This sailing ship ventured up the Potomac River for the Blessing of the Fleet weekend and a crisp wind guided her into Breton Bay. See more and all about how to catch and cook catfish, by Cap’n Larry Jarboe. Mark Robbins entertains with a Thanksgiving tale of sailing adventures. Ellynne Brice Davis brings forth bunches of terrific recipes all about how to prepare tasty dishes of oysters. Coming in November!

He took care of the real estate for the Warner Brothers Company on the East Coast, and he lived and worked in Washington, D.C. Prior to going with Warner Brothers, he and my grandfather built what is now called The Warner Theatre at 13th and E Street, and the office building that surrounds it.
Originally it was called the Earle Theatre, and of course it started out very, very early in the 1920’s as a Vaudeville theatre and then of course, went to the silent movies and then movies with sound and so forth came in and now it is a prime theatre to this day.

The Earle Theatre, Washington, D.C. 1920's Library of Congress

My earliest recollection living in Charles County was on the Wicomico River. Oddly enough, we had electricity but the rest the rest of the county did not.
Father, being from the city and being used to electricity, and one of my uncles, well, he really wasn’t an uncle, but we called him uncle, his name was Uncle Edward. He was the chief electrician at the Earle Theatre and he handled all the stage work.

The Earle Theatre

I do recall going back stage and seeing that. Today, I think everything is handled by little switches and you sit at a small console and handle all the electric, but in those days, the switches were enormous.
They were huge double throw switches and when you would throw a switch, sparks would fly. The lights were huge and it really took something to handle all that electricity back there.

My recollection of that was rather awesome but my uncle, Uncle Edward, used to love to come down to Tompkinsville and spend some time with us. I don’t know if it was his idea or not, but somebody in the family decided we were going to have electricity.
We had bought an old farm house, which was on the water and I do remember when we had no electricity.
I don’t remember where we got it, but I can remember the Coleman lanterns, and I can recall that we had a spring. We used to cool our food and our watermelons and such as that in the springhouse. Just set them in that cold water, which would come up out of the ground.
In those days, it was a true artesian well as to say it really flowed, you didn’t have to have a pump to pump it up.
Well anyways back to the electric. My father decided that he was going to have electricity.
He built a little shed about two-hundred or three hundred feet away from the house. In that shed he put a one-horse power, not on horse power, one cylinder engine what similar to the Palmer Engines that the crabbers used to use.
You could hear them, back in those days, going down the road. They would have four revolutions and hit on the fourth and not hit on the third, so it made a rather peculiar noise.
This one-cylinder engine was hooked to a generator and to create electric they ran this all day long.
It charged some batteries, thirty-two to be exact. The batteries were huge. They were glass batteries so you could see them bubbling.
Again they were really the batteries, and if you can imagine thirty-two of the big batteries on the shelves in this shed with this one-cylinder engine going bang! Bang! Bang! all day long charging these batteries.
Each battery in turn would generate one volt, and a thirty volt system. Today we have what is known as AC Alternating Current.
Those days, we had DC or Direct Current just like you have with the dry cell batteries today or a battery in your car was the same sort of thing.
We generated thirty-two volts.
I don’t know what the interference was, but we could use that electric in the evening to run a few lights, and we could use it to have a pump for the water system.
That allowed us to have indoor plumbing. I suspect in Southern Maryland about the time we had it, because I believe we had it from 1926 on.
We had something that most homes in rural America, particularly Southern Maryland didn’t have indoor plumbing in the early or mid-twenties.
By that time we also had a refrigerator, but not like the refrigerators you have today. This was not run by electricity.
That was run by a rather odd thing.
It was a Kegometer.
I believe they are still manufactured. They are used in so- called emerging countries, which might not have electric. They run off of heat.
I’m not going to go into how they work because I’m really not sure of the exact theory of it. I know they had no moving parts, absolutely no moving parts.
They had a small flame and they transformed liquid into gas and back into a liquid again which create a cold.
Ours was run by coal oil, now called kerosene, as was our stove. That was the latest for the country in which we had a coal oil stove which was supposedly a step up from the wood stove.
Certainly was a little bit cleaner and took a lot less effort which had to go by the kerosene.
We had radios which were run on batteries called Kent Atwater radios. They had dials that must have been about 4 inches in diameter and looked like and amazing gang of things in there and was very impressive looking.
Of course every we heard was AM band radio. We pulled in a fantastic amount of static.
(This column by Alan Brylawski is from March of 1990. Alan has proven that he can indeed outlive his detractors; the author is now 90 years old and will be updating his columns soon. Alan is a longtime local Realtor and former owner of the old Mr. Donut in Lexington Park as well as the Baskin-Robbins and during the sixties operated the Point Lookout Hotel.
His dear wife Jean passed away in January.)

