Local attorney Charles “Mike” Preston, 73

Sunday, December 23, 2018 by Kevin Dayhoff, kevindayhoff@gmail.com

Local community leader and well-known attorney Charles “Mike” Preston passed away on December 6. He was 73. On December 12, several hundred friends, family, members of the Bar Association, community leaders, past and present judges, and dignitaries crowded into the chapel at Pritts Funeral Home to celebrate the life and times and accomplishments of Preston.

As I walked quietly across the parking lot to attend Preston’s memorial service, my mind drifted back to long meandering conversations with Preston about the life and times – and works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. As I approached the large mansion known today as Pritts, I imagined walking into a soiree in ‘The Great Gatsby.’

Fitzgerald lived in Baltimore with his wife, Zelda, from 1932- 1937. One can only imagine if he ever visited Westminster with his friends H. L. Mencken and Gertrude Stein – on one of Mencken’s frequent trips to Frizzellburg.

Preston was well-known in the community as an accomplished man of letters. Whenever I attend events at Pritts I am always taken aback by the breathtaking view of Westminster – otherwise known to Preston and me as ‘East Egg.’

If you will recall, ‘East Egg’ in Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic novel ‘The Great Gatsby,’ was a fictional community separated from ‘West Egg’ by the ‘Valley of Ashes.’ East Egg represented the past and West Egg – situated over on Parr’s Ridge, Western Maryland College, and beyond, represented the ‘clash of the new.’

For additional context, there was once a time in Westminster’s past when the community was the proud home of almost 18 saloons in a single one-mile long stretch of mud, dust, roaming livestock and all that it accompanies. This was great fodder for a spirited conversation among story-tellers and historians who romanticized writers like Fitzgerald and the golden era of Westminster’s historic downtown. To paraphrase a famous line from a New York Sun writer, the history of the Valley of Ashes – Westminster, could be best told in eleven words, “Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Volstead, two flights up and ask for Gus.”

For Preston and me, East Egg and West Egg were interchangeable depending upon whether or not we started the conversation at Western Maryland College – the Preston version of Fitzgerald’s experiences at Princeton University or we started with a discussion of Jay Gatsby, or the 1922 classic ‘The Beautiful and the Damned,’ or the posthumous ‘The Last Tycoon.’

Many conversations began with “How are you and the family old sport?” It is a line repeated 45 times in The Great Gatsby. I was also fascinated to learn that we both wrote some material under a pseudonym. His nom de plume was S.W. Throckmorton, and mine – well, I guess mine is protected by an attorney-client privilege.

Our conversations began over 30-years ago with discussions about zoning issues and property rights when I was chair of the Carroll County Environmental Affairs Advisory Board and continued years later when I served as the mayor of Westminster. There was many occasions in which Preston and I agree upon nothing – zip, as in zero. However we loved our disagreements which quickly evolved into far-ranging agreements on history, literature, Mark Twain, and writers.

Early on I called to his attention my first impression of him, taken from The Last Tycoon, “It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers - because if you ask a writer anything, you usually get an answer - still it belittled him in my eyes. Writers aren't people exactly. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors. Who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.”

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Fortunately Preston has inspired many to follow in his footsteps. Thank you for all your service to our community Mike – we’ll take it from here. God Bless. Happy Hanukkah and Merry Christmas

A portion of this article appeared in the Carroll County Times online and in the Sunday Dec. 23, 2018 print edition in the Life and Times section. This edition of the story contains many of the edits restored. Read much more here in the Carroll County Times: https://www.carrollcountytimes...