The Park Bulletin

The Community Newsletter for Sudbrook Park, Pikesville, • www.SudbrookPark.org April, 2018 Flower& Bake Sale Saturday, May 12 9 am to 1 pm (rain or shine) Sudbrook Lane / Cliveden Road triangle

Hanging baskets, annuals for sun or shade, yummy homemade edibles! New this year: perennials for pollinators. Find the perfect gift for Mom right in the neighborhood. Pick up a copy of Olmsted’s Sudbrook and a beautiful Sudbrook Park mug. Meet the neighbors-free coffee and conversation! All proceeds support community improvements and programs. Donations of baked goods are most welcome. Contact Carolyn Hartloff at [email protected] or 410-580-0183 or drop off your goodies at the sale. See you there!

Dumpster Day When: Saturday, April 28, 8:30 to noon Where: Westover and Greenwood Roads Dumpsters provided by the County to help in your spring cleaning! Typically one Inside the Bulletin dumpster is for metal, one for non-recyclable yard waste, and two for general trash. Western Railway...... 2 Items that are typically put out on recycling days - i.e leaves, grass, branches, paper, cardboard, bottles - should not be brought to the dumpsters, which go to landfill. Annual Meeting...... 3 Butterfly bush...... 3 Not allowed: paint, flammable materials, chemicals, drums and tanks, large stumps, asphalt, blacktop and concrete. Board responsibilities....4 We will have a small, separate trailer with limited capacity for electronics such Save the date...... 4 as televisions, computers, printers, monitors. Dumpster Day is held rain or shine. Monarch Waystation....5 Volunteers are welcome. Election Day...... 5 Contact Mark Plogman at [email protected]. Meetings...... 5 Membership form...... 6

The Park Bulletin is published four times a year (April, June, September and November) by Sudbrook Park, Inc. to provide information about upcoming events, newsworthy items, community activities, and historical information, and to foster a greater sense of community among residents of Sudbrook Park. The Park Bulletin April, 2018 pg. 2 What draws a boy to a railroad? Perhaps the sound late at night of a train whistle while you lie awake in bed. I wasn’t inclined to roll out of bed in the dark and stumble through the darkness to the tracks. Instead, I waited until daylight and went straight down Upland Rd., which ended at the Western Maryland Railway tracks. There was a trail which provided ready access to the tracks. A boy had two choices: take a right toward Milford Mill Rd (now Old Milford Mill Rd.) or turn left and head toward the bridge and beyond to Owings Mills. Speaking of Milford Mill Rd., it took a different course before the light rail line was built. If you were headed to Reisterstown Rd. it used to take a downhill turn (at the present intersection of Greenwood Rd. and Milford Mill Rd.) to the right, passing Gehlfuss (Guilfuss?) Bus, which was a combination bus depot and auto graveyard. I used to attend St. Charles Borromeo school and the school, it seems, had a contract with Gehlfuss to transport the students who lived in distant neighborhoods such as Brighton, which is adjacent to Patterson Ave. I’d be sitting in a classroom facing Sudbrook Lane and into the parking lot would limp a Gehlfuss bus. The kids from Brighton would come into the school and tell us of their adventures when their bus broke down and a second bus had to be dispatched to pick them up. After you passed Gehlfuss Bus you came to the railroad crossing, which had red blinking lights and arms that descended across the road to bar traffic. Next to the tracks was a grocery store I called the Little Green Store, though I’m told it was also known as Burns’ Grocery. A husband and wife ran the store, which was a simple grocery store with the basic staples. The husband, who was tall and lean and wore a white apron, worked behind the meat counter while his wife worked the cash register. Upon entering the store there was a red Coca Cola cooler on the left. You’d lift the lid and reach down for a cold Coke or Sprite. You’d remove the bottle cap on the bottle opener on the front of the cooler. The Little Green Store was where your mother might send you if she needed something for dinner. The store did a modest amount of business, though I remember a time in the mid sixties when the local groceries (A & P, Giant, Acme) were closed by a strike. Without anywhere to shop it seemed everyone descended on the Little Green Store. During that strike, which lasted a week or two, that store probably did more business that it did the remainder of the year. The shelves were bare, unless you were looking for a jar of olives. If you kept walking on the tracks you’d eventually come to Patterson Ave. and The Seton Institute, which was hidden behind tall stone walls (some of which remain today). I was told as a boy that the Seton Institute was where retired nuns from the Sisters of Charity resided. Those tall walls were where I usually did a U-turn and headed home. If I was lucky a train coming out of the city or from the hills of West Virginia would come into view. The trains, which were more frequent in the sixties, often carried coal, some of which fell off the trains and mixed with the rock ballast. Of course as kids we were always happy to find a loose spike or somesuch to carry home. A neighbor tells me he was walking on the tracks back then and found an oversized hammer that a railroad work crew had left behind. The hammer has a hammer head as big as a baby’s head. You didn’t often see work crews but a special delight was the occasional sighting of a hi-rail, which was a pickup truck outfitted with rubber tires and flanged steel wheels, which dropped from the undercarriage of the truck and allowed it to ride the rails. The hi-rail was used for track inspection, among other things. When I saw a hi-rail coming down the tracks I fell back in amazement and marveled that men were paid to do such work. If a train were approaching we boys would fish in our pockets for pennies to put on the track. After the train passed we’d search furiously for our souvenir - a flattened penny the size of a quarter on which Abe Lincoln’s head had been flattened into unrecognizable shapes. Those too were taken home to be put in a drawer, usually the same drawer in which we kept our baseball cards. Speaking of the Sudbrook Lane bridge, I recall attending a meeting in the early 2000’s when an engineer from the county public works department explained to the crowd that in order to build a new bridge the old bridge would have to come down, after which it would take up to a year to erect a new bridge. Someone in the crowd, a wiseacre, put this question to the engineer: “As a boy I learned to smoke by crawling under the bridge with other boys where we’d coughingly smoke a cigarette a boy had stolen from home. If you take the bridge down, where will today’s boys learn to smoke?” After the laughter died down, the engineer said, “I guess they’ll just have to walk along the tracks.”

