Paul Sarbanes Was the Embodiment of the American Dream

Paul Sarbanes slips away the other day, and I’m left with a memory of Roy Tucker, a fictional baseball player, and a telephone call at my old newspaper office nearly 30 years ago.

The voice on the line was a woman’s, full of urgency. She said, “This is Senator Sarbanes’ office. The senator is trying to reach you.”

“About what?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said, “but he said it’s important and he needs to reach you. He’s on the road. Can he call you at this number from his car telephone?”

I had no idea what Sarbanes wanted to talk about. I had a column in that morning’s newspaper, but it wasn’t about him. It was about the city of Baltimore looking to save money by closing some of its libraries.

I was sick at heart about it, and wrote about kids finding inspiration in library books. I mentioned a baseball novel, “The Kid from Tomkinsville,” by a writer named John R. Tunis, about a rookie named Roy Tucker.

Tucker was an outfielder. This was incidental. He was also a great role model. I wrote about how Tucker stood for honor and decency and sacrifice and courage and hard work. Such things mattered even more than baseball, if that was possible to an 11-year-old kid.

So now, maybe five minutes after I got the first call, the phone rang again. The voice was familiar, but the introduction was not.

“This,” said the distinguished Sen. Paul Sarbanes in an unaccustomed booming voice, “is Roy Tucker.”

“You, too?” I said.

“Of course,” said Sarbanes, laughing aloud.

Roy Tucker bridged our generations. Sarbanes was 87 when he died the other day. He was a child of Greek immigrants, of the Great Depression, and he learned early in life to play the game the right way.

From childhood, Sarbanes said, Tucker was one of his great role models. For several minutes, we talked about the fictional kid, about how he’d taught us not only about baseball but how to live our lives decently. That’s what good books sometimes accomplish. They put worthwhile ideas into the heads of those paying attention.

Roy Tucker was the imaginary version of the American Dream, and Paul Sarbanes its real-life embodiment.

Sarbanes lived his life unlike most of the political hustlers all around him. Whatever ego he had, he kept under wraps. He was gracious and dignified and terrifically smart, and he didn’t try to boil down his ideas for 12-second TV soundbites on the evening news.

He was the Quiet Man of the U.S. Senate. When others employed empty theatrics, Sarbanes could be found in a congressional backroom somewhere, probably figuring out some piece of arcane legislation.

In the heart-thumping Watergate era, he was there for the impeachment hearings, all right. But he let the others on Sam Ervin’s congressional committee grab the TV time. It was Sarbanes, behind the scenes, putting together the first impeachment draft.

The evening after Sarbanes died last Sunday Dec. 6, two of his old friends, Lynn and Ted Venetoulis, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, put together a virtual meeting for a few dozen people. The intent was to raise money for the two Democratic U.S. Senate candidates now running in Georgia and hoping to take the Senate away from Mitch McConnell.

But the talk immediately got around to Sarbanes.

“A beautiful man, of great dignity,” Pelosi said.

“An incredible person,” said Maryland’s Sen. Ben Cardin.

“A great, great loss,” said Ted Venetoulis, the former Baltimore County executive.

Then someone mentioned Sarbanes spent the last hour of his life, the previous evening, watching the Senate debate out of Georgia.

Whoever wins those two run-off races down there, here’s hoping they bring some of Sarbanes’ attributes: grace and intelligence and integrity, and the enduring lessons of a few good books.

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,” was reissued in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press.