Deaths
Kevin Kamenetz
At the funeral of Baltimore County Executive
But for Mr. Kamenetz, who had risen from County Council member to two-term county executive with his eyes on the governor’s mansion, there was no option but to enter the fray with full devotion. “He was driven, and he loved what he was doing,” Jill Kamenetz said. “He was in this to win it.”
Mr. Kamenetz died May 10 at age 60 after suffering cardiac arrest. After awaking at his Owings Mills home with chest pains, he drove with his wife to a
“It’s just shocking,” said his predecessor, former Baltimore County Executive Jim Smith. Gov. Larry Hogan called his frequent political adversary a “dedicated public servant.”
In his 24 years as a Baltimore County councilman and executive, Mr. Kamenetz amassed an array of accomplishments — renovating aging schools, revitalizing downtown Towson and never raising taxes.
Critics described him as arrogant, and said he was more beholden to developers than to constituents. He made no apologies for a leadership style some found abrasive. Others called it decisive. “I’ll accept whatever criticism is out there,” Mr. Kamenetz told The Baltimore Sun a week before his death. “The real answer is the results.”
The youngest of five children of Irvin and Miriam Kamenetz, he grew up in Lochearn. At the Gilman School, he was named “class politico” in 1975.
Also in that class was Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., the future Republican congressman and Maryland governor. The two disagreed on just about every issue, Mr. Ehrlich said, but “there was never any bitterness, any partisanship, mostly laughs.”
Mr. Kamenetz studied at the Johns Hopkins University and the University of Baltimore School of Law, became a prosecutor and served on the Baltimore County Democratic Central Committee before being elected in 1994 to the Baltimore County Council. He served four terms before being elected the county’s 12th county executive.
He called himself “the person who will look you in the eye and tell you the truth.” When the closure of the Sparrows Point steel mill in 2012 put 2,000 people out of work, he recalled having to “look those steelworkers in the eyes and tell them the truth: Steel wasn’t coming back.”
Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, himself a former Baltimore County executive, praised Mr. Kamenetz as “exceptionally smart, extremely principled and always did what he felt was in the best interest of his community.”
Sally J. Michel
Sally J. Michel was described by former mayor and governor Martin J. O’Malley as a “fearless and faithful champion” of Baltimore. She had been chair of the Baltimore Planning Commission, established the Parks and People Foundation and during her life served on the board of 57 local and state organizations including the Walters Art Museum and the University of Maryland School of Social Work.
She died Aug. 16 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at age 80.
The wife of the late Robert E. “Butch” Michel Jr., she paid $20 in an auction in the 1970s to have lunch with then-Mayor William Donald Schaefer, and turned their meeting “into a lifelong collaboration of creative problem solving, coalition building and grand thinking for the city of Baltimore,” wrote a daughter, Carter Brigham of Roland Park, in a biographical profile.
She hosted nearly 80 “brainstorming” dinners in her home to discuss issues with city leaders. Mayor Catherine Pugh, then a recent Morgan State University graduate, was among young people asked to attend those dinners, and said the events let her know leaders “were interested in our concerns about the future of the city.”
Mrs. Michel was a founding supporter of the Baltimore School for the Arts and the force behind Expressions, a fundraiser and student performance that introduced thousands to the school.
In 1983, Mayor Schaefer asked her to develop a private-public partnership for the city’s parks — that resulted in the Parks and People Foundation, a national model for urban parks, recreation and environmental issues. She also worked to establish the Baltimore/Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School. More than 77,000 people have gone through the program at Leakin Park.
On her resume, Mrs. Michel noted that her last paying job was in 1959, but said she drew “physic income” from being a volunteer.
“I don’t think in the last half century there has been a more important private citizen in Baltimore than Sally Michael,” added Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation. “She was an extraordinary citizen model for all of us.”
