Evening Sun

Art Geiselman, a former Evening Sun reporter who relished catching crooked police officers and exposing squalid conditions at prisons and mental hospitals over a 47-year career in journalism, died Dec. 21 of injuries suffered in a fall at the Copper Ridge residential care home in Sykesville. The York, Pa., native was 85. Mr. Geiselman borrowed a sentiment from David Copperfield to explain his life philosophy, shaped by the accidental death of his father when he was a boy and his first wife's death from illness only a few years after they married.

John Richard "Dick" Irwin, a tough, accurate veteran police reporter with a heart of gold whose signature Police Blotter became required reading for both crime aficionados and the just plain curious, died Wednesday at Greater Baltimore Medical Center of complications from diabetes. Mr. Irwin, whose career at the News-Post, News American, The Evening Sun and The Baltimore Sun spanned more than 40 years, was 76. "He had the mutual respect of the police. He was an honest man, and he didn't like when people tried to fudge things with him. He believed that the police had to be as transparent as possible, and he was right," said Bill Toohey, former Baltimore County police spokesman.

Readers seeing the exact same stories in The Sun and then The Evening Sun have been asking for months, "Why don't you just kill The Evening Sun? You're slowly letting it die anyway."The answer: About 133,800 people buy the paper. This is 25,000 fewer than during the same period ending March 30 last year, but too many readers to ignore or to transfer easily to The Sun all at once. When papers fold, many readers just vanish.How did The Baltimore Sun get to this point? In the last two years, advertising and circulation revenues declined.

Robert Keller, The Evening Sun's first metropolitan editor and later executive director of the Greater Baltimore Committee, died May 12 of complications from Crohn's disease at Harbor Hospital. He was 71. The son of a banker and a bookkeeper, Robert Keller was born in Trenton, N.J., and raised in Baltimore's Howard Park neighborhood. He earned his high school diploma and bachelor's degree in 1963 from St. Mary's Seminary & University in Roland Park. Mr. Keller was a reporter for The Catholic Review from 1963 until 1965, when he joined the staff of the Delmarva Dialog in Wilmington, Del. In 1967, he joined The Evening Sun as a reporter and in 1972 became city editor.

John M. "Jack" Lemmon, managing editor of The Evening Su for the past 12 years, announced his retirement yesterday.Though Mr. Lemmon, 63, gave his official retirement date as Dec. 31, he said yesterday that "as a practical matter, today is my last day."During his tenure as the newspaper's top news executive, The Evening Sun received numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize."I think we had some good times. This was a happy place to work. Most of us enjoyed doing what we did," he said. "One of the most exciting things was a good story, having something in the paper that you're proud of."

The Baltimore Sun's special section on the closing of Memorial Stadium was named one of the 10 best special sections in the country in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors contest.The Evening Sun was honored as one of the best daily sports sections in the 50,001-175,000 circulation category, and the Sunday Sun sports section earned honorable mention honors in the over-175,000 circulation category.In addition to the section awards, Bill Glauber, Mike Littwin, John Eisenberg and Ross Peddicord of the sports staff were honored.

So today they make the chalk outline and zip another newspaper into the body bag of American journalism, and everyone's telling me not to take it personally.Look, it's a business decision, they all say. The paper's been losing circulation for years, reading habits have changed, afternoon papers are going the way of running boards on cars, blah, blah, blah.Except the problem is that I worked for this newspaper for 14 years, and at one time it was a damned fine newspaper with a lot of damned fine people working for it, which is why I tend to take this personally.

The Cleveland Press, which I joined out of college in 1954, was the archetypal powerful newspaper.Many Clevelanders blamed it for whatever they thought wrong with their town, on the ground that it could do anything it wanted, so whatever civic need went unmet must be the Press' fault.It wasn't true, but we weren't going to disabuse them. A lot of what passes for the latest in daily journalism the Press was pioneering. Zoning. White space. Provincialism. Baby talk. Passionate commitment. Sam Sheppard, long before O.J.But the Cleveland Press died in 1982 after several years of losing money.

"Let us confess it to one another, Baltimore is a good old town," announced H. L. Mencken on April 18, 1910, in a short comment in the very first edition of The Evening Sun.As The Evening Sun goes to press for the last time today, we continue to marvel at the good old town that molded this newspaper. Whatever distinction The Evening Sun holds in newspaper history it shares with the city that nourished it. Baltimore gave this paper 85 years of daily headlines and, more important, its unmistakable character and its distinctive flair.

