50th Anniversary

Howard County Department of Recreation and Parks will celebrate Earth Day at West Friendship Park by planting trees and installing tree shelters. Volunteers are needed to help from 9 a.m. to noon April 19. Wear work gloves and bring a shovel, if available. For information or to register: Ann Combs, 410-313-4624. In case of rainy weather, call 410-313-4452 on the day of the event. Recreation and Parks will sponsor "You Can Draw and Paint" classes for those ages 55 and older from 9:30 a.m. to noon Wednesdays, starting this week, at the Glenwood Community Center.

It was Feb. 1, 1945, and Michael Katen was freezing.For four days, he had huddled in a drafty 1939 Pontiac waiting for his chance to pay the first toll on a new section of the Lincoln Tunnel, which links midtown Manhattan with New Jersey.His coffee had frozen. His meal of spaghetti and meatballs had frozen. So had the doors on his automobile.But patience and a 50-cent toll won him a place in history.On Wednesday, the 82-year-old Margate, Fla., resident will relive the event -- minus the four-day wait -- at a special 50-year anniversary celebration of the landmark tunnel's north tube.

ANNIVERSARY journalism is a staple, and I expected to see a lot of 50th anniversary of this and 50th anniversary of that this year, as the Allied war effort in World War II began to pile up victories in 1943.But there hasn't been much of it. Let me contribute a little. Fifty years ago today a war-related meeting began that a later historian described as "a concentration of physical power and political authority unique in the whole history of mankind."That was the Tehran Conference. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin -- the Big Three -- met together for the first time.

Library to end dial-up Internet service June 30 The Baltimore County Public Library system will stop offering dial-up Internet service subscriptions at the end of June, a library spokesman said yesterday. Begun in 1995, the service offered inexpensive dial-up service to county residents and nonresidents and peaked at 9,000 customers. But as Internet users have moved from dial-up access to far faster broadband connections, the subscriber list has dwindled to about 2,000 accounts, said Bob Hughes, a library system spokesman.

UFOs. Aliens. Crash test dummies falling from the sky. Area 51. Government cover-ups and explanations. And now, Martians?By now you know the U.S. Air Force tried to debunk, once and for all, the tale of a wrecked spacecraft and dead aliens near Roswell, N.M., on July 7, 1947. "Case Closed," the Air Force titled the 231-page report this week.There was a big-time Washington press conference. Very serious.At the Fund for UFO Research, actually a phone and fax in the Alexandria home of Don Berliner, the report only furthered suspicions.

D-DAY's golden anniversary was a piece of cake. Now for the hard part. By a year from this month, the U.S. has got to figure out a politically correct way to celebrate a more significant event: The 50th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.The aircraft that dropped the historic bomb has long been an object of scorn, hatred and shame for many people around the world, even many Americans. It symbolizes to its critics a warfare that needlessly chose civilians as victims. The Smithsonian Institution has kept that plane, the Enola Gay, a B-29, hidden away.

Brooklyn church set to celebrate 50th anniversaryEmmanuel Wesleyan Church at 3716 West Bay Ave. in the Brooklyn section of South Baltimore is inviting the public to join in celebrating its 50th anniversary at 3 p.m. Sunday.The congregation is actually 25 years older than the small Wesleyan denomination of which it is a part.The Wesleyan Church in its present form, which has about 110,000 members in the United States and another 75,000 members in 19 other countries, is the result of a merger in 1968 of the Wesleyan Methodist Church, which was founded in 1843 partly because of its members' opposition to slavery, and the Pilgrim Holiness Church, founded in 1897.

Choral society seeks new members for 50th anniversary The Harford Choral Society, under the direction of T. Herbert Dimmock, is seeking new members for the 50th anniversary celebration, which will begin with a performance of Handel's Messiah. The chorus is composed of men and women interested in singing classical music. Rehearsals are held at 7 p.m. every Tuesday at the Churchville Presbyterian Church. The first rehearsal date is Sept. 7. Call 410-836-2773 or 410-452-5974. HCC needs volunteers to help literacy classes The Literacy Education Department of Harford Community College is seeking classroom volunteers to assist instructors in English as a Second Language classes and Adult Basic Education in reading, writing and math classes this fall at various times and locations throughout Harford County.

The familiar finger-snapping logo of Stax Records in the '60s signified not only a sweet soul label, but one of the first fully integrated studios, where black and white musicians, songwriters and executives worked together to create a uniquely American sound. In hits such as "Soul Man," "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," "Respect Yourself" and "Theme From Shaft," Memphis, Tenn.-based Stax mirrored the country's racial hurdles with a one-of-a-kind brand that offered a grittier sound than Motown and boasted one of the greatest house bands in pop history -- Booker T. & the MGs. "Stax was a product of the working-class South," said Rob Bowman, a Grammy Award-winning ethnomusicologist and music professor who wrote the definitive Soulsville U.S.A.

JOHNNIE CARR, 97 Civil rights activist Johnnie Carr, who joined childhood friend Rosa Parks in the historic Montgomery bus boycott and became a prominent civil rights activist over the past half-century, died Friday in Montgomery, Ala. She had suffered a stroke Feb. 11, said Baptist Health hospital spokeswoman Melody Ragland. Ms. Carr succeeded the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association in 1967, a post she held at her death. It was the newly formed association that led the boycott of city buses in the Alabama capital in 1955 after Ms. Parks, a black seamstress, was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to whites on a crowded bus. A year later, the Supreme Court struck down racial segregation on public transportation.