Door To Door

John L. Webster Sr., who delivered fresh milk and bread door to door in many Baltimore neighborhoods, died Thursday of heart failure at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore. He was 72 and lived in Chase.Mr. Webster was a map collector and loved mapping trips for friends and family members.After serving in Europe during World War II, he returned to Baltimore and began working as a deliveryman, delivering dry cleaning door to door.Beginning in the 1950s, he was a deliveryman for dairies and bakeries, including Berg's, a defunct Perry Hall dairy.

The NAACP is going door-to-door this month in a bid to boost its national membership by reminding Americans of all races what the organization is doing and how new members can get involved.Although the NAACP's leadership is strong and its finances stable, organization officials have struggled to boost national membership in recent years. To address the problem, it hired its first membership consultant this summer.The Knock Across America campaign asks each member of the Baltimore-based National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to knock on at least 10 doors to tell friends and neighbors about the organization.

Baltimore police are searching for a woman who went door-to-door this week posing as a police officer asking for donations to the Police Athletic League.Police said the woman, described as between 23 and 30 years old, thin and about 5 feet 4 inches tall, collected money Wednesday from residents in the Cedonia area of Northeast Baltimore.She wore a navy blue uniform sweater and pants with oxford shoes, and was well-mannered and neatly groomed.The Police Athletic League does not solicit donations door-to-door.

One of the biggest challenges of operating a business in downtown Baltimore is finding enough parking for employees. Doug Whitaker thinks he may have found a solution with a park and ride shuttle service that debuts today.Door-to-Door Park and Ride is geared to downtown workers who don't want to pay up to $200 a month for parking, and for employees who are on waiting lists that are weeks and months long to try to get a spot in a garage, Whitaker said.To kick off the venture, which is based at a 500-car parking lot on Ostend Street, Whitaker is offering one week of free service to 170 Legg Mason Wood Walker Inc. workers who signed up for the pilot program.

The director of the Grant-A-Wish Foundation, frustrated with police inattention to complaints about a woman fraudulently soliciting donations door to door in South Baltimore and northern Anne Arundel County, went out and chased the suspected con artist this week.The Baltimore-based national nonprofit organization received six calls about a woman asking elderly people for funds in the foundation's name. Volunteers went out looking for her. Director Brian Morrison ran into a woman who fit the con artist's description Tuesday and chased her 15 blocks through Glen Burnie until she jumped into the cab of a commercial truck and got away from him.The foundation, which does not ask for money door to door, has had trouble over its 16 years with impostors using its name to rake in money, and none has been caught.

Adults in strange costumes escorting their inner child from door to door! Relationships ripped apart at the seams like an overstuffed bag of candy!Today, on Halloween eve, we examine twentysomething trick-or-treaters: Are they aging sociopaths desperately trying to cling to their childhoods, costumed candy addicts or frighteningly free spirits?Join us as we study this little-known disorder.A case studyJennifer Koerner is an otherwise normal 23-year-old assistant for marketing at Towson University.

A thief who has robbed at least 17 homes in Severna Park, Millersville and Arnold since December now has taken his sneaky ways to a neighborhood just outside Annapolis where at least two homes have been robbed, county police say.The burglar has been preying on citizens in upper-class communities who leave doors open and purses or wallets in sight, police say.Officers just missed the man Thursday when he abandoned a 1986 Ford Taurus in a private drive on...

Freddy Archable was leaving for work yesterday when he saw smoke in a hallway at his West Baltimore condominium building and went from door to door to alert his neighbors."

Three children died in fires over the weekend, an 18-month-old girl in a blaze yesterday in a Dundalk apartment and two boys in a fire Saturday in West Baltimore.The girl, identified as Paige Nicole Warlick, and Shawn David Adams, 29, were found unconscious in a hallway of a second-floor apartment in the 2900 block of Yorkway in Dundalk. She was taken to Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, where she died at 5 a.m.Mr. Adams was taken to the hyperbaric chamber at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where he was in critical condition yesterday, Baltimore County Battalion Chief Mark Hubbard said.

