Armory

City officials will establish a cooling station at the Laurel Armory Anderson-Murphy Community Center and open city pools early beginning Tuesday to help residents combat the heat wave expected to hit the area this week. The Laurel Armory, 422 Montgomery St., will be open as a cooling station Tuesday through Friday, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesday through Friday, the city's two pools will open an hour early. Both the Municipal Pool, at Ninth and Main streets, and the Greenview Drive Pool, 14403 Greenview Drive, will open at 11 a.m. and close at 8 p.m. For more information, call the city at 301-725-5300.

David Roszel was on an evening walk along Lafayette Avenue in Bolton when he spotted me last Saturday night. In a subsequent conversation, he presented a version of the events that led to the Howard Street Bridge's construction in the late 1930s, a topic discussed in this column a few weeks ago. As a boy, he remembered his father awakening him and then watching the smoke and fire in the early morning of Jan. 13, 1933, as the 5th Regiment Armory burned....

Baltimore's 5th Regiment Armory could become a soundstage for film production in Maryland under a proposal to revitalize the 28-acre State Center renewal area. Planners have recommended that the state-owned building near Howard and Preston streets, now home for a division of the Maryland National Guard, be preserved and converted for new uses as part of a transit-oriented development that would also contain new housing, commercial space and offices for state agencies and others. The National Guard division has indicated that it may want to move to a different location in central Maryland, and that would free up the armory for new uses.

Seriously nerdy The lowdown -- If you enjoy Magic: the Gathering, Atari or science, then check out Nerdfest 2008. Load of Fun Studios encourages basement-dwellers to get out and get social Saturday for an evening of nerd culture. Attending geeks can look forward to video games, Dungeons & Dragons, science and math experiments, and bands inspired by Star Wars and Harry Potter. If you go -- The festival is 4 p.m.-10 p.m. Saturday. Admission is $5. The studio is at 120 W. North Ave. Call 412-901-1216 or go to loadoffun.

When Ross Hempel walked into the Pikesville Armory in Baltimore County yesterday, he expected to take the professional engineering exam that he had studied three months for. But just 10 minutes before the exam was to begin, the 23-year- old Marriottsville man - along with some 325 other aspiring engineers - was ushered out of the building because of a sewage backup. Now the prospective test-takers might have to wait until October to take the eight-hour Fundamentals of Engineering exam, which is the first step to getting a license to practice engineering in the United States, said Dan Parr, executive director of the state Professional Licensing Boards.

CHESTERTOWN -- For decades, the men of the Army National Guard's 29th Infantry Division prepared for war inside the powder-blue corridors of this faded fortress, perfecting drills in the cavernous gym. Weekends when the soldiers weren't there, Chestertown's armory hosted basketball games, concerts - even the town's Christmas bazaar. But the building has been quiet for more than two years, ever since the state's Military Department announced plans to sell it. Now, seemingly everyone in this close-knit town has an opinion on what should happen to the armory - which sits on waterfront property.

WASHINGTON -- As the insurgency in Iraq escalated in the spring of 2004, U.S. officials entrusted an Iraqi businessman with issuing weapons to Iraqi police cadets training to help quell the violence. By all accounts, the businessman, Kassim al-Saffar, a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, did well at distributing the Pentagon-supplied weapons from the Baghdad Police Academy armory he managed for a military contractor. But, co-workers say, he also turned the armory into his own private arms bazaar with the seeming approval of some U.S. officials and executives, selling AK-47s, Glock pistols and heavy machine guns to anyone with cash in hand - Iraqi militias, South African security guards and even American contractors.

Snow fell in Baltimore on Oct. 19 and 20, 1940. It clung to trees still burdened with leaves, mostly north and west of the city. Limbs sagged and snapped off electric service to thousands. Wet flakes fell on visitors to the Baltimore Automobile Show at the 5th Regiment Armory, where manufacturers hoped to "woo the whims of the ladies" with cars in colors other than black. In New York, under gray skies, 141 officers and men of the Maryland Naval Reserves sailed for Panama under "indefinite" activation.

Guard troops to leave for Iraq training, deployment About 130 military police officers of the Maryland Army National Guard are set to leave Thursday for combat training and subsequent deployment to Iraq, officials confirmed yesterday. The 290th Military Police Company, based at the Parkville Armory, expects to be in Iraq for about nine months after 90 days of pre-deployment training at Fort Bliss, Texas. The call-up has been long planned and is not part of the Pentagon's plans, reported this week, to alert up to eight National Guard units that they should be ready to go to Iraq or Afghanistan beginning next summer.

Starting the 1972 hurricane season with a rough blow, Tropical Storm Agnes swept the Eastern seaboard in June, causing $3.2 billion in damage and claiming 122 lives, 21 of them in Maryland. Agnes was the worst tropical system to hit the United States until Hurricane Andrew smashed into the East Coast in 1992. Flooding from Agnes forced hundreds of people in Anne Arundel County to leave their homes and find refuge in schools, fire stations and the National Guard Armory in Annapolis. Most of the evacuees lived in trailer parks along the Patuxent River.