Deford

On November 11, 2003, MARGARET W. (nee Warner); wife of John E. Deford, Jr.; mother of John E. Deford, III, Cooper D. Deford and Michael W. Deford; grandmother of Henry, Michael, Sam and Megan. Interment private. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to Save the Children, 54 Wilton Road, Westport, CT 06880.

Colleges Caringi equals UMBC mark with four goals in 7-1 rout Junior forward Pete Caringi III (Calvert Hall) tied a school record with four goals as UMBC (9-4-4, 3-2-1 America East) clinched a spot in the conference tournament with a 7-1 victory over visiting Hartford (7-8-1, 1-4-1). Caringi equaled the mark of Ted Lawler , who had four in a 1995 game against UMES. Caringi also became the third player in the country to score four goals in a game this season. "He has scored goals his entire life and is very confident right now," coach Pete Caringi Jr. said of his son. "It just seems like everything he hits is going in. The seven goals scored by the Retrievers are the most since they found the net seven times vs. St. Francis (Pa.)

On December 18, 2004, JOHN E. Deford Jr., husband of the late Margaret W. Deford, father of John E. Deford III, Cooper D. Deford and the late Michael W. Deford, grandfather of Henry, Michael, Sam and Megan. Also survived by one sister Agnes D. Cohen of Charlottesville, VA. Memorial service at Northminster Presbyterian Church, 705 Main Street, Reisterstown on Wednesday, December 22, at 2 P.M. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be sent to the S.P.C.A., of Baltimore, 3300 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD, 21211.

NPR sports commentator Frank Deford threw propriety to the wind Wednesday morning in favor of hometown pride and loyalty, admitting on air that he was rooting -- hard -- for the Orioles. Deford, who grew up in North Baltimore, first explained that when it comes to sports teams, folks need to dance with the one that brung ya. "My first protocol in rooting in sports is you should stick with the teams you grew up with," he said. "Continuing to cheer for your original hometown teams is one way of displaying the old-fashioned value of allegiance.

John E. "Gus" Deford Jr., a retired printing company owner, World War II veteran and former country club golf champion, died of asthmatic bronchitis Saturday at his longtime North Baltimore home. He was 88. Born in Baltimore, he lived in nine different homes and apartments in the area before he was 18 - among them Greenwood, a residence his father built on Charles Street that is now the headquarters of the Baltimore County Board of Education. "His childhood was a study in contrasts. His father liked to build new houses.

Sports writing may be what Frank Deford is most widely known for -- a Sports Illustrated editor's urgent appeal for a farewell garland came to him, in Connecticut, the night of John Unitas' death. But more than half of Deford's 14 books so far have been novels. And it is in fiction that his momentum and skill increase. An American Summer (Sourcebooks, 256 pages, $24) is about a 14-year-old boy from Indiana whose father, with a new job as factory manager, moves the family to Baltimore. This is northern-suburb, propertied, private-school Baltimore -- Deford himself started there.

Margaret W. Deford, an artist whose paintings were characterized by bright, fluid colors, died of cancer Tuesday at her North Baltimore home. She was 77. Born Margaret Warner in Baltimore and raised in Roland Park, she was the granddaughter of Dr. Howard A. Kelly, one of the four founding Johns Hopkins School of Medicine physicians. She visited his Harford County estate, Liriodendron, where family members said she grew familiar with the trees and flowers that she later incorporated into her paintings.

It's the kind of day God created for malls and old movies, a misty, gray Saturday where inertia seems the only reasonable response to the humidity.Unless, of course, your name is Rob Deford.In that case you've been up since 4 a.m. You drove to Western Maryland, returned with 10,000 pounds of grapes, unpacked half from the truck and now feed them into a crushing machine you call the Mechanical Human Foot.There's also much you ignore on this afternoon: threatening clouds, hovering bees and the flood in your office from the rain last night.

This time of year, the leafless vines at Boordy Vineyards look as if they've been permanently etched against the gray sky. Now, Anne M. Deford has found a way to ensure that those vines - which produce seyval blanc and chardonnay grapes - remain firmly rooted in the land. Deford, owner of 252-acre Long Green Farm - home to Boordy Vineyards - has joined a movement that is responsible for protecting one-third of the Long Green Valley National Historic District in northeastern Baltimore County.

