Articles

He’s made a career of giving hope to people who have very little: those individuals awaiting transplants, particularly kidney transplants, and those who have been deemed “untransplantable” and, therefore, have been largely ignored by the medical establishment.

But in the summer of 2003, Dr. Robert Montgomery made medical history when he headed a team of physicians and nurses who performed the first “triple swap” kidney transplants in the United States. The headline-grabbing surgery saw doctors matching up patients so that all the incompatible donor-recipient pairs ended up getting transplants.

Tom Penna, a 25-year-old bank teller in Frederick, was ecstatic when his banking job finally allowed him to have adequate health insurance. With a host of allergies and a warning from an allergist that his childhood bouts of asthma were likely to return, he was finally able to embark upon a treatment plan of prescription drugs and weekly shots.

But with rising health costs, his employer was forced to switch insurance plans and to slash its subsidy of the plans as well.

“The result was that my premiums, as well as my co-pay if I were to get the weekly shots, would cost me much more,” says Penna.

Newly married, with a wife in graduate school, Penna was forced to drop treatment for his asthma. “We just couldn't afford it. I guess we'll re-evaluate things when my wife is out of graduate school.”

Tomiko Fraser and her younger sister, Shneequa, can still communicate, although it is often a struggle. Shneequa, who was diagnosed with lupus seven years ago, has suffered brain damage and can't always come up with the right words.

“My sister has a special language that she uses,” says Tomiko. “For instance, for some reason she refers to the color ‘black’ as the number ‘10’ and ‘green’ is the number ‘4.’”

Understanding the code words, combined with hand gestures, makes it possible for the sisters to stay close and share each other's thoughts and feelings.

As a model for Maybelline, an actress, and a spokesperson for the Lupus Foundation of America, Tomiko is surrounded by the glamour that accompanies today’s top models. But, as Shneequa’s guardian and primary caregiver, Tomiko often has to make the glamorous life less of a priority.

All too often, caregivers are so overwhelmed by the demands of a child with schizophrenia that they overlook the needs of their other children, the so-called “well” siblings. But mental illness affects everyone in the family and parents need to take care not to neglect the needs of their well children.

In her Book, “Troubled Journey: Coming to Terms with the Mental Illness of a Sibling or Parent,” University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg psychology professor Diane Mash writes, “The sense of being forgotten family members reverberates through the personal accounts of siblings. When their sister developed mental illness, a sibling wrote that ‘my brother and I felt there was no time for us; everyone was consumed by what was going on with my sister. We no longer mattered.’”

In February 2003, Jill Wiechert—34-years-old with a full head of hair and carrying a three-week-old baby girl—showed up at Johns Hopkins Hospital for her first round of chemotherapy. It was a scenario she could have hardly imagined in May 2002, when she got married and found herself getting pregnant on her honeymoon.

Six months later she found a lump in her breast and called her obstetrician, who sent Wiechert for a sonogram. “From there I went to a surgeon, who believed there was a 90 percent chance that this was just a cyst, and I had a biopsy,” says Wiechert. “Two days later my husband and I were listening to people recommend that I have both breasts removed.

Thirty or so years ago, it was the exotic island of pink sand and beautiful beaches, a destination especially popular for honeymooning. These days one hears considerably less about Bermuda, which is a pity: the beaches are still pristine, golf courses abound, shopping remains wonderful and banking executives still head to the office clad in shirt, necktie and short pants.

Juan de Bermudez discovered these uninhabited islands in 1503, but neither he nor the Spanish explorers who were to follow him saw fit to claim the island for their king and queen. The Brits, however, arrived shortly thereafter: In 1609, the Sea Venture, an English ship traveling to assist the beleagured Jamestown, Va., colonists, crashed offshore. The English had a distinctly different take on the place than their Spanish counterparts. While rebuilding the Sea Venture, George Somers claimed Bermuda—or Somers Isle as it was called then—for England and a charter was granted a few years later.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Baltimore was thought of as an industrial spot that people drove through or around on their way to more glamorous cities, such as New York and Washington.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, Baltimore—also known as Charm City—got a face-life: Our once-ratty Inner Harbor was spruced up with restaurants and shopping, as well as a science museum, a fabulous aquarium and several other attractions. The harbor is, without a doubt, Baltimore’s main attraction. But, thankfully, the city also has retained many of its oddball quirks (this is, after all, the hometown of Frank Zappa and John Waters). For starters, we’ve got a tattoo museum, a museum of dentistry and municipal food markets. Baltimore is home to duckpin bowling and beehive hairdos, which in some quarters are still considered the height of hair sophistication. We’ve got painted screens, Edgar Allan Poe’s grave … and much more.