Thanks to Gene Wimert for his contributions The Park Bulletin April, 2018 pg. 3 Annual Meeting, June 16 Mark your calendar for Saturday, June 16 at 7 pm for Sudbrook’s annual meeting. This year’s presentation will be given by Teri Rising from County Historic Preservation on Baltimore County Historic Districts, the background of the program, history of each district and fun facts about their creation. A brief business meeting and election of next year’s Board will precede the presentation. The meeting will be at 507 Sudbrook Lane, partly so we can also provide refreshments and wine and beer, and have no curfew! Please come, have a voice, meet your neighbors! Nominating Committee Each June we elect officers for the following 12 months. The nominating committee must submit at least one candidate name for each board officer position: President, Vice President-Civic, Vice President-Social, Secretary and Treasurer. Any member of the Sudbrook Park Community Association may submit his or her name for one of these offices by May 1, 2018. If you are interested in submitting your name in nomination, please contact one of the following nominating committee members: Carolyn Hartloff [email protected] (410-580-0183), Roy Lappalainen roy_lappalainen@ yahoo.com (410-653-6087), or Deana Karras [email protected] (410-653-5010). If you are interested in serving on the Board as a Director-at-Large or attending a monthly meeting, please contact any Board member. Deane Rundell, President [email protected] Mark Plogman, Vice President-Civic [email protected] Craig Falk, Vice President-Social [email protected] Izzy Patoka, Treasurer [email protected] Deana Karras, Secretary [email protected] Darragh Brady, Immediate Past President [email protected] Stuart Abarbanel, Director-at-Large [email protected] Richard Gruberg, Director-at-Large [email protected] Carolyn Hartloff, Director-at-Large [email protected] Roy Lappalainen, Director-at-Large [email protected] Michelle LaPerriere, Director-at-Large [email protected] Linda Rundell, Director-at-Large [email protected]

Consider the Butterfly Bush With all the focus on native plants and supporting our native beneficial insects, the butterfly bush (buddleia davidii) has come under fire. A native of China, it won’t necessarily stay where you want it, seeding freely and outcompeting beneficial native plants. Ironically, they don’t really benefit butterflies. They cannot use it as a host plant. No food for caterpillars means no next generation of butterflies. Not a single North American caterpillar will feed on its leaves. Butterflies do like the nectar, but it has been characterized as like a coke machine in a high school, i.e. not healthy. Some great alternatives to consider: common buttonbush, clethra, viburnums, laurel, meadowsweet, and abelia. The Park Bulletin April, 2018 pg. 4 What are the Board responsibilities? The Sudbrook Park Board meets ten months each year (no August or December meetings) on the third Thursday each month at 7:30 pm.

President (or Co-Presidents) Preside(s) over meetings and the Board; supervises and administers the business and affairs of the community association; represents the community association to the greater community.

Vice President-Civic Oversees the maintenance of public spaces and historic street signs; arranges for Dumpster Day. Makes Secretary questionable jokes. (ok I put that in to see if anyone is Takes, distributes and reading this) maintains a written record of Board meetings and any meetings where appropriate. Vice President-Social Oversees all events, ideally working with volunteer chairs Director-at-Large for each event. Events: Flower & Bake Sale in May, July 4 Board members with voting rights. Generally Directors Parade, Halloween Parade, Tree Lighting. volunteer on a committee. Currently active committees are Bridge Roads and Traffic; Welcoming; Website; Treasurer Landscaping; Landmarks. Custodian of funds. Presents a monthly and annual accounting of monies spent and accrued; makes payments and deposits funds. Tracks membership.

