I was saddened to learn of the death of Bob Blatchley, one-time Baltimore news reporter and a story teller so gifted he would make his Irish ancestors proud. Blatchley was one of our favorite people. Joe Curran had it right when he said, "He was a man who had nothing but friends." Blatchley brightened any fire, crime or election scene into which, cigarette at lip and notebook or microphone in hand, he strolled. He worked for The News-American and some of the radio stations here. He spoke in as strong a Bawlmer accent as you'd ever hear, and made not attempt to disguise it or even polish it for broadcast.
Blatch was a hard-working news reporter, trying to patch together enough income to support his family. I first encountered him when the governor or Maryland was on trial in federal court. For a time, in my experience, he was Forrest Gump, showing up at every major event in the Baltimore of the 1970s -- the Good Friday killing of a police officer, the crash of a plane into Memorial Stadium, the World Series, the Preakness, major elections and indictments. Blatch seemed to relish opportunities to teach me a thing or two about Baltimore -- and it didn't matter that I worked for the competition, The Evening Sun.
Blatch seemed to always be around, and then suddenly, he was gone from the news business. He'd been going to law school at night, and now the time had come for a career change. After that, almost every time I saw Blatch he was dressed in a jacket and tie, and he had a briefcase. But he still had funny stories.
He was employed for a time with the Maryland public defender. I saw him in District Court one day, holding a stack of files, searching in the gallery for men and women he'd been assigned to defend. There's a time, about 30 minutes before court convenes, when assistant public defenders might stand before the assemblage of defendants and their families and simply call out names. Blatch and another PD were doing this together one morning, taking turns calling out names, except the names Blatch uttered were all famous murderers: "Richard Speck? Richard Speck here? . . Elizabeth Borden? Is there an Elizabeth Borden here? Looks like a failure to appear . . . . " This went on for several minutes, with none of the real defendants recognizing the joke.
Blatch always had a joke, or an amusing anecdote. I think I first heard the phrase "listing to starboard from too much port" when it came off Blatch's lips in telling a story of a drunk, and the story probably came from Blatch's experiences growing up near Greenmount Avenue and Dolan's Bar and Grill in the old 9th Ward.
Dolan's had been opened by an immigrant Irish family in the 1920s and became a Baltimore institution over the decades. The Irish-Americans gathered there to plot politics and, beginning in the 1950s, Joe Dolan made the family-run tavern a theater where hospitality and pranks were raised to art forms. Blatch told me all these stories -- how Joe Dolan kept a casket in the bar's basement so he could play jokes on passed-out patrons by placing them in it, guaranteeing that they'd wake up terrified and full of promises never to a drop of grog again; how he rigged a bar stool with electricity, how he flew his airplane low over Greenmount Avenue and tossed dummies from the aircraft. All those tales came from Blatch. He had an endless supply. He loved his hometown and he was one its great story-tellers. Last time I saw him, at a lacrosse game, I suggested he write a book. I don't know if he did. If not, then surely it's our loss, but surely heaven's gain.
