Growing up in Ocean City, I was cool-adjacent.
I ran a beach stand but was never a lifeguard. I drove a city bus but was never a summer police officer.
So I was saddened when a colleague told me that Ocean City will end its summer police program. The final 21 temporary officers will turn in their guns and badges after Labor Day.
“We’re going to continue to hype up these kids because they’re the last of their kind,” said Ashley Miller, a police spokesperson.
As you get older, things that were always there suddenly are not.
The new owners of Baltimore Sun Media stopped publishing the Maryland Gazette, which carried news of the Declaration of Independence on July 11, 1776. The Big Glen Burnie Carnival ended a summer run that started in 1908.
And down in Ocean City, millions of beachgoers this summer will see the last in a century-long line of young men and women sworn in as 90-day officers to keep the swelling population safe.
Ocean City announced the decision in February, citing changes stemming from police reform laws.
“It’s not our decision,” Miller said.
The Maryland Police Training Commission will no longer allow officers with only partial training have arrest powers. Many departments used the rule to put officers recruited from other states on the street before they qualified in Maryland.
But Ocean City used it to hire men and women 21 and older, give them basic law enforcement and firearms training and deploy them as the population swells in the summer from a few thousand to more than 300,000.
It’s been good for the department. Recruiting is easy when you have a pool of boardwalk-tested applicants. Of Ocean City’s 115 full-time officers, all but a handful started this way.
“I think the seasonal program has shaped not just the Ocean City Police Department but law enforcement agencies all around the world,” Miller said. “So many people have started here.”
One of them was U.S. Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger, the retiring 11-term congressman from Baltimore County. He joined the Ocean City Beach Patrol as a 15-year-old in 1962 and shifted to the police department when he turned 21.
“I loved action, and I tried for the police department. I knew the head of the Police Department … and I got to him and I said, ‘I’m 21 and I’m going to try out as a cop,’ ” he recalled. “I was able to talk to the top guys [and] I got a car right away.”
While Ruppersberger remembers the program as one that worked, he left for law school after witnessing some things he couldn’t condone. Ocean City was segregated until the mid-1960s, and racism was a powerful force for years.
“I saw things that I didn’t like,” he said. “I saw one of my sergeants beating a long-haired hippy. It was just very racist. It was a long time ago.”
Miller said summer officers have not been involved in highly publicized brutality complaints against the department.
Ocean City, with an annual police budget of about $25 million and about 6,000 full-time residents, has some of the highest per capita spending on law enforcement in the country. Over the next six months, it will add another 10 officers to cope with the loss of summer help.
And that also explains the change. Tens of thousands more people spend time in the beach town year-round than when I was growing up, when Coastal Highway traffic signals blinked yellow for months.
Far fewer people today want the summer job anyway, with less than two dozen applicants for this season’s force. Next summer, the department will expand its public safety aide program, hoping to fill its ranks with people 18 and older who want to explore law enforcement careers — without guns or handcuffs.
“By next summer, our community won’t really notice,” Miller said.
***
I was in a quiet room with Tim Knight, then CEO of Tribune Publishing, a day after the June 28, 2018, shooting that killed five people in my old newsroom in Annapolis, The Capital.
“We’ve got to save the Maryland Gazette,” he said. “It’s the oldest newspaper in America.”
Uh. About that.
I was the editor of the Gazette starting in 2006 and became editor of Capital Gazette Communications in 2015. Somewhere along the way, I met historian Jane McWilliams.
She explained that the owners in the late 1960s hired her to research the paper’s past after Alex Haley used its archives to trace the enslaved ancestor he placed at the start of his novel, “Roots: The Saga of the American Family.” She discovered the Declaration of Independence on page 3 of the Maryland Gazette on July 11, 1776.
She told then-Publisher Phil Merrill (as in the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland) that she also discovered the paper ceased publication on Dec. 12, 1839.
After the Civil War, new owners started it up again and advanced the volume and issue numbers (essentially the odometer) to make it appear that it had been publishing continuously since 1727.
It was bought in the 1880s by the family that started The Evening Capital, renamed The Capital a century later.
“He said, ‘Let’s not tell anyone about that,’ ” McWilliams told me.
Now both names are gone, merged this month into one edition called Capital Gazette. The folks at The Baltimore Sun, which bought Capital Gazette Communications in 2014, are bowing to the inevitable with this move.
Readers have long shifted to digital, advertising revenue is down, and a much smaller staff makes it harder to give each newspaper a distinct voice. Lots of us who worked there will be sad to see it go, but it is just a local manifestation of national trends for print journalism.
The new paper is unmistakably a renaming for The Capital, though. It is the historic paper with ties to the Revolution that is gone.
In this short eulogy, I should dispel one other myth about the Maryland Gazette. Some marketing person once explained the Declaration’s page 3 position by saying it wasn’t on page 1 because it wasn’t local news.
Phooey.
A plate full of type was heavy, assembled by hand over several days and something you wouldn’t change a day before publication.
Page 3 was the space left when news of independence arrived in Annapolis.
***
It’s been forever since I thought of a Wengert ice cream sandwich.
But when my colleague Royale Bonds reported that the Glen Burnie Improvement Association canceled The Big Glen Burnie Carnival, probably forever, I instantly remembered eating one of these on a warm August night.
It was an inch-and-a-half-thick slab of ice cream — chocolate, vanilla or strawberry — sandwiched between two crisp sugar wafers.
I don’t really remember what it tasted like — probably about the same as any ice cream sandwich. But these desserts were made by one family, by hand, every carnival summer — an incredible record that started in 1919.
When I talked with Candy Fontz this spring about the death of Barb Moeller, longtime GBIA president, she said the future of the carnival was looking grim.
Professional carnival companies might run the tilt-a-whirl, Ferris wheel and fun house, but volunteers worked the raffles, games and food concessions.
Then, over the last decade, the number of volunteers started to dwindle. Emma Wengert’s son, Richard, died in 2014 at 92, and his son and daughter dropped out a few years later.
I worked out of a Glen Burnie newsroom for a few years, and as much as I lament the passing of the Maryland Gazette, there are just as many people there who are thinking wistfully of a Wengert ice cream sandwich this summer.
