Bay Weekly’s 20-Year Book
1993: Volume I
Vol. 1, No 1: April 22, 1993: Our First Cover
Born on Earth Day 1993 as the paper Committed to the Chesapeake, New Bay Times appeared with a cover drawn to tell the whole story.
No. 5, June 17: Burton on the Bay
Bill Burton leaves the Baltimore Evening Sun for upstart New Bay Times.
Okay, I exaggerate. After 35 years with the Sun, the famous outdoors editor was pining from an early buyout at 66 years young. In New Bay Times, he smelled success and opportunity to keep writing — as he did for 16 years.
Bill Burton needs no introduction, we editorialized. Nevertheless, we are happy to announce that with this issue, Bill Burton joins New Bay Times to bring you the finest outdoors column on the Chesapeake.
In Siren Sounds of a Coming Crab War, his first column, Burton wrote that a waterman “mooned a DNR panel in disgust to cap an impassioned plea for less restriction.”
No. 12, September 23: Ol’ Grand Pappy Tobaccy
The wealth of the Maryland colony — was a common but declining field crop by New Bay Times’ 12th issue. Newspapers were black and white back then, except for the comics, so dropping in spot color front, back and center was quite an advance. This is our third spot-color issue.
No. 19, December 30: Faces of Bay Weekly
With one year done, the people of New Bay Times planned to eat their way into a lucky 1994 with heirloom First Day recipes.
1994: Volume II
No. 4, February 24: Iced In
The great ice storm of February 9, 1994, here recalled the week after, turned off our power at work and at home (where a limb crashed through the roof), causing our first and so far only publication delay. New Bay Times hit the streets on Friday, not Thursday.
No. 11, June 2: Premier Weekly Issue
June 6, 1944, was D-Day, when 100,000 Allied forces stormed the beaches of France to take Europe back from Hitler.
We commemorated the 50th anniversary with stories of two World War II boats, one living and one dead. The captured German U-boat Black Panther lies at the bottom of the Potomac River. But Bruce Bauer of Shady Side still sailed an English sailboat designed to be dropped from the sky to rescue sailors torpedoed by the U-Boats.
Fortnightly was too easy, we decided with that paper, our 23rd. Thus we became New Bay Times ~ Weekly.
1995: Volume III
No. 1, January 5: First Movie Reviews
Doc Shereikis, the Movie Professor, writes our first movie reviews. I.Q., Little Women, Mixed Nuts, Nell, Pulp Fiction and Disclosure, which earns his first review in doggerel verse, reserved for the worst:
This is a tale of two hotshot execs
Who get all embroiled in matters of sex …
Doc reviewed for us for four years, until he said he couldn’t bear to sit through another bad movie.
In sad synchronicity, Richard Shereikis departed this world the day I wrote these words, March 29, 2013. As well as Doc Shereikis Bay Weekly’s Movie Professor, Rich was a street-wise south Chicagoan proud of his Lithuanian roots; a Dickens scholar and lit prof; curmudgeon intolerant of pretension; sports nut, humorist, columnist and ace movie reviewer first for the paper I grew up with, Illinois Times; husband, father, grandfather and friend.
Jonathan Parker, Mark Burns and, now, Diana Beechener have followed in Doc’s footsteps, and to this day, Bay Weekly brings you the smartest movie reviews and previews.
1996: Volume IV
No. 5, February 1: Let’s Go Fishing!
Bill Burton liked football, especially the great Colts Steve Stonebreaker and Johnny Unitas. But the Hall of Fame outdoors writer loved the Chesapeake more. Maryland’s subsidy of a new stadium for Baltimore’s new, as-yet-unnamed team outraged him; that money should have been spent on the Bay, he roared in many a column.
With the support of Bay Weekly readers, he organized a retaliatory protest: boycott football for one Sunday and go fishing instead. Thus began the tradition of Bill Burton’s fall rockfish fishing trip, sponsored by New Bay Times.
On February 1, 1996, Burton surveyed readers. On February, 29, he announced his plan. On Sunday, September 22, we went fishing, as you see in Burton’s column of September 26.
