News from 25 years ago in The Baltimore Guide

by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com

April 29, 1982
City homicide detectives were working on a case at the Flag House Courts housing project where two women were found bound and strangled a week before. Police said the apartment had not been ransacked and there was no sign of forced entry; the two women, ages 27 and 23, may have known their attacker. Police had no suspects.
A&P joined the parade of supermarket chains demanding concessions from union workers. The company said that 2,200 unionized meatcutters, cashiers and clerks at area A&P stores would have to consider lower wages and fewer benefits—or lose their jobs altogether. The cuts would add up to about $2 per hour per worker. Most of the workers made between $10 and $12 an hour.
The Enoch Pratt Free Library announced that it would have to close six branch libraries, one in each councilmanic district, to cover an operating deficit of $850,000. The system had 32 branches at the time, and each of them had closed for one month during the year to save money. Pratt director Anna Curry said that the Pratt had given its best effort to save money and could think of no alternative to closing the branches.
City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of extortion and mail fraud. Orlinsky allegedly received $11,000 in exchange for his influence in awarding the city sludge-hauling contracts.
The director of an East Baltimore urban services agency was arrested by the FBI and charged with stealing and reselling more than half a ton of government surplus cheese. Harold D. Wright, 47, was arrested at his Randallstown home as FBI agents confiscated 510 pounds of cheese from the back seat of his car. The cheese was labeled “U.S. Department of Agriculture, for food help programs, not to be sold or exchanged.” Wright was head of the Urban Services Agency center at the Dunbar multi-purpose  center.
Three inmates escaped from the Maryland State Penitentiary on April 11, 1982, and the state prisons chief responded by firing two assistant wardens there. Jon Galley, state commissioner of corrections, said that the escapes could have been prevented had procedures been followed.
Two inmates on janitorial detail overpowered guards and took over a control center, unlocked the front door of the prison and took off with another inmate. One of them was later killed in a shootout with police. The Easter Sunday escape was the first in a series of breakouts from Maryland correctional facilities. A convicted murderer, an inmate from the House of Correction in Jessup, was still at large after disappearing during a visit to University Hospital on April 19, and two more inmates escaped from the State Pen on April 22 but were recaptured almost immediately.
Mayor William Donald Schaefer visited Washington to pitch Baltimore as a candidate for an enterprise zone in Park Heights. He also shot another volley in his feud with Governor Harry Hughes, asking the Senate Finance subcommittee to leave Hughes out of the process of forming a business and industrial zone in the city. The rules for forming the zones called for the state and city to apply together, but Schaefer told the subcommittee he did not want to give Hughes “veto power” over matters in the city.
Police responding to a distress call about a man sitting in his basement threatening to blow his house up ended up shooting him. Daniel Lee Wade, 37, was in satisfactory condition at Church Home after a shot by Officer Paul Valeri passed through his right cheek and out the back of his neck.
Police said that Wade’s wife called the police after Wade, who had been drinking all day, descended to the basement, opened the gas valve and produced a pack of matches. When police arrived, they asked him to drop the matches but Wade reportedly refused, then made a quick move toward the gas valve while threatening to blow the officers up. Wade was charged with three counts of assault with a deadly weapon.
The youth group at St. Paul Lutheran Church held a concert of folk songs and lieder to benefit the pediatric oncology unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The concert featured the Patapsco High School Chorale, Sweet Adelines quartet, St. Michael’s folk singers and St. Philip’s Gospel choir.