James H. Bready, the Calvert Street Whirlwind

By Jason Policastro

Junior Staff Writer

Aging Newspapermen's Club of Baltimore

It was 1944, and American forces were preparing to capture the strategically critical bridge at Remagen, Germany, the last remaining bridge over the Rhine River and a key route for Nazi supply lines during World War II.

Twenty-six-year-old James H. Bready was working as an agent in the U.S. Army's Counterintelligence Corps. He didn't see combat, and never fired a gun; his unit entered liberated areas after the G.I's had left to monitor progress, gather tactical enemy intelligence, and keep an eye out for any Nazi activity.

But before the war, Bready was a young newspaper reporter, unaccustomed to being away from the action.

He and a friend borrowed a jeep, parked it on a hill overlooking Remagen, and beheld the front lines of the war in Europe for the first time.

A commanding officer spotted Bready and screamed at him on the hillside, but Bready had gotten what he wanted. It wouldn't be the last time that he would brush aside authority to satisfy his curiosity, support a cause, or see his work through on his own terms.

After the war, Bready resumed a career that would span 60 years, longer than any other Baltimore newspaper columnist. He would earn the title Dean of Baltimore Editorialists by Harold A. Williams in his 1987 book “The Baltimore Sun, 1837-1987.”

He mingled with Baltimore's biggest names before they adorned government buildings or pieces of legislation He organized labor protests against Sunpapers management while writing for a replacement paper and marching the picket line. He loved his paper, the Evening Sun, unconditionally, haunting the newsroom on days off and trumpeting its superiority over the morning edition to anyone who would listen. He championed the paper's young reporters, and the Baltimore region's many writers.

He sat at the foot of Mencken, sharing newsroom gossip with the great man at his home on Hollins Street.

He was a benevolent agitator in the newsroom, a lovable, eccentric rebel, curious and always on the move.

Bready was a born newspaperman.

His parents met while on the staff of the Philadelphia Public Ledger, the first paper founded by Arunah S. Abell, eventual founder of the Baltimore Sun. James Hall Bready was born in 1918, and grew up 15 minutes south of Philadelphia in Woodbury, New Jersey. His father died when Jim was a teenager, and he and his brother were often left alone when his mother would go to work.

It was a spartan family life for young Jim, and it would fuel his desire for a full family of his own.

“My father was a George Bailey,” said Chris Bready, Jim’s son. “When he grew up he didn’t have a hometown, didn’t build lasting friendships from childhood.”

He studied American History at Haverford College, and his constant energy propelled him to captain of the school's cross country team.

After college, Bready received an indoctrination as a summer vacation relief copyboy at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, surrounded by clacking typewriters.

"When reporters had finished a sheet of paper, they'd pluck it from the typewriter and holler 'boy!', and I would come running and carry it to the copy desk so the writers wouldn't waste time," Bready said.

He studied European History in graduate school at Harvard University. Once finished, Bready wrote a letter to his friend and fellow Haverford alum Felix Morley, editor of the editorial page of the Washington Post, asking about a newspaper job. Morley answered with a list of his colleagues around the country, and Bready found luck with the Des Moines Tribune. He was working on the copy desk when World War II broke out.

"I was prime draft bait, so I volunteered," Bready said. His basic chemistry experience earned him a slot in the chemical warfare section at Edgewood Arsenal in Harford County.

In 1941, a friend introduced Bready to a pretty girl working as a librarian at the Govans branch of the Pratt Library. After pedaling his bike the twenty miles from his base in Harford County, Bready entered the library to discover that the girl behind the counter wasn't the one he was expecting.

She had been replaced by 16-year-old Mary Hortop, and Bready was even more smitten. He hung around the library until closing time, and asked Mary if he could walk her home. She agreed.

Bready hopped back on his bike and hightailed it back to Edgewood, the base where he and Mary would eventually marry in 1943.

