December, 2006 |
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Marc Elrich era ends in Ward Five;
Two candidates compete
in special election
For the first time since 1987 Marc Elrich no longer represents Ward Five on the City Council. Marc was treated to a good-bye tribute in his final Council meeting on November 27th, one week before being sworn in as an at-large member of the Montgomery County Council.
 Applause erupted several times, and Hank Prensky, who served with Marc on the Council in the 1990’s, triggered laughs and cheers. “We have the strange situation of losing a great representative at the same time we’re gaining a great representative,” he said from the podium. “As they say with the Queen, long live our representative!”
Marc is the first member of the Council to go directly to higher office in more than a generation, although Heather Mizeur, only a year removed from the Council, was also elected on November 7th, winning one of the District 20 seats in the Maryland General Assembly.
After the testimonials were done Marc thanked his friends and colleagues and noted that altogether four Takoma Park residents now hold elected office outside the town boundaries. The other two are Peter Franchot, the new state comptroller and the first politician from Takoma Park elected to a statewide office, and George Leventhal, reelected to the County Council. “It’s no longer a big negative to be from Takoma Park,” Marc said. “There’s no doubt this change benefited me, and I want to express my gratitude to the Council and all the town leaders for how business has been conducted over the past several years. We’re still perceived as very liberal, very progressive, but we’re no longer kooky.”
Meanwhile, Ward Five voters get to choose a new Council member by special election on January 30th. Marc has been an institution in the ward, rarely drawing a challenger, but already two men, Reuben Snipper and Eric Hensal, have declared their intent to run for the one year left in his term.
Reuben, who moved here with his wife Cheryl Morden in 1984 after finishing a PhD in international development, has been doing policy analysis of welfare, teen pregnancy and other poverty-related issues at the Department of Health and Human Services. He and Cheryl, who works for the United Nations, were soccer, baseball and basketball parents while raising three kids, all now off to college or beyond.
Bilingual in Spanish, Reuben lived in El Salvador for a while in the 1960’s as a Peace Corps volunteer and then in Mexico in the 1970’s. Among his civic endeavors here: a long term on the Takoma Park Nuclear Free Zone Committee and a steady numbers-crunching role with citizen groups, most recently dealing with the Washington Adventist Hospital’s plans for expansion.
Eric arrived in town with his wife Sonya Adamo in 2003, and they have since become the parents of a son Nicolas, who, tucked in a baby stroller, often accompanies his dad to meetings of the Regional Advisory Board of Silver Spring. Eric has been active in getting full funding for the downtown Silver Spring civic center that is to be built on the vacant lot covered with artificial grass.
He is a 15-year P. R. consultant who has done work for the Washington Building Trades Council and the American Federation of Teachers; “my preferred clients are unions and non-profits.”
Qualifying for the ballot requires the signatures of ten registered voters who live in Ward Five, an area bounded roughly by Sligo Creek, Carroll Avenue, Flower Avenue and Piney Branch Road. An election poll will be open 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. at Columbia Union College’s Wilkerson Hall.
Crowded contest
to replace Valerie Ervin
on school board
A rush of 20 applicants put in for the position on the school board vacated by Valerie Ervin, but Chris Barclay, the well-credentialed former Blair Cluster coordinator, has Valerie’s backing and seems the favorite for the appointment.
The elected members of the board will interview the finalists on December 9th and make a choice either that day or soon afterward. Valerie was elected on November 7th to the District Five seat on the County Council, an area encompassing Silver Spring and Takoma Park, the same area she represented on the school board. Two years remain in her term.
Chris, a Verizon project manager, is a veteran organizer inside the local PTAs, the NAACP and the local sports leagues and is a former president of the Takoma Foundation. Ten-year residents of Takoma Park, he and his wife Sambia have three adolescent children in the public schools. “My goals are to aggressively address the ‘achievement gap,’ make our system more user-friendly and maintain a high degree of transparency and accountability,” he says.
Fran Rothstein, another longtime PTA activist, calls Chris “the very, very best from a very good field.”