No. 14, April 4: Not Just for Kids
Not Just for Kids was everybody’s favorite job. In our early years, our mini-paper for young readers spread news, puzzles, stories, poems, art, photos, tricks and reports from our junior reporters plus places to go and things to do across the two pages of our center section. This one brought in spring.
1997: Volume V
No. 47, November 20: Season’s Bounty
By 1997, we’d made it an annual tradition to compress six weeks of holiday offerings into Bay Weekly’s guide to the Local Bounty of Chesapeake Country. On November 20, 1997, Thanksgiving’s turkey and Old Father Time joined Saint Nick on our cover.
1998: Volume VI
No. 18, May 7: Birthday Bash!
Five years in, we celebrate with a Birthday Bash! Over 600 friends, well-wishers and party animals gathered at Surfside 7 on the South River for a sunny afternoon of festivities. A live auction called by Pam Parks and Judy Howard of Deale raised $6,500 for the Oyster Recovery Partnership. Food, music, auction items and seated massage were all community donations.
No. 50, Dec. 17: Surf’s Up
We join the expanding universe of the World Wide Web, positioned there by young web-mistress Brianne Warner, our former intern and University of Maryland journalism student. Ever since, you’ve been able to read Bay Weekly in print or online at www.bayweekly.com.
1999: Volume VII
No. 13, April 1: April Fools!
Finally, April Fool’s Day falls on a Thursday, our day on the streets. We mark the date with New Bay Crimes, chronicling the theft of the Maryland State House, lifted and transported by black helicopters from Annapolis to the original seat of government, Historic St. Mary’s City.
In this Exclusive Investigative Report, writer Mark Burns reveals that Senate President Mike Miller, a Southern Marylander, rejoices.
“Finders, keepers,” says St. Mary’s City.
2000: Volume VIII
No. 1, January 6: Into a New Millennium!
On our first issue of the year, January 6, 2000, New Bay Times ~ Weekly became Bay Weekly. We prepared for the change with a pair of double covers, Bay Weekly slipping from back to front.
What’s in a name? our editorial of Vol. VIII, No. 1 asked.
In 1993 we chose a name that would reflect the niche we hoped to fill: A paper looking for new ways of covering news and new, sustainable ways of living on Chesapeake Bay in changing times.
After seven years of publishing, New Bay Times is the Bay Weekly.
So, as we change the calendar to a new year, we change our name to better match what we are: Bay Weekly.
Bay Weekly. Nothing better describes what we do. Week after week, issue after issue, we publish the Bay’s news, news our readers want to read.
2001: Volume IX
No. 11, March 15: Goodbye Tobacco
The new millennium saw the end of tobacco’s 350-year reign as the king of Maryland crops. By the end of the first year of Maryland’s tobacco buy-out — financed by the National Tobacco Settlement and
Recovery of Federal Health Care Costs — 559 out of 981 eligible growers had signed contracts to take 5.4 million pounds of tobacco out of production.
Two Thousand, Two Thousand, Give Me Two Thousand-One: Maryland Tobacco Goes to Market reported that many tobacco farmers are looking at their last auction, Maryland’s tobacco’s traditional point of sales.
On November 22, Maryland’s Former Tobacco Farmers Need a Crop As Good As Gold reported the search for alternative crops, from turkeys to tulips, grapes to mazes.
2002: Volume X
No. 17, April 25: Volvo Race Comes to Town
The Volvo Ocean Race made its first of two visits to Annapolis, with our capital city the April 28 starting point for Leg 7, ending 3,500 miles later in LaRochelle, France.
Six of the eight boats in the fleet were designed by Farr Yacht Design in Annapolis, but they traveled 31,375 nautical miles to visit us at home.
The fleet of the Chesapeake — from Pride of Baltimore II to skipjack to Bay-builts to pleasure craft — gathered to greet Volvo 60s and their crews at City Dock. Bay Weekly was among the sponsors of the weekend of festivities.
2003: Volume XI
No. 31, July 31: Calvert Gas Docks Come to Life
Big boats of another sort came Chesapeake way in 2003. Tankers big as football fields began importing liquefied natural gas to Dominion Cove Point dock, just south of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. After the first ship’s arrival, business boomed. By 2009, Cove Point had added a second pipeline to carry its gas to Virginia and beyond expanded storage and production capacity by nearly 80 percent. But discoveries of natural gas-rich shale in the U.S. have since reversed the economics, and Cove Point is now seeking to become an exporter.
