* Howard Kohn is the author of Talk of Takoma articles unless otherwise noted.
July 2009 • Talk of Takoma
"Sometimes the work stops"
by Howard Kohn
Aaron Lavallee saw the pillaging as soon as he walked up to Takoma Park’s new community garden on a Sunday morning in June. Green orbs that had been hanging in plain view the day before on tomato and tomatillo plants were missing, snipped off.
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Garden guru Aaron Lavellee nets in his plants to keep deer out.
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June 2009 • Talk of Takoma
Classic sports song shows versaility in the hands of local philanthropist
by Howard Kohn
When Jeff Campbell told his board of directors that he planned to produce a CD of baseball songs as a way to fund his do-gooder organization, Hungry for Music, they were more than a tad skeptical. Songs they could understand, but baseball songs? “Yeah, they thought it was a little nuts,” Jeff said the other day at his Takoma Park office, reflecting on the release of his twelfth baseball CD.
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For Jeff Campbell, baseball is a touchstone that has helped him raise money to buy musical instruments for underprivileged children |
June 2009 • Talk of Takoma
A good-looking legacy
by Howard Kohn
Ward Six looks a lot better now than when Doug Barry was first elected to the City Council almost six years ago. There are evergreen shrubs and bright flowers in new traffic circles. There is a fine-looking black metal fence along newly bricked medians on University Boulevard. There is a new park with plans for stone walls.
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May 2009 • Talk of Takoma
Meals on Wheels & fish on pedals
by Howard Kohn
For the past 11 years Jill Feasley has made sure that an apartment-dwelling Silver Spring woman gets a freshly cooked noon meal and an afternoon sandwich five days a week. The woman, now 94 years old, invariably escorts the food courier to the elevator and invariably says, “Press ‘L’ because if you press ‘1’ you’ll go to the basement.” But the other day the elevator wasn’t working. The courier headed for the stairs. “No, no,” the woman said firmly. She commenced kicking the elevator door. “I’ll fix it!”
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Photo by Jill Feasley
The snakehead fish, a local "kinetic structure" in its natural environment. |
May 2009 • Talk of Takoma
Reuben’s ride and recuperation
by Howard Kohn
Reuben Snipper, who represents Ward Five, stayed home and phoned in his contribution to the City Council sessions the last two weeks of April, but don’t assume he had shoeless feet on a hassock and a bowl of popcorn at his elbow. He had his left arm in a sling, and to the extent he could move around he had to hop about on his right leg.
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Photo by Julie Wiatt
Reuben Snipper |
May 2009 • Talk of Takoma
Tom's new appointment
by Howard Kohn
Before Takoma Park’s Tom Perez was elected to the Montgomery County Council in 2002 and before he was appointed the Maryland secretary of labor in 2007, he was a prosecutor in the civil rights division of the U. S. Justice Department handling such notorious cases as a hate-crime spree by whte supremicists in Texas.
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Photo by Julie Wiatt
Tom Perez |
April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
“What am I getting myself into?”
by Howard Kohn
The cold was bad last September 19 in the King’s Inn parking lot on the first morning of Kevin Edwards’ Tacoma-to-Takoma odyssey, biking east from the state of Washington toward the Washington on the opposite coast. After a while his hands hurt so much he could barely switch gears. Of course, he had forgotten his gloves. He had packed his gear in a rush after eleven days of hiking across the face of Mt. Rainier with his dad, Bruce.
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Photo by Lucas Braun
Kevin Edwards and Lucas Braun biked across the country from Tacoma to Takoma. |
April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
Mystery of the “drive-in bank”
by Howard Kohn
Ever since the Takoma Park community center opened more than three years ago an unfinished concrete jut-out to the side of the front entrance has been a sort of mystery. A surface of pea gravel made for difficult walking, and anyway trespassers were unwelcome. City Councilmember Doug Barry joked that, flat and empty, suspended over open concrete walls, the space looked like “the roof of a drive-in bank.”