Bready's next stop was Czechoslovakia and other areas of Europe for a tour of duty in World War II. When he wasn't commandeering jeeps and infuriating officers, Bready was sending home any spoils he could lay his hands on. Back home in Govans, Mary would walk outside in the morning and find German military helmets wrapped in newspaper waiting for her on their porch.

While on leave back in the states, Bready called his friend Morley back at the Washington Post, and discovered they were shorthanded due to the war. Bready was on a train to D.C. the day after his tour of duty ended in 1945, still in uniform and bound for the copy desk.

In the weeks that followed, he heard that the Baltimore Evening Sun copy desk was understaffed as well, put in for the job, and found his time at the Post to be sufficient recommendation.

"I shifted from taking the train to work, to taking the trolley," Bready said. He often opted instead for his bicycle, hustling down York Road from his home in Govans and stashing the bike by the backdoor of the Evening Sun offices.

Bready moved copy for two years in the old Sun building at the corner of Charles and Baltimore streets, located on the southwest corner of Charles and Baltimore streets. The grand new structure, complete with marble floors, limestone columns, and copper doors, was twice the size of the newspaper’s former home in the Sun Iron Building. Its location near Baltimore’s financial and retail districts afforded reporters quick access to the city’s business district, and advertising staffers were mere steps from major clients in the retail shops.

Though times were different, methods for relieving newsroom stress weren't.

"Reporters would throw paper airplanes at each other, and it wasn't long before one would go sailing out the window and land on some poor pedestrian down on Redwood street," said Bready.

WMAR-TV went on the air in 1947, and was located in the same building as the Sun. The allure of jobs in television began to pull reporters away from the newspaper. One of these reporters was named Jim McManus, later known to the world outside Charm City as Jim McKay, who would go on to host ABC's Wide World of Sports for close to 40 years.

Bready had come of age near McKay's typewriter, and claimed the spot McKay had vacated on the city desk. Once there, he pulled double duty with general assignment reporting and longer-form feature writing, honing his distinctive style.

To read Bready's work is to gain a glimpse into the mile-a-minute thought process of his writing mind. He rattles off lists of historical figures in his articles or books, punctuated by questions about certain standouts. These are followed by punchy one-word sentences. ‘Just the facts, ma'am,’ this was not.

"He would create new words," said Chris Bready, Jim's son. "He would create sentences 50 words long. He entertained himself that way."

Bready story leads are deliberately indirect, and his work often flouts traditionally compact newspaper style. Sentences are constructed out of multiple clauses and sub-clauses. His wending prose presents familiar subjects in unique ways:

"A final scene from the early days: One enemy batter had a dismaying nonchalance - at the plate, he would grip his bat with only one hand, and yet connect; at least once, in this manner, he hit the ball over the fence. An early-days spectator of this stunt was happier when Google Poles, of the home team, performed his specialty: bringing up a gloved hand out of nowhere and catching a thrown or batted ball after it had apparently gone by him." (from “Baseball in Baltimore”, 1998.)

"You could always tell a Bready editorial," said John O'Donnell, who worked with him on the editorial page from 1973-76.

Russell Baker, himself a Baltimore native, regarded Bready as a master features stylist. He once walked in on Bready interviewing Evelyn Waugh. They had both been assigned to interview the English novelist, and Bready's formidable reputation left Baker feeling intimidated, as he wrote in his 1989 memoir, “The Good Times”:

"He was James Bready, one of the Evening Sun's brilliant cadre of feature writers, all of whom I admired with a respect close to awe. Bready was major league. The imagination, wit, and graceful lilt of his writing made him one of the glories of the Evening Sun. He was the kind of newspaper writer I wanted to be, but until this moment I had never met him. Thin, pale, and as ascetic-looking as a metaphysical poet, he gave me a wide, impish smile. He probably meant it to be genial, but in my frantic state of mind it seemed satanic and malevolent, as though he relished this chance to watch me humiliate myself."