It’s just a matter of breaking away from the beaten path to discover the joyous peculiarities that make this city great.

Along the River Seine in the heart of Paris lies the entrance to one of the world's most unusual museums. Here, literally in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, one puts aside views of one of the world’s most beautiful cities and descends to a kind of parallel universe: that of the sewers.

Below is a world unto itself, one that, in its own way, is about art and culture. Victor Hugo wrote: “Paris has beneath it another Paris, a Paris of sewers, which has its own streets, squares, lanes, arteries and circulation.” Indeed, Hugo found the sewers so fascinating that he gave us the indelible image of his hero, Jean Valjean, fleeing his pursuers through them: “All dripping with slime, his soul filled with a strange light.” And at Le Musee des Egouts de Paris (the Museum of the Sewers of Paris), visitors can find out firsthand what Hugo found so fascinating.

This is a serious museum about a serious subject, and its guides hold visitors enthralled with the surprisingly complex history of the Paris sewers. Much of the tour is conducted in portions of Baron Haussmann’s original galleries close to the Seine. Exhibits, original equipment on display, films and tours in both French and English only begin to convey the fact that it is a dirty job but someone has to do it.

A detail little-known to most Free State residents is that Charlestown, tucked away in Cecil County on the banks of the North East River, was once a contender vying to be named capital of the United States. Dating back to 1742, when it was incorporated, Charlestown was originaly a shipping center, sending significant quantities of flour to England. The town also was famous for distilling Jamaican molasses into rum, much of which was then exported.

More recently, Charlestown was a popular place for political heavy-hitters—including Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge—because of its many opportunities for hunting and fishing. According to residents, 100-pound sturgeon were once routinely hauled out of the North East's waters. In addition, there were canvasback ducks, shellfish, geese and shad in abundance.

The allure today is that Charlestown is quiet, quaint and placid: In other words, a perfect place to escape the hubbub of bigger cities and suburbs.

Most anyone visiting London—from Paloma Picasso and Madonna to curators from American museums and the idly curious—comes to Portobello Road.

Althought the street has been well known as an open-air fruit and flower market for the past 130 or so years, it has only been over the course of the past five decades that the area has garnered a reputation as an antique lover's haven. Probably more serious antique business is conducted here than anywhere else in London.

Nevertheless, even today, the fruit and vegetable and flower vendors remain, although they have set up shop further downhill from the antique dealers, and beyond the greengrocers comes the last of Portobello's offerings—its junk market where, for a song, one can literally pick up someone’s old kitchen sink.

When looking to the technology workforce of the future, David Pearce Snyder describes it as “destroy first and create later.”

Or, looking at the issue from a different vantage point, Snyder believes that it typically takes about 75 years from the invention of a new technology to the point at which it becomes the standard. “On Valentine's Day, 1946, the first computer was switched on, so we are still in the destructive phase of technology jobs,” says Snyder, a futurist consultant and contributing editor to The Futurist Magazine. “The information technology displacement that began in 1995 will end in 2020, according to the way I interpret Bureau of Labor statistics. After 2020, greater prosperity can be expected, although that is hardly a certainty.”

And there is plenty about which to be uncertain. As Terry Brock, a syndicated columnist notes, “The reality is that we don’t know what many of the jobs will be in 15 years.”

Pam Tucker sits at her desk, reading what employers and their staff have to say about telework: This is the greatest company to work for; A huge benefit that makes me more likely to stay with the company; I can now make dinner for my family; Very positive; My morale is up.

With raves like that, one would think that Baltimore employers would be falling all over themselves to offer the option of teleworking--working from home with a computer and phone--to their employees.

But even though there's a good chunk of public money available to help employers and their staff make the transition, this region is not embracing telework the way other parts of the country, such as the West Coast, have.