Joseph D. Tydings
U.S. Sen. Joseph D. Tydings, who followed the footsteps of his adoptive father, Millard Tydings, into the U.S. Senate, died Oct. 8 of cancer. He was 90.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle recalled him as a fair, principled prosecutor and politician. Gov. Larry Hogan called him “one of Maryland’s great civic leaders,” and Sen. Chris Van Hollen said Senator Tydings’ “political courage was an inspiration to me and many others.”
Born in Asheville, N.C., he and his sister, Eleanor, were adopted by Millard Tydings after his mother divorced their biological father. He grew up on a farm in Havre de Grace. His grandfather married Marjorie Merriweather Post, heiress to the Post cereal fortune. A horse lover, he served in the U.S. Army with one its last horse platoons.
He represented Harford County in the Maryland House of Delegates. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy named him U.S. attorney for Maryland. As the state’s federal prosecutor, he brought so many political corruption cases against fellow Democrats that he once received a call from U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy. “My God, Joe,” he recalled Mr. Kennedy saying, “can't you ever find a Republican to indict?"
At the urging of President Kennedy, he ran for U.S. Senate in 1963, and won. During his six years in the Senate, 1965-1971, he championed gun control and civil rights and opposed the war in Vietnam. He became an enemy of President Richard Nixon, and his advocacy for gun control drew the wrath of the National Rifle Association. He lost a 1970 re-election bid.
After leaving elected office, Senator Tydings lobbied for laws protecting the Chesapeake Bay. He served as a member and chairman of the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland from 1974 to 1984 and was a regent of the University of Maryland system from 2000 to 2005. He was an architect of spinning off the former University of Maryland Hospital into the nonprofit University of Maryland Medical System.
Former Maryland Attorney General Douglas F. Gansler called Senator Tydings “a man of deep principle and courage. Civil rights, women’s issues and minority issues — he was talking about them in the 1960s and we’re still talking about them today.
“He lived a very long and spirited life, and he made a great deal of difference in other people’s lives,” Mr. Gansler said.
Taylor Hayes
At the funeral for 7-year-old Taylor Hayes in July, the Rev. Jamal Bryant, then-pastor of Empowerment Temple, noted that the little girl “should have been out today doing back-to-school shopping."
He cried out: "Enough is enough."
Taylor, whose satin-lined coffin was embroidered with a single word, "Princess,” died July 19, two weeks after being shot while sitting in the backseat of a car being driven through Southwest Baltimore. Keon Gray, 29, has been charged in her death; his girlfriend, Daneka McDonald, 33, was charged with accessory after the fact and obstruction. Two others, including the driver of the car, were charged with drug and gun offenses.
The girl was recalled by family and friends as a youngster who would light up a room. She loved the color purple and the movie “Frozen,” and was happy, jovial, always smiling and dancing.
“This was an energetic and loving child who touched a lot of people in her short seven years on Earth,” said Catalina Byrd, a spokeswoman for Taylor’s family.
Her death outraged the city, and became a symbol of how the violence and death plaguing Baltimore had come to engulf even the most innocent.
It also gave a new sense of urgency to those people in the city who rail against
At Taylor’s funeral, Rev. Willie Ray called the girl, “a spark and a flower the Lord plucked."
Dozens of children, accompanied by their parents and grandparents, helped fill much of the church sanctuary. Surveying the seated mourners, Mr. Bryant, said their numbers "honor a girl who had that much influence.”
Shanika Robinson, the girl’s mother, said she hoped her daughter's death would serve as a wake-up call for the community.
“I don’t have my 7-year-old daughter anymore,” Ms. Robinson said. “I think this should be something big. All the killing’s got to stop. We have to come together.”
Carol Mann
Long after she left Baltimore for Chicago as a teenager, Carol Mann loved coming back to her adopted hometown. She became one of golf’s biggest stars, but seemed at home in the city.
