Daniel Webster

The young men who work out of an East Monument Street rowhouse are giving Baltimore a safer city. They walk the streets in McElderry Park, engaging other young men whom they pass on a corner and with whom they share a common past. Some are known by reputation, others are newcomers, but they all appreciate how fast a beef, a slight, an insult can turn deadly. It's their job to help settle scores without a gun. It's their job to help curb the violence. Mayor Sheila Dixon has invested in the crew of Operation Safe Streets, and initial reviews of their efforts are promising - shootings in their neighborhood are down.

The Baltimore Police Department has been selected as one of six cities to receive a federal grant to fund and evaluate gun suppression efforts, officials announced Wednesday. The $300,000 Smart Policing Grant will be used to support the work of the department's Violent Crime Impact Section, a plainclothes deployment of officers focused in East, West and Northwest Baltimore, and the gun offender registry, which helps keep tabs on people convicted of gun offenses. It will also fund an evaluation of the department's effectiveness in those areas, led by Daniel Webster of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Charles D. Allen of Reading, Vt., wrote that he wanted a recipe for clam cakes or clam balls. "I got hooked on them when I lived in Providence, R.I., and they were as popular as french fries or onion rings. They are fried balls of bread dough with minced clams in them. I can't find the recipe and would appreciate your help." Blair Brennan Slaughter of Hunt Valley responded. She wrote: "I am a native Rhode Islander living in Maryland, so I had to respond to the request for clam cakes. "When I first served my Maryland-native husband clam cakes he was appalled, as they are the antithesis of crab cakes.

LAST MONDAY the Senate engaged in one of those debates that justify its boast as "the world's greatest deliberative body."I watched most of it on C-Span II, from early afternoon to nearly 11 p.m. It was the Senate I remembered from the civil rights and Vietnam debates of the 1960s. I consider it the Senate at its best:Many senators spoke. (Usually only a few do on any single topic.) Even more noteworthy, many senators listened. (Usually practically none do.) The typical Senate afternoon is not deliberative.

MERRILL PETERSON, 88 Scholar of 19th-century America Merrill Peterson, a University of Virginia professor whose writings on Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and other figures made him a renowned historian of 19th-century America, died Tuesday at a retirement home in Charlottesville, Va. He had pneumonia. Dr. Peterson was teaching at Brandeis University when he wrote his first book, "The Jefferson Image in the American Mind" (1960), which explored the relatively new field of intellectual history by focusing less on Jefferson's life than on the wide-ranging influence of his ideas.

Here is how members of Maryland's delegation on Capitol Hill were recorded on important roll-call votes last week:Y: YES N: NO X: NOT VOTINGHOUSE: DEBATE ISSUEBy a 217-178 vote, the House removed certain words critical of Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., from the official record of floor debate. The vote was strictly along party lines.A yes vote was to strike certain spoken words from the record of House debates.Y N X MemberY * * Ehrlich, Robert, R-2nd* N * Hoyer, Steny H. D-5thY * * Bartlett, Roscoe G., R-6th* * X Wynn, Albert R., D-4th* N * Cardin, Benjamin L., D-3rd* N * Mfume, Kweisi, D-7thY * * Gilchrest, Wayne T., R-1stY * * Morella, Constance A., R-8thHOUSE: CONGRESSIONAL COMPLIANCEBy a 390-0 vote, with 45 members absent, the House sent President Clinton a bill (S 2)

"Can I be a great tennis player and a normal person, too?"It's not exactly, "To be, or not to be." But it's the question that drives "Phenom," a new ABC sitcom about a 16-year-old tennis whiz, which premieres at 8:30 tonight on WJZ (Channel 13).And 16-year-old Angela Goethals is an engaging enough actress to make you care about the journey her character takes to find the answer.Move over, Blossom, it looks like network TV has another girl-coming-of-age show worth watching.I say "looks like," because it isn't clear from the pilot which direction this show is going to take.

One of old Baltimore's most somber and funereal moments came in late April of 1865, when Abraham Lincoln's funeral party paused briefly in the city for a lying-in-state ceremony at the Baltimore exchange and custom house.But there had been an earlier presidential mourning here -- for the first president to die in office.William Henry Harrison stands out in history as one of the few U.S. commanders who won any victories in the War of 1812. But his brief time in the White House (31 days) was ended on April 4, 1841, when he died of pneumonia.

After Baltimore police officers seized 53 guns in one week, a top police commander said yesterday the department would "reaffirm" its commitment to pulling illegal weapons off the streets and work to ensure that repeat offenders are held on high bails after their arrests. "We're not here today to claim any sort of victory," Deputy Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III, the head of operations, said at a news conference at police headquarters, where many of the guns were displayed. "We're here to reaffirm our commitment to do our part to make this city safer," Bealefeld said.

Although Virgil Thomson's place in the pantheon of American composers is secure, it is as a music critic that his influence is most obvious.His daily reviews at New York's Herald Tribune (1940-1954) were much admired for intelligence and sophistication. Those qualities could turn cruel in the composer's elegant prose. And the gratuitous nastiness some newspaper readers detect in music criticism today is partly Thomson's legacy. In this respect, Thomson was the mother of us all.As it happens, it is "The Mother of Us All," Thomson's second opera (and second collaboration with Gertrude Stein)