In the spring of 2022, Baltimore artist and participatory-history specialist Lauren Muney hand-created custom silhouettes(profile portraits)of Baltimore City, Maryland, residents for long-term public installation at the Peale. These faces will encircle several rooms of the historic Peale walls, giving visitors, residents and guests the opportunity to feel the Baltimore ‘family’ all around them. The exhibition will be installed in August 2022. Some sitters also contributed stories about their lives and experiences in Baltimore.
Karen Cook (00:01): My name is Karen Cook. My maiden name is Myers. I was born in east Baltimore in 1963 on Ashland Avenue. Eric Roho had white marble steps, and I remember women and children would scrub these marble steps so that they would sparkle in the sun. Other memories of mine are, remember the Arabers with their horse drawn wagons who yelled out while trying to sell vegetables and fruits. My mom would take us for a lot of walks, she didn't drive, and we would go to Patterson and Bocek Parks. People sat outside a lot on their steps or stoops to talk while the kids played and, especially during hot summer evenings, everybody was sitting out and all the doors and windows were open because no one had air conditioning.
Karen Cook (00:59): Painted screens were popular when I was a child, I remember seeing them in windows and storm doors. There was an ice truck that would deliver giant blocks of ice to homes and to businesses and the driver would stop a lot of times during hot summer days and use an ice pick to break off pieces of ice to give us kids. That was a real treat. I remember the chaos of 1968 during the riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was pretty young so I didn't really understand everything that was going on and why, but I remember trucks of national guardsmen patrolling the streets. It was very scary.
Karen Cook (01:41): We had a black and white TV with about three working channels. Dad would use aluminum foil to put on the antennas or rabbit ears to try to get a better signal. You didn't have a remote control so you had to get up and manually change the channel. We children would collect glass Coke bottles and take them to the corner store for a deposit. Might have been five cents that you could get for a bottle at the time. They had a lot of penny candy in the stores so five cents to us was a lot of money. I remember getting a pickled onion for, I think, about five cents.
Karen Cook (02:21): Christmas time, there was many great memories. We had an artificial aluminum, silver tree. There was a color wheel that you would plug in. It had four different colors and we would sit mesmerized on the floor watching the tree turn these four different colors. Some of the ornaments were pretty old. If you dropped some of the balls, they would splinter into a thousand pieces. Department stores, such as Levinson and Klein, would have these huge Christmas displays which included moving figures and train sets. It was a treat to walk and just look in each window.
Karen Cook (02:55): In the evening, dad would drive us around in the car through the neighborhood so we could watch people's Christmas displays. They had a lot of moving things and, of course, the Christmas lights. Dad would threaten to call Santa Claus if we didn't go to bed early enough on Christmas Eve. We had these old black rotary phones and he would pick up the phone pretending he was calling Santa Claus. It was a tradition for dad to wait until Christmas Eve to put the tree up because that's what his family had done.
Asset ID: 2022.11.04
Transcription abbreviated: Contact the Peale for a complete transcript.
Photo courtesy of Karen Cook