“She felt very comfortable in Baltimore. It just fit her,” said Dennis Satyshur, the director of golf at Caves Valley. He recalled talking to her after moving here from a club in Vero Beach, Fla. “She’d say, ‘You’ll love Baltimore. You’ll love it here.’ ”
Ms. Mann, a pioneering giant in women's golf who died May 20 at age 77, had a deep connection to Baltimore and its golfing community. It was where she learned the game at age 9, growing up in a household where her father, Rip, was a member of Baltimore Country Club and the Country Club of Maryland in Towson, and where her mother, Ann, started a women’s nine-hole group.
Her professional career began in 1961, and though she never won a tournament in Baltimore, she won 38 overall — two of them majors, including the 1965 U.S. Women’s Open. She was elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1977. She returned often to Baltimore to play in the LPGA Baltimore Classic at Turf Valley and later at Pine Ridge.
Ms. Mann reflected on her childhood growing up in Rodgers Forge and how she started as a ballet dancer — her debut was at the Lyric Theatre — and who played a little tennis and swam competitively. She outgrew ballet, eventually reaching 6 feet 3, or as she liked to say, “5 feet 15.”
She turned to golf. Not only did Ms. Mann play at at the highest level, but she was instrumental in the LPGA going from being a backwoods operation to a sophisticated corporate brand. As president of the LPGA from 1973 through 1976, she was largely responsible for luring Ray Volpe, a Madison Avenue executive who worked for the NHL, to run the LPGA in the mid-1970s.
Annika Sorenstam, who became the most accomplished golfer in LPGA history, tweeted that Ms. Mann was a “great ambassador” of the game.
After her retirement at age 40, Ms. Mann became a golf commentator, president of the Women’s Sports Foundation and later president of Carol Mann Golf Services, the first female-owned and operated course design and management firm.
In her bio on the World Golf Hall of Fame website, she stated: “I never think how people will remember Carol Mann. The mark I made is an intimate satisfaction.”
Shoshana S. Cardin
Beneath her yearbook picture as a member of the 1943 class of Western High School was a quote that young Shoshana Shoubin selected: “I love life and ask no more.”
The woman who became Shoshana S. Cardin may not have asked more, but she gave more over a lifetime of civic and philanthropic work. She was internationally known as a humanitarian, counted presidents and world leaders among her friends and led national and local Jewish organizations.
The Pikesville resident died May 18 from respiratory failure at age 91.
“Shoshana Cardin became an icon for leadership in the Jewish world,” said Baltimore Circuit Judge Ellen M. Heller.
Born in Tel Aviv in what was then Palestine, Shoshana Shoubin and her family came to Baltimore in 1927. She attended the Johns Hopkins University and UCLA, and received a master’s degree in planning and administration from Antioch University.
She married Jerome S. Cardin in 1948, and began a career in activism that defined her life. She was president of Maryland’s Federation of Jewish Women’s Organizations and served with the Maryland Constitutional Convention in the late 1960s. She led a state conference on battered women and urged women to work toward financial stability. Appearing on NBC’s “Today Show” in the mid-1970s, she urged women to obtain credit in their own name and make important purchases such as houses and cars.
As chair of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry from 1988 to 1992, she made freedom a priority for Jews living in Russia and Soviet republics and challenged then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to lift restrictions against more than 11,000 Jewish “refuseniks” in the Soviet Union. In 1991 she met with Mr. Gorbachev, and later said her most significant accomplishment was to persuade him “to condemn anti-Semitism and racism in a public statement.”
Also in 1991, she clashed with President George H.W. Bush over a $10 billion U.S. loan guarantee for Israel. After 1,300 Jews spent a day lobbying Congress to support the guarantee, President Bush commented that he was just “one lonely little guy” who opposed. Mrs. Cardin called his remarks “disturbing.” He apologized for sounding “pejorative.”
The co-founder and chair of the Soshana S. Cardin Jewish High School on Park Heights Avenue, she said she wanted to stress “the importance, the pride and the responsibility, the blessing of being Jewish.
”That’s what gives me the strength to challenge what I have challenged and bring about change where I could,” she said.
