About

Summary

My name is Bernard John Hayden, age 62, and I live in West Ocean City. I’ve worked 40 years in the private sector, mostly as a journalist and editor, and also as a store manager. These days, I’m a blogger by winter and work in the Ocean City hospitality industry by summer. (My extended family, and my friends on he Eastern Shore, call me by my middle name, John.)

During the 2009 season, I worked as a desk clerk at a hotel on the Boardwalk. During the 2010 season, I worked as a security officer at a condominium tower on High-rise Row. I have 25 years experience as a newsman and editor.

Like many Marylanders, I’ve been a registered Democrat since I was old enough to vote. I’m an independent-thinking Democrat, liberal on social issues and civil rights, conservative on taxing and spending, proactive on economic development.

Contents:

Ocean City in the Fall, 2008

Ocean City in the Spring, 1972

New Years Eve in the Newsroom, Y2K

All the Boring Details

Community Activity

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Ocean City in the Fall, 2008

I first came to live in Ocean City, Maryland, in May of 1972.

I worked four seasons on the Boardwalk, and three winters. At the end of the 1975 season, after inventory was finished, I moved on.

I return to Ocean City 33 years later, in October 2008.

In 1972, I was young and needed to work. I did work, seven days a week. Four summers, May 1 to Sept. 30, 150 straight days, (and five days a week in the winter). No matter how long or hard I worked, there were others working longer or harder. (Later on, some clever consultant conceived the chimera that everyone should “work smarter, not harder.”)

The Ocean City boardwalk may seem an unlikely place to learn lessons of value. Not true. I worked for people who had lived and worked through the Great Depression, World War II, and many seasons in the five & dime business. They shared their wisdom freely by word and example.

In 2008, I feel old and need a rest. I’m not finished working, but I’m done with seven-days-a-week. I look forward to work in the Spring of 2009 with curiosity and anticipation.

Ocean City. May and October, Spring and Fall. Sometimes life surprises us with pleasing symmetry. October, BTW, is one of the fairest months of all at the beach.

– John Hayden

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Ocean City in the Spring, 1972

I arrived in Ocean City, Maryland, on a gray afternoon in early May. All my possessions fit inside a Ford Pinto. It was 1972. The town was quiet and empty. The three-story house at 5th Street and Baltimore Avenue was deserted, and the front door unlocked.

I walked in and found that the electricity was on. It was a summer cottage, sided with white shingles, big and sparely furnished. Running water, hot and cold. A small sign said Gordy Hall.

I had few plans, limited skills, no evident talent, no money and hardly any sense. But I was a college graduate, after all, so of course I considered myself well-prepared. I had a car. The room had been rented and a job lined up. Working seven days a week did not daunt me in those days.

The cool Ocean City, Md., afternoon turned into a cold night. Not only the house was empty, but the street as well. My Pinto was the only vehicle parked on 5th Street from Baltimore Avenue to the Boardwalk. No television and no telephone.No heat! I settled down to read.

By and by, the landlord appeared, a rough but friendly old man, and practical. He got right to the essentials. It was cold, he observed, and we should burn some wood in the fireplace. He offered me a beer and we pulled two chairs close to the fire. Right away, I knew Ocean City was going to be all right . . .

My landlord was a retired FBI agent, Paul Ernest, and he preferred to be called Mr. E, or Paul. He and his wife leased the place and ran it as a rooming house for young men. The first floor rented by the week to families. The Ernests and their daughter lived on the second floor. The third-floor rooms they rented to eight or nine college boys, lifeguards and such. At 23, I had seniority on the third floor. The Ernests ran the house as if their roomers were relatives. The only rule: No girls on the third floor.

On the corner across 5th Street was a larger house, four stories, with dark weathered siding, Berkley Hall. The first floor was the home of Mrs. Strohecker, a prominent Ocean City businesswoman, and a member of the Showell family. The second, third and fourth floors were a rooming house for young women, many of them waitresses at Phillips Crab House. Their uniform: white shirt, white shorts, red apron, tanned legs. Berkley Hall had a long list of rules, most prominently: No boys allowed past the lobby.