No. 39, September 25: Isabel Strikes
Hurricane Isabel landed in Chesapeake Country on Thursday, September 18, bringing a perfect storm of elements. A six-foot surge of water, high tide and easterly winds brought the worst flooding in a century. Then the backflow doubled the damage.
2004: Volume XII
No. 22, May 27: Saving the Bay One Flush At a Time
Republican governor Bob Ehrlich decides Maryland needs a dedicated fund to pay for reducing nitrogen pollution from human waste and farm fertilizer.
Humans helped the campaign along. The fee promptly became known as the Flush Tax. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation posted notices in bar toilets with such texts as Don’t make this your only contribution to the Bay.
The $30-per-household Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fee, doubled last year, has become one of the best tools we have in cleaning up the Bay. By 2011, the Flush Tax had raised $352 million for Wastewater treatment plant upgrades, $42 million for septic systems replacements and $37 million for cover crops.
We wrote of the Bay Restoration Fund back then: Finally, something politicians agree on.
That was then. In today’s polarized times, the Flush Tax — and the consequent move to control where new septic systems can be built — have been demonized by Maryland’s increasingly conservative Republicans as “taking away local sovereignty.”
2005: Volume XIII
No. 52, Dec. 29: Tracking the Bay’s Bounty
From February 24 through October 20, stalwart contributor and crab connoisseur and oyster lover M.L. Faunce writes the column Bay Bounty, keeping tabs on Chesapeake crabs, oysters and fishing. M.L., who could write about policy with one hand and practice with the other, was our first woman columnist among all the men. (I’m the second.)
2006: Volume XIV
No. 25, June 22: A Year for Farewells
Ever the smart businesswoman, Vera Freeman retires after selling Vera’s White Sands. The trajectory of Vera’s career from small town Montanan to the Hollywood starlet to Calvert County legend gave me one of my favorite stories — and won me a big deal first place in the Maryland, Delaware, DC Press Association editorial competition. But fame is fleeting: If you were born after, say, 1980, you won’t know there ever was a real Vera behind Vera’s White Sands, which thrives in an entirely new identity.
Retirement came as the Big Sleep for other eminent Chesapeake citizens: National Geographic adventurer Tom Abercrombie; naval, merchant, pleasure captain and Bay Weekly contributor Bruce Bauer (pictured on our first weekly cover back in 1994); visionary Leonard Blackshear, who won a place on City Dock for the Roots statuary group; Western swing fiddler Bill Marquess; signature Bay photographer Marion Warren; and Pirates Cove bartender Joe Williams.
For all these other Bay notables and more, you can bring history back to life by browsing our archives. At www.bayweekly.com, click Editor’s Desk. Under Archives (Our Old Site), you can page week by week through the years and meet the people who once were as they were when we knew them.
No. 52, December 28: Saving the Best for Last
Best of the Bay voting jumps to our last issue of the year, with readers reviewing Bay Weekly features along with the businesses, services and events of 2006.
Wouldn’t you know! A dog story wins readers’ favorite. As well as Chessies and the return of the Volvo Ocean Raceesapeake, outdoors columnist Bill Burton takes top honors. No surprise there.
Nor in Bernie Fowler’s selection as your Bay Hero for his 30-year campaign to clean up his beloved Patuxent River. Bernie’s annual second Sunday in June river Wade-In.
2007: Volume XV
No. 9, March 1: The Big Deal
Thirty-five million years ago, a big rock fell from the sky. The big hole it made formed the Chesapeake. Science writer Lynn Teo Simarski — whose boat at sunset photo graced our cover just a couple weeks ago on April 11 — explained what and how we know.
No. 10, March 8: The Big Competition
Delegate Bob Costa and then Anne Arundel County Councilman Big Ed Reilly bare their bellies — and their willpower — in the South County Chamber of Commerce Biggest Loser Competition.
No. 13, March 29: The Novelty
Cruciverbalist Ben Tausig adds a weekly competition of wits to our pages. Tausig explains how (and why) he makes the weekly puzzles that pain you.