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Photo by Julie Wiatt
The ground-floor “roof” of the Community Center is slated for greening. |
April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
At the moment clocks sprang forward an hour in the wee of March 8, the earliest date ever for Daylight Savings Time, someone should have inserted an asterisk in the record book to give credit to Jim Benfield, the Takoma Park guy who, more than anyone else, sold Congress on the philosophy that earlier is better.
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April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
Alanna Natanson says, “I wanted to start a book club because I love to read.” But reading the likes of Diary of Anne Frank, Catcher in the Rye, The Outsiders and To Kill a Mockingbird meant that Alanna had started the “Banned Book Club.” With help and encouragement from Karen MacPherson, children’s librarian at the Takoma Park Library, Alanna recruited other young students for monthly readings of books that have occupied a spot on lists of censored writings.
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12-year-old Alanna Natanson, founder of a Banned Books Club for middle-schoolers, with children’s librarian Karen McPherson |
April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
The Department of Defense, a major landowner and employer in Montgomery County, is seeking conservation partnerships with the community to increase the impact of the military’s internal natural resources programs and the community’s parallel efforts. This call echoes the county’s recently christened sustainability drive, an intensive effort calling on community stakeholders to help “green” the county.
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April 2009 • Talk of Takoma
“Something even more interesting”
by Howard Kohn
In recent months Kay Daniels-Cohen noticed the dwindling of the odd lot of collectibles that had always been on display just inside the picture window of Takoma Framers, a historic shop at Takoma Junction. “Maybe it’s just me, but I felt depressed not seeing all those little items,” she said, before venturing into the store to make an inquiry.
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February 2009 • Talk of Takoma
“Hopefully, word will get around”
by Howard Kohn
Maynor Escovar is still learning the ropes when it comes to life in the States, and he wasn’t aware of the front-page assertion in the Sunday, January 11 edition of the Washington Post that, even in Takoma Park, there is a new get-tough attitude toward immigrants because presumably they are more likely to be criminally active.
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November 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Sparky on the war brought home:
“Can I see another’s woe?”
by Howard Kohn
Last year the Takoma Park poet-psychologist John Breeskin, a retired Air Force major who once tried out for the Packers and Eagles and who, at age 73, prefers to be called “Sparky” rather than by any professional title, was asked to talk to a young American soldier home from Iraq but unable to leave behind the affects of the war.
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John Breeskin — Sparky the Mind Doctor |
October 2008 • Talk of Takoma
The artists Sam
& Byron: Fancy meeting you
by Howard Kohn
In the movies a random intersection of two strangers can be the opening act for romance (kindred souls bumping shoulders on a busy street) or perhaps espionage (ah! – then it may not be a chance encounter). But a happenstance that leads to a story about art? Where’s the drama?
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The Carrol avenue mural draws inspiration from surrounding architectural styles. |
October 2008 • Talk of Takoma
He didn't keep score
by Howard Kohn
The college boys who spoke at the memorial service of Reuben Gist, the big-smiling, high-fiving bear of a guy who used to coach them in the local Babe Ruth league, described how disconcerting it was during the course of a game to ask him about the score. Reuben, with scorebook in hand, would always say, “I don’t know.”
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Reuben Gist |
September 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Tim, Pete & kids go birding:
“Pretty cool to see so many”
by Howard Kohn
To be available for the morning avian show along Sligo Creek it’s wise to be an early bird yourself. On a recent morning Tim Male and Pete Marra, two of Takoma Park’s professional naturalists, fed sugar-high donuts to their second-grade daughters, Zoe and Aline, and then embarked on a stealthy hike along the creek banks with six other youngsters and affiliated adults.
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Searching high and low -- seven-year-olds Zoe Roberts, Lucy Gavin and Aline Marra. |
September 2008 • Talk of Takoma
“It all comes down to a couple minutes”
by Howard Kohn
On August 7 Jeff McCandless and his wife Veronica took a break from Amano, the eclectic gift shop they own in Old Takoma, and boarded a plane for the Beijing Olympics. They had been anticipating the trip for four years, ever since their son, a champion kayaker, had been the last one cut in the last qualifying run for the Athens Olympics.
