two colleagues. Except for his military service, he lived unmarried with his mother in two different very plain West Baltimore two-story, six-room "daylight-style" rowhouses on Edgewood Street (off Edmondson Avenue) all his life, until moving to the Government House (Maryland Governor's Mansion) at age 65 in 1987. Impelled, according to his biographer, by a situation in which Cummins Memorial Church lost a city property auction in which it was the highest bidder due to alleged corruption, Schaefer ran for a seat in the Maryland House of Delegates (lower chamber of the General Assembly of Maryland) in 1950 and again in 1954, losing both elections. He was successful in his third campaign for a seat on the Baltimore City Council in 1955, when his concern for city planning and housing issues propelled him to a seat representing the 5th Councilmanic District. In 1967, Schaefer ran successfully for Baltimore City Council president and, four years later in 1971, he ran successfully for the mayor's office, when incumbent mayor Thomas L. J. D'Alesandro III, brother of Nancy Pelosi, retired after one term. Mayor of Baltimore (1971–1987) Schaefer served four terms as mayor, being first elected in 1971, then re-elected in 1975, 1979 and 1983, each time receiving 85% or more of the vote. He was known for his attention to detail: taking notes of strewn garbage and citing other violations as he rode around for appointments/events in a plain town car with a police officer driver, and ordering them fixed immediately. A famous photograph shows him dressed in a Victorian style red and orange-striped bathing suit, with a straw boater hat, carrying an inflatable rubber duck into the outside seal pool at the then under construction National Aquarium in Baltimore at the Inner Harbor, attracting wide national media attention, to settle a wager that it would not be opened in time in August 1981. In 1984, in a move to give the majority African-American population more power in the city of Baltimore, Schaefer named Bishop L. Robinson as the Baltimore City Police Department's first African-American police commissioner, a position previously dominated by Irish American and Italian American members of the city police department. Baltimore's 1967 police headquarters were renamed for Robinson in 2007. Throughout his tenure as mayor, Schaefer realized that the closings of large manufacturing plants like Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point (since 1887 in southeastern suburban, but blue-collar Baltimore County, near