Jean Brylawski, longtime owner and operator of the Lexington Park Baskin Robbins for 20 years located in Millison Plaza, died in Florida in January. She and her husband operated the Point Lookout Hotel. THE CHESAPEAKE photo

From Washington-Theatre.com: The Warner’s special place in the history of Washington began in the 1920s when dozens of grand theaters and moviehouses lit up downtown. Built first for vaudeville and silent movies, the Theatre was opened as the Earle Theatre in 1924. It was complemented by a rooftop garden that attracted thousands of visitors per night. The basement was also famous, first as a restaurant and ballroom, and in the 1930s as the Neptune Room.
The Earle featured its own precision dance troupe-much like the still-famous Rockettes-called the Roxyettes. They kept the traditions of vaudeville alive at the Earle until 1945, performing before and after feature films and with guest performers such as Red Skelton and Jerry Lewis.

Alan Brylawski, known far and wide as "Mr. B", was the last operator of the Point Lookout Hotel, and owned the former Mr. Donut in Lexington Park for 20 years before retiring and selling his business. The CHESAPEAKE photo

The Earle switched to a movies-only policy in 1945 and in 1947, owner Harry Warner, one of the Hollywood’s Warner Brothers, visited Washington and told his tour guide Julian Brylawski (one of the original builders) that since he owned the theatre, his name should be on the marquee.
Thus the Earle Theatre became the Warner Theatre.
Adapting to new entertainment trends in the 1950s, the auditorium was redesigned for Cinerama movies. The screen stayed lit into the 1960s featuring such memorable runs as Ben Hur, Dr. Zhivago, and Hello, Dolly! As with much of downtown Washington in the early 1970s, the Theatre fell into disrepair and disrepute, even functioning briefly as a pornographic movie theater.
By the mid-1970s, the Theatre blossomed anew, mainly as a destination for concerts. The Rolling Stones performed a surprise small-venue show here in 1978.
In 1989 the wonderful mix of 1980s concerts in the genres of soul, jazz, punk, world music, heavy metal, and funk, as well as many touring and local plays finally took its toll on the 65-year-old building.
The Theatre closed for three years to undergo extensive renovations and enhancements under the eye of real estate developer The Kaempfer Company. The “new” Warner-opened in 1992 with a gala featuring Frank Sinatra (in his final D.C. appearance) and Shirley MacLaine-became once again a destination, not only for revitalized downtown Washington, but also for national and international recording artists and the finest in theatrical, dance, and television presentations.

Suggested

(Editor’s Note: It is no small wonder that our schools are in such sad shape and there are so many socialists around America when one of the most significant national landmarks features as part of it’s suggested lesson studies for school children, such complete crap….why not just teach the history as it was? It was a pretty good story of brave souls persevering through the night against a much superior force who were intent on taking back America as it’s colonies.)

Baltimore Md.- February 28, 2011 -The Maryland Historical Society (MdHS) is loaning the priceless original manuscript of the Star Spangled Banner by Frances Scott Key to the National Anthem Celebration Foundation on Tuesday, March 1 for an event in Annapolis.  The following day the document will be lent to the National Park Service at Fort McHenry for three months. The document has never before been out of Baltimore.
 The armored truck, honor guard, local, state and park police motorcade will begin at the Park Ave entrance to MdHS. 
At 10 am on Wednesday, March 2 a similar motorcade will take the Star Spangled Banner manuscript from the MdHS  at its Park Ave entrance to Fort McHenry for a major new exhibit opening on the War of 1812.  There will be reinactors dressed in 1812 uniforms as part of the honor guard. 
For more information on either of the two departures from MdHS contact Marc Apter at 301-904-3690 or mapter@mdhs.org

Attention History Teachers: Here are the words you might not be able to find on the National Park Service Website….much more can be learned from The National Anthem Project Teacher’s Resources
Oh, say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hail’d at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, thro’ the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watch’d, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof thro’ the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen thro’ the mists of the deep,
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream:
‘T is the star-spangled banner: O, long may it wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O, thus be it ever when freemen shall stand,
Between their lov’d homes and the war’s desolation;
Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land
Praise the Pow’r that hath made and preserv’d us as a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

 By Fred McCoy
The Chesapeake    

The men, that day, were up early, the fire was roaring in the barnyard.

Old pieces of iron were being placed on top of the fire by men using pitchforks.

The glowing hot iron later would be dropped in the large barrel of water, set at an angle, with a few boards in front and its mouth covered by several guano sacks.