Mr. and Mrs. E ran a rooming house, not a boarding house. Meals were not included. Mrs. E was your idea of a perfect grandmother. She allowed us to keep beer in her refrigerator. (I was over 21. If some of the others were underage, well, the statute of limitations has expired.) She maintained order with a smile and a kind word. It never occurred to anyone to misbehave in her presence.

Roomers on both sides of 5th Street worked hard and spent any free daylight hours on the beach. I hardly remember where or how we ate. From early May to late September, the only amenity at the boys’ rooming house was a spacious porch with rocking chairs. The only air conditioning came through screened windows; it must have been hot on the third floor, but I don’t recall the heat.

Late evenings after work were spent rocking on the porch, talking and sipping cold beer, watching the comings and goings of our neighbors across the way. . . .

The boys’ rooming house is long gone. The Tidelands Hotel expanded down the south side of 5th Street to Baltimore Avenue, and clear around the corner. A Comfort Inn sign and landscaping now occupy the lot where Berkley Hall stood.

– John Hayden

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New Years Eve In The Newsroom, Y2K

Remember Y2K? Can that possibly have been 10 years ago? An entire decade? Today, we are on the cusp of Y2KX, 2010, another new decade.

Where were you, and what were you doing, on New Year’s Eve, 1999? It was the end of a millennium,and everywhere there was trepidation and anticipation.

I was working at the Baltimore Sun on Calvert Street on the evening of Dec. 31, 1999. I was the makeup editor that night, shuttling back and forth from the newsroom to the composing room. (One composing-room wag called the printers who worked there “the world’s largest dysfunctional family.”) People in the newspaper family called me by my first name, Bernie.

Nearly the entire news staff, from Editor John Carroll and Managing Editor Bill Marimow down to the greenest reporter, was in the building, or out covering a story. The top brass wanted to celebrate Y2K at the newspaper. Everyone wanted to be present if there was big news to report at the dawning of the millennium. News Editor Paul Moore was bouncing on adrenaline. “I’ve got Y2K fever,” he told me about 10:30 p.m. Publisher Mike Waller, an editor of the old school, was chatting with veteran printers in the composing room.

At 11 p.m., someone turned on the big new generator out back. The Sun would not be without power on Y2K, no matter what.

Those were the glory days. I was a card-carrying member of the Baltimore-Washington Newspaper Guild, with a reasonably well-paying job. I was solidly and safely middle class.

Midnight came and went. Nothing happened. No news. The newsroom was all but deserted by 1 a.m., Jan. 1, 2000. Quiet as a tomb. We monitored the news wires for a couple more hours, but Mr. Waller had already decreed that The Sun would not be publishing a Y2K Extra. There was nothing to report, and the paper was on a tight budget.

The newspaper people in the Calvert Street building that New Year’s Eve are a diaspora, 10 years later. None among those named in this essay remain at The Sun today.  The majority of the reporters and editors have moved on, one way or another. All of the printers are gone. (The Sun converted to full pagination early in the decade. That means the news pages are created on computer in the newsroom, and transmitted digitally, untouched by human hands, to the printing plant in Port Covington.)  The printers – masters of hot type and then cold type — have faded into retirement and into history, replaced completely by computers. It’s a story of automation at least as old as the Industrial Revolution.  John Henry was a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord. John Henry was a steel-driving man.

John Carroll soon departed The Sun to become editor of the much larger Los Angeles Times. In the best tradition of journalism, Mr. Carroll took a select few of  The Sun’s best and brightest reporters with him. For a time, top editors and reporters at The Sun eagerly awaited a phone call from LA, a call that never came for most.

Bill Marimow was promoted to editor, but before long, he was fired by a new publisher. Marimow landed for a time as managing editor at National Public Radio (NPR), with a few Sun reporters tagging along. A handful of reporters, led by Fraser Smith, moved to WYPR, the Baltimore public radio station.Marimow later returned to the Philadelphia Inquirer, scene of his two Pulitzer Prices years earlier, to become editor. Naturally, a few Sun alumni, mostly from the contingent that had followed Marimow from the Inquirer to the Sun previously, made the return trip home to the Inquirer. Many of the remaining Sun staffers departed in the continuous rounds of downsizing and buyouts at the paper during the first decade of the 21st century. What is left is hardly more than a shell of the once-great newspaper institution employing hundreds of reporters and editors, and hundreds of printers.