First, a few facts about the Maryland equine industry. There are more than 20,000 horse farms and almost 90,000 horses in the state, which is twice as many horses per square mile than in Kentucky. The first organized horserace on the continent was held here in 1743, and the horse industry contributes $2 billion annually to the state’s economy. The industry employs 20,000 men and women and encompasses 600,000 acres of land.

In short, Maryland enjoys a tradition that includes Thoroughbred racing, jousting tournaments (which date back to the Revolutionary War), steeplechases, fox hunting, and recreational riding. But it is an industry that, at least for now, sees the Free State losing racing ground to its neighbors in Delaware and West Virginia. If that’s not bad enough, many of Maryland’s breeders are heading to Pennsylvania.

Twenty or so years ago, security clearances were typically required just for those working in government, particularly with the CIA or NSA. But that is no longer the case, especially since the Sept. 11th attacks.

“Since 2001, everyone has become very security conscious,” says Roy Bombard, president and founder of Ailsa Information Services, a Bethesda-based firm that provides contract staffing and search capability. “In the corporate world, we used to just ask for references, but that's no longer the case.

“Now a background investigation is definitely required.”

Y. Martin Lo says eating genetically modified foods is no different than eating chicken.

“I’ve been eating chicken my entire life, and I’m very certain that I’m not going to turn into one myself,” said Lo, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, who is working with Chesapeake Field Farmers LLC through the Maryland Industrial Partnerships program. “All food, whether genetically modified or not, passes throught the GI tract, but there is no exchange with one’s DNA, and there is no exchange of other genetic information.”

So why all the ruckus over genetically modified foods?

One of the great mysteries in the art world is the one that swirls around the American portrait painter, Joshua Johnston.

It is believed that he was the son of a slave mother and a white father, although most think his father was not his mother’s owner. Documents show that his father purchased his son’s freedom, either at the time Johnston—some maintain his name really was Johnson—attained his majority or completed an apprenticeship as a blacksmith. The dates of his birth and death remain uncertain, although historians have a pretty good idea of when he stopped painting.

And, perhaps, the biggest mystery of all is, under what circumstances did he learn to paint?

A few hundred years ago, men of means would order barrels of wine right from the ship’s dock. From there it was simply a matter of pouring the wine into utilitarian brown or green bottles and storing them in the cellar until they were to be served.

“But as drinking wine became more popular and more of a status symbol, it became necessary to have more attractive objects at one’s table,” says Catherine Stewart Thomas, assistant curator of decorative arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art. “To be able to afford expensive engraved decanters was very desirable.” 

While many collect antique decanters—because of their weight and size, more of the old decanters have survived than wine glasses or other glass object--there is still a significant market for contemporary versions.

In 1900, it is estimated that there were 250 million icons in imperial Russia.

“And that is a conservative figure,” says James L. Jackson, president and C.E.O. of Cedar Falls, Iowa-based Jackson’s International Auctioneers & Appraisers of Antiques & Fine Art, who is also the founder and president of the Sacred Art Gallery, a by-appointment-only private gallery that deals in Christian ecclesiastical art from the 15th through the 19th century. “Icons were an integral part of Russian Orthodox life … they were used at weddings and funerals and were seen in schoolrooms, factories, stores, hospitals and prisons.

“Every home had a collection of icons and even a peasant household could own as many as 10. While Americans may think that icons are rare, they weren’t and they are not now. If anything, they’re as common as Tupperware.”

If it were not for the diligence of one Mrs. Miles White, the Baltimore Museum of Art's collection of Maryland silverware would be a significantly less impressive achievement, says James Abbott, curator of decorative arts at the BMA.

“She was one of the very early collectors of American decorative arts, and she particularly focused on Maryland silver pieces,” says Abbott.

Beginning in the late 19th century, Mrs. White was said to travel the Maryland and Virginia countryside. When she came across a particuarly impressive home, says Abbott, she would stop and ask for a glass of water. After being led to the kitchen, the collector would cast a knowledgeable eye over the silver pieces—often finding 18th century silver spoons that were being used to stir pots of soup.

Thirty-three years ago, Annapolis collector James Magliano purchased his first piece of stoneware for $25. Today that simple crock is likely to sell for $1,500 or more.

