6/10/2023 0 Comments Maurice charmas baltimore![]() ![]() My mother was scared of hospitals and all the children were born at home. At one point, he said, “You are writing my obituary.” I reminded him that he was really doing the writing. Here are some of the things he said as he reviewed his life over the course of three afternoons we spent together. Martick’s son came from a different mold. Rather than eccentric, his approach to life was unique, governed by his gimlet eye for the absurd and the ever-present need “to make a buck, boss” – “boss” being his customary salutation.įrom his deadpan humor (surgically delivered in nasal Bawlmerese) to his business model (developing and sustaining a one-person French restaurant for 38 years), Mrs. He viewed the word as condescending and implying some kind of pathology. If there was one thing Morris never liked, it was being called “eccentric.” A painting of a fat, florid lady in the throes of laughter sat on the mantle above his gnome-like head. An old-fashioned wristwatch, flanked by keys, was tethered to a battered brown belt. Morris wore his trademark wool ski cap, flannel shirt and khaki pants. Another wall was covered with aluminum sheathing salvaged from a B-52 bomber. One side of the restaurant featured albino snakeskin wallpaper. Martick cooked upstairs above the restaurant. “For a person who is inferior and lacked identity, I did a lot of stuff,” he admitted. Then after a bout of soul-searching and depression, Martick reinvented himself as the proprietor of an authentic French restaurant, foreshadowing the food revolution that Baltimore has undergone in the last 25 years.īefore he closed Martick’s Restaurant Francais in 2008, Morris and I sat down in his dining room to talk about his life. He mixed up people from different races and different economic stations and changed the city’s rigidly defined sense of social and cultural propriety. As the owner, bartender and muse of the city’s first beatnik bar, he inspired countless local artists to pursue their work. Morris stayed put – and the world came to him. Give or take three involuntary years in the Army and another one wandering around France, Martick lived his entire life at 214 West Mulberry, a Civil War-era rowhouse awaiting the wrecking ball for the city’s Westside renewal project. Last Friday, Morris Martick – restaurateur, cook, philosopher, iconoclast, art promoter, raconteur, lifelong bachelor and “server of drunks” – succumbed to lung cancer at Union Memorial Hospital. Upon delivery of that child on January 18, 1923, the midwife was given two bags of coal and a loaf of bread, while Baltimore gained one of its most memorable residents. Perelman liked to write his own epitaphs, including this homage to himself: “Before they made Perelman, they broke the mold.” One can only assume that a similar breakage took place when Florence Martick gave birth to her third child at 214 West Mulberry St. ![]()
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