There were no horse trails where Ronald Franklin grew up; there were only highways and alleys. The grass didn’t grow high or stretch beyond sight in rolling emerald-green meadows; it was sparse and opportunistic and bristled out of the cracks in the concrete or little openings in the mortar of stone walls. To the extent that it was cultivated at all, it was only in neat little backyards the size of postage stamps or in public parks that were bordered by loud streets buzzing with traffic.
In those days Franklin’s hometown was called “Baltimore,” but it was in essence two cities, two populations living side by side and separated by a river that rushed between them like a railroad track. On the west shore was the town everyone knew, the place where Edgar Allan Poe had written and died, where Johns Hopkins had built a world-famous hospital and university, and where Francis Scott Key had survived an all-night battle with a foreign invader to write a poem he called “The Star-Spangled Banner.” That was the place where lawyers, doctors, bankers, stockbrokers, journalists, and business professionals of every stripe worked and plied their crafts.
On the east side of the river was an obscure place called Dundalk, a harbor and factory town to rival anything found in the sad pages of Charles Dickens. Its wheezing industrial chimneys jutted high into the sky like giant, vertical, unfiltered Marlboros, relentlessly exhaling carcinogenic plumes that floated inexorably upward, into the lofty heights of the atmosphere. Dundalk’s perfume was an acrid bouquet that wafted silently and invisibly, infiltrating nostrils and walloping noses like a clenched fist.
In Dundalk the people lived in little houses and worshipped under low-slung steeples. They tirelessly labored in huge buildings and nursed their nights away on tiny little stools. When they worked, which was frequently and exhaustingly, they manned assembly lines or lifted and loaded crates and canisters, and they transported things. They had job titles like “steelworker” and “stevedore,” “truck driver,” “longshoreman,” and “heavy machine operator.”
Many Baltimoreans wore neckties to work. But in Dundalk, where the necks were thick and damp, a full Windsor felt like a slipknot in a rope. So the men who worked with their hands wore their collars wide open, and if they put on a jacket for a Friday night dinner out, it likely was a windbreaker with the name and number of a union local printed on the back.
The men and women of Dundalk manufactured automobiles, electronics, and appliances, among many other things, but huge numbers of them disappeared into the same grim and terrifying plant where they posted for long, grueling shifts, working beside hellish fires. They were tempered every bit as much as the steel they manufactured, and because of that, their product won two world wars and shaped America’s great bridges and skylines.
This was the world into which Ronald Franklin was born in 1959, just two weeks before the Colts—named to honor the city’s long and storied history in horse racing—won their second straight NFL title. He lived in that hard town with his parents, Tony and Marian Franklin, five older siblings, and, later, his nephew, Walter “Tony” Cullum, all shoehorned into a two-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom house in the middle of a row.
Tony Franklin was a small and strong man. In his youth he had entertained thoughts of being a jockey, but the only thing he ever saddled up was the forklift he drove for the American Can Company. Tony was born Anthony Frankoviak in East Baltimore to a Polish father and an Italian mother. He came of age just after World War II, joining the navy straight out of high school and cruising to Korea for the war. Fully grown, he was 5 feet 7 inches, only slightly shorter than average, and athletic. He boxed in the service and remained fighting trim for the rest of his life, with muscles like steel cords in his neck, arms, and back.
Tony’s great strength was undoubtedly a product of his life of hard work. In addition to the hours he put in on the forklift, he drove a moonlight shift in a taxicab and on weekends performed odd jobs and small home renovations for his neighbors.
After his stint in Korea, Anthony Frankoviak came home and reinvented himself. He banged away at his surname like a blacksmith, smoothing out the edges and halving the syllables. He shaped the remainder into the distinctly American handle, Franklin. Soon he met and married Ron’s mother, Marian, who came from one of East Baltimore’s many Italian families.
Marian was a maternal woman but also a coquette. She was wispy at less than 5 feet tall, with a head full of curls. Trim and flirtatious, she had an outsized and vivacious personality. She was a loving mother who kept a spotless, almost immaculate home for her family.
Marian’s defining feature was her hot temper, volcanic but short-lived. Everyone who knew her knew she could flame up to a boil in an instant and then simmer down just as quickly. She passed down that flip-a-switch nature to every single one of her six children.