Two former board members – Blair graduate Sebastian Johnson, now a Georgetown freshman, and Kermit Burnett, a previous appointee who chose not to campaign in the 2004 primary – also applied, as did Sheldon Fishman, a two-time unsuccessful candidate who lost to Valerie in the 2004 general election.
Other contenders are Beth Wong and Alies Muskin, both experienced leaders of the county council of PTAs, and Michael Pauls, a pastor with Mosaic Community Fellowship who has been active in the NAACP and elementary-school PTAs.
A boy who studied
for a future
he knew
might not be his
Nahom Hailu turned in his homework on time and dedicated himself in class as much as any sixth-grader last year at Takoma Park Middle. If anything he tried harder. The way he applied himself hid from almost everyone the fact his heart, the blood-forcing pump itself, was giving out and only a transplant could save him. Even teachers and students who were aware of Nahom’s condition thought of him as a kid of normal zest always ready for the next day.
In spring, toward the end of the school year, he began to miss classes. It became clear he would be too weak to sit for the required county MSA exam, but he insisted on taking the exam at home.
This fall, although Nahom was absent from the seventh grade, the tonic of the History Channel kept his interest. He read books. He leaned against the kitchen stove and practiced cooking. His mother encouraged him and stayed home with him as much as she could, as did his sister, a junior at Blair, while their father remained at work in their native Ethiopia, unable to join the rest of the family.
As the time for Nahom’s transplant drew near, his heart suffered new failures, and then, before surgery, the worst of fears was realized.
A service for him took place on November 8th at First Assembly of God Church in Silver Spring. “We’ll remember him for his love of life and love of learning,” says Yasmin Anderson-Smith, a president of the school PTA.
Yasmin and the other president, Michelle Harvey, are attempting to find a new job for Nahom’s mom who lost her old one because of the time spent with him. They can be reached at yazzz1@aol.com or fourharveys@rcn.com.
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On Saturday, Oct. 14, DC mayoral candidate (now mayor-elect) Adrian Fenty (center) helped Ethan and Michael Landis cut the ribbon for their new Design-Build Center on Blair Road.
The building was constructed using green principles. Read our article about the new building.
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Two local writers
speak
to film noir’s
“idealistic disillusionment”
“Tell me if this isn’t true,” panelist Jim Grady said to fellow panelist George Pelecanos at the evening finale of the Takoma Park Film Festival in the community center on November 19th. “You take a meeting, and soon as you hear, ‘Oh, I love film noir,’ you know it’s going to be bad.”
George gave a nod, and Jim went on. “Because you’re going to ask what movies they mean, and they’re going to say, ‘Oh, well, I loved Chinatown,’ and you’re going to sigh and know they never saw Kiss Me Deadly.”
George and Jim, distinguished writers of crime fiction who live a few blocks from each other on the Takoma Park-Silver Spring border, had their focus on the 1955 classic Kiss Me Deadly, perhaps the purest example of American noir cinema, because George helped produce a new documentary about A. I. Bezzerides, the movie’s scriptwriter who made it into a dark-with-silver whipsaw of military corruption and ambiguous love. The literary form has been called “idealistic disillusionment.” There is a quality of existentialism to his hard-boiled lines: “I want you to kiss meÉThe liar’s kiss that says, ‘I love you,’ but means something else.”
What a dressing-up for a Mickey Spillane novel.
George liked Mr. Bezzerides for his erudition and his roots — “a self-made artist who came out of the immigrant working class,” the milieu of many of George’s books. “He’s an amazing character. Hardly anyone like him is left.” Mr. Bezzerides, a pal of Faulkner, is still alive and still writing without letup at age 98 on a manual typewriter.
The documentary, The Long Haul of A. I. Bezzerides, was a top pick for the film festival, and Steve Mencher, omnipresent as the festival moderator, persuaded George and Jim to put on a post-screening talk show. The two authors are friends not just from the neighborhood but from the book-peddling circuit and from periodic Hollywood enterprises. Jim started early with the Redford hit, Three Days of the Condor, and George’s name is flashing these days on credits to The Wire. As for their books, George’s latest is The Night Gardener and Jim’s is Mad Dogs.
