Wedded to His Home Town

if | care about people," says Baltimore's Mayor William Donald Schaefer. "I I know that sounds silly." It does not sound the least bit silly to his constituents. In the worst and best of times since he was first elected ten years ago, the balding, portly (5 ft. 9 in., 186 Ibs.) executive has doggedly fought city hall sloth, inefficiency, arrogance and red tape. He believes that the city's neighborhoods, with their rich ethnic mix, are Baltimore's greatest asset. He has extracted some $55 million for housing and development beyond the city's federally mandated entitlements of about $240 million from Washington; the ninth largest U.S. municipality, Baltimore is the nation's third biggest recipient of federal Urban Development Action Grants.

Schaefer's weapons have been gall, soft soap, hard nose, demonic energy and the kind of showmanship Baltimore had not seen since the death of vaudeville. During a crippling 1974 strike by municipal workers, Hizzoner was out there pitching garbage on a sanitation truck. When the new National Aquarium failed to open by the July 4 deadline he had guaranteed, Willie Don, as they call him, demonstrated his contrition by plunging into the seal pool (temperature 79DEG) in striped Victorian swimsuit and straw boater, clutching a yellow rubber duck (he is also affectionately known as Donald Duck). His penitential immersion was shared by a voluptuous model done up as a mermaid. Since he was the target of an assassination attempt by a deranged citizen in 1976, Schaefer has been dogged by security guards; his daily delight is to shake them.

It is a truism in Baltimore that the mayor is married to his city. A bachelor at 59, he lives with his mother, Tululu, 87, in the same West Side house where he was born. He got his law degree at the University of Baltimore.

Apart from three years as an Army hospital administrator in Europe during World War II, he has hardly ever left his home town. After a week of 18-hr, days, Schaefer likes to spend Saturdays and Sundays patrolling the neighborhoods in a 1975 Pontiac, furiously jotting "Mayor's Action Memos" about the potholes here, the garbage pileups there, a blanked-out street light in between.

They get action on Monday, or else.

Even when he departs on his annual one-week vacation in nearby Ocean City, he lugs boxes of official business.

A staunch Democrat who worked his way up through 19 years as a city councilman (he was council president for four years), Schaefer is a master at circumventing city hall bureaucracy. He has managed to push through major ventures like the Inner Harbor redevelopment and the subway now abuilding, by creating a series of quasi-public commissions. On every major civic commitment he has sought direct approval from the voters by referendum; he won all but one of them.

Baltimore is blessed with a strong mayoral system--and has had a succession of strong mayors. Another key to Schaefer's success is the willing, even ardent cooperation of business, even though Baltimore boasts no big corporate headquarters. The Greater Baltimore Committee, a civic organization of 900 businessmen, is running a "Blue Chip-In" campaign that is expected to raise $500,000 from local firms and create 200 jobs, thus partly offsetting President Reagan's slash in federal outlays for job training. Another group of Baltimore businessmen, taking a cue from a program pioneered in Minneapolis, is lining up some two dozen local firms to contribute up to 5% of their annual taxable income for civic and philanthropic causes. Still, Schaefer says of people and of neighborhoods: "They must show that they will help themselves."

Willie Don Schaefer manages to fit in only one private pastime: raising African violets in his city hall suite. With little time for books, he has never read H.L. Mencken but plans to make the sage's Union Square home a memorial.

His real hobby, of course, is Baltimore. It has been a fruitful one. "Six years ago," he recalls, "I predicted that people would spend vacations in Baltimore. Everyone laughed, but it has been proved true."

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