Early Edition

In early June 1939, not only were the King and Queen of England introduced to the culinary delight of a good American hot dog, they also, if only for a few minutes, were exposed to old-fashioned Baltimore hospitality. More than 500 soldiers, state and city police stood guard at bridges and railroad crossings as a royal train of 12 cars bearing King George VI and Queen Elizabeth and pulled by two powerful Pennsylvania Railroad K-4 steam engines, slowly steamed down the Northern Central Railroad from York, Pa., to Baltimore's Pennsylvania Station on June 8, 1939.

"I met your grandfather just before he retired," says Randolph C. Kendall Jr., the executive director of the Richmond, Va., Urban League. "He was a fine man, a real gentleman. And very, very courageous. He and a woman named Maggie Walker held this organization together through some very difficult times.""Courageous?" I ask."Oh yes," replies Mr. Kendall. "There was a time during the 1950s when the Urban League came under severe attack. Your grandfather and the Richmond Urban League came out in public support of the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation ruling, and that enraged so many people down here that a number of organizations were pressured to withdraw their support.

Ray Brown, 75, a legendary jazz bassist who played with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and his one-time wife Ella Fitzgerald in a career that spanned a half century, died in his sleep Tuesday in Indianapolis. He was in Indianapolis for an engagement at the Jazz Kitchen at the time of his death. Mr. Brown, whose fluid sound helped define the bebop era, started his career in the 1940s and performed during jazz's Golden Age with Mr. Gillespie, Mr. Parker and Bud Powell. He was a founder of bebop and appeared with Mr. Gillespie in the 1946 film Jivin' in Be-Bop.

Bobby Fischer may have said it best: "You can only get good at chess if you love the game." From the looks of his backyard patio, Mike Kelley of Ellicott City must be quite a chess player. He built a stone-and-granite chessboard measuring 8 feet square in a 12-foot-by-18-foot patio, and he carved all of the game's 32 pieces with a chain saw. Tucked under the canopy of a huge maple, the giant chess set has an almost surreal look - as if pulled from an early edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Forget the beehive 'do and cats-eye glasses. The new symbol for Hampden could be the Port-O-Potty, the kind at the center of a neighborhood dust-up. On one side: Jack Gilden, the ad man who created the beehive logo for the local Main Street group years ago but thinks the hon thing has grown a little old, inauthentic and insulting to residents. ("She's become like a low-rent Marlin Perkins, escorting outsiders in to gape at the people who live here.") On the other: Denise Whiting, the Cafe Hon owner, HonFest promoter and "she" from the previous sentence, who says the shtick isn't just a shtick.

The lady at the bank on Falls Road said the war was endin and wasn't it great? The man in line right behind her rolled his eyes and said it wasn't over, it was just a trick by Saddam Hussein.It was 9:05 Friday morning.The man at the drug store on St. Paul Street said he'd been listening to National Public Radio. The peace offer was a phony, he said. No way, said the woman behind the counter. She'd heard a diplomat interviewed on CNN who said it wasn't a final deal but at least it was a starting point.

In today's Real Estate section, the names of Felix Agnus Lesir and Felix Agnus are misspelled.The Sun regrets the error.Two miles north of the Beltway, between the noisy commercial corridor of Reisterstown Road and the residential developments along Falls Road, acres of pristine meadows and woodlands hug the origin of the Jones Falls waterway.This is the Greenspring Valley, and in the heart of the valley, home of polo and fox hunting, is the village of Stevenson."We say Stevenson is from hill to hill.

According to Julia Randall, "There is no excuse for poetry, unless there is an excuse for being." Introducing the first full-length collection of her poems, "The Puritan Carpenter" (1965), Ms. Randall goes on to say that she believes there is an excuse for poetry.It is in the act of creating, she says, of "making new."Ms. Randall, who was born in Baltimore and received her master of arts degree from the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, has published widely. She has won numerous awards, including the Shelley Award and the first Poet's Prize for "Moving in Memory," her sixth book of poems.

On the night that the National Football League voted i Hawaii last month to move the 1993 Super Bowl from Phoenix to Pasadena, Calif., David Simon, president of the Los Angeles Sports Council, remembered two old newspaper headlines:"DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN.""PHOENIX BEATS LOS ANGELES."The first was on the Chicago Tribune's front page in 1948, when the newspaper made an erroneous early edition guess that the favorite, Thomas E. Dewey, would wrest the presidency from Harry S Truman.The other headline was composed during the NFL convention a year ago in Orlando, Fla., where Phoenix routed the combined California forces of Los Angeles, Pasadena and Anaheim on the fifth ballot.

Most people think of popular music as evolving pretty much along generational lines. Baby boomers, for example, rejected the swing-based big band music of their parents in favor of the backbeat-driven sound of rock and roll; their children, in turn, prefer the feisty funk grooves of rap. It's almost as if some sort of cultural alarm clock goes off every 30 years or so, and popular music suddenly changes its tune.Of course, it's actually a little more complicated than that. Pop styles don't just come out of nowhere, nor do they automatically fall out of fashion as their audience ages.