For Tony and Marian, Dundalk’s paved, concreted, and asphalted landscape was their Eden, the place where they enjoyed their marriage, made their money, and raised their family. It was the so-called American Century, and it was such for good reason. The United States dominated in war, business, and building. And Dundalk was the steel spine of all three. Its blast furnace was “the largest . . . in the Western Hemisphere”—a point of pride—and it forged the raw material of warships, the essential parts of skyscrapers, and massive bridges.
As the United States prepared for World War I, Dundalk was the recipient of large shipbuilding contracts. Getting ready for the massive job ahead, the steel company bought a thousand acres and developed housing for all the necessary workers it would soon employ. The real building boom, however, didn’t occur until World War II, when the workers came flowing in to defeat the Nazis and then take advantage of the opportunities and prosperity that followed.
After the war, between 1950 and 1956, approximately ten thousand new homes were built in Dundalk. The Joseph Meyerhoff Company built more than three thousand dwellings all by itself. Later on, Joseph Meyerhoff’s nephew, Harry, would also become a developer and would purchase racehorses with his earnings.
So Dundalk expanded. The town grew to encompass thirteen square miles and 115,000 residents. The steel mill was the combustible engine that drove this rapid growth, employing more than thirty thousand people all by itself.
For many decades and generations, the steel mill provided a reliable, if dangerous, way to make a living. Author Deborah Rudacille grew up in Dundalk in a family of steelworkers, and she saw firsthand how demanding and dangerous life in and around the mill could be. She noted that the employees “worked in two grueling 10- to 14-hour shifts.” Every other week, one team was forced to man a twenty-four-hour shift just so the other team could enjoy a day off. “They had two unpaid holidays a year,” she wrote, “Christmas and the Fourth of July.”
Relentless and exhausting, the work was also dangerous in the extreme. The plant once built a monument to its employees who had died on the job. It included 110 names. Even that scandalous number was an obfuscation, a mere “fraction of the thousands” who had actually been killed or seriously injured at the plant.
And it wasn’t just the unfathomable numbers that were so horrifying; it was also the cruel way in which they accrued. “Many workers died gruesome deaths,” Rudacille said. “[They were] burned, crushed, gassed, and dismembered. Others experienced a slower, though no less painful, demise from diseases caused by exposure to asbestos, benzene and other toxins.”
The disease and loss of life caused by the plant was hardly confined to its campus. The residents and wildlife that lived nearby suffered too. Rudacille and her friends felt hemmed in “by industries that pumped effluent into rivers, streams and creeks.” She said that “during the 1960s and ’70s, a fine red dust coated [Dundalk]. . . . The local rivers and creeks, which fed into the Chesapeake Bay, became so contaminated with run-off that dead fish often littered the beaches.”
The plant may have leeched its toxicity to the people, but it couldn’t poison their minds against it. Decades after the well-paying jobs had dried up, former employees still felt a kind of “smoke-stack nostalgia” for the plant and pined for the heyday of production.
“Sometimes I think the danger of those jobs, the brutal heat and the terrible cold were part of what made the work interesting and attractive to people,” Rudacille said. “Men have this thing about going to war and that camaraderie with [one’s] fellow soldiers and proving [oneself] in this really terrifying and yet exciting experience. . . . I think something of the same thing was true at the [steel mill].”
But Rudacille knew that the allure of the plant went beyond its adventure or even the economic security it offered. The mill gave the steelworker something he or she might otherwise never have had: the dignity of a mission-driven life. “There was . . . the sense that the work they were doing mattered,” she explained. “They took enormous pride that the steel they were making was helping to build America.”
In Dundalk dangerous work was a crucible that hardened and ennobled souls. If you survived, your reward was a roof, a car, and a sack of groceries when your cupboards were bare. And the mill was what made you that greatest and most esteemed of all people: a provider. And if you were one of the unlucky ones, one of the many who posted for the job in the morning but never came home, there was a sort of martyrdom in that.