The “plow point” or other type of glowing hot iron was dropped into it to make it hot. Yes, this was a real operation, a tradition on Maryland farms and one which the writer performed up until the year before last.

When I was young, the men, at first light, had begun the task of butchering and scalding the hogs. The hair had been scraped off and they had been gutted by early morning and were hanging on make-shift scaffolds, losing their animal heat in the cool air.

In the afternoon, if they had chilled sufficiently, they were placed on boards spread on saw horses were they were cut up in appropriate pieces. A large iron kettle was hanging over a fire and the fat, cut in small squares, was thrown into to it be melted into lard.

In more recent years at St. Gabriel’s this job had some slight changes. It took place around Christmas week.

We always bred, raised, fattened and butchered our own hogs, cured our own hams and bacon and made our own sausage. It was purely a family operation.

It always amazed us to hear city folks and people from other areas refer to hogs as pigs.

Pigs are sucklings, shoats are weaned and growing swine. Hogs are butchering size, either gilts-female or barrow castrated males. Boars are “unchanged” males used for breeding purposes and sows are mothers who give birth to pigs.

Just a few years ago, during Christmas week vacation, one of our sons brought home from college, several classmates. After seeing our hogs, they offered to help in butchering, something they knew nothing about.

The next morning proved to be a good day and we butchered two hogs for home use.

One of the college boys was so amazed that he wrote a description of the event for an English assignment.

He described me as an old man, who raised a rifle and fired striking the hog between the eyes and then grasping a long knife, grabbed the animal as it fell, turning it on its back and while straddling it, thrust a long shining knife into its throat, then pulling it out dripping while a red fountain shot in the air.

Well, that was a good description, but my children had witnessed it so often, it was nothing unusual, but for the college boys from the city, it must have been quite a shock.

In recent years, several of our children and some grandchildren helped on “hog-killing” day. The little ones were sent to the house for this and that, one to get the gambrel sticks that were kept from year to year.

They were made of white oak or hickory and sharpened so as to slip under then tendons in the hogs back legs to hold them apart while they were being gutted.

The older helpers were used to dunking the hogs into the very hot water and then to scrape the hair off.

We loved to have the first pork loins from our corn-fed hogs and let nothing go to waste.

The brains were used along with the feet.

The children loved the liver and heart but I kept the kidneys for myself.

My wife would make me the best kidney stew and I kept it all for myself.

Many cuts of meat were frozen in the deep freeze.

Of course, the bacon and hams were cured and it was another year before the hams would be eaten.

The “old hams” of mine were considered to be excellent, even by such experts as Miss Hope Swann of Gravelly Hills and some said they were as good as Mr. Foxwell’s of Leonardtown.

This winter there will be no hog-killing at St. Gabriel’s and the tradition will die.

(This article originally appeared in the December 1988 edition of the original THE CHESAPEAKE)

Have not you readers had enough? If I cannot tolerate myself, how can you? If I bore you, call me collect!! I went to my psychiatrist last week. He asked “What is your problem?” I replied, “I have amnesia.” He asked, “How long have you had it?” “How long have I had what?” I replied.
He had put me on the couch, and then said, “MOVE OVER!!” Now you’ve got me crazy Jack!” I told him I was available Jack and I was already spoken for! KEY OF C
“Just a gigolo – everywhere I go.”
When we returned to the waiting room there was a client with a duck on his head. My psychiatrist asked his problem. The duck spoke up and said “get this dude’s head out of me!!
Ken, you’ll have to launder this article to keep from getting sued by me!
Imagine publishing trash like this that I write about myself! Get yourself an attorney!
What do these old jokes have to do with building a hospital? You figure it out. As I mentioned before we took our problem to the County for advice. We had two interested Citizens from each district and our board met at the library.
Dr. Honey, a Doctor of Theology (no less) from New England, a professional fund raiser, present his program. He was one of the finest gentlemen I have ever met. His presentation was not a sales pitch whatsoever. The cost of raising matching funds was $24,000.00. Salaries were $12,000.00 and expenses $12,000.00. We had the usual dissenters and he spent a lot of time explaining how his program worked. After he left we appointed a committee to make the decision if whether to go it ourselves or retain his firm.
A week or so later, we met in Ollie Guyther’s office. Ollie, Bascoum Broun, President of First National, Allen Coad, President of County Trust, (State Wide), Bob Dean, Frank Abell, Ben Burroughs, Ernest Bell and maybe a couple of others.
They had had a meeting before this one and decided that the committee was going to put on the fund raising drive themselves at the cost of $18,000.00 for supplies and a secretary.
The Bell Brothers loaned us the old County Trust Building. I asked who was going to run the Campaign and they had selected Guyther.
Ollie said “I am a Lawyer (and a good one) know nothing about raising money but sure know how to spend it!”
They turned to me and said, “You are Chairman of the Board – you run it.” I said, “Gentlemen – I’ll fly you in an airplane, mix you a drink, play you a hoe-down on my fiddle but know nothing about fund raising.
There was much conversation about what to do. I said, “Gentleman” There is $600,000.00 donated by the Federal Government. We are about to lose it due to amateurs doing their best to put the campaign together. Without success. We are discussing $18,000.00 (Our cost) or $24,000.00 (Dr. Honey’s cost).
This is a difference of $6000.00 and we are about to lose $600,000.00. Ollie get me a set of dice and I’ll roll with these odds day and night! (they thought Ollie was going to reach in his pocket and hand me a pair). They said that they had never thought of it that way. You just won that roll!! 