That’s pretty impressive for containers that typically held foodstuffs, acting as the Tupperware of a previous era. Yet, in spite of its humble origins, stoneware's popularity continues to rise. John Killy, assistant director of the Annapolis-based Lost Towns Archaeology Project, says that the roots of this collecting can be traced back to the Centennial Exposition of 1876, which was held in Philadelphia. The exhibit was a significant force in popularizing the Colonial Revival movement, which has carried through to this day.

I grew up in Cleveland's Detroit Shoreway neighborhood, where I now live and work, but I spent my teens in the suburbs. My mother’s family immigrated here from Italy in the 1890s, and my father’s parents came from Tennessee after the Second World War to work in the steel mills.

When I was 19 and taking a couple of years off from college, I had a job working for a wholesaler that provided health and beauty supplies to independent, predominantly African-American, inner-city grocery stores. This really was an eye-opener for me. It really gave me an appreciation for diversity and for different points of view, which I didn’t have as a white teenager in the suburbs.

As told to Mary Medland

It is a few minutes before 7 a.m. on a Thursday, and Lauren Abramson, executive director of the Community Conferencing Center, is already on her cellphone chatting with a staff member while meandering back and forth between her living room and front porch. Her home is in a placid middle-class neighborhood that is vastly different from those of the Baltimore schools she will visit this day.

She is eager for her colleague, Nel Andrews, to arrive. When she does, the duo will head off to present a violence-prevention workship for public-school teachers. They have their work cut out for them: On average, just under 100 Baltimore students each month are arrested for incidents that occur on school grounds, according to the Baltimore City School Police, and on average more than 150 city students each month are involved in heated conflicts with one another that require intervention by adults.

I was the middle of three sisters who were raised by a single mother in Brooklyn. My high school had a lot of violence, as did the neighborhood in which we lived. When I was 15, I was a member of the Deceptinettes, a gang of girls. At this time, I really was in need of help: I had been arrested for assault and robbery, and my boyfriend had been murdered. Fortunately a police officer assigned to the gangs unit and a couple of my teachers believed in me, and I managed to cut my ties to the gang and finish high school on time.

My first job, while I was still in school, was working at New York’s detention facility for girls on Staten Island, and in most of those girls I saw a reflection of myself. I remember thinking that they were smart and resilient, but that they came from homes where they had been some sort of abuse, whether sexual, physical, or emotional. These girls were victims; they were acting out and ending up in the juvenile-justice system. Worse yet, the system would see several generations of women from the same family. The cycle just kept continuing.

As told to Mary Medland

I grew up in a household with a father who was a drunk and who was physically and sexually abusive. I remember the fear of watching my mother being beaten, what it was like to feel helpless and hopeless and being unable to protect any of us.

Things changed in 1992, when my brother was convicted of sexually molesting a child, whose family I knew. He and I had been buddies as children, and he tried to protect us from my father's abuse. The fact that now he was doing what my father had done was very upsetting.

Wynona I. Ward, as told to Mary Medland

Artist and designer David Wiesand likens his work to that of the great artisans of the Renaissance. “At that time, there were wealthy patrons who commissioned the works and relied on a small community of craftsmen to produce the pieces,” says Wiesand. “Today, we are the artisans for those unique patrons.”

And Wiesand is very grateful for those clients who have the time, money and taste to appreciate his efforts.

These days, Wiesand, owner of McLain Wiesand, is a craftsman and Jack-of-All-Trades when it comes to custom-built furniture. His first love, he acknowledges, is crafting reproduction Neoclassical and Empire furniture, but he is also adept in recreating painted furniture, moldings, murals and sculptures. “I’m lucky in that, in this area of work, I can do a lot of things fairly well,” says the 46-year-old, who holds a masters degree in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. “We've very stubborn and very proud of our work.”

Eleanor McKay prefers to think of chandeliers as architectural adornments for the home. “When we create a chandelier for a residence, we view it as a piece of jewelry,” says McKay, a founder and partner in Annapolis's full-service home furnishings company, Niermann Weeks.

Today chandeliers are able to fit nicely in virtually any style home—from rustic to high-tech. It is important to bear in mind that a home’s lighting is a small detail that, properly done, can make a home fabulous. “Lighting can flatter a home or make it look like a disaster area,” says McKay.

