Calverton

Bell Atlantic Corp., which announced in January that it would move 600 engineering jobs to its Pratt Street state headquarters building, said yesterday that it will move 120 customer service representatives from downtown to an office in Calverton, about 30 miles down Interstate 95.Bell Atlantic spokeswoman Shannon Fioravanti said the move, expected to take place in late 1996, is part of a consolidation of its consumer line of business into fewer locations."

AMONG THE GUESTS at a recent celebration of our 60th wedding anniversary was a young couple planning to be married soon. Each was a college graduate from an upper middle-class family."

Although her work was cleaning up after people all day, Earlene McFadden always told her family that she loved her job as a custodian at Calverton Middle School because she liked being around children.And it was there, in one of the classrooms, that she was fatally wounded by a man with a knife.Mrs. McFadden, 57, died Friday after being attacked about 5 p.m. in a classroom in the West Baltimore school where police believe she surprised a burglar who may have been hoping to steal money raised by children in a candy sale.

Leroy McFadden was shocked and confused yesterday as he tried to figure out why anyone would want to kill his wife as she did her job cleaning classrooms in a West Baltimore middle school."

A school cleaning woman was fatally stabbed in the chest and throat yesterday afternoon after she apparently interrupted a burglary at Calverton Middle School, Baltimore police said.The intruder repeatedly stabbed Earlene McFadden, 58, who had been on the schools' custodial staff for 18 years, after she walked into one of the classrooms about 5 p.m. and found the man hiding there, said homicide detective Errol Etting."It was an unprovoked attack; there was no reason he had to attack her," Detective Etting said.

Irony, irony -- when V. F. Calverton is finally the subject of a biographical study, the author is from New Zealand. But the face on the front cover is that of George Goetz (1900-1940), a once-famous Baltimore intellectual, and the brick rowhouse on the back cover is his old home, 2110 E. Pratt St.By now, explaining is in order: in 1923, when Goetz, the son of middle-class, East Baltimore Germans, set out to call his new magazine the Radical Quarterly, title alone was likely to cost him and his wife, Helen Letzer, their jobs as public school teachers.

IN THE COZY rooms at the Calverton, cheerful with fresh paint and donated bedroom furniture, 13 women have been setting up home. Small radios, cosmetics, plants and books give each private bedroom a personal stamp -- something unfamiliar and exciting for the formerly homeless women who are settling in for good."

Don't cut the life line for state teensThe plan to cut funding to the Youth Services Bureaus [as a result of the state deficit] is absolutely unacceptable. These centers save the lives of our youth daily, as surely as lives are saved at the Shock Trauma Unit. I can only hope that this unthinkable threat is merely a ploy to redirect the energies of the state budget watchdogs.If this proposal is allowed to go into effect, I know from personal experience, as a veteran educator of at-risk youth, that the loss of counseling advocacy and nurturing provided by centers such as the Northwest Baltimore Youth Services Agency will mean that hundreds of youngsters will be without their life support system as of Feb. 2. The economic impact will be shifted to the detention centers, prisons, shelters and health-care providers.

The Calverton, a four-story, 13-unit rehabilitated building on East 25th Street, opened its doors this week to women who cannot afford market-rate housing. It's about time.Sponsors of the $630,000 project expect a diverse mix of tenants, ranging from women with physical or mental disabilities to battered wives, the homeless and minimum-wage workers. All will earn less than $7,900 a year. Temporary housing options exist for such individuals, but many find themselves back on the streets when the time limit runs out. Some are even less fortunate: In a random sampling last November, Action for the Homeless found that 43 women were turned away for emergency shelters.