Baltimore City Community

Howard William Hammond, a Baltimore City Community College financial administrator who served as the school's interim president in the 1970s, died of congestive heart failure Dec. 14 at the Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The Towson resident was 81. Born in Nashua, N.H., he began studies at Tufts University. But his studies were interrupted by his service in the Army. He was assigned to the Galapagos Islands during World War II and attained the rank of sergeant. After the war, he completed his undergraduate studies at Tufts and also received a master's degree in education at the New England college.

Baltimore City Community College marked its 60th anniversary last week with an International Festival featuring food, flags and artifacts from the more than 50 nations represented in the campus community. The event was one of three held as part of the celebration. A Literary Festival included book signings and discussions, and an Arts Festival featured student and professional artists. The college offers 31 degree and 28 certificate programs, according to its Web site.

The Community Law Center likes its clients so much that it invited them all to a Client Celebration at the Baltimore Urban League building and gave a good number of them awards.The center, a private organization of five staff lawyers and about 40 volunteer lawyers, provides free legal representation to Baltimore City community associations. Its executive director is Anne Blumenberg.Clients such as the Harlem Park Revitalization Corp., the Franklin Square Community Association, the Druid Heights Community Development Corp.

For Richard Bucher, diversity isn't just about racial differences and feel-good politics, it is about being able to succeed in a changing world. "Diversity is the difference in all things, in people and nature, and so on," says Bucher, a sociology professor at Baltimore City Community College. "The individual must understand diversity and use it to his or her advantage, because that's the way the world is going."Bucher's new book, "Diversity Consciousness," is aimed at helping people see that being comfortable with diversity is crucial to success in college and in the workplace.

MAYBE IT would be desirable for the state to take over operation of the Baltimore Convention Center, as Comptroller William Donald Schaefer suggests. But in the end it really does not matter who runs that taxpayer-built facility -- as long as the city lacks adequate hotel capacity to attract major conventions.Nearly two years after Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's Baltimore Development Corp. selected the site farthest from the Convention Center for a new city-subsidized hotel, prospects for additional hotel rooms are uncertain.

Kicking off an intensive drive to draft NAACP President Kweisi Mfume into Baltimore's mayoral race, more than 200 high-profile political, business and community leaders listed their names in an advertisement yesterday in support of his candidacy.The full-page ad in the Afro-American newspaper included the Rev. Frank M. Reid III and the Rev. Harold A. Carter, prominent city ministers; H. Furlong Baldwin of Mercantile Bank; and Rebecca Hoffberger, director and founder of the American Visionary Art Museum.

UPPERCO -- The Associated Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore is the latest organization to propose building a religious retreat in the northern part of the county, with a request to expand its summer camp on Mount Gilead Road.The Associated will ask the county's Development Review Committee on Monday for permission to build a religious study center with accommodations for sleeping, dining, recreation and meditation for adult retreats in the spring and fall.The Pearlstone Retreat would be built on a portion of the Associated's Camp Milldale, which attracts about 1,000 campers each summer.

Baltimore's new museum for children is not just a new museum for children.When Port Discovery opens Tuesday with a ribbon-cutting and a parade led by the Ravens marching band, it will be charged with two missions:To be a cheeky, Disney-infused "edu-tainment" center where children have a blast as they learn and dream.To be a $32 million high-voltage jump-start for the city's economically troubled east side.Port Discovery, one of the largest children's museums in the country, is promoted as the cutting-edge brainchild of an unprecedented partnership between Disney Imagineering and educators.

H. Donald Summers, 75, railroad workerH. Donald Summers, a retired railroad employee, died Dec. 19 of lymphoma at his home in Bowie. He was 75.Mr. Summers worked in the railroad industry for more than 40 years -- in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, St. Louis and Minneapolis. He directed the distribution of freight cars and was district manager. He retired in 1986 as director of field operations for the Association of American Railroads in Washington.He was born and raised in Indianapolis, where he attended public schools and studied transportation at Butler University.

The state has approved a two-year pilot project allowing as many as 500 welfare recipients attending Baltimore City Community College to count their schooling as a "work activity" under welfare reform, a school official says.Under the project, which will be evaluated by the University of Maryland, Baltimore school of social work, students would not have to work 20 hours a week, as might otherwise be required under reform, said Harry Bosk, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Human Resources.

Charles Pennington LaMont, a day care assistant who volunteered with several AIDS organizations, died of a seizure Aug. 13 at his Saratoga Street apartment. He was 22. Mr. LaMont was born and raised in Northwest Baltimore and Hagerstown. Mr. LaMont, who had suffered from Asperger's syndrome, a neurological disorder that produces autisticlike behavior, had spent his teenage years at a group home in Hagerstown, where he graduated from Washington County High School. "Charles had recently started the process of enrollment at Baltimore City Community College and had hoped to pursue a career as a social worker," said his father, Alonzo D. LaMont Jr. of Northwest Baltimore.