Once, many decades if not a century or two ago, the home you just purchased was beautiful. But that was before the original wallpaper had been scraped off, dropped ceilings put in, original walls knocked out, and the pine-plank floors covered with linoleum.

Clearly your home deserves better and you have every intention of restoring much of its former beauty. But just where does one begin to discover what the placed looked like in its heyday?

The first step, says Lynne Dakin Hastings, curator and chief of cultural resource management at Hampton National Historic Site, is to seek out those who can help implement your plan of action. Hastings recommends first taking care of the floors, ceilings and walls and worrying about the furniture later. “It's almost like one has to internalize the personality of the house,” she says. “There are some things that are correct for Hampton Mansion, but that would make no sense in a log cabin.”

As far back as ancient Egypt and, even more recently, during the Italian Renaissance, craftsmen were cutting and fitting stones and tiles into intricate, decorative mosaics. “If you go to Italy and look at some of the cathedrals, you’ll see beautiful ceilings decorated with 1,000-year-old glass mosaics,” says Jan MacLatchie, vice president of marketing for New York-based Artistic Tile.

Yet for many of us, tile, whether ceramic, stone or glass, often conjures up little more than utilitarian rectangles in our kitchens and baths that protect walls or floors from water damage.

But that scenario is rapidly changing as American consumers become more daring and sophisticated and as tile manufacturers offer more and more products that virtually beg to decorate a home.

If one likens a single-level garden to a painting--a combination of textures, colors and shapes—then a terraced garden is more along the lines of a sculpture--textures, colors and shapes, to be sure, but with an intriguing third element of depth and dimension.

Terracing allows gardeners to challenge their imaginations by creating more space for plantings, or a spot to sit and relax and to experiment with either formal or casual waterfalls. It also offers a viable solution to problematic plots of land and presents creative possibilities not always available on a flat surface.

Financial advisor Randy Brinton tells a story that would cause savvy retirees—and a lot of successful middle-aged people, too—to gasp in utter horror.

One of his clients—a woman worth roughly $20 million—refused to consider estate planning advice, says Brinton, a senior vice president and stockbroker with Ferris Baker Watts. “All she wanted me to do was act as her stockbroker, nothing else,” he says. “After all was said and done, I ended up writing the Internal Revenue Service a check for $12 million.”

While the IRS was undoubtedly thrilled, Brinton knows intelligent estate planning could have reduced that figure significantly, leaving much of that money for her heirs or for her favorite nonprofit causes.

Figuring out the perfect formula for financing one’s retirement would require the mathematical skills of Albert Einstein combined with a wisdom available only to the Almighty.

Yet for mere mortals, say financial planners, the necessary ingredients for achieving one's goals include careful oversight of asset allocation, combined with an eye for risk tolerance.

“Furthermore, when it comes to asset allocation, there are subsets to pay attention to,” says Giff Blaylock, a Wooden & Benson Chartered tax manager. “One of those subsets is asset diversification.”

All in all, it’s a balancing act that is as unique as DNA, and one that changes depending on the stock market, the investor's age and a host of other considerations, such as when one hopes to retire and what kind of an income is expected. Not to mention how many years the investor will end up living and whether or not he wants to leave money to the next generation.

It was only 10 or so years ago, says antiquarian bookseller Drusilla Jones, that someone rummaging through items at a New England shop picked up a copy of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tamerlane and Other Poems by a Bostonian, paying a mere 50 cents.

Tamerlane—a pamphlet of works published in 1827, less than a handful of which are known to exist—turned out to be a deliciously fine investment. When the gavel came down and the auctioneer hollered “Sold!,” the gleeful seller realized about a $10 million profit.

As Americans continue to watch years of savings eroded by a depressed stock market, more and more people are considering alternative ways to invest their hard-earned, after-tax dollars. Whether it’s sinking money into franchises, race horses, art, or jewelry, the possibilites for doing well are almost endless, as is the potential for losing a pile of money if you don't know what you’re doing.

In 1990, 17-year-old Mohan Thapa arrived at his uncle’s house in Woodbridge, VA, hoping to begin a new life. When his uncle discovered that his nephew had neither a job nor any money, he quickly sent Thapa packing on a train to Baltimore. It was a city in which the teenager knew not one soul.