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Pablo McCandless on a breakneck run down the kayak slalom at the Beijing Olympics |
August 2008 • Talk of Takoma
A parade, a beauty queen and a new basketball league
by Howard Kohn
While some observers of the Independence Day parade may have considered it an outlandish throwback or may have simply missed the connection, Kay Daniels-Cohen, who came up with the idea, considered it as normal as apple pie that a lovely lady riding in a convertible, her slightly disheveled red hair adorned with a sparkling plastic tiara, should be the advertising gimmick for a new youth basketball league in Takoma Park.
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Howard Kohn revels in Independence. |
August 2008 • Talk of Takoma
“We’re close, very close”
by Howard Kohn
For the pared-down economy of 2008 a type of concretized exterior siding and old standby wooden 2-by-4’s are now in and the more stylish copper panels and the sturdier metal studs are now out in a new design of Ecco Park, a four-story complex awaiting construction at an unsightly vacant lot at Carroll and Maple Avenues inside the District, just on the other side of the boundary line.
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July 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Some cooks are made, not born
by Howard Kohn
Before Carol Blymire won the role of lead character in a Wall Street Journal feature about the food blogosphere published in May and even before she showed up at the Old Takoma farmers’ market in March attended by a TV camera crew assigned to document her rendition of a braised, stuffed pig’s head, an experience as unappetizingly difficult as it sounds that became for her a three-day marathon of hacking through the boar-skull with a “crap saw,” scooping out the face meat and other gross-outs and ended with a panic attack at the denouement – before all of this, Carol’s blog about her personal odyssey with the “French Laundry Cookbook” was already a hit.
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Carol Blymire went whole hog into her culinary blogging project |
June 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
“Siblings, yes, definitely siblings,” Jack Carson said of the squirrels as they stopped every few seconds to tease each other on a recent May afternoon. The two young gray squirrels fussed across the spreading limbs of a maple tree behind the “Ivy House” at Auburn and Elm where Jack was raised and where he still hangs his hat.
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Squirrel nibbles corn on Adirondack chair |
June 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
Unglamorous sex, the diminished legacy of Al Jolson and the insolvent dream of every medium-height white jock at Blair—such are the themes of Takoma Park native David Andalman’s 10-minute independent film that made the cut at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City this spring.
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Indy filmmaker David Andalman with his mom Martha Bergmark |
June 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Marika Partridge
Uncle Ed” Hume lived in downtown Takoma Park for 47 years. He was a striking figure: tall, thin, and straight-backed. He was a Master Tile Setter, a maverick who chose not to have a telephone, and sometimes decided to do a job for free. When he refused payment for laying a floor at Mark’s Kitchen, Mark refused to let Uncle pay for meals. That’s how the corner table at Mark’s became the place to find Uncle Ed if you needed him.
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Tile portrait of Ed Hume, by John Hume, will hang in Mark’s Kitchen |
June 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Janet Baldwin Anderson spotted these yellow-crowned night herons sauntering down Lancaster Road in Takoma Park, and nesting in nearby trees.
Send us your views of Takoma Park: photos @ takoma . com.
May 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Ginger vs. the assassins
by Howard Kohn
In the predatory world that Ginger inhabits a career lawyer is her best friend. And her worst nightmare occurred a while ago when, in the middle of the night, a possum snuck through an opening in the floor of her cleverly engineered, scrap-lumber henhouse.
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May 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
No one keeps track of such records, but it’s hard to imagine that anyone will ever be witness to more Independence Day parades in Takoma Park than Elizabeth Degan.
She started in 1912, the year she was born, and her streak lasted until 2005 when she was injured in a fall.