Marjorie Holt
At her funeral in January, people from all political stripes remembered Marjorie Holt for her fairness, bipartisan nature and determination.
The first Republican woman from Maryland to be elected to Congress, Rep. Holt was “a trailblazer and pioneer who paved the way for the next generation for women leaders,” said Gov. Larry Hogan. “Her legacy will live on through the countless lives she touched.”
Robert Neall, a former Anne Arundel County executive, called her “first and foremost a lady, and she served with dignity and honor.”
Ms. Holt, who had represented Anne Arundel and Prince George’s counties in the 4th Congressional District, died Jan. 6 at her Severna Park home at age 97.
Born in Birmingham, Ala., she married Duncan Holt, an electrical engineer, and they moved to Maryland when he became a manager at Westinghouse. She practiced law and became involved in Republican state politics, running for the Maryland House of Delegates in 1966. She lost.
“Nobody wanted to vote for a woman,” she said in a 2010 oral history. “They said, ‘You’re a nice lady, but I can’t vote for a woman.’”
She did win over Louis Phipp for clerk of the Anne Arundel Circuit Court, and began to build a political machine. “I wrote a lot of notes, did a lot of favors, and built quite an organization,” she said.
When a new congressional district opened up in Anne Arundel and a portion of Prince George’s counties, she went for it, and defeated the Democratic candidate with 59 percent of the vote. She was aided by Arundel’s conservative base — and the policies of her party’s leader, President Richard M. Nixon. Once in congress, a future president, then-House GOP leader Gerald Ford, helped her get a seat on the Armed Services Committee.
“Her career took off on that committee,” Mr. Neall said. “She helped the 4th District which was home to the Naval Academy, Westinghouse, Fort Meade and the National Security Agency.”
She was re-elected until 1986. She resumed her law practice, and then President Ronald Reagan named her to the General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament. She later volunteered at the Light Street Soup Kitchen and Meals on Wheels, and attended the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans.
At Ms. Holt’s funeral, longtime friend the Rev. Dr. Terry W. Schoener told the audience of Democrats and Republicans: “There was a time not very long ago when opinion and party affiliation didn’t keep people apart. It was a time when the good of the nation drove people together, not apart.
“Marjorie, we will miss you.”
George Taliaferro
George Taliaferro, the first black player drafted by the NFL and a star for the Baltimore Colts in 1953, died Oct. 8 in Mason, Ohio., at 91.
A three-time All American at Indiana University, he was a 13th-round pick of the Chicago Bears in 1949 but signed instead with the Los Angeles Dons of the rival All-America Football Conference. When that league failed Mr. Taliaferro signed with the New York Yanks, who became the Dallas Texans — who became the Colts in 1953.
He scored four touchdowns and was named the Colts’ Most Valuable Offensive Back. He rushed for 479 yards, caught 20 passes for 346 yards and passed for 211 more. He also punted 65 times and returned punts and kickoffs. For three straight years, he was selected to the Pro Bowl.
“George can run with any of them,” said coach Weeb Ewbank. On Nov. 22, 1953, pressed into duty at quarterback for a game against the Los Angeles Rams, he became the first black player to start at that position in the NFL. Off-season knee surgery hampered him in 1954 and the Colts released him the following season.
He began to work with disadvantaged youths in a recreation program he founded at Lafayette Square Community Center, and did prisoner rehabilitation work at the Maryland State Penitentiary. In 1962, he obtained a master’s degree in social work at Howard University, then served as field instructor to the Juvenile Court at the University of Maryland. He also worked for the Martin Marietta Corp., training black males for business careers.
In 1970, he was named dean of students at then-Morgan State College. “It is impossible to go to any college or university campus in America today without concerning yourself with unrest and dissent, and the seeds from which they grow,” Mr. Taliaferro said. “My primary aim is to impress upon Morgan’s students the importance of making positive use of their talents and the college.”