Now we are off and running. I feel real good and confident. Dr. Honey sent three professional fundraisers, two were college graduates, man and wife – great people. We got the literature, pamphlets, etc. printed. They handled no funds. We had Bascoum Broun and Charles Fenwick as Treasurers.
Dr. Fishbein, M.D. came to the kick off dinner at Little Flower School. He was head of the American Medical Association. His speech lasted forty-five minutes. Igor Sikorskly talked the same length of time at the “O” Club.
You could hear a pin drop during either of their speeches. Dr. Honey solicited me and it took Penny and I several years to pay our pledge. Then I had to solicit my board and the Doctors.
It was one Heckuva job to raise their sights. I told him what I pledged and their reply was that we were rich. I said I am absolutely not rich and only act that way and still do!!
Harry Ocker and Frank Barley collected the funds on the base for us. I had a rough time getting money out of the Park because of the Leonardtown – Lexington Park friction.
Many called me the Leonardtown kid and still do. One of my cleaner nicknames!The big stumbling blocks were the slot machine operators. WHAT GREED. WHAT IGNORANCE. I couldn’t believe it. It was sickening.
There was no state tax on them at the time. L. Goldstein had a law passed over in Calvert County taxing their machines and giving it directly to the Hospital. I had to listen to that and the greed of the slot operator over and over.
Time was of the essence. This thing had floundered about two years before I got on the board. (I do not mind a bit of self flattering.) Thank God we had the good St. Mary’s Countians backing me up.
Things are moving forward and we can smell sweet success. We open the bid at the hospital and Colonel Duke (a fine gentleman) gets the bid. Oh, before I forget it, Fulton Lewis, Jr. had a big affair for us. He had so many people we used the Drill Hall on the base. Some of his guests included Senator Joe McCarthy, Jack Rue, Jeannete McDonald, Jack Rue, Charles Laughton, Jack Rue, V.P. Nixon, Jack Rue, etc.

Central Air Conditioning were first being perfected and were not in our plans. Eleanor Peabody air conditioned that hospital with window units

single handedly and we never forget her. The hospital is now being constructed. We get our first $300,000 from under some and are using our funds. Colonel Duke called me on a Monday and said they were going to shut the job down in a week as we were out of funds.
The other $300,000 had not arrived, I got on the phone. The money had to go through our State Treasury from the Federal Government Mervel Dean came in the Roost one day. He was V.P. on the Board. What to do? He said I’m going to call my political enemy.
A little later Phil Dorsey walked in. We talk. Phil went to the phone. He never said who he called. After a few drinks the phone rang for Mr. Dorsey. He said “Mervel, Jack, the money will be here tomorrow delivered by a state trooper.”
I have no idea who he shook up. He was people’s counsel at the time. Later he told me some bureaucrat had mislaid it in his desk.
These were the good old days when this was DORSEY LAND (Paul Bailey and Joe Weiner were his junior partners) and don’t you forget it. Many people resented it but it was true. If they didn’t like the Democratic candidate that won the primary, they put in a Republican. This was with a five to one Democratic to Republican registration.

The Dorseyites met the night before election at Cecil’s Store in Great Mills and then went politicking. Two Dollar bills and miniatures of whiskey were very conspicuous on election day.
THE KNOT HOLE ELECTION.
Now don’t forget this one. We had wooden precincts sort of like outhouses in some districts. One of our outstanding citizens stood in back of the precinct, the ballot was passed out through the Knot Hole, he worked it and passed it back with the bill curled up in it. This was done by a stalwart member of the loyal opposition to the Dorseys. Don’t you just love it? Who is holier than thou?

I took my mask off for Halloween!! Went to my favorite bar naked and backed in as a parker house roll and the girls autographed my buns.