Baltimore’s infamous Bicentennial Birthday Cake. Weighing 69,000 pounds, the cake rests on a 51-by-24-foot plywood frame placed on a 120-foot Army barge at Pier 7. The cake is shaped as a map of the U.S., with Alaska and Hawaii as separate sections. (Pauline Lubens, Baltimore Sun photo, July 3, 1976)

Maybe somebody got their revolutions mixed up back in 1976, when Baltimore’s big idea for celebrating the nation’s bicentennial was to – in a major way – let them eat cake.

At some point, this must have seemed like a good idea, at least to City Council President Wally Orlinsky, who proudly took credit for it. With all the civic-minded ballyhoo he could muster, Orlinsky laid out plans to build the world’s largest birthday cake, adorn it with 200 candles and float it on a barge out in the harbor.

Baltimore, the plan went, would get some major attention, especially when plans morphed into making the cake the centerpiece of a nationally televised bicentennial celebration to include appearances by Kirk Douglas, Jim Nabors, Scatman Crothers, Mike Douglas (whose talk show broadcast out of Philadelphia, so at least he wouldn’t have to travel far), George Kirby and Kiki Dee (best known as Elton John’s singing partner on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart”).

Hoo boy, people – especially Orlinsky – figured. This would be Baltimore’s ticket to the Big Time.

City Council President Walter S. Orlinsky (left), working on a model of the soon-to-be-constructed Bicentennial Birthday Cake at Herman’s Bakery in Dundalk, squeezes icing over the parapet of Fort McHenry. (Walter M. McCardell, Baltimore Sun Photo, June 9, 1976)

“Everybody said I was crazy,” Orlinksky said in late May of 1976, with the cake’s appearance less than two months away, “so I knew I was right.”

Well, he wasn’t…

The cake turned into a pretty unmitigated disaster. For one thing, the cake, which weighed in at a hefty 69,000 pounds, wasn’t really a cake at all, but rather some 153,000 individually boxed seven-ounce sheet pound cakes, which were squeezed inside a plywood map of the U.S. for its July 2 unveiling. Plans were to sell the boxes for $2.25 a pop, on the supposition that orders would be coming in from all over the country, if not the globe.

They didn’t. It appears that only about 10,000 sold – although, a Baltimore Sun story noted optimistically, two orders came from Alaska.

Dan Olenick, of Herman’s Bakery, ices part of Baltimore’s Bicentennial Birthday Cake as it is floated out to Fort McHenry. The cake, weighing 69,000 pounds, rests on a 51-by-24-foot plywood frame. (Pauline Lubens, Baltimore Sun photo, June 29, 1976)

Hard to say why so few pieces of cake sold. Unless you figure that some people were turned off by news that a June 30 rainstorm had washed about 3,000 pounds of icing into the harbor even before the cake made its debut. New icing was applied, it seems, but you can forgive people if they found better (not to mention more appetizing) ways of spending their $2.25.

And, oh, the fun didn’t stop there. The following October, Orlinsky submitted a bill for $80,000 for the cake to the Board of Estimates – which agreed to pay $70,000, about $35,000 of which had to be footed by taxpayers. (Originally, of course, it was promised that the cake would pay for itself, thanks to corporate donations and sales. But you know how those things go…)

Orlinsky and Comptroller Hyman Pressman got a little snippy with one another during the meeting. Pressman said Orlinsky should simply admit to doing “a lousy job,” while Orlinsky called Pressman an idiot, a liar and a “guttersnipe.”

Such language.

So, what of the cake itself? By July 7, rain, rats and the heat had pretty much taken care of the cake, which had been sitting forlornly on an Army barge off of Pier 7. About 17 tons of cake ended up being thrown away.

And in a final insult, the thing never even made the “Guinness Book of World Records,” whose judges decided to award the title of World’s largest cake to one baked for Philadelphia’s bicentennial celebration – even though it weighed “only” 40,000 pounds. It seems nobody wanted any part of Baltimore’s hapless, out-sized confection.

Joan Bialecki tapes the seams of the wood on Baltimore’s Bicentennial Birthday Cake, as it is floated out to Fort McHenry. Note the “candles” to both sides. (Pauline Lubens, Baltimore Sun photo, June 29, 1976)