Monday, October 14, 2019

Cats Eye Pub, Fells Point Maryand




October 14, 2019
Here is the small part I played in the send off of a bartender and local celebrity, *Jeff Knapp.
 
October 1, 1992
Ruth Goetz stood in noonday sun along the 500 block of S. Wolfe St. yesterday to watch an eight-piece brass band, a couple hundred mourners and a lone bagpiper march south to the harbor.
"I've seen it in New Orleans," she said, "but in my 70 years I never seen it on Wolfe Street."
 
Never in Baltimore, as best anyone can remember, until the funeral of H. Jefferson Knapp III, local character nonpareil.
 
"Jeff wanted a Viking funeral where they put your body on a boat and light the funeral pyre at sea, but all he had was a rubber dinghy," said Larry Benicewicz, a friend who flew the brass band into town from the Crescent City. "We gave him a New Orleans send-off, instead."
 
Jeff Knapp was a generous barkeep, an incorrigible prankster, and a slavish scene-maker known as the Abe Lincoln of Fells Point for reasons carved into his face.
 
He died Saturday at age 63, setting off rounds of waterfront fetes in his honor that lasted until the bars closed this morning.
 
Yesterday they eulogized him, cried and danced for him, and cremated him.
"Jeff was always the spirit behind an impossible lifestyle," said Megan Hamilton, who carried a basket of flowers to give to mourners and spectators lining the street. "He couldn't [party] without style, and if he couldn't do it his way he'd just stop. He must have been ready to go."
 
Some thought it beyond coincidence that Mr. Knapp passed away a week before the Fells Point Fun Festival, where for the first time public drinking would not be allowed.
 
In front of the funeral parade as it left the Lilly and Zeiler funeral home on Eastern Avenue was a man carrying a floral arrangement of carnations shaped like the letters V.T.N.F., which stood for Mr. 
 Knapp's beverage battle cry: "Vodka Tonic No Fruit!"
 
Behind it marched his brother, Phil Knapp, carrying a large color photograph of the deceased taped to a stick. On either side were Jeff Knapp's four children and his grandchildren. Next came the tuba, drums, trumpet and trombone of the Treme Brass Band playing Old Rugged Cross, followed by a gang of mourners whose ranks swelled as Thames Street neared.
 
Bringing up the rear was Wayne Francis, piper for hire, who played "Amazing Grace" before Mr. Knapp's open coffin and blew a spirit of Eire that snaked through the narrow streets and alleys of Southeast Baltimore.
 
The procession turned onto Thames Street from Wolfe, paused before the Cat's Eye Pub where Mr. Knapp is best remembered by tugboat men and Ph.Ds as the blasphemous wit who gave away drinks like water. It then rolled along to "When The Saints Go Marching In" toward the new promenade where his name and motto are chiseled in a brick his son Gary painted gold the night of his father's death.
 
There, a man who was once a minister stood on a platform, held a Bible and gave the final blessing.
"Jeff's stories will be told and retold for years to come," said P.J. Trautwein. "The way he used to take wedding pictures and have them developed in time to give to the bride at the reception; the first time he dressed up as Lincoln to dedicate the Tomb of the Unknown Wino in the Fells Point square to the dismay of then Mayor Schaefer; when he staged the Skylab crash on Thames Street."
 
And now, Mr. Trautwein said, Herbert Jefferson Knapp III has been reunited with his late Cat's Eye commandos Kenny Orye and Ralph Miller who succumbed to the party a few years before him.
 
*Jeff Knapp worked at the Cat’s Eye Pub for most of his life and all of his death. Since he passed eight years ago, countless employees and customers have had experiences with Jeff, including the owner of Baltimore Ghost Tours, Melissa Rowell. When she moved to the Fells Point neighborhood in Baltimore, she stopped by to pick up a Cat’s Eye T-shirt for her father. She didn’t know Jeff was a ghost. She claims he made her change and was “as solid as you or me” – and as dead as a doornail.

Tuesday, October 1, 2019

The poppy of remembrance


Poppy's growing wild among the remnants of World War One fortifications.
This war was called "The Great War" and “The War to end all Wars” in retrospect. 
New technologies delivered death on an unheard of scale just years before. 
The airplane, machine gun, tanks and poisonus gas made killing easier and faster. 
The accuracy of exsisting weapons such as the rifle and cannon were sharpened as well. 
 Armies faced off against each other from protective trenches dug in the ground, the land in between was called “no mans land” for good reason. 
Constant shelling and bombardment made recovering the dead impossible.


Poppies were a common sight, especially on the Western Front. They flourished in the soil churned up by the fighting and shelling. The flower provided Canadian doctor John McCrae with inspiration for his poem ‘In Flanders Fields’, which he wrote whilst serving in Ypres in 1915.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the dead: Short days ago,
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved: and now we lie
In Flanders fields!
Take up our quarrel with the foe
To you, from failing hands, we throw
The torch: be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die,
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields
A paper poppy was eventually adopted by the British and Canadian Legions as the symbol of remembrance of World War One and a means of raising funds for disabled veterans. 
An American war volunteer, Moina Michael, helped establish the symbol in the US where the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion also embraced the Red Paper Poppy tradition. The America Leigon celebrates National Poppy Day on May 25th. It is strongly linked with Armistice Day in the UK (11 November)



A red paper poppy, that is sold on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in remembrance