The people of Dundalk represented every American virtue: hard work, duty, and manufacturing power. And yet Americans, and especially other Baltimoreans, did not see or understand Dundalk’s pride. They looked on with skepticism at a community in a dirty shirt that reeked with the smell of hard work. To them, the Franklins and their neighbors lived in a white ghetto where the dialect, mores, and jobs had created a culture on the margins. So-called decent people aspired to higher education, a profession, and an expansive suburban life. In Dundalk they were happy to be urban dwellers and physical laborers. This created a class-based divide and a kind of peculiar prejudice.
One Dundalk woman recalled the humiliation she felt when she reported to college at the University of Maryland in the early 1960s. She met her scheduled roommate for the first time, an exciting moment for any two kids going to school. But the experience was ruined when the other student’s mother realized that her daughter would be rooming with a girl from Dundalk. She called the school and maneuvered to get the room assignment changed.
Dundalk was not only the Franklins’ hard world, but it was also the place that shaped their worldview.
Tony Franklin’s Dundalk life wasn’t easy. He worked constantly and earned little. He and Marian raised six children plus their grandson Tony Cullum in their small, brick-box of a home. They made it work with bunk beds and retrofits. They remodeled the house, constructing a kitchen in the basement so that the former kitchen space could be utilized as the master bedroom.
Despite these cramped quarters theirs was by and large a happy home. Marian’s superb homemaking skills rivaled those of any mother on television. She kept her large family well fed and happy. Tony was at work most of the time, but he was a kindly and respected presence. Their home was a place that relatives and friends felt comfortable enough to filter through for parties, holidays, and other happy occasions.
Marian’s sister Dorothy (called Aunt Dottsie by the Franklin children) lived only about a mile away in an almost identical house to Marian’s and Tony’s. She had her own huge brood, and on the holidays she brought them all over to the Franklins’ to celebrate.
With the combined families inside, the small row home just about exploded. There were aunts, uncles, and cousins everywhere, all of them packed in and drawn together by the intoxicating fragrance of mother-made cooking. Marian and Dottsie worked all day on the meals, especially the spaghetti sauce, their signature dish. It was simmering on the stove even before breakfast, and it slow-cooked all day long until dinner. The sisters were creative sauce chefs who added unexpected flourishes to their product, such as pork spare ribs, cooked right in the same pot with all of the other ingredients.
These were all signs of an unquestionably close family. In the summer they all piled into the car and headed to a riverfront house on Sparrows Point, near the steel mill. The place had been passed down to Marian and Tony and provided them their own private beach. They enjoyed idyllic summer days there, swimming, catching crabs, and playing games on the sand. They also drove over the Bay Bridge to the Eastern Shore, where they took extended vacations in the Maryland resort town of Ocean City. Whatever fun the Franklins had, they had it together.
Ronald came late into this happy home. He was Tony and Marian’s sixth and final child and was a particular favorite of both. It wasn’t hard to understand why. He was an endearing boy with a tousle of sandy brown hair; large, dark brown eyes; and a lot of personality.
Ronald’s close connection with his parents was encouraged by his small size, but his tiny frame was also a cause for concern. They expected that he would have a growth spurt, but it never arrived. Because of that he retained a childlike quality much longer than most boys, and his mother and father loved him all the more for this vulnerability.
But they also worried that his stature might hinder his success and happiness or—worse—be the symptom of some serious health problem. They took him to Johns Hopkins and had him examined, but the doctors determined that he was physically normal in every way. He just happened to be small; that was simply who he was. The family accepted that fact and moved on from it.
Ronald was Marian’s baby; she cherished him, and in turn he loved her. But he looked up to his father and had a great deal of pride in his dad. The two were particularly close. Tony made the effort. He engaged his son in manly companionship, doing things with his boy that two pals might do together. Tony would fry up hot baloney sandwiches for them, and they’d chomp away while they watched baseball or football on the TV in their basement den.
One of Tony Franklin’s few luxuries was a small watercraft he’d bought. He used it to entertain Ronnie and an assortment of his cousins. They spent entire summer days gliding around the tributaries of the Chesapeake, dropping trout lines into the brackish water to harvest bushels of scudding crabs.
Tony was an avid outdoorsman, but for him the real lure of the boat was engaging the boys. It transported them from the urban streets they knew to the flowing currents and tall grasses of the wild. These voyages took them all over the Chesapeake and connected the kids to the place from which they came and to each other as a family. For the rest of their lives the boys remembered these adventures with Tony, his leadership and kind companionship, the joy of discovery, and the appreciation for the outdoors.