The Evening Sun is conducting a survey this week to guage our readers' interest in the comics and panels that appear daily.To participate call Sundial, the telephone information service of The Baltimore Sun, at (410) 783-1800. Enter code 6300 and you will be instructed in how to indicate your preferences. The survey can take 5 to 10 minutes. You will need to use a touch-tone phone.However, if you only have a rotary dial phone, you may call (410) 332-6450 between 9 a.m. and noon Thursday and Friday to take part in the survey.

Paul B. Moore, a former Evening Sun reporter and editor who later became a public relations executive, died Nov. 27 from complications of prostate cancer at his Homeland residence. He was 84. "Paul was a very conscientious reporter and a very conscientious person. He was very talented and what he did, he did well," said Helen Delich Bentley, a former newsroom colleague who later became a congresswoman and federal maritime commissioner. "As a reporter, he was always fair, and wherever he went always looked for something interesting and challenging," said Mrs. Bentley.

Christopher Gaul, former managing editor of the Catholic Review and reporter for The Sun and The Evening Sun and area television stations, died of lung cancer Thursday at his home in Essex. He was 72. He joined the Catholic Review as a writer in 1995 and worked there until he retired in 2005. George P. Matysek Jr., the Review's assistant managing editor, remembered Mr. Gaul as a mentor to the junior writers at the paper, taking time to carefully edit their work. "He really showed us what went into a good story," Mr. Matysek said, "He was very nurturing in how he dealt with younger writers.

Patricia P. Ritter, a former Evening Sun reporter who later became a Life magazine staff writer, died Aug. 20 of pneumonia at the Atria assisted-living community in Kennebunk, Maine. The Baltimore native was 83. The daughter of a former president of United States Fidelity and Guaranty Co. and a homemaker, Patricia Phillips was raised on Northway in Guilford. She attended Calvert School and graduated in 1947 from Bryn Mawr School. She earned a bachelor's degree in 1951 from Wheaton College in Norton, Mass.

My first memories of The Baltimore Sun go back to 1982, when my wife and I were planning to move to Baltimore from Massachusetts. In the days before the Internet, home buyers turned to The Sun 's classified ads to get their arms around the range of housing alternatives. Thirty years ago was not only a time when The Sun 's real estate section was the go-to source for home listings, but it was also a time of low-teens mortgage rates and a housing crisis (albeit not quite as bad as our most recent crisis)

I believe to this day that I accepted the job I was offered at the Evening Sun in 1981 because of the Bromo Seltzer clock. The route from the airport took us right past the downtown tower that (at the time) still defined the Charm City skyline, and I was immediately taken by it. It was retro. It was kitschy. And it seemed real. Just like Baltimore in 1981. Although I'd come to town for an interview at the morning paper, Bob Keller, then the editor of the afternoon paper, was clever enough to snatch me up at the airport.

I was there that night. It was 28 years ago, in the snowy, pre-dawn darkness of March 29, that the Mayflower vans rumbled out of Owings Mills and the Baltimore Colts left for Indianapolis, ripping an entire city's heart out in the process. Just before midnight, we started getting calls on the sports desk at the old Evening Sun that there was unusual activity taking place at the Colts complex. At first we thought it was just a couple of crank calls. But more folks were calling in to report that the complex was lit up, with the sound of trucks echoing everywhere and security guards stopping anyone not authorized to enter.

Eileen S. Tarcay, who had taught English and journalism at what is now Coppin State University and was a prolific contributor of freelance articles to The Baltimore Sun, died Feb. 18 from complications of a stroke at a Salt Lake City nursing home. The former Homeland resident was 97. The former Eileen Schultz was born in Hiawatha, Utah, and was raised there and in Latuda, Utah, both coal-mining towns. After graduating from St. Mary of the Wasatch High School in Salt Lake City in 1931, she earned a bachelor's degree in English in 1935 at the University of Utah.

Charles Erwin Brookes, the retired chief of W.R. Grace's Davison Chemical division, died of a heart attack Nov. 1 at the Bay Medical Center in Panama City, Fla. The longtime Gibson Island resident was 86. Known as Charlie, he was born in Orange, N.J. His son, Stephen Brookes of Washington, D.C., said his father came from a "family of very modest means. " At one time, his parents addressed envelopes by hand for a business to make ends meet. At age 12, Mr. Brookes won a scholarship to St. Mark's School in Southborough, Mass.