Decades

The civil rights movement was full of dynamic and evocative images. Today, even many of us born after its iconic moments were captured on film can describe Martin Luther King Jr.'s outstretched arm pointing a sea of people toward a future decades beyond the short span of his life, or German shepherds in Birmingham ripping into black skin, as if we had watched these events live. But 50 years after the March on Washington, one local institution is helping audiences revisit this period in American history and examine details that were largely overlooked.

A 13-year-old patient at a state-run psychiatric treatment facility in Baltimore died from a "possible suicide" Tuesday night after being found unresponsive by facility staff, police and state health officials said. The death is the first at the Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents in Baltimore, a residential facility for patients aged 12 to 18 that opened at its current location in Southwest Baltimore in the early 1970s, said Dori Henry, a spokeswoman for the state's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Carol Benjamin didn't like having the bull's-eye on her back. Competing in the seventh Maccabiah Games in 1965, she despised the pressure that came with being one of the most highly regarded athletes in fencing. And she didn't like the idea that if she didn't come away with a gold medal, she had failed to meet expectations. It was an unpleasant feeling for the then-19-year-old New York native, but it didn't stop her from finishing first and continuing her success in the sport by winning the NCAA championship in 1966.

Two decades ago, when lawyer Robert Waldman and his family moved to the Annapolis neighborhood of Homewood, there was talk of converting the old railroad right-of-way across from his house into some kind of thruway. An extra lane to take the traffic pressure off West Street, which ran parallel several blocks away; a route for a shuttle bus from downtown Annapolis to Westfield Annapolis Mall - city officials were regularly talking about ways to pave the four-block long stretch of grass that bisected the old neighborhood of mixed-generation families.

She had won a string of beauty pageants - and was the original St. Pauli Girl of beer advertising fame - so Debbie Walker, a blond model from Washington, D.C., was accustomed to her fair share of attention. But she'd never seen anything like the morning of July 15, 1981. She had to wear a skin-tight, sequined costume with a 15-foot train for that gig. A team of frogmen carried her across a makeshift pond and placed her on a rock. And as cameras from media outlets around the world clicked, flashed and rolled, three seals swam over to pay her a visit, followed by an equally frisky mayor of Baltimore, William Donald Schaefer.

The five-pointed star, made of stainless steel and dozens of heavy-duty light bulbs, looks deceptively simple. Its symbolism is anything but. Not long after Bethlehem Steel built the Sparrows Point steel mill's massive "L" blast furnace in 1978, workers erected the "Star of Bethlehem" at the top - a reference to the longtime owner as well as to the nativity. The star has shone from on high in December ever since, its meaning slowly transforming from an eye-catching example of the steel mill's might to something deeper and more emotional.

Anyone who believes that political stalemate over raising taxes or a preference for deferring hard choices were problems unique to Congress has probably never been to Annapolis. Even when one party dominates both chambers, as the Democrats do in the Maryland State House, lawmakers are all too frequently loath to stick their necks out for anything controversial if there's any possibility it might be postponed. Witness last week's debate over Maryland's transportation finances and the possibility of raising the gas tax. Everyone seems to recognize that the status quo is wholly unacceptable.

William F. Beauchamp, a real estate appraiser and avid sports fan who founded his own firm in the mid-1980s, died Wednesday of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. The longtime Timonium resident was 57. "His father had been an appraiser, and he got his skills in part from him, and then embellished them," said Mark J. Plogman, who worked as an appraiser at Mr. Beauchamp's firms for the past 25 years. "When he started his firm, he invited me to join.

First, the Army told Frank Olson's sons that the Fort Detrick scientist's death in a fall from a 13th-floor window of a New York hotel had been an accident. Then a presidential commission revealed that the CIA had given an unwitting Olson LSD as part of a mind-control experiment in remote Western Maryland only nine days before the fall, and concluded that his death had been a drug-related suicide. Now Eric and Nils Olson believe their father - a bioweapons expert who had told colleagues before he died that he wanted to quit the top-secret Special Operations Division - was murdered.

Titillation over David Petraeus and political posturing over Susan Rice aside, here is the most important unasked question: Why did we foster regime change in Libya and Egypt that gave the Muslim Brotherhood control in the latter and produced a gaggle of Islamic militias in the former? Earlier, we forced elections in Lebanon and Palestine that gave Hezbollah control in Lebanon and Hamas the Gaza Strip. Again, why? Replacing the Mubarak government has left the border between Gaza and Egypt more open for weapons deliveries to Hamas, which produced the latest conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.