Evening Sun

Phil Evans, city editor of the old Evening Sun during the 1960s, died of cancer May 8 at his Silver Spring home. He was 77 and had lived in Roland Park. Born Philip Morgan Evans in New York City and raised on a Dorchester County farm, he graduated from the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J. He studied for a semester at Yale University. He later drove a truck in Morocco in North Africa and served in the Army. He joined the Associated Press in Salisbury and worked in West Virginia before joining The Evening Sun as a reporter.

During William Donald Schaefer's first term as mayor I served as the Evening Sun's reporter covering downtown, so I had an intimate view into many of the projects that Mayor Schaefer has been praised for. There has been much written about these projects, but not much mention of what I consider to have been one of Mr. Schaefer's greatest skills: Picking talented people to implement them. Just off the top of my head I can think of Bob Embry, Sandy and Bob Hillman, Mark Joseph, Bernie Berkowitz, Walter Sondheim and many, many others.

Charles J. Henn, a Catonsville bookbinder and World War II veteran who became the subject of national attention in 1946 when he fathered quadruplets, a 1-in-600,000 medical chance, died Monday of lung disease at Summit Park Health and Rehabilitation in Catonsville. He was 92. The story of the quads drew President Harry S. Truman's daughter to the Henns' Catonsville home along with newsreel photographers and reporters from Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. The news broke in November 1946 when an X-ray taken at the Medical Arts Building on Cathedral Street predicted the births — an event eagerly awaited in Baltimore for nearly a month before the quadruplets were born.

Clara Ruth Kratz, former secretary to the controller of The Baltimore Sun who was also a champion duckpin bowler, died Feb. 14 of renal and heart failure at Carroll Hospital Center. She was 88. Miss Kratz, who went by Ruth, was the daughter of a steamfitter and a homemaker. She was born in Baltimore and raised on Catherine Street in West Baltimore. After graduating from Western High School in 1940, she went to work as a clerk-secretary at J.B. Norris, a 29th Street auto dealership.

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.

No, Dear Reader, you are not caught in a time warp or a victim of a delayed April Fool's prank. You are not in "The Twilight Zone" and your eyes are not deceiving you. What you're looking at is The Baltimore Sun's vignette, or nameplate, as it appeared on May 17, 1837, when the newspaper first came off founder Arunah Shepherdson Abell's R. Hoe & Co. Press in his 21 Light St. office. We are republishing this venerable nameplate today in honor of the 173rd birthday of Vol. 1, No. 1 of The Sun. When the first Sun was published, Martin Van Buren was president (he was the eighth)

The Eastern Shore's second annual Chesapeake Film Festival kicks off at 8 tonight with Scott Teems' award-winning "That Evening Sun" (Teems, producer Laura Smith and cinematographer Rodney Taylor will all be in attendance) and ends with a 7 p.m. Sunday screening of the 1936 comedy "After the Thin Man." Other movies set for the weekend celebration of cinema include director Kimberly Peirce's 2008 "Stop-Loss," with Ryan Phillippe as an American soldier re-upped against his will for another tour in Iraq (12:30 p.m. Saturday, at the Academy Art Museum in Easton, with an appearance by screenwriter Mark Richard)

With his bushy beard and ever-present pipe, Bill Burton looked like the outdoors writer from Central Casting. His basement resembled a tackle shop. His stories were lively and memorable, as you would expect. But truth be told, Bill Burton was a softie, with a heart of gold and a center as squishy as an Easter peep. He loved cats. And beautiful sunrises. And fresh, ripe Maryland peaches just off the tree. And kids, especially his granddaughter Mackenzie Noelle Boughey, whom he called "Grumpy."