In 1952, Bready's skill earned him the position of editorial writer at the Evening Sun. The 34-year-old Bready now found himself surrounded by much older colleagues on the editorial page. He used the situation as an opportunity to distinguish himself.

Bready was a different breed from most of the editorial writers of his time.

"These guys were a little bit stuffy, and Jim is anything but stuffy," said Mike Bowler, who worked with Bready for 15 years, starting in 1970. "He wasn't going to sit down like [Evening Sun editorial writer and conservative legal theorist] C.P. Ives and write a heavy editorial on the latest talks in Brussels."

"He wasn't aloof or arrogant like some other editorial writers were," said Joan Jacobson, a reporter at the Evening Sun for 28 years. "In a newspaper of cynical journalists, Jim stood out as a perennially upbeat and optimistic man."

After interning at the paper during her senior year at College Park in 1973, Jacobson returned a year later and was offered a full time job.

"As I left the building, Jim was standing on the sidewalk on North Calvert Street," Jacobson said. "When I told him I had the job, he jumped up and down on curb like a 5-year-old, shouting 'Oh goody, goody!"

Also in '52, Bready became a Baltimore stringer for the Time, Life, and Fortune magazines. Edwin Young - a beloved Evening Sun city editor - held the job previously, but had taken an offer for the executive editor position at the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. Bready stepped in, and traveled all over Maryland to file stories for the national magazines.

"Sometimes they'd send me to the shore, sometimes to a factory, sometimes to a school in Cumberland," Bready said. "My wife Mary would make dinner, hoping that I'd show up for it."

Bready strove to keep his newspaper and magazine duties separate. He once typed up some information for the magazines and hustled down to the Western Union office to send it off, only to be photographed by a laughing Evening Sun photographer on his return trip up Calvert Street.

In October 1954, Bready's first "Books and Authors" column appeared in the Sunday Sun. He became the paper's arbiter of the Baltimore literary scene, vetting books and assigning them for review. At a time when bylines were rationed conservatively and not necessarily a reporter's birthright, Bready was in the position to offer both a book's author, and its reviewer, some ink. This power, coupled with his fair treatment of the region's writers, made Bready a popular name in Baltimore.

"Everybody knew him and liked him, and abided his eccentricities," Bowler said, laughing.

Bready was a kinetic force in the newsroom, often seen hauling around canvas bags full of books and newspaper clippings at a rapid pace.

Ernie Imhoff was the Evening Sun's last managing editor. He described Bready as a "Calvert Street whirlwind."

"A thin, wiry man running, walking fast, bicycling quickly," Imhoff said. "He was always talking in a hurry, sometimes quicker than his thoughts were lined up to come out."

Jim Keat spent almost 40 years at the Sun, as a foreign correspondent in India, editor of the Sunday Sun section, and assistant managing editor under James I. Houck. According to Keat, Bready was "always smiling, always quick with a chuckle, always had a joke to make."

"He was a perpetual motion machine," Keat said.

Bob Erlandson started at the Sun in 1955, and met Bready by doing book reviews for Jim's section. He visited Bready's office to chat, noting it's gradual shrink from the encroachment of accumulated newspapers and magazines.

Once, Erlandson was returning to the office after lunch and saw Bready running up the street with a brick in each hand.

"He never walked when he could run," Erlandson said.

Bready had plucked the bricks from two old buildings being demolished for urban renewal.

"That was Jim, trying his best to preserve some part of old Baltimore," Erlandson said.

Once the paper had gone to press just after noon each day, Bready would be seen bounding out the door in pursuit of his next curiosity. He never stopped chasing news, even on his days off, when he would head down to the newsroom and linger until 6:30 or 7 in the evening.

Bready's three sons, Rick, Chris, and Steve, would be called into duty to pry Dad away.

"Our day would end with picking up Dad," said Chris Bready. "We'd get down to Calvert Street, and Mom would send one of us in to get him. After 15 minutes, another would be sent in, and sometimes even the third. We'd find him in his office, still working."