Practice over, the high school basketball player headed home to his family's gray clapboard house in north Baltimore. There, Frank Deford went for the mail - and the magazine. Sports Illustrated had arrived. Half a century later, Deford can guess what was on the cover. A rainbow trout. The Matterhorn. A spaniel with a bird in its mouth. "I was very taken by much of the writing," he says of those early issues. But his typical response to the fledgling weekly was one of disappointment.

On NPR , Frank Deford talks about Bud Selig's decision to add an extra wild card team to each league this season , and the effect it's having on the postseason chances for several teams, including the Orioles . Deford makes note of something that I've heard a lot recently on sports talk programs around the area -- the Orioles are somehow 10 games over .500 even though they have been outscored by a large margin and they're among the league's...

It was one of the true watershed moments in Baltimore sports history, so why should anyone be surprised that Frank Deford - one of the greatest sportswriters of the modern era and a Charm City native - would be there to witness it? Well, slightly after the fact. The date was July 4, 1944 and the place was Greenmount Avenue and 29th Street, where a 5-year-old Deford stood with his mother and looked at the smoking pile of debris that remained of Oriole Park. The old wooden stadium was destroyed the night before by a fire that some now credit with helping turn Baltimore into a major league city.

Though he's long since moved away, award-winning sports writer and Baltimore native Frank Deford feels the same way about the Orioles and owner Peter Angelos as someone who never left.   “He was great at asbestos,” Deford, a Gilman graduate, said. “He's not so great at baseball.”   During an interview given Wednesday afternoon after Deford spoke to a group of students at Garrison Forest School in Owings Mills, the author and Sports Illustrated mainstay -- his work also appears on NPR and HBO -- said the team's fortunes have clearly transformed since Angelos took over.

In her sunlit kitchen, where hickory cabinets frame the back-lit glow of red-checked cafe curtains, Lynda DeFord has hung a plaque with just one word: "Simplify." The message reflects DeFord's approach to decorating her dream home and serves as a yardstick by which to measure future projects. "I decorate to the type of the house," said the 53-year-old Social Security retiree. "When I lived in Federal Hill, I furnished that [house] in Queen Anne style." Eight years ago, DeFord sold her downtown rehab and moved to the West Baltimore neighborhood of Ten Hills, near the Baltimore County line, an area she had always hoped to call home.

While grain farmers witness the damage to their corn and soybeans from the lack of rain, grape growers and winemakers are looking at a possible banner season. "We are celebrating a fantastic year," said Rob Deford, president of Boordy Vineyards in the Hydes section of Baltimore County. This could be a reserve year for winemakers, Deford said, those rare occasions when the critical weather factors come together to produce a wine of such quality that it sells for twice its normal price.

Now that spring is here and temperatures are rising, Boordy Vineyards is kicking off its annual outdoor Reds, Whites and Bluegrass Festival. Sunday, the vineyard will have a live performance by the Satyr Hill Band, catered food and about a dozen of the wines they make on premises for sampling and selling. The vineyard's president, Rob Deford, said the festival fits in with Boordy's mission -- that wine should be enjoyed in a laid back, pretension-free atmosphere. "It's casual, it's rural -- it's all the things that we are," Deford said.

Heard back from Frank Deford the other day, responding to my column about his Smithsonian magazine piece on Charm City. You may recall that Deford had lamented the lack of white luminaries in the Baltimore of his youth: "It is both ironic and instructive that in the first half of the 20th century, the two most illustrious Americans to come from Baltimore were Thurgood Marshall and Billie Holiday - African-Americans who rose up out of a segregated society;...

Frank Deford wrote about his hometown in last month's Smithsonian magazine, under a headline that picked up on an imperiled civic slogan: "Bleeve it, hon." The gist of the piece: A city whose glory days are behind her has regained some "swagger" thanks to professional sports, a remade Inner Harbor and somebody named "Donald Schaefer." (Any relation to William Donald Schaefer?) Deford describes the Baltimore of his youth this way: "The harbor was a Stygian tributary leading to a humdrum skyline that was dominated by a bizarre faux-Florentine building that was topped by a rendering of an antacid fizz bottle.