A botched robbery left four people dead and one critically wounded in Montclair, N.J., last evening, police said.Police were searching door-to-door for suspects in the normally quiet suburban town about 15 miles west of New York City.Article on Page 3A

Consumer affairs officials are warning Howard County residents about a water quality sales scam being pushed by door-to-door promoters. Rebecca Bowman of the county's Consumer Affairs Office said residents have been finding notices on their doors offering free water testing. Those who accept and leave a water sample and completed questionnaire are later told that the test revealed the need for purification equipment, which the person then tries to sell them. The name of a testing company is not provided.

The late Robert H. Kittleman, a Howard County Republican who served for more than two decades in the Maryland General Assembly, always said the surest way to elective success is to knock on 10,000 doors and impress voters within the first 30 seconds that you are intelligent enough to do the job and affable enough to be approachable. Democrat Shane Pendergrass has spent 22 years in elective office, the past 14 as a member of the House of Delegates, yet she doesn't like knocking on doors, and doesn't do much of it, though she doesn't dispute the Kittleman credo.

Havre de Grace voters returned two experienced politicians to the City Council and selected a newcomer, all to serve two-year terms. A self-described "new face for Havre de Grace," Bill Martin, a 34-year-old teacher at Aberdeen Middle School, was elected to the council after weeks of going door to door to about 250 houses, introducing himself to the city's voters. After learning of the results Tuesday, Martin declared, "I love democracy." He credited his success to old-fashioned campaigning.

Sykesville police are warning residents about door-to-door solicitors, primarily magazine salesmen working for a Texas company, who have been the subject of several complaints and who are working in the area without proper permits. Cpl. Dave Lewis said at least one incident of unwanted touching of a woman by a male solicitor has been reported. "It has been our experience that all of the sales persons are from out of state and almost all have criminal records," Lewis said in a news release.

The car smelled like cantaloupe, and that meant it was high summer, the start of the local cantaloupe season. The two ripe cantaloupes were stashed in the back of my car, sharing space with some pretty aromatic company: a handful of peaches, a bag of coffee beans and a loaf of freshly baked bread. Yet when it came to fragrance, there was no contest. The "lopes" were far and away the smelliest. Scent is a powerful memory trigger, and the fragrance of lopes that I purchased last week reminded me of past summers and juicy delights.

About 5,000 Maryland middle-schoolers, mostly in Baltimore and Prince George's County, are still being kept out of school because they have not shown proof that they have been immunized against hepatitis B and chicken pox. By tomorrow, they will have been excluded from classes for two full weeks - an unacceptable interval when important subjects are being missed and state assessments are about a month away. State and local officials need to accelerate their efforts to make sure the remaining stragglers either get the necessary shots or are allowed to go back to school until they can be vaccinated.

THE ISSUE: -- Do you allow your child to trick or treat door to door, or do you prefer planned events at such places as malls? Tell us, and we might give you a piece of candy. Halloween fosters communal feeling The only choices I can think of are trick or treating in the neighborhood or a neighborhood party. Commercial events seem to be missing the point. Halloween, to me, is about hospitality -- strangers (masked people pretending to be strangers, anyway) come to your door to be fed. You feed them.

THE ISSUE: Do you allow your child to trick or treat door to door, or do you prefer planned events at such places as malls? Tell us, and we might give you a piece of candy. YOUR VIEW: Send e-mail responses by tomorrow to howard.speakout@baltsun.com. A selection of responses will be published Sunday. Please keep your responses short and include your name, address and telephone number. Addresses and phone numbers will not be published.

THE ISSUE: Do you allow your child to trick or treat door to door, or do you prefer planned events at such places as malls? Tell us and we might give you a piece of candy. YOUR VIEW: Send e-mail responses by Thursday to howard.speakout@baltsun.com. A selection of responses will be published next Sunday. Please keep your responses short and include your name, address and telephone number. Addresses and phone numbers will not be published.

Support for Leopold missed the mark I have bought your paper for nearly 50 years and I will continue to do so. I did not always agree with your endorsements, but I could make sense out of them. However, I cannot see how you could have possibly endorsed state Del. John R. Leopold for county executive in the Republican primary last month. You mention that he has done work for the environment; I cannot see anything outstanding that he has done for the environment. Does he now hold any job that was voted on by his peers?