Column

Your letters are the lifeblood of this column. This month, many of you wrote about homemakers who find themselves divorced, hard-working nurses, and how hurtful idle gossip can be when people who work together fall in love."

The Editor glowered. He frowned. He fulminated.The Editor spake:"Someone hath been reading thy column.""No way! 'Tis an incredible, baseless falsehood," retorted the Dead Politician. "Nobody readeth this rag. And if anybody were fool enough to read it, surely never would they have the fortitude and persistence to suffer the editorial page. They'd be subjected to both of us. Nay, that passeth belief.""But I have proof," The Editor smirked."Surely thou sayest so; but thou hath lied to me oft before, ohVast One."

THIS HAS BEEN the most difficult column I've written in nearly two years of filling this space each week.I have gone through dozens of false starts. I've written different leads in my mind, on the computer, in longhand.This is the last of my regular columns in the Howard County section of The Sun on Sundays.Tomorrow, I will move to another assignment in the editorial department, writing occasionally, but also editing letters to the editor. Leaving this column is not easy. It is like saying goodbye to a dependable friend.

SADLY, it's time to say goodbye. This is my last column. When Ticker was born almost 25 years ago - Feb. 22, 1977, to be exact - the Dow Jones industrial average stood at 939.26. This morning it is at 10,131.31, a gain of nearly 979 percent. Today, 2,300 columns and about 2 million words later, thanks to our many readers for loyalty. I appreciate your kindly letters, cards, calls, for over a quarter of a century. Since Ticker first ticked, we've seen many changes. Most important: better-informed investors, thanks to an outpouring of financial books, magazines, newsletters, seminars, evening courses, TV shows, computerized research and professionally trained brokers.

Blah-Blah-Blah-Of-The-Week: Alan Keyes, whiningly defending his decision to pay himself $8,500 a month in campaign funds while he runs for the U.S. Senate: "I work for a living and I don't mind saying that I am proud of being a working person." Who knew campaigning for office paid so well? Nice work, if you can get it. Or if you can find fat friends to pay your way.*Remember Wilbur Cox, the Patterson Park baseball kid whose Bazooka face appeared with this column last week? His photograph, by Harry Connolly, now adorns the reception area on the club level at Oriole Park.

Friends and readers often suggest column topics to me. It is a bit like asking a doctor for medical advice while at a cocktail party. Often, their suggestions can be dispensed with in a couple of thoughtful sentences - hardly enough to fill the newspaper space set aside for me each week - and my response goes something like this: "Fine. Sounds good. But what is the rest of the column?" This space is dedicated to those too-brief ideas - some suggested to me, some my own - that don't require much more discussion than is contained here.

Disregarding the one irate Chesapeake parent who called my 24-hour Sportsline last week and told me she was going to personally take my poison pen and stick it up my nose, I have to admit taking to heart two other phone calls Friday night from another very nice Chesapeake lady.The episode got me thinking that, just maybe, some parents take this high school sports scene a little too seriously, especially what we in the media write.It's never ceased to amaze me over the years how readers misconstrue the things we write, missing the lighter side of things and getting upset over certain descriptive words.

Can this marriage be saved? You bet it can. Not only saved, but rewritten, recycled, syndicated and -- if things work out -- even featured on cable television."

I hope you can help. Somehow I have managed to cause all the titles of my e-mails to be hidden in my Outlook Express software. To read them, I have to right-click to highlight them and then click on Open in order to read them. Thank you for any suggestions. A great aspect of e-mail is that as each message arrives it is marked with the time and date, the name of the sender and other details that get listed in different columns that run across the screen. One of two possible fixes will get your e-mail display restored to the happy state where each note is displayed with a column for the subject line next to the name of the sender.

Letters, calls and the roar of the crowd:H. L. Suprine, Baltimore: I think your column of 8/16 was most disgusting. And what does it say about you personally? Your column should be relegated to the back pages, if not discontinued entirely.COMMENT: I write nearly 200 columns per year, many of which are disgusting, and I cannot be expected to remember them by date.It is therefore important for letter writers to let me know which disgusting column they are talking about.I admit this is often not easy.