Page 14 - Rukert - 100th Anniversary

Putting Down Harbor Roots
[1900-1920]
O ne day in 1900, a youngster of 14 made his way through the crowded but
carless downtown Baltimore streets
to the main office of The Baltimore American. Armed with an eighth-grade education,
standard at the time, W.G. Norman Rukert snagged a job as a junior reporter for the newspaper, then the oldest in the city.
Young Rukert helped cover the Great Baltimore Fire of February 1904, which leveled the newspaper’s home office and about 1,500 other downtown build- ings. The fire did not incinerate his job, but one of his assignments helped to. One day his father, George Rukert Sr., a bakery-owner and second-generation
German American, heard that Norman had been given an assignment to cover the city’s seedy red-light district. Soon after, George Sr. found a new job for the young man as a clerk in the Jackson’s Wharf Freight Station of the Pennsylvania Railroad that overlooked the water in Fells Point.
After a few years, Norman took a position close by as a stock clerk with the Terminal Warehouse Company, a major local business founded in 1893. Norman worked in Terminal’s six-story warehouse at 1601 Thames Street. The iron-shuttered brick warehouse was on the National Register of Historic Places before being torn down in 1992 and replaced with the now prominent Bond Street Wharf
BELOW:
A view of Jackson’s Wharf in the early 1900s