Too Good to be True

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No partisanship here, just a local note: Homegirl is going to be the speaker of the house. Nancy Pelosi is Baltimore born, bred and buttered, a member of a storied political family here. In fact, her brother features in a Baltimore Sun legend, a story so good that we all know it’s probably not true. Still, we tell it.

Now, one thing about being a reporter — you blame a lot of stuff on the bosses. “I hate to ask this, but my editor says . . .” Or, sometimes, you blame it on the faceless entity known as the city desk. As in: “My desk wants to know . . .”

So the story goes that a reporter has to talk to “Young Tommy,” Mayor Tommy D’Alesandro III, and the reporter says, “My desk wants to know –”

Young Tommy holds up a hand to silence the reporter and puts his ear down on the desk in front of him, listening intently for several seconds. He then says: “My desk tells your desk to go fuck itself.”

It probably never happened. But it should have.

Got any stories too good to be true? Why not tell them here?

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16 thoughts on “Too Good to be True”

  1. Trivia maybe, but I can’t help mentioning it:

    Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Mikulski (for the non-Marylanders, Mikulski has been a Maryland Senator since 1986 and was the first female Democratic Senator elected in her own right) went to the same small all-girls Catholic high school-the Institute of Notre Dame on Aisquith Street in Baltimore. Not bad Congressional representation for a small, fairly blue-collar, all-girls school. They must be doing something right in teaching girls to be leaders. (Disclaimer: I’m a very proud former faculty member.)

  2. My favorite story concerns a local small-town councilman, who, upon receiving the ceremonial brass bowl celebrating his retirement, was told, “At least now you’ll always have a pot to piss in.”

  4. Elaine Flinn said:

    Rummy is gone. Does that qualify?

    I thought that you were very witty but but kidding–as in that would be too good to be true and thus was not true. CNN now tells me that it is actually true–it certainly qualifies as too good (IMHO).

  5. Lo some 20 years ago, a few months after Ben Cardin was elected to the U S House of Congress from MD, he had reason to visit the senior center that I ran. One of my ladies of 80+ years walked over to him to let him know that she had voted for him. Her reason? She had never heard of him and figured he wouldn’t do any worse than the names she did know. She would be happy to know that her judgement was good since he just became a MD senator.

    Diane, you forgot to mention that Nancy Pelosi came from a prominent Baltimore political family. Her father was a well liked mayor for many terms and one of her brothers was also a Baltimore mayor.

  11. Did you manage to snag one of his signs, Laura?

    On the subject of “too good to be true,” I always think of the story about Marion Barry and the blizzard of 1996. He was at the Super Bowl when the snow flew, and reporters asked him what the city’s snow removal plan was. He said, “Spring.”

  12. Here’s one about Mayor Richard Daley the first – my Irish friend from Chicago swears it’s true:

    The Mayor had ongoing wars with the Chicago papers, especially the Tribune. At a point, Daley got his son a job at a big name insurance agency, where he immediately won O’Hare Airport’s liability insurance business. Well, the Tribune went crazy, and at one of Daley’s press conferences, accused Mayor Daley of nepotism. Daley’s response: “I don’t know nothin’ about nepotism, but if a man can’t get a job for his son, what the hell kind of country is this?”

    The Tribune was delighted, because they thought they had a great scandal brewing, but the resounding response of the Chicago electorate was “So what? He’s right.”

  13. Right now, the Democratic sweep of the House, and possibly the Senate, is feeling like a story too good to be true.

    Louise
    (Who’s claiming Nancy Pelosi as my San Francisco Representative to Congress)

  14. When I was covering the very small town of Durham, Connecticut during Hurricane Gloria in 1985, no one could find the first selectman to find out where the emergency shelter was. Most of the town was out of power, but a generator was powering the Durham Fair, a huge annual event that went on despite the hurricane. The only way to get a hot meal for most of the town’s residents was to actually pay to get into the fair and then buy the food. The first selectman was spotted flipping burgers at the GOP booth. I asked him why there was no emergency shelter set up. He replied, “People can come to the fair. And you know, people don’t have to take a shower every day anyway.” I quoted him in the paper and he didn’t speak to me for three months, until he left office.

  15. OT: In response to Clair’s comment on Marion Barry’s snow removal plan, when I was living in Kalamazoo, Michigan during the early 80′s, that WAS their plan!
    The county road commission would not send out the trucks unless they got four or more inches in a 24 hour period.
    One winter, we got three inches every day for close to a week. They refused to send out the plows. People actually got out shovels and snowblowers to try to clear their own streets, and the police went around telling us we faced fines and arrests if we did not stop!

  16. Chiming in late. In Denver in the early 1980′s we had a huge blizzard on Christmas Eve. The resulting mess took a month to clean up and helped the then mayor Bill McNichols lose the next election to Federico Pena. Fast forward a few years to the first big snowstorm of the Pena administration. The streets got cleared pretty quickly but not the alleyways so lots of people couldn’t get cars out of their garages. Pena’s solution was to send out the trash trucks to drive up and down the alleys and pack down the snow! Mayor Pena ended up having the only road to Denver International Airport named after him (he spearheaded the drive to get the place built) and going to Washington as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Transportation!

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