Was Y2K hysteria a hoax? It created work for computer programmers, and sold untold numbers of  generators, firearms, emergency food and water supplies. Or did the frantic rewriting of computer software prevent a worldwide collapse? Who can say?

The first 10 years of the new millennium have been a decade of terrorism, wars, dislocation, and financial crisis. But also a decade of advances in medical research and treatment; relentless digital innovation and online social networking; and progress for millions of people in China, India, and other developing countries.

Who could possibly predict what might happen next?

– “Bernie” John Hayden

The Boring Details

Born in 1948, Bernard John Hayden grew up in Maryland. He attended St. Jude’s Elementary School and Robert E. Peary High School, both in Rockville. He attended Montgomery Junior College (now Montgomery Community College) for two years and transferred to the University of Maryland, College Park. He majored in journalism and minored in political science, and graduated from the University of Maryland in 1971.

John Hayden’s first job after college was as a reporter at the Morning Herald in Hagerstown, Western Maryland. He moved to Ocean City in 1972, and worked one winter as a reporter for the Maryland Coast Press (predecessor of today’s Maryland Coast Dispatch). He worked year-round for Edwards 5 & 10 at North Division Street, and during the summer season managed one of the company’s four stores, the Boardwalk 5 & 10, at 6th Street. After four seasons on the boardwalk, he decided it was time to return to the Western Shore, where he helped manage a small bookstore for a year.

Mr. Hayden worked for Congressional Information Service, Inc., in Bethesda, MD, from 1977 to 1990. During his last nine years at the small publishing company, he was managing editor of the CIS Index to Congressional Hearings and Reports, with a staff of 18 writers, editors, and clerks.

In 1990, John Hayden returned to newspapering at the Carroll County Times, a small seven-day newspaper in Westminster, where he worked as a reporter and soon as news editor. He supervised the newsroom at night, and managed a staff of four full-time and four part-time copy editors who put out the paper seven days a week. He worked at the Carroll County Times more than five years.

After a brief stint as an editor at the York Daily Record, in Pennsylvania, Mr. Hayden returned to Maryland to accept a position as copy editor at The Baltimore Sun, which at that time was ranked one of the top 10 metro newspapers in the country.

During six years at The Sun, he worked on the Sports desk, the Metro News desk, the Business desk, and the Telegraph desk, which edited the front page and first section of the newspaper. He also was the “makeup editor” one or two nights a week in the composing room. As makeup editor, he worked with printers on deadline and signed off on pages before they went to the printing presses. He accepted a small buyout during a staff reduction at the newspaper in 2002.

During the next six years, he worked as a Realtor and retail salesman, and then had an inside look at the state’s often maddening bureaucracy, working for four years as a driver’s license agent at the Motor Vehicle Administration.

Bernard John Hayden returned to Ocean City in October 2008. He devotes winters to blogging, and summers to working in the resort’s hospitality industry.

Community Activities

Newspaper reporters and editors are prevented by journalistic ethics from engaging in political activity.

However, during the 1970s in Ocean City, John Hayden was a board member and secretary of the Worcester Environmental Trust, which was founded in the 1970s by Joe and Ilia Fehrer and Bill Ford. He also edited the environmental group’s monthly newsletter.  In 1974, Hayden worked on Bill Ford’s Republican campaign for county commissioner in Worcester County.

For most of the 1980s, while working at Congressional Information Service, he served as a Democratic Precinct Chairman in Silver Spring. He also was active at church, serving as an usher and several years on the parish council.

Later, in Baltimore County, he was vice president of the Rogers Forge Apartments Tenants Association, working to protect tenant rights during conversion of the apartments to condominiums. In 2006, he ran unsuccessfully for the Maryland House of Delegates in District 42, which is north of Baltimore.