2008: Volume XVI
No. 24, June 12: 15 Years with Bill Burton
We celebrate Bill Burton’s 15 years of columns for Bay Weekly. Burton was absolutely faithful to deadlines, though once or twice he had to call in sick from the hospital. So he wrote close to 800 columns, amounting to over a million words. Enough Said! was his favorite sign-off, but come the next week he always had more to say.
Even so, we couldn’t get enough of Burton, so we’d write features about him. One Father’s Day, Burton was our Old Man of the Bay. Another year, we wrote about how he sat still for hours on six successive Fridays as two dozen members of the Maryland Hall for the Creative Arts Portrait Coop painted him. This year, we did a retrospective of outstanding columns. Burton always talked to his readers one to one, and in turn they had plenty to say to and about him, from admiring his fishing prowess to sympathizing with his loss of beloved cat Frieda to sharing in his delight with last granddaughter Mackenzie ‘Grumpy’ Boughey to advising how to best satisfy his taste for martinis.
2009: Volume XVII
No. 24, June 11: Enough Said
This was the week when Bill Burton missed his first deadline. He’d finally said enough — or all he could manage — for he could no longer summon the energy to write, he told Alex and me. Bill died on August 10 at 82.
“The sweetest berry is surely the one still to come,” he wrote in his last column, on the subject of berry picking.
But that wasn’t his last say. His last words became Bay Weekly’s first YouTube production.
Earlier that year, he’d reminisced about his life with me. Recording was Tom Tearman, for many years the top audio-visual hand at the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Burton’s family and boon companion Alan Doelph contributed pictures. Movie maven Diana Beechener edited our tribute.
Meet Bill Burton and hear about his wonderful life at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTxOldtb4AE.
The cover story in that June 11 paper ran under the title How the Butler Did It. In that gem, Jane Elkin described how actor Ray Fulton beat death and amnesia to return to the stage. In that very same paper, Bay Bard Tom Wisner’s determination to “live this reality of dying,” was Sara Leeland’s theme. Like Bill, both Tom and Ray are now among the legions who were.
No. 25, June 18: Here’s to Dad
Father’s Day followed with my favorite of our 20 years of father’ day stories, a puzzler posed to us by Margaret Tearman: Describe your father in three words. Many of us found the words.
How am I going to beat that one this year? Suggestions, please!
2010: Volume XVIII
No. 11, March 18: The Osprey Takes Flight
For 26 weeks March 18 to September 9, The Osprey Saga brought us to the nest of Michael Koblos’ nearest osprey family in the Potomac River community of Cobb Island.
By September 9, Junior was able to catch his own fish. “Junior has graduated Summa Cum Laude from Osprey U and is now on his own,” Koblos wrote. “At night he sits alone on the platform.”
No. 30, July 29: Our Digital Makeover
This issue divides Bay Weekly.com’s old era from its new. It remains what you see when you visit our old archives. From 1993 through July 29, 2010, papers are archived by date (with some holes from 1994 through 1997). The new era is categorical, in some cases by department and others by subject. It’s also interactive so you can talk as well as read, to us and all our readers.
2011: Volume XIX
No. 10, March 10: Loving Libraries
We spent a week at Anne Arundel County Public Library branches to help new Director Skip Auld remind us why we love our libraries. Clearly we’re fans: We were back in the library Nov. 10, reporting on how to use — and borrow — eBooks.
No. 43, October 27: Aliens Among Us
Our Halloween features reported a new strategy for defeating the invasive snakehead fish: If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em. We found more aliens in our fields, where genetically modified soybeans come to harvest this time of year. Born in test tubes in the 1990s, these genetically modified organisms have taken over the soybean market in Maryland and across the nation.
2012: Volume XX
No. 43, October 25: Growing Grapes in Grand Pappy Tobacco’s Shadow
Grapes do pretty well in fields where tobacco once grew, and Chesapeake Country is earning something of a name for its wines. The former president of St. Mary’s College, Jane Margaret O’Brien is now a principal in her family’s Slack winery in St. Mary’s County. As far as vices go, we’ll take wine in place of tobacco.