They also are raconteurs full of Big Screen wisdom, and after they finished there was a showing of Kiss Me Deadly. It was shot originally with two endings, the darkest and most disillusioning of which stayed in the can for years but was the one selected by the festival judges.
Benita’s winning personality
and a spin of good fortune
 The e-mail invite early this year from “Wheel of Fortune,” dispatched by the hundreds of thousands, went straight to the happy vice of inveterate Takoma youth sports coach Benita Griffis. She is a devoted watcher of “The Wheel” and loves to play the game on-line.
So in March she showed up for a tryout in downtown Washington. Several hundred others from the area showed up with her. She filled out a card and tossed it in a lottery box. The lucky ones went up on stage to take a turn at a cardboard wheel. Her card wasn’t selected. She went home. “I thought, you win some, you lose some.”
Several weeks later, in the midst of going to soccer, softball or basketball games for her four children, as often as not as their jocular and jabbering coach, Benita got another invitation from the quiz show, this time by post. Her card had caught someone’s interest. “I had written on it how addicted I was to coaching, and it must’ve sent up a little flag, ‘Oh, this woman’s definitely crazy!’”
Benita was one of 75 contestants asked back for the next round in June. They were given a five-minute written test that left 25 in action. She made it onto the stage and spun a computerized wheel. “They told us, ‘Show your energy. Show your personality.’ Well, that’s what I always do!” The final cut was to be announced in two weeks. A month passed, and Benita assumed she had lost out, but then came another letter.
On October 18th she and her mother (“I think she was even more excited than me”) flew to Los Angeles. The next morning, during three more hours of tuning up, Benita met Vanna White, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans. “This is how I like to look,” Vanna told her. At 11:45 a.m. the “Wheel of Fortune” cameras bore down on Benita. “The next 22 minutes were the hardest pressure of my life, but also a lot of fun, a whole lot. I didn’t win the big money, but I did win prizes and, well, you can see for yourself.”
ABC’s Channel 7 airs her episode at 7:00 p.m. on December 5th.
Vinny’s champion
delinquents:
Trust goes both ways
The decision fell to former Takoma Soccer dad Vinny Schiraldi in his role as director of the District’s services for juvenile delinquents. Should the Oak Hill detention center’s JV football team that had reached the final four in the city playoffs be allowed to play for a trophy at a stadium without a padlocked fence?
In the same circumstance two years ago, before Vinny was on the scene, the Oak Hill boys had been forced to forfeit. Too many boys to keep on eye on, too many opportunities for escape – that had always been the thinking at Oak Hill. Last year, Vinny’s first on the job, he allowed the team to go off grounds for the season finale, but at the last minute the security staff determined they couldn’t trust certain players not to cut and run. They were left behind, and the team lost.
This year Vinny decided to let everyone go and play it up big. He mailed game invitations to the families and attorneys of the players, even the judges who had put them away. In the semi-final on November 7th moms and dads waved, and girls flirted from the stands. The boys seemed distracted by all the attention. They fumbled the ball and missed tackles. To win they had to score a touchdown with two seconds left in the game. With drama, on a trick play, they did. A week later they won the championship.
“For a lot of them their prestige has come from crime,” says Vinny. “Now they have something else to brag on. That’s the whole point.”
Plan B for the gym
An architectural firm hired by the City to figure out the particulars of adding a regulation-size gym to the community center reported on November 21st that the cost would be in the range of at least $6 million, twice the previous estimate.
On November 30th the citizens committee that’s been advising the City on the project recommended placing a $3.5 million cap on the project. In a memo to the City Council the committee suggested building a smaller gym “even if that means eliminating certain amenities.”
To date the City has raised $1.5 million in state grants and private donations for the gym. A $360,000 county grant is also pending, and the City can apply for additional federal, state or county funding. The rest of the cost would have to be made up in long-term bonds that would add to City debt.
The Council will be discussing the options over the winter.
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