Ronald particularly treasured those days with his dad, and he never let them go. Long after he was grown up and his father had passed away, he found comfort on the bay. When he needed solitude and relaxation, he rented or borrowed a boat to get away and catch and steam his own crabs. It was the most natural activity in the world to him, and it relieved the stresses of his life and career.
When his work took him far from the Chesapeake, Ronnie still required a taste of it. He insisted that Maryland crabs be shipped to him wherever he was. It’s not hard to imagine the taste and smell of the unique Maryland spices triggering his memories of Tony and the simpler, more innocent days.
Ronnie and his friends also enjoyed a great deal of unsupervised time. The Franklins’ Dundalk neighborhood was filled with young parents like Tony and Marian who had large families and brutally hard jobs. So on most days, the kids were left to their own devices to create their own fun and entertainment.
The children with whom Ronnie grew up did pretty much what kids everywhere did. They gathered together at the local playgrounds for games of pickup baseball, football, and basketball. They haunted the shopping mall. And they simply “hung out,” doing nothing but enjoying each other’s company and whiling the days away.
And of course, from time to time and in varying degrees, they also fell into mischief. Ronnie and some of the others were cited for throwing mud balls and dead fish into neighbors’ swimming pools. Sometimes the kids met in the alleys to smoke cigarettes. They started with tobacco, but like kids all over the country they also found and smoked cigarettes they rolled themselves and filled with marijuana.
Everything wasn’t easy in Ronnie’s world. For one thing, he did not take well to school. He attended Patapsco High, a public institution named for the river that separates Dundalk from Baltimore. But he was academically incurious and impudent with his teachers. When he was bored, which was often, he refused to sit in his chair and upended the classroom.
There was only one place at school where Ronald felt at home, and that was on the baseball diamond. He made the varsity as a tenth grader, supposedly as a reserve outfielder, but his coach, Rich Bartos, had a specific and valuable role for him. Ronnie, listed at only 4 feet 7 inches tall, was used as the team’s “designated walker.” He was sent to the plate whenever Bartos felt his tiny strike zone could be of service and Patapsco needed a base runner. And Ronnie delivered. In six trips to the batter’s box he walked three times. This skill, such as it was, made Ronnie a valuable addition to a team that struggled to score runs.
One of Franklin’s teammates, Rich Cooper, was a behemoth. He stood 6 feet 4 inches tall and weighed 220 pounds. The unusual sight of two teammates scraping the extremes was not lost on the editors at the Baltimore Sun who photographed the boys together in a shot that deliberately emphasized their comical gap in size.
None of this offended Franklin or affected his self-image in the least. In fact, there was ample evidence that he had a far different view of himself and his ability than what others saw. He knew their view of him was of a shrimpy little kid struggling to keep up. But Franklin didn’t see it that way. He believed he could be a useful everyday player, manning the outfield and taking a full complement of at bats. But it was his uniform that told the real story of his self-image. He picked out and wore 44, the same number that adorned the Braves uniform of Hank Aaron.
Franklin’s size wasn’t always so charming. It created problems for him in other parts of the school and out on the streets. “He was bullied [and] picked on,” his sister Carolyn remembered.
Big, mean kids may have traumatized generations of small boys in the school hallways and playgrounds, stealing milk money and administering punches to the heads and stomachs of the small and the weak. But that wasn’t for Franklin. “He was bigger than what these other kids thought he was,” Carolyn said.
One neighbor learned that the hard way in the sparring ring of a local YMCA karate class. At first he had no particular fear of Franklin; they were long-standing friends. “I knew he’d never hurt me,” the kid said. “A friend’s a friend, right?”
But to Ronnie, a fight was a fight. He lunged at his buddy and ended the encounter with only one hammer-like punch. “That’s all it took,” the bruised kid remembered. “He knocked me out.”
Ronnie’s skill with his mitts kept bullies at bay not only for himself but also for his more average-sized older brother. “Ronald stood up for his brother and chased them all away,” Carolyn said. “He never gave up on anything.”
Nothing but high school.