Even at home, Bready was consumed by his writing.

"After dinner, I would peer into his room and find him perched over the typewriter," said Chris. "Sometimes nodding off, other times searching for the right word, or way to put them together."

Wages for Sunpapers reporters were notoriously low during much of Bready's career. In addition to his myriad reporting duties, Bready remained in the Army Reserve to pull an extra paycheck. He went to meetings every Monday, and reported to Fort Indiantown Gap in Carlisle, Pa. for a two-week training session every summer.

Bready was among Sun staffers who helped to found a local chapter of the American Newspaper Guild, to negotiate labor contracts with management in the hopes of improving salaries.

In April of 1965, the existing labor contract had expired and negotiations were deadlocked. The first ever strike against the Sunpapers resulted. The printers, deliverymen, and other trade unions had been in place far longer than the Guild, and, in a bold statement, threw their support behind the new kid on the block.

"I gave my shoe soles a hard time, walking around in a circle and carrying a sign in front of the Sun building," Bready said.

Bready brought Mary and the boys down to the picket line.

"We brought up our three sons to be rebels," Mary said.

Indeed, 14-year-old Steve wore his Guild sandwich board around the campus of local high school City College, where he was a student.

Bready and other striking reporters worked together to write and print a Sun replacement paper, in a building one block north and across the street from Calvert Street headquarters.

"It was called The Baltimore Banner, and we gave it away," Bready said.

The strike lasted 47 days. When the picketing stopped, the reporters had earned a wage increase and more frequent mandatory Guild representation in new hires.

"From then on, [labor] contracts went up and up," said Imhoff. "It was a real watershed time. Jim never quit. He never gave up on these issues."

Bready was a Guild stalwart, even after he retired.

"Jim would show up at negotiations with management," Bowler said. "The guild negotiator would say 'Mr. Bready, can you tell us how much your pension has increased since you retired?' His answer was always the same: zero."

"There were only certain people you could always depend on," Jacobson said. "Jim was one of them"

Jim's connections around town and Mary's work in various civil rights groups made the Breadys one of Baltimore's most politically active couples.

"Jim and Mary may have been in a ticklish situation," said Antero Pietila, former Sun editorial page editor and friend of the Bready family. "The newspaper company abhorred any kind of activist involvement."

But the Breadys were uncompromising. In January of 1969, Richard Nixon had just been elected President, and Chris Bready was home from college in Indiana with some friends. The boys headed to Washington, DC to attend an anti-inaugaration event on the Mall, leaving Jim and Mary behind.

Upon returning from the rain-soaked rally, the boys encountered two pairs of muddy boots on the front porch. Jim and Mary had gone to the event to do some demonstrating of their own.

Every year, during the week between Christmas and New Year's, Jim would get behind the bar in his big woodframe house on Gladstone Avenue in Roland Park, and the Breadys hosted Baltimore's power players for a bash that earned the title of Baltimore's Best by the City Paper in the 1970's.

"He had, far and away, the best parties in town," said Bowler. "Everybody who was anybody was there. Folks from the legal community, the arts community, circuit court judges, senators. Sen. [Paul] Sarbanes would come. It was probably the longest running party in Baltimore history."

Aside from his beloved Mary, Bready's great love is books: reviewing, collecting, and writing.

He poured his considerable energy into them, first with “The Home Team: The Baltimore Orioles”, self-published in 1958, the 100th anniversary of baseball in Baltimore. Bready took out a second mortgage on his home to afford the book's publishing costs. The Orioles had been in town for a mere five years when Bready completed the book, and he painstakingly put out several new editions as his research uncovered new material.

Bready ushered the reprint of “The Story of Maryland Politics” by Frank A. Kent, who was the Sun's premier political writer in the early 20th century, adding a new introduction to the version Bready had printed by Tradition Press in Hatboro, Pa. in 1968.

