All Hail the 'Hon Man'

Think of this as a shout across a highway. It’s a shout for a man who had a paintbrush and a dream. After all this time, I miss him still. He is the “Hon Man.” He should have headed Baltimore’s unofficial welcoming committee, but political nonsense got in the way.

Remember the “Hon Man”? Back in the ‘90s, he’s the guy who sneaked out there when nobody was looking, out along the Baltimore-Washington Parkway a few miles before you get to the city’s two great ballparks, and he put a paintbrush to a municipal sign that said, “Welcome to Baltimore,” and he changed it with three little hand-painted letters to, “Welcome to Baltimore, Hon.”

Oh, what a beautiful gesture! Oh, what a sweet way to welcome all visitors to a city otherwise too often associated primarily with mayhem and murder — to offer a comic example, instead, of the municipal mother-tongue, a good-natured greeting characteristic of an unaffected Bawlamer sloughing off all manner of formality.

Welcome to Baltimore, Hon. It means, even if you’re a stranger, when you’re here, you’re one of us. Hon, just make yourself at home.

The Hon sign was an unanticipated gift from the public relations gods, a no-brainer, a gesture unlike any other city’s — so that all tourist types arriving here from somewhere else might return home and talk about the open friendliness they sensed from their very first moment arriving in good ol’ Baltimore.

And all who already live here could enjoy this roadside reminder: Here’s a bit of local jargon that binds us in our municipal unpretentiousness.

So naturally, heaven forbid we should take something as bland and generic as a road sign and give it a little local flavor, the geniuses at City Hall quickly took this highway hug and ran over it with a steamroller.

First, they sent out a Public Works crew to paint over the “Hon” and leave a standard “Hon-less” version. So the “Hon Man” sneaked back and repeated his paint job — and the city erased it again. This back-and-forth silliness happened several times.

Then, the language police got involved. Stuffy academic types said “hon” wasn’t linguistically unique to Baltimore. To which we say: Yeah? So what? If other cities want to put up their own “hon” signs, let ‘em.

Then things got worse. Some claimed “hon” carried overtones of sexism — though, if these critics ever explained what they meant, most of us missed it. And then the argument moved to the State House in Annapolis.

There you had legislators who loved the idea. They loved it so much that some of them suggested blackmail over it — either a balky City Hall adopt the “hon” sign, or risk losing certain state financial support.

To which we had former State Sen. Larry Young enter the argument. He said “hon” was a term used strictly by white people (a dubious proposition, but let it be) and was therefore an inappropriate welcome for people of various colors.

Maybe, Young said, the sign should say, “Welcome to Baltimore, Bro.”

Well, he might have been on to something. But instead of shutting down the whole concept, why not expand it? Why not offer a whole series of entrance signs along multiple Baltimore area highways as cars enter town, each sign separated maybe by a few hundred yards, and each one in a different ethnic greeting.

You open with “Welcome to Baltimore, Hon” (or Bro), one after the other and, from there, you offer the welcome in Spanish and Polish and Italian and Chinese and Greek and so on and, of course, reading from right to left, Hebrew.

Each one with a “Hon” or “Bro” at the end.

And each one a reminder of the richness of the great American mix — and an especially warm embrace to all those spotting their own ethnic roots on a municipal sign.

Now, can somebody out there tell me how to spell “hon” in Hebrew?

Also see: Fear Not, Carroll County

A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books. His most recent, “Front Stoops in the Fifties: Baltimore Legends Come of Age,” has just been re-issued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Top image: “Hon Man Strikes Again” — April 6, 1993: (Reporter: Frank Graff; Photographer: Mac Finney, Screenshot from WBAL-TV, YouTube)