Articles by Sandra Olivetti Martin

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/24/11

Rebuilding The Old Stein

After 100 years in New York, a storied mahogany bar finds a new home in Mayo

Prost! will make room for salute when you next click glasses at the bar at the new Old Stein. That’s because owner Mike Selinger has imported the bar of a famous Manhattan Italian eatery to keep the old in the Old Stein, which he hopes to reopen at its Mayo location in August after December 31’s fire. For over a century, the mahogany bar and bar back was the centerpiece of Carmine’s, a rustic Italian gathering spot in New York City’s South Street...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/24/11

Good Dogs and Bad Dogs

Often bad dogs make the better stories; this week, good dogs have their day

Who can resist a dog story? My favorites star villainous dogs, like Muggs, the hero of James Thurber’s story The Dog that Bit People.* Nipper, Bay Weekly’s collections manager, would like to bite people and sometimes sneaks in a nibble. He’s a Jack Russell terrorist — as proofreader Dick Wilson calls him — and most anybody who has had a dog of that breed has a collection of bad dog stories. For better and...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/17/11

From Osprey to Farm Fields, Spring Is Here

Will ‘tweaking’ help shrink the Bay’s dead zones?

The osprey is in. Promptly on March 15, the first osprey appeared in my part of Bay Country, no doubt hungry and tired after flying from as far away as deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Fast, determined birds can make the trip in as little as a week. Pussy willows are fat catkins. Weeping willows are chartreuse with life. Crocuses, daffodils and forsythia are screaming the yellow message of the returning sun. Earlier warming Washington, D.C., is pinking with...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/10/11

Libraries Are Chesapeake Country’s Town Squares

Where would we be without them?

“People want and use their libraries in pretty tremendous ways,” Anne Arundel County library administrator Skip Auld told me when we met. His words rang true to my experience. When I moved to the Calvert-Anne Arundel border 26 years ago this month, I promptly got cards for both libraries. (Now any county’s library card works in every other county throughout Maryland.) For me, libraries were the substitute for town squares. In Deale, I...

Article - News; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/10/11

The Magician

Anne Arundel County Public Library’s
new administrator, Skip Auld,
is learning to pull dollars
out of thin air

Skip Auld will have to be a magician to pull all he wants out of Anne Arundel County Public Library’s incredible shrinking budget. Anne Arundel was a big step up for Auld, who came here in early November from running the Durham County public library system, about half the size of Anne Arundel County, in North Carolina. Auld’s big promotion came with a bigger problem. Total library funding has fallen 16 percent since 2007,...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 3/3/11

Your Dream Is Your Only Scheme

So keep pushing on

“Move on up,” Curtis Mayfield exhorts from my iPod, urging me to stack up sweaty minutes on the elliptical trainer. “Your dream is your only scheme, so keep on pushing.” An hour later at Bay Weekly, I see what the R&B singer, who died in 2009, is talking about. News of hundreds of dreams pushed into reality cross my desk every day. You read about many such schemes each week in our pages. The Peace Corps has inspired dreams...

Article - Letter from the Editor; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/24/11

Let’s Rumble!

What you get when you come with us to the theater or to the movies

Theater-going is serious business by Bay Weekly standards — whether the action is live in local theaters or projected in huge images on the silver screen. Since our earliest days, both have had prominent place in our pages. From 8 Days a Week to reviews, the plays of local theaters always get play. Carol Glover, our first official theater reviewer back in the 1990s, handed over the privilege to Dick Wilson, who in turn passed it on to Jane Elkin and Davina Grace Hill...

Article - People; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/24/11

Chronicler of Presidents

In his fifth book, Family of Freedom, Chesapeake Neighbor Ken Walsh introduces us to Presidents and their African American servants in the White House

To keep up with presidents, you have to share their drive and stamina. Understand that, and you are getting to know Ken Walsh, one of the shrinking corps of reporters whose job is telling the rest of us about the plans, plots and policies of the occupants of the White House. Walsh has so much drive and stamina that, after a full day writing about presidents for US News & World Report, he comes home to what he calls “my second full-time job,” writing books...

Article - Creature Feature; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/17/11

Love is in the Water

Oyster babies abound

Chesapeake Bay oysters were amorous last summer, and the seed they sent forth willy-nilly into the water has set into abundant spat. Natural Resources researches examining the intimate lives of 53 key oyster bars last fall found spat — or oyster babies — about five times higher than the 25-year median. Instead of 16, spat count per bushel was nearly 80, the overall highest since 1997. Oyster babies were most plentiful in saltier waters of the...

Article - Green Living; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 2/17/11

Beat Back the Bag Monster

We’d get two sticks under Maryland’s Clean the Streams and Beautify the Bay Act

This is how you’d look if all you had to wear were the plastic bags you toted home all year long. You’d look like a plastic imitation of New Orleans’ legendary Mardi Gras Indian tribes. But you’d be warm. That’s the overheated conclusion of Bag Monster Rick Rogner of Silver Spring. Rogner donned the borrowed costume to help Del. Al Carr, of Kensington, convince Maryland to learn to follow the District of Columbia’s...