The constant fighting and his inability to concentrate in class all took their toll on him. At first, he skipped a few classes. But after a while he stopped going to school altogether. While most of the other kids were in class preparing for their futures, Ronnie was a truant roaming the streets.
Tony and Marian were distressed. They had already seen five children through to their high school diplomas, and they were unsure how to handle their youngest son’s brazen rejection of both school and their edicts. Tony was a stern father at times but far from brutal. He never raised his voice or his hand to any of his kids. He believed in physical discipline, although that did not include hitting his kids or whipping them with the belt.
Tony’s creative corporal punishment was making a young offender kneel for an hour or more on uncooked rice that had been poured onto the kitchen’s cold, hard floor. As the minutes ticked away, the kernels stabbed at the child’s knees and dug into the skin. It was a painful if more humane punishment, and the fear of enduring it kept the other Franklin children mostly in line and respectful of their parents’ rules.
But Ronnie was different, the exception. He went beyond typical teenage defiance and added his own odd, indomitable will. Rice-kneeling had no effect on him and neither did fear of his father’s wrath. Ronnie loved his dad, and he respected him, but he defied him all the same.
Ronnie simply could not be forced to do anything that he did not want to do. And he did not want to go to high school anymore. “He hated school so much and skipped so many classes,” Marian said, “we had no choice but to let him quit.”
So at fifteen Ronnie got himself a job at the local Roy Rogers fast-food restaurant and officially became a wage-earning man. It didn’t take him long to realize, however, that he was as miserable behind the counter as he had ever been in the classroom.
Tony saw this as a key crossroads in his son’s life. He saw his boy was going in the wrong direction. There was every reason to believe that was true. Ronnie was officially a high school dropout, and now he was just another minimum wage worker in a city that was full of them. He hadn’t gotten much out of the years he had spent in school. And he was still immature, with a huge chip on his shoulder.
Tony had confessed his anxieties about Ronald’s situation to his close friend and neighbor, Hank Tiburzi. Hank was an angular, reed-thin fellow of Italian descent who wore a golf-style cap everywhere he went.
Tiburzi and Tony had a lot in common. They were both hard-working Dundalk guys. (Tiburzi was a tile layer who worked for himself.) And they were both married to tiny but tough women. Hank’s wife was named Miss Lucy.
When the two men weren’t with their families or at work, they spent a great deal of time together. They shared a mutual love for all sports and were fans of Baltimore’s Colts and Orioles. But they especially enjoyed horse racing. On any given day Tony and Hank could be found together, hanging out at Pimlico, Timonium, Bowie, Laurel, or even Delaware Park. They liked to watch the ponies and risk some of their hard-earned cash.
The fathers’ friendship extended to their kids. Tiburzi’s and Miss Lucy’s children were close in age to the Franklins’ children, and they played and went to school together. Ronnie in particular spent a lot of time with the Tiburzis, and he saw Hank as a trusted friend and mentor. In fact, later on, many people outside the family mistakenly believed that Tiburzi was Ronnie’s uncle.
Like any good friend, Hank deeply felt Tony’s concern for his son. He thought a lot about Ronnie’s predicament, and he ground his own gears thinking about how the boy might turn his life around. Tiburzi had one quality that uniquely suited him for that job, and that was optimism. While most of the people in Ronnie’s orbit dimly saw his problems and limitations, Hank focused on the positive.
Everyone else might think Ronnie too small for many careers, but Tiburzi noticed the kid’s ant-like strength. Others looked at Franklin and saw an angry kid. Tiburzi recognized a fighting spirit. Countless times throughout the years Hank had looked out his window and had seen Ronnie fearlessly facing down someone twice his size. Hank admired the quality.
Tiburzi contemplated it all and then, suddenly, he had a revelation. Ronnie wasn’t an unmolded and unmanageable kid in a greasy fast-food smock. He was, in Tiburzi’s imagination, decked out in a brightly colored silken shirt that rustled in the wind. He could see the kid high on a horse with his little clenched fist raised in victory.
When Hank looked at Ronald, he didn’t see him falling behind; he saw him elevating. He envisioned the boy high above the concrete streets and the row house roofs, floating beyond the smoke stacks and even high over the cranes of the working harbor. What Hank Tiburzi saw in that tough, little, troubled kid was the raw, unfired ore of a winning jockey.