Getting into Penn Station at 11:30 p.m. in November, Thapa climbed on the No. 3 bus hoping to locate someone who would help him. After getting off the bus, he walked for an hour and a half and finally spent the rest of the night sleeping in the stairwell of an apartment building. The next day, with $.75 to his name, he bought a cup of coffee and later in the day, located a pizza shop. “The owner gave me a job distributing flyers for the store, and the cook let me share his apartment,” says Thapa, who today owns Charles Street’s Kumari Restaurant and Bar.

Quick Now: Why are the tines of dinner knives curved?

Well, dear reader, during the reign of Louis XII, pointed dinner knives not only tore the meat in manageable sizes, they also were used to pick the remaining shreds of food that were stuck between a diner's teeth when the meal was finished.

Fortunately, Cardinal Richelieu—Louis’ chief minister—was so appalled by this behavior that he exerted his considerable influence to have the knives’ tips rounded.

OK, Try this one: Why do we shake hands?

When Hollywood celebrities like Sharon Stone, Halle Berry or Paris Hilton make appearances at glitzy events, there’s usually one accessory they never leave home—a Moo Roo handbag designed by Mary Norton. Norton has refused to let lupus stop her from adding sparkles to the wardrobes of a long list of celebrities, as well as everyday fashionable women across the globe.

“I was diagnosed with lupus just after the birth of my second daughter in February 1998,” says Norton from her home in Charleston, S.C. “But in retrospect, I think I actually had the disease before my older daughter was born. At that time I’d get terrible rashes after I’d been in the sun, but I just assumed that this was an allergie reaction to sunscreen.”

Flipping through her e-mails one morning last year, Hilary Greene was struck by one from a high school friend with the subject line reading: “Lung lobe needed.”

It was a third or fourth generation e-mail from another Massachusetts woman, Ellyn Cohen [who Greene did not know]. Suffering from a fatal lung condition, Cohen, the mother of two young children, had hoped for a transplant from a deceased donor, but to no avail. Her condition was rapidly worsening and finally, in desperation, she wrote to friends and relatives seeking a living donor.

Little did she know that Greene would step up to the plate and end up donating one of her lobes. It was dangerous and extremely painful transplant surgery, but it was to save Cohen's life.

It was an air-tight, couldn't-go-wrong case. Private eye William Jazwinski had all the dirty laundry on his client's philandering husband right there on video—all set for the judge to see.

“She had evidence that would have allowed her to get anything she wanted in the divorce,” says Jazwinski, president of Essex-based PDQ Private Investigators and Processors.

Alas, even air-tight cases can be blown to smithereens.

Call ’em what you want—yard sales, rummage sales, estate sales, or garage sales—but the name of the game is still the same: One guy’s flotsam and jetsam is another gal’s ruby necklace.

From early spring ’till fall, yard sales are in full bloom all over the Baltimore area, luring a segment of the population for whom bargain-hunting and haggling is an addiction of sorts.

And, oh, the stories these garage-sale groupies can tell, of the exhilarating victory or agonizing defeat at the hands of private junk peddlers.

For 27-year-old Federal Hill editor Kristen Keener, yard-sale nirvana came a dozen or so years when, as a Fab Four-obsessed teenager, she came upon a robin’s-egg-blue Beatles lunch box. Although lacking a thermos, 25 cents later it was her proudest possession.

“Shortly thereafter I found the same item in a collector’s catalogue,” says Keener, “with a heart-stopping price tag of $225!”

It was a theme party the likes of which only a Dan Van Allen could have cooked up.

For the festivities, Van Allen, a fine furniture restorer and decorative painter, bought a couple of roosters. To provide atmosphere. “I love animals and kept them for several years, until they started digging up the bulbs in my neighbor’s garden,” he says.

Then he arranged to have plenty of fresh coconuts—which, hacked in half with a machete held rum drinks—as well as an old drum that was revved up as a bonfire. While some of the guests danced around the fire, others had the pleasure of watching a Bela Lugosi film.

Still, still, there was something missing. Voila, intrinsic to any self-respecting voodoo party is, naturally, a Haitian Voodoo Altar.

Van Allen got to work.