Next came “Baseball in Baltimore: The First Hundred Years”, published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins University Press, a meticulous look at all of the players, teams, and stadiums that have called Baltimore home, including a few remarkable photos of a young Babe Ruth.

In his books and in the pages of the Evening Sun, Bready was an expert booster of his adopted city.

"I developed a prejudice for Baltimore," Bready says.

His passion, and prose, shines in a 1996 summary of the local literary scene for the Sun:

"This home to hairdo stylists and hardcrab malleteers, to lacrosse gunners and once-more-unto-the-breach shortstops - is it also friendly country for a writer? This Baltimore, this Maryland - does the region invite and nourish careers in literature? Does it earn more than a pro rata share of publishing glory? Yes. Certainly. The proof is in stores, libraries, homes - and the intellects and performances of a wide array of resident writers."

Bready once covered the substantial donation of a collection of books to the Enoch Pratt Library. The donor was H.L. Mencken. Bready parlayed the story into an excuse to visit Mencken at his home at 1524 Hollins Street in West Baltimore.

"I just kept going back," Bready said. "Why others didn't do the same, I don't know."

Fortified with newsroom gossip Mencken craved, Bready would join Mencken and his brother August in the living room who would pull out a bottle of whiskey to bolster the sessions. Bready, never much of a drinker, imbibed only of Mencken's presence.

"I was awestruck," Bready said.

Bready once tried to do a favor for whom he still refers to as "the great man."

"Mencken never went to college, and Curley Byrd at the University of Maryland wanted to make up for that by giving him an honorary doctorate," said Bready.

Harry Clifton "Curley" Byrd, the namesake of today's Byrd stadium, was president of the university from 1935 to 1954.

"August didn't like the smell of it," said Bready of the University of Maryland offer. "So I talked with some Hopkins professors I knew, and they said they could do it if the Mencken brothers would agree."

Bready broached the topic at the Mencken house the following evening.

"I can still picture Mencken sitting there, opening his mouth, and letting out a roar," Bready said. "Mencken's speech had been affected by a stroke, but August translated it to mean he preferred a degree from Oxford."

While Russell Baker and many others stopped in Baltimore only briefly, on their way to careers in New York or other places, Bready never had a reason to leave his adopted hometown.

Chris Bready operates the Baltimore Book Company on North Charles Street in Charles Village. He credits his father for inspiring him toward a career that enabled him to enjoy life while doing something he loves.

"My father taught me that you could become somebody without having to be famous," Chris said. "For him, success was not based upon the number of bylines. He got what he really wanted, which was a home life. Married, kids, comfort. Domestic success."

Jim and Mary share an apartment two blocks from where the couple first lived together with her parents in Govans. Jim still heads down to the library every June 21 to mark the anniversary of their first meeting, even if Mary isn't feeling up to the journey.

He still isn't content to walk when he can run. Now it is a quick shuffle around the apartment, newsboy cap perched on his head, retrieving books, photos, and other artifacts for a curious visitor.

He still visits Sun headquarters on Calvert Street to stalk the grounds and rifle through waste paper baskets searching for useful discarded newspapers. His visits have been hampered by the new Sun policy requiring visitors to be accompanied by a current staffer. This policy includes, apparently, retired newspapermen who gave the paper over 60 years.

He still mourns the 1995 death of his cherished Evening Sun, insisting that without it, "somehow life has its miseries."

Three days a week, he heads to the hospital for kidney treatment.

"I've traded a life of analysis, for dialysis," he says. Still, he insists that if his name isn't in the death notices, "it's a nice day."

Bready is a rare exception among former Sun scribes - he was able to leave on his terms, before buyouts and layoffs eviscerated the paper he loved. He never had to become a working newspaperman without a newspaper.

When conversation turns to the current state of journalism and the growth of online news, Bready is resistant, insisting that he wants to read a newspaper that is "news, on paper."

"Would I want to live in a world without daily newspapers?" Bready asks, unprompted.

In a brief moment during a life built with words, James H. Bready is at a loss for them.

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