Bronze

During the many months of modeling and molding it took to create her 9-foot, 800-pound Babe Ruth in bronze, artist Susan Luery met countless experts and aficionados.Through her studio they would traipse, bringing ideas and leaving suggestions. Details were researched and debated. Did the Babe wear his belt buckle on the left or right? Was his hat cocked to the side or worn straight?No fact was too small to escape scrutiny. Except one.The bronze Babe, unveiled last month at the northern Eutaw Street entrance of Oriole Park, is leaning on a bat and clutching on his hip a right-handed fielder's glove.

The intense stare is captured, the look of a slugger tracking a ball hit well into the night. The bat is dangling from the bronzed Frank Robinson's left hand. “I'm looking at the ball going out in the outfield, but I am ready to drop that bat and get my damn butt down the bases,” the flesh-and-bones Robinson quipped Saturday evening. “I don't want to stay up there [at the plate] too long.” Robinson, the Hall of Fame outfielder who led the Orioles to their first world championship in 1966 and a string of three more World Series appearances in the next five years, on Saturday became the first player to have his likeness replicated in a life-size bronze statue in the Garden of the Greats picnic area behind center field at Camden Yards.

You can see the hand of the artist at work in the sculpture of Reuben Kramer, the marks of his tools, the mediation of his mind and the feeling in his heart.He formed his figures and his portrait heads from lumps of clay, pressed and prodded into place with his fingers, worked with knobs and scrapers and knives, and cast into bronze with the marks of his workmanship left undisguised, as a hallmark of his integrity."He had a distinctive technique," says Virginia North, librarian and archivist at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the repository for a rich selection of Kramer's work, his notebooks, many drawings and several of his tools.

The Environmental Business Journal has recognized Sovereign Consulting Inc., an environmental consulting and remediation firm with an office in Edgewood, as one of the top medium-sized environmental businesses in the United States. Sovereign received a Bronze Medal for Business Achievement in 2011. The Environmental Business Journal honored Sovereign Consulting for its business successes over the last five years. Sovereign's 2011 revenue was approximately $48 million in 2011, up from $26.6 million in 2007.

Although William Donald Schaefer opened or dedicated a flurry of state buildings before leaving office this month, he left some of the most unusual projects of his administration to be unveiled by his successor.They include miniature bronze replicas of a doghouse and a tepee. There also are an igloo, a mobile home and a lighthouse.All are part of a simulated streetscape -- a sculpture titled "Dwellings" -- that will be installed in the Maryland State Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped at a cost to Maryland taxpayers of $100,000.

Bronzed baby shoes? On exhibit? At the august Walters Art Gallery?Yes. A pair of bronzed baby shoes at the entrance to the exhibit "The Allure of Bronze" announces that this isn't your usual art exhibit. Curator Joaneath Spicer affirms that right away."I wanted a different perspective from exhibitions of the past," she says. "I'm interested in focusing on issues for people who are not specialists. The baby shoes are telling people, 'Maybe you've commissioned something in bronze,' as introduction to showing that bronze has been much a part of the intimate life of the past."

BARCELONA, Spain -- It's hard to smile when you are 16 and the world is watching your heart break.You never think about finishing third, only first.But someone else, a little younger, someone else, from the other side of the earth, pushes past you, touches the wall before you, gets to stand a step or two higher on a medal platform.Yesterday, Anita Nall of Towson did not win the gold medal in the women's 200-meter breast stroke at the 1992 Summer Olympics. She didn't get the silver. She accepted the bronze.

FOR WEST Columbia artist Vinnie Bagwell, finding inspiration to create her sculptures is easy. Locating the funds to finish them in bronze is the hard part. Bagwell is the featured artist this month in an exhibit at Artists' Gallery in the American City Building. "I want to make sculptures of black people just being people like anybody else, being parents, being lovers, being friends," Bagwell said. "Often my inspiration comes from real life, sometimes from photographs and sometimes it just comes from my head."

DALLAS -- People in Fort Worth, 30 miles west of here, have long had a pithy way of explaining the difference between the two cities. Fort Worth is where the West begins, they say. Dallas is where the East peters out.But in one enormous artistic undertaking on a 4.2-acre plot downtown, Dallas is now officially on a mission to redraw forever the boundary of the American frontier.The city is erecting a giant bronze rendering of a 19th-century cattle drive, with 70 6-foot-high steers and three trail riders herding them up a ridge and past a man-made limestone cliff a block from City Hall.