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April 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
In the apostle business, you seldom find the preservation of the native Frisian tongue on Top Ten lists. But when you grow up in the home of Frisian nationalists, as Welmoed Laanstra did, then it seems a little less odd to be teaching daughters a language that is important to fewer than half a million people congregated in a northern sphere of the Old World.
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Takoma Park artist Welmoed Laanstra is ensuring that her native language passes to her daughters, Maaike and Amarins. |
April 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
The impulse to buy a Fantastic 5 scratch-off from the Maryland Lottery struck John McQuillan four times on a recent day in March. That qualified as a mood bordering on recklessness for John, whose success as owner of Salon JAM is a by-the-bootstraps story.
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April 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
The house at 7010 Westmoreland sits as a transitional marker between residential and commercial at the edge of Old Takoma. In the 1990s, the house was occupied by Mary Chapin Carpenter’s management team. Now the house is about to become an iconic location once again.
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April 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Sam’s Wide World
photo by Sam Kittner
by Howard Kohn
Digital technology allows photographers to cheat a bit and stitch together several still frames into a panorama that looks better on photo stock than in real life, but you still have to have an eye.
The wide-angle looks of Sligo Creek and the downtown DC landmarks that have made Takoma Park photographer Sam Kittner a local legend recently received regional coverage in a four-page spread of Washingtonian magazine, April edition.
“The article has garnered some nice attention to my work and brought inquiries for both art print purchases and commercial commissions,” said the always nonplussed Sam. |
March 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
Back in November, when the idea of entering a national C-SPAN video contest first made the rounds at Takoma Park Middle, it seemed to ESOL teacher Hue Tran, whose students have recently arrived in the U. S., often with big lapses in formal education, that producing a 10-minute video-documentary could be fun, almost a lark.
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March 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
The supple and sinewy glass sculpture that won Takoma Park artist Jackie Braitman a prestigious NICHE award in February cannot hold up a bookcase, let alone a wall.
This is what it has come to for Jackie, who has fully left behind the world of carpentry and bulldozers, where she started, for the elegant and somewhat fanciful artwork she calls “movement in glass.”
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March 2008
Ding-a-Ling loses but will be back
by Howard Kohn
The left hook that Takoma Park boxer Darnell Wilson, known as “The Ding-A-Ling Man,” landed for a knockout victory last June made him, at the old age of 33, the U. S. Boxing Association 200-pound cruiserweight champion and an Internet celebrity. By many accounts it was the baddest punch of the year, rendering his opponent Emmanuel Nwodo instantly unconscious.
On February 8, in his first title defense, he relinquished it when he was outpointed by a younger challenger, B. J. Flores, in Dover, Delaware. Darnell says he has no plans to retire, though, |
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February 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
There is a new spring gurgling at Spring Park, but no one is going to name it after Todd Bolton, the City’s can-do arborist, because he did not discover it so much as free it.
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Arborist Bolton has created two small wetlands from the soggy area in Spring Park, a piedmont bog and a coastal plain wetland. The site overlooks the picnic and playground area. |
February 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
The menu for the January 27 meeting of the Fourth-grade All-Boys Book Club was Irish cheddar, salmon, water crackers and caviar, the selections of Carter Tipton who thought they suited the stylish playboy ways of the protagonist in the club’s book of the month, Artemis Fowl, from the fantasy series by Irish author Eoin Colfer.
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February 2008 • Talk of Takoma
Former City Councilmember Hank Prensky (far right) is a regular at the peace rallies held the third Friday of every month at the Takoma metro station between 6 and 7 p.m. At the January rally about 20 members of the Takoma Park Presbyterian Church joined the regulars from the peace group, Iraq Moratorium. The group then gathered for a potluck supper at the church. |
February 2008 • Talk of Takoma
by Howard Kohn
José Dominguez is now arguably the man at the center of the arts world of Takoma Park and the arts world of Silver Spring. Modesty carries a high premium with Jose, so he would beg off on the characterization. But what else call the chairman of Takoma Park’s Arts & Humanities Commission and the new executive director of Silver Spring’s Pyramid Atlantic Art Center?
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