<p>Police K-9 units have become an increasingly essential law-enforcement tool in and around Baltimore.</p>
On a clear, crisp March day, Officer Christopher Davies prepares the second floor of a long-abandoned building at Rosewood State Hospital to go to the dogs—or, more specifically, to the Baltimore County K-9 unit.
Earlier in the day, Davies had signed out dangerous controlled substances stored in a safe at Essex headquarters (many of which were seized during local drug busts) as well as an arsenal...
<p>Why do so many of us find our way back to Charm City?</p>
About four years ago, my wife Brenda and I were driving back to New York City, where we lived at the time, from Baltimore, where I grew up, when she did something that truly shocked me.
“We should move to Baltimore,” she said, staring dreamily at the Harford County farmlands along Interstate 95.
If I had been drinking something, I would have done a spit-take. “Really?” I asked. “Why?”
I grew up...
<p>Dr. Al Luckenbach, Anne Arundel County Archaeologist</p>
“It’s not unusual for young kids to be interested in dinosaurs and Indians. I just never outgrew it. When I was in seventh grade, my father started taking me out into the fields to look for arrowheads. I remember thinking it was so cool to be looking for things the Native Americans had dropped hundreds of years ago. Later on, we joined the Maryland Archaeological Society, and I went on my first...
<p>Taking time between high school and college has become increasingly common among Baltimore teens.</p>
In the fall of 2011, as The Park School graduate Jamie DeMarco’s classmates packed their duffel bags for colleges across the country, a freshly immunized DeMarco (rabies, Yellow Fever, Typhoid) filled his R.E.I. backpack with six bottles of insect repellant, a hand-filter pump, and some mosquito netting and boarded a Miami flight bound for Quito, Ecuador.
“I had been going to class my entire...
<p>A curious piece of Baltimore’s political history fades away.</p>
Folks entering the front door of the Hampden Republican Club are not greeted by political functionaries. There’s no phone bank getting out the vote for the upcoming election, no signs promoting GOP Congressman Andy Harris or presidential candidate Mitt Romney. Not even an animatronic Ronald Reagan statue emitting storied sound bites like, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
In reality,...
<p>Maryland's Oldest & Oddest Congressman Fights For His Political Life</p>
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett doesn't have an entourage.
Almost every morning, around 6 a.m., the 20-year veteran of the House of Representatives, who will turn 86 in June, drives his Toyota Prius three miles from his Buckeystown, MD, farm to his office in Frederick. He shares the small building, which sits between a Chuck E. Cheese and a Wal-Mart, with a pediatric dentist’s practice.
Once there,...
A new minor-league soccer team gets an unlikely sponsor.
Pretty much all soccer teams have a shirt sponsor—Manchester United had AIG for a while, Chelsea FC has Samsung, and now Baltimore’s new minor-league soccer team has what else but National Bohemian.
The Baltimore Bohemians, who will play in the Premiere Development League, will launch their inaugural season next month. The 16-game season will feature mostly local, college-aged soccer players—...
From flight announcements to road signs, prom proposals get creative in area high schools.
For 18-year-old McDonogh senior Tyler Meagher, the hardest part about last year’s prom wasn’t deciding who he was going to take—that would be his girlfriend, Payton Sanchez—but how he was going to ask her.
“My girlfriend hates being the center of attention,” explains Meagher, “so I decided to make her the center of attention.”
His idea: to post a series of cardboard signs, beginning at the end of...
After leaving WMAR-TV, Mary Beth Marsden chose to take on a new cause—the fight for her daughter and other children with autism.
On December 2, 2009, and after 21 years as anchor at WMAR-TV, Mary Beth Marsden signed off for one final time at the end of the 6 p.m. newscast.
It was a bittersweet moment for the Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, who, after months of stressful negotiations, had taken a buyout from the ABC affiliate.
While her three children (Jack, now 14, George, now 12, and Tess, now 10) and her husband,...
We interview three local broadcasters who recently gave birth to twins.
Bernadette Woods
When WJZ meteorologist Bernadette Woods and her husband found out they was pregnant with twins, it wasn’t that surprising. “We did in vitro, so it wasn’t a total shock,” she says. But going into pre-term labor at 26 weeks certainly was unexpected. Her twins, Thomas and Daniel, were born 11 weeks premature on August 28, the same day as Hurricane Irene, fitting for a meteorologist...