Two years later, he resigned to return to Indiana to recruit and counsel minority students. On his departure, Dr. King V. Cheek, president of Morgan State, said of Mr. Taliaferro: “It has been his keen insight and understanding of youth that has kept our campus relatively free of disturbances in a troubled era.”
In 1981, Mr. Taliaferro was enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame.
“He was a hell of a football player,” said former teammate Gino Marchetti, 92, “and a hell of a nice guy.”
Martin L.
Millspaugh Jr.
Martin L. Millspaugh Jr., who shaped the urban redevelopment of downtown Baltimore and was considered the founder of the Inner Habor, died of cancer on Nov. 27 at age 92.
“More than any one person, Marty was responsible for the Inner Harbor,” said Robert C. Embry Jr., president of the Abell Foundation and former head of Baltimore’s redevelopment program.
In 1960 Mr. Millspaugh co-founded a quasi-city agency, Charles Center-Inner Harbor Management, with philanthropist J. Jefferson Miller. Over the next quarter-century he managed the Charles Center and Inner Harbor projects, and once estimated that he had overseen $6 billion in new construction.
His redevelopment work changed the face of an aging, industrial and maritime downtown and replaced it with the National Aquarium, Maryland Science Center, the Convention Center, Hyatt Regency Hotel, Harborplace and Gallery.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, he was a 1943 graduate of the Gilman School and served in the Army’s Air Corps during World War II. He was a journalist for the Baltimore Evening Sun. He worked in urban renewal with the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In 1960, Baltimore’s Urban Renewal and Housing Commissionmade him director, and Mr. Millspaugh and his colleagues produced an estimated 15 major buildings and stimulated more than a dozen others in adjacent blocks.
“Baltimore was suffering from a radical decline.” Mr. Millspaugh wrote in his private papers. “The city was threatened with municipal bankruptcy.”
In 1976 he pitched the Inner Harbor redevelopment on James W. Rouse. What followed was the Rouse Co.'s development of Harborplace. The success of the Inner Harbor earned awards from the Urban land Institute and the American Institute of Architects, and drew millions to the area. Mr. Millspaugh later joined the Enterprise Development Co., founded by Mr. Rouse, and worked around the world.
Yet he remained interested in and connected to Baltimore. He was a trustee of the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Association, Metropolitan YMCA and Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Maryland.
“He believed that Baltimore deserved the absolute best,” said his daughter, Elizabeth “Lisa” Millspaugh Schroeder, “and that Baltimore was worth fighting for.”
Imamu Baraka
Imamu Baraka, a therapist who sparked a nationwide conversation about “patient dumping” after capturing video of a distraught woman who was put out of a Baltimore hospital in just a hospital gown, died July 12 after a bout with cancer. He was 47.
The Baltimore psychotherapist and Reservoir Hill resident caused a flurry when he found the woman outside the University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown campus in January. He recorded her in a video posted to Facebook, bringing attention to what he called the mistreatment of the mentally ill.
“I just witnessed this with my own eyes,” he wrote on Facebook. “I had no choice but to give this young lady a voice in this moment."
The woman, whose family later identified her only as Rebecca, had a history of mental illness. She was taken back to the hospital after Mr. Baraka called 911. Because of the incident, the hospital, whose leadership apologized for what happened, was cited by federal regulators. The hospital replaced its CEO and other leadership and made changes to discharge protocols after the incident.
Mr. Baraka was born in Baltimore and raised in Annapolis. His mother, Glenda Smith of Annapolis, said her son wanted to dispel the stigma that surrounds mental illness and get more African-Americans to seek treatment.
He was a graduate of Annapolis High School, and obtained a bachelor’s degree at Morehouse College in Atlanta and a master’s degree from George Washington University’s School of Business and Public Management.
His mother said he had planned to start a magazine and hoped to expand his counseling practice.
He was a member of the American Association of Christian Counselors.
Mr. Baraka became well known after posting the video, but his mother said he told her: “‘Mommy, I just couldn’t walk away. They treated her as if she wasn’t human.’”
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