Help The Honeybee! Spare Your Dandelions! Block Captains You may have heard of Colony Collapse Disorder, a Save the Date condition that has been killing off literally thousands of hives of honeybees over the past few years. Sunday, June 3, 4-6 pm Honeybees are responsible for pollinating many of the plants that provide us with food, and they are in big A huge THANK YOU to all our current and past trouble. Block Captains. These are the neighbors who tirelessly deliver this newsletter to your door five The bees have had a very tough year, with a very cold times a year, through heat of summer and snow of spring. They need a lot of pollen and nectar at this time winter! Then there is Mikki Keller, who for years has of the year, and depend on early blooming flowers, volunteered to compile the newsletter into the lovely such as our humble dandelion. publication it is. And Mary and Pat Lackey who pick Please consider the following to help the honeybees: the newsletters up at the printer and divide them into the right number for each Block Captain and a Leave the dandelions in your lawn! drop it at their homes (25 or so). THANK YOU for all a Avoid the use of pesticides; as many have been linked your dedication on the part of Sudbrook Park! Please to the death of honeybees. come to a reception in your honor on the afternoon a Plant things that are beneficial to honeybees. A of June 3 at 503 Sudbrook Lane. great article on providing forage plants for honeybees in Maryland is available at: www.tonitoni.org/bee_ gardening.pdf The Park Bulletin April, 2018 pg. 5 Monarch Waystation You may notice some digging going on in the park. We are beginning a monarch waystation project, a small planting in the center of the circle beyond the playground area. It will be planted with milkweeds, the host plant for monarch butterflies, and native pollinator plants they use as food sources. Hopefully we can expand the garden with time. Once it is in place we will apply to Monarch Watch for an official site plaque. Stay tuned! Want to get involved? Contact Deana at [email protected].

It’s The Law In Baltimore County Primary Voting TRASH AND TRASH CANS: Nobody relishes dealing with trash, but it’s even less Our Primary Election is June 26, 7 am - 8 pm. appealing when debris is scattered about on driveways, sidewalks and the street. Please use trash cans with Early voting this year is Thursday, June 14 - secure lids, and do not place your garbage out in plastic Thursday, June 21, between 10 am and 8 pm. or paper bags – not only does Baltimore County law There are 11 early voting sites for Baltimore require this, but crows and dogs easily invade plastic County. Check www.elections.state.md.us for bags, making an unsightly mess. Worst of all, scattered complete information. garbage attracts rodents, and this is a problem no one wants. PLEASE DO YOUR PART AND HELP MAINTAIN THE BEAUTY OF OUR COMMUNITY.

Schedule of Upcoming community Meetings

Board Meetings: Board meetings are held at Sudbrook Park Landmark Committee (SPLC) 7:30 pm on the third Thursday of each month and Meetings: SPLC meetings start promptly at 7:30 pm. are hosted by the neighbor listed. You may want to Residents are encouraged to attend, but we ask that check with the host to confirm that there has been no you call the Chair, Charles Locke (410-580-0342) change in the meeting schedule or location. All residents forty-eight hours in advance for issues to be presented are welcome! Please come and bring a neighbor! Help to the committee. We suggest you check with the host continue our cherished traditions and create new to confirm that there has been no change in the meeting ones! schedule or location.

Thu. Apr. 19 Deane & Linda Rundell 608 Carysbrook Tues. Apr. 17 Denise Watkins 709 Cliveden Rd (765) 730-9942 (410) 415-5429 Thu. May 17 Richard Gruberg 504 Upland Rd. Tues. May 15 Charles Locke-Chair 722 Howard Rd (410) 602-1107 (410) 580-0342 Thu. June 16 Annual Meeting 507 Sudbrook Lane Tues. June 12 Peter King, 711 Cliveden Rd (410) 653-5010 (410) 602-2796 Community Association 2018 membership drive

Sudbrook Park Inc. January 1 - December 31, 2018 Membership Membership Dues and Registration

Individual or household: $25 Senior (65+): $20 Year you moved to Sudbrook Park______

Check here if you do not want your name listed when we publish a member list in the newsletter: Additional contribution: Triangle Landscaping: $______Holiday Tree: $______Other (please specify) $ for______Payment options: Use the PayPal link on our website, www.sudbrookpark.org; or send a check made out to “Sudbrook Park, inc.” to Izzy Patoka - Treasurer, 709 Cliveden Road [email protected] Member(s) Information (please print clearly) Last Name*(s)______Address______Email address______Phone______*To include another household individual with a different surname at the same address, please include it here: Last Name______First Name______Email address______

Volunteer Opportunities All of the Sudbrook Park traditions, from the Fourth of July and Halloween parades to the Flower & Bake Sale and the Holiday Tree Lighting, are made possible by your donations, and the efforts of volunteers. To volunteer, please check one of the boxes below: Refreshments for Bake Sale or Events Welcoming New Neighbors Dumpster Day July 4th or Halloween Parades Newsletter Distribution Holiday Tree Lighting

Help keep Sudbrook Park a great place to live