The Yellowed Pages: News from 25 years ago in The Baltimore Guide
by Jacqueline Watts
editor@baltimoreguide.com
July 8, 1982
Bethlehem Steel announced that it was cutting the pay of salaried white-collar workers by five percent. The pay cut would affect 5,000 workers in Baltimore, or about a quarter of the workforce.
A Bethlehem spokesman said that it would save the company $15 million a year. Unionized workers were not affected.
Mayor William Donald Schaefer shook out the cushions of the municipal couch and found $2 million to call back 225 furloughed public school teachers. A hundred of those were elementary school teachers. John Crew, superintendent of public instruction, said he did not anticipate any further rehirings and that the recall number “was a little better than I had anticipated.”
The imposition of martial law in Poland meant that couples were marrying—and divorcing—at a record rate. The newspaper Kurier Polski reported that many couples were marrying because “people believe that it is easier and more secure to be together.”
As for the divorce rate, that was easily explained. The Communist Party had decreed that one couple could not own more than one house or apartment, so in cases where a couple owned two apartments, a quick divorce allowed them to keep both. A divorce was easy to obtain in state court, but the Roman Catholic Church did not recognize the divorce.
Cindy Kastina of N. Montford Ave. was chosen as a finalist in the Miss Maryland Teenager Pageant. Cindy graduated from The Catholic High School, where she was a member of the Ecology Club and Spanish Club and participated in the senior talent show. She also edited the school paper. Her parents, Frank and Betty Kastina, sponsored her in the pageant.
The American Cancer Society recommended that women over 50 have an annual mammogram, saying that mammograms were more valuable as a detection tool than previously thought. The ACS reported taht nearly 90 percent of more than 3,500 cancers discovered in a study conducted in 27 cities were found by mammography, as opposed to 56 percent found by a physical exam.
A 23-year-old man was hospitalized at Johns Hopkins Hospital after he was shot in the throat. Roger Bullock was arguing with another man in the 1800 block Orleans Street when the man pulled out a handgun and shot Bullock. The bullet cut through his spine and he was paralyzed. Police were looking for Bullock’s assailant, who was described as 6-1, about 230 pounds, and about 30 years old.
A Princeton University researcher predicted that within a decade couples would choose the sex of their children. Charles Westoff, a demographer, said that couples that he surveyed said they would never do such a thing, but he compared that to public attitudes about the automobile in the early years of the century (people said they would never get in such a contraption). Westover said that a simple sex-selection method was at least a decade away. His survey, taken of 3,400 randomly selected women across the country, was taken in 1975 but only recently analyzed.
The furor over a controversial call in a Little League game continued to boil on the letters to the editor page. George Dopkowski, a “concerned parent of the Highlandtown Exchange Club Little League,” wrote on June 24 to protest what he called biased officiating. He did not describe the play that led to the call.
A letter in answer to Dopkowski’s letter explained a bit. George M. McCord Jr., president of the league, wrote that a player had used “vulgar and abusive” language to an umpire and that his parent used the same language after the game.
Stephen McIntyre, a 30-year-old who had participated in Little League as a player, coach, manager or ump since he was eight, laid the matter to rest most eloquently: “It seems we miss the intent of a Little League sometimes. It is set up to have young boys and girls compete against each other in a spirit of sportsmanship and friendly rivalry while they are learning the game. When we feel it is more important to win a game than to enjoy a game, something is out of order.”
Gasoline prices averaged $1.31 a gallon, eight cents higher than at the Memorial Day weekend.
Elmer “Elmo” Walters reminisced about the days when Canton was CAN-ton.
He wrote about Joseph Thaddeus Kasprzak, who spent a good part of his youth filling cans with string beans and tomato juice for 10 cents an hour. He worked at several canneries: Southern Can, Foote’s, Langralls, Booth’s and McGrath’s on Boston Street and Roberts on Luzerne Avenue. Kasprzak said the job was so boring he would fall asleep sometimes, but it paid enough to get him into the movies or for a swim in Patterson Park.
