvarez can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com

BREW BONUS:
The Dundalk Potato Salad Sandwich Recipe

Ingredients

  • 1 “good bun” of your choice from Herman’s Bakery, Holabird Avenue
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons of Hellman’s mayonnaise to ‘bring out the best.”
  • 2 leaves of lettuce
  • 2 slices tomato that in the middle is more red than white in December
  • 1/3 cup of your grandmother’s “Labor Day and bridal shower” potato salad

Directions

  1. Open bun and spread each side with mayonnaise.
  2. Place lettuce leaves and tomato slices on bottom half of bun.
  3. Scoop potato salad onto tomato, and gently spread toward edges of bun.
  4. Cover with top of bun.
  5. Enjoy


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