All the big names were there: NFL Films, CBS Video, Warner Brothers, Howard County Cable 8.In the midst of the national broadcast media blitz for silver and bronze statues, called Telly Awards, there was a Howard County public school system's Cable 8 sports video, a telecast of the 1992 Wilde Lake/Glenelg high school football championship, competing for national recognition.Glenelg lost 28-0. Howard County Cable won a bronze statue."Based on the level of competition, I didn't really expect to get anything," said Mike Dubbs, who produced and directed the sports video.

Members of the Harford Tech FFA Chapter formed one of 29 teams participating in the National FFA Food Science and Technology Career Development Event. The event was held in conjunction with the 84th National FFA Convention in Indianapolis, Ind. The team, led by advisor Naomi Knight, was awarded a bronze emblem. Members also competed for individual awards with 112 other participants. Kelly Kundratic received a bronze emblem, Sarah Martin received a bronze emblem, Ashley Riemer received a bronze emblem, and Marisa Tenney received a silver emblem.

College football Terps ' Vellano named top D-lineman in ACC Maryland's Joe Vellano was honored Monday as the Defensive Lineman of the Week by the Atlantic Coast Conference for his play in Saturday's 21-16 loss at No. 13 Georgia Tech. Vellano made a career-high 20 tackles, including 14 solo stops and a tackle for loss. Vellano became just the fifth defensive player in the nation to post 20 or more tackles this season and the sixth Maryland player — as well as the only defensive lineman — to reach the 20-tackle plateau since 1990.

Kevin Cobb of Nottingham, a rising 12th grader at Carver Center, won a bronze medal at the NAACP national Afro-Academic, Cultural, Technological and Scientific Olympics Competition, held in Los Angeles from July 22-24, 2011. He competed in the painting category. As a bronze medalist, Cobb received a laptop computer and a $2,000 award.

Part of a longtime bronze statue at Friends School has been stolen, Nothern District police said. The statue sits on the upper school plaza on the campus at 5114 N. Charles St. Made by the noted local sculptor Bart Walter, 53, a Friends graduate whose studio is located in Westminster, the statue is called "Friends. " It shows a boy reading to a girl — both sitting on stacks of books — and includes a lacrosse stick among other sports items. Someone stole the lacrosse stick between 10:30 p.m. July 14 and 6:30 a.m. July 15, police said.

The idea is always at the surface, has been since the story of an NFL star dying in an Afghanistan firefight captured America's attention, and struck especially hard on this past holiday weekend, 10 years after the Sept. 11 attacks. You remember Pat Tillman, the NFL star who sacrificed a dream career and millions of dollars for the front line of the fight against terrorism, driven by the kind of values the rest of us admire but can't always match. He died for it, killed by friendly fire and then disrespected by a government cover-up, so how could we not want to honor him as best we possibly can?

Charles Sussman, a retired Baltimore County public schools administrator who was a decorated World War II veteran, died of congestive heart failure Wednesday at Sinai Hospital. He was 85 and lived in Pikesville. Born in Baltimore and raised on Bryant Avenue near Druid Hill Park, he worked as a cashier at the popular delicatessen Sussman and Lev, at 923 E. Baltimore St., which was operated by his father, Jacob. While attending City College, where he graduated in 1942, Mr. Sussman befriended Russell Baker, who went on to become a Baltimore Sun reporter, New York Times columnist and author.

BEIJING - Nastia Liukin is having so much fun at these Olympics, she says she might stick around and compete again next year at the world championships. Shawn Johnson won't look beyond tomorrow's balance-beam final, her last chance to win a gold medal. Johnson won the silver medal in yesterday's floor exercise competition, her third silver medal of the Olympics, and it was a bittersweet finish for the defending world champion who had to compete first among the eight finalists and then watch and wait.

The student: Andy Walker, 16 School: Oakland Mills High School Special achievement: Andy, a freshman special education student, took a bronze medal at the Special Olympics four-day National Golf Tournament held in October in Nashville, Tenn. He was chosen to carry the Maryland flag in the parade of athletes. Special Olympics golfers play alternate holes with a partner. Andy's father, John Walker, was his partner in the competition. More than golf partners: Andy and his father spend a lot of time together.