Kathy Lilley sees her academic counseling office at the Community College of Baltimore County as almost like the front desk in a hospital emergency room. A middle-age truck driver looking to become an apprentice electrician might be followed by a 20-year-old unsure how to translate academic skills into a paying career. No matter what the problem, Lilley's staff tries to find a solution within the college's catalog of courses and job-training programs. With the recession wiping out thousands of careers, their advice has never been more in demand.

Recently, I was honored as a member of the board of the American Association of Community Colleges to be one of six community college presidents invited to join President Obama for the unveiling of his "American Graduation Initiative." This unprecedented federal commitment will spur new and innovative work force training programs, offer options for free online learning and provide capital funding for renovation and/or new construction. The goal is to assist community colleges to do what they do best - and what they have always done - educate and train people today for tomorrow's careers.

Irona Pope, a street-savvy community activist who defended East Baltimore schoolchildren, died of a blood infection Tuesday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The Lakeside resident was 69. Born Irona Elizabeth Lee in Baltimore, she was raised in the old Fort Holabird and Lafayette Court public housing developments and was a 1958 Dunbar High School graduate. She earned an associate's degree from Baltimore City Community College and a bachelor's degree from Sojourner-Douglass College. When her children were attending public school in the 1960s, she volunteered as a cafeteria aide.

Sylvan A. Dogoloff, a retired Baltimore public school teacher and administrator, died Tuesday of congestive heart failure at his Upper Park Heights home. He was 90. Mr. Dogoloff was born in Kiev, Russia, immigrated to Baltimore with his family in 1921 and settled in the old Jewish neighborhood near the historic Lloyd Street Synagogue in East Baltimore. Growing up, he worked in Dogoloff's Grocery, his parents' Reisterstown Road store. He was a 1936 graduate of City College and earned a bachelor's degree from the Johns Hopkins University in 1940.

Maryland's community colleges are bracing for budget cuts from state and county governments, and educators are worried that tuitions might rise at a time when deteriorating economic conditions are driving more students to the traditionally affordable two-year campuses. Depending on the extent of the belt-tightening, the colleges could respond by increasing tuition or class size, or reducing the number of courses offered at a time of growing student demand, officials said. "This would be a very unfortunate time to cut funding to community colleges, because now is when people are turning to us as a lower-cost alternative to getting started in higher education," said Clay Whitlow, executive director of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges.

On a Wednesday evening in late summer, it's hard to tell who's interrupting whom: the people peppering Dexter Parker for advice on decorating their Baltimore homes or Parker, who is trying to finish his seminar on interior design in the allotted time. As Parker explains how furniture should fit with a room's size, questions hammer him from around this room in the Enoch Pratt Central Library, an upstairs auditorium to which the program was moved when far more than 20 people signed up. The free hour-and-a-half presentation drew 75 people, a substantial turnout of persistent questioners.

Ebony Paige wasn't sure what Bill Cosby would talk about yesterday in Park Heights, but she figured the speech would be poignant and funny, something worth bringing her two daughters and goddaughter to hear. What Cosby delivered to the hundreds who gathered in the 4500 block of Park Heights Ave. was a 40-minute plea for attendees to empower themselves by attending community college. Cosby also told the audience to encourage their children and other relatives to do the same. Cosby, using Baltimore City Community College President Carolane Williams as his sidekick, told the crowd, "You may have dropped out of school for whatever reason, but you now realize that's not going to do it. We got something for you. We got community college for you. You may feel so broke, so poor and think, 'I can't become a doctor, I can't become ... ' But we got something for you: community college."

William L. Brooks, a retired contractor with the Raytheon Service Co. at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, died of lung cancer June 21 at the Veterans Administration Rehabilitation and Extended Care Center in Baltimore. The Annapolis resident was 64. In his position at Raytheon, Mr. Brooks managed the vehicle fleet and ensured that supplies got to NASA stations around the world, according to his wife, Sara Jensen Brooks. He traveled extensively to Guam, Hawaii, Bermuda and elsewhere, she said.

The life and death of Nicole Sesker - stepdaughter of Baltimore's previous police commissioner, drug addict and homicide victim - emerges now as the central image from a tragic tableau 40 years in the making, a vast crowd scene with thousands of weary faces. Sesker's death stands out to some because of its irony: Her stepfather was Leonard Hamm. But most who know better, who know that addiction and alcoholism infests the best of families, look past that and see something familiar: the end of a life of pain.