Wally Orlinsky was so brilliant and so colorful, bursting with such passion and imaginative proposals, that you couldn’t help but want to be around the City Council president of the ’70s. “You leave him vibrating,” Ed Rovner, the state’s first secretary of economic and community development, told The Washington Post when Orlinsky made a bid for governor in 1978. “He can generate more ideas than anybody I’ve ever met.”

Rovner said there was no one he’d rather sit next to on a transcontinental flight. The only problem, he noted, was that only about one in 10 of Orlinsky’s ideas were feasible.

His plan to celebrate America’s bicentennial on July 4, 1976, by sending a 35-ton birthday cake into the Baltimore harbor on a barge was not feasible, for example. Not that it stopped Orlinsky. By the time a summer thunderstorm—who could’ve guessed?—washed 3,000 pounds of icing into the harbor before the big occasion, the doomed cake had already picked up the nickname “Wally’s Folly” around town.

Orlinsky’s pitch to the City Council had included selling 153,000 pieces of the cake to confectionary-loving patriots. That was supposed to pay for Baltimore’s massive 200th birthday party, which included fireworks, entertainment, and, for some unfathomable reason, 12 hours of live television coverage from Fort McHenry hosted by Ed McMahon.

But the July Fourth bicentennial enthusiasm never fully materialized. Crowds at Fort McHenry failed to meet expectations—as did turnout for events across the country, which was reeling in every way possible in the 1970s. The Sun reported that 30,000 people—half the projected numbers at best—made their way to the Independence Day anniversary. Maybe it was that the headliners included José Feliciano, Lynn Anderson, Rod McKuen, and Zim Zemarel’s Big Band. Not exactly big “gets.” (The Sun’s next-day story highlighted the smell of marijuana in the air during the all-night Saturday party at Fort McHenry, perhaps a sign of the times or merely an effort at stemming the boredom.)

“Sure, I remember the cake,” DeFilippo says. “Everything went wrong in the ’70s.”



Orlinsky’s cake, a Guinness Book of World Records effort created in the shape of the United States and decorated with 200 candles, fared worse. By midweek, the July weather and Baltimore’s renowned rats nearly finished it off. Seventeen tons got tossed.

As a metaphor for the government ineptitude of the 1970s—Watergate, Vietnam, the oil crisis, Love Canal, school busing, deindustrialization, double-digit inflation, crime, radical politics—Wally’s Folly wrote itself.

“Sure, I remember the cake,” says Frank DeFilippo, press secretary for then Gov. Marvin Mandel. “Everything went wrong in the ’70s.”

True to the period—a dark time in Maryland as well as national politics—DeFilippo’s boss faced federal corruption charges during the great bicentennial year and was eventually found guilty of mail fraud and racketeering.

Naturally, Orlinsky, too, would later do time for accepting a bribe.

There was one huge bright spot on the horizon, however, on July 4, 1976. Eight tall ships from around the world set sail from New York City that day for Baltimore. They’d arrive seven days later and dock at the Inner Harbor and Fells Point for the next week and change the course of the city forever.

In a broad sense, the country had continued to fracture in the decade following the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, when the murders of hopeful young leaders landed like a rock against the nation’s windshield. The United States would experience more than 2,500 domestic bombings in just 18 months in 1971 and 1972, including one at the U.S. Capitol. Much of the bombing was tied to the militant Weather Underground, and some to other groups like the Black Panthers, who were active in Baltimore, where one leader was convicted of killing a city police officer. By the mid-1970s, at least 150 planes had been hijacked in the U.S., many to Cuba.

By the bicentennial, the country was coming apart not just politically and culturally—the controversy-tackling All in the Family was the No. 1 television show from 1971-1976—but economically as well. Cities were going bankrupt. (The infamous New York Daily News headline, “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” was published in October 1975 as the Big Apple sought a bailout.) Keep in mind this was also a period when it appeared as if the U.S. might just be losing the Cold War.

In Baltimore, unemployment during the 1970s jumped from 4.6 percent to 10.3 percent and the federal law enforcement agencies began to rate the city the most violent in the country. City residents may recall the deluge of local crises—the plant closings, the corruption, the population and commercial exodus (including our NBA team), and the rise of the drug trade. Also, spiraling homicide totals were unrivaled until this past year.

It’s not as if you could change the date of the country’s founding, however. President Lyndon Johnson had established a national bicentennial commission in 1966 and it was coming, hell or high water.

“It was on the calendar and it was going to fall when it fell—it just didn’t feel quite right when it finally arrived,” says journalist and political historian Jules Witcover, who witnessed the first of two assassination attempts on President Ford in September 1975 and wrote a book about former Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, who was forced to resign the vice presidency in 1973 over bribery charges. “It was just a strange year to be celebrating with the country in so much turmoil. That’s the irony of it—the mood wasn’t celebratory. A few years later, Jimmy Carter gives his ‘malaise’ speech and talks about the crisis of confidence in the country.”