"Blue Collar Glen Burnie" Glen Burnie by grandmaR

Front of our former apartment building

My husband Bob moved from Towson to Pasadena in 1953 and he went to Glen Burnie HS for his senior year.

In about 1991, Bob got a job in Baltimore at the Maryland Department of the Environment. Baltimore was 80-100 miles from our home in Leonardtown. At the time I was working for Maryland OSHA which also had an office in Baltimore, but at that time I was a field inspector and worked from home quite a bit. Bob had to go in to the office every day.

He lasted for about 3 weeks commuting back and forth each day and then he found himself a room with a widow near where he worked. He was home only on weekends. But I wasn't - I was often gone on the weekends.

So we decided to get a cheap apartment so we could be together. The cheapest apartment we could get was in Glen Burnie. We had a year's lease. We were on the first floor (the bottom floor was the ground floor) at the back.

From that time until the time I retired in Feb 2000, we commuted almost every weekend back and forth to Leonardtown.

But the apartment turned out to be in a known drug area - we'd hear gunshots. We'd see people's possessions out on the curb when they hadn't paid their rent. And I'd see all these dudes with cell phones and beepers sitting on the fence in front of the apartment. I would see police cars out in the parking lot in the early morning, and one Saturday the police chased the guy in the apartment over ours (we weren't there at the time) up the stairs and arrested him. Someone broke the back window of Bob's 1958 Falcon to steal the stuff inside.

Plus Bob hated living in an apartment. So we bought a house in Brooklyn Park and moved when our lease was up.

We did continue to go to Glen Burnie to shop and/or eat, since our route south could go through this area.

• Pros:A lot of services
• Cons:Crowded with a lot of traffic