Crossing The Bay Bridge And Entering Summer

The last Saturday in June was the day we said goodbye to Baltimore and packed it up for the summer. As a child, it was a day I anticipated all year, then remembered for its unforgettable set of rituals.

By the end of June the pace of our domestic life was slowing. The heat had set in, and, as a neighbor once observed, there was never an electric fan in our home. Baltimore was just different in the summer. The downtown department stores closed at noon on Saturdays. As you walked the streets you heard Orioles games on radios through all the open windows.

My relatives were industrious morning people who worked hard before the summer sun got going. For weeks before that June Saturday we collected cardboard boxes for packing. We went away for a month or more, sometimes the entire summer, and took necessities such as traveling steam irons and cast-iron frying pans.

At about 9 or 10 on that Saturday morning, we finally cast off from the alley behind our Guilford Avenue home, the neighbors assembled on back porches and waved us off for a happy departure; most neighbors indulged in the same practice a few weeks later when they called at our summer addresses and spent some time. Those without cars arrived via the Carolina Trailways bus, which served the Eastern Shore and Delaware on curiously zigzag routes that involved excruciating traveling times.

My elders traditionally dressed formally but not on a travel day. They acted as if crossing the Bay Bridge were crossing the meridian. For this arduous, 114-mile excursion of three hours (tops), my grandmother and great aunt wore elasticized turbans atop heavy hairnets. My grandfather, rarely seen without a suit and tie, produced a khaki shirt and khaki trousers, along with a matching canvas cap with broad visor. He could have been on an archaeological dig.

The then-new Bay Bridge was a talking point. Some days there weren't enough toll takers on duty. That occasioned my grandfather to give one of his sermons on the complete and totally inefficiency of all Maryland governmental agencies. He also paid the toll in silver dollars, just to get a reaction from the unsuspecting collectors.

A civil engineer, he habitually rapped the bridge's design, which he held should have been four lanes wide, with a pair of train tracks down the center. In 1954 it was one lane in each direction.

More