NEWS
By Frederick N. Rasmussen, The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Sun reporter | April 7, 2011
James Bernard "Jimmy" Watkins Jr., a veteran Baltimore & Ohio Railroad dining car chef who during his 36-year career prepared thousands of meals for passengers, including Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman, died March 30 of prostate cancer at his Pikesville home. He was 89. Mr. Watkins was born in Baltimore and raised in Glen Burnie, and was a 1939 graduate of Glen Burnie High School. He began his cooking career in the late 1930s, working as a lunch counter cook at Read's drugstore at Howard and Lexington streets, and soon began looking for a better job because "they didn't pay no money," he said in a 34-page typed transcript of a taped interview made for the Hays T. Watkins Research Library at the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore in 2002.
NEWS
By Jacques Kelly, The Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Sun reporter | December 29, 2010
Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family made famous in "The Sound of Music," who took exception to the way her father was portrayed, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 97 and lived in Brooklandville. "She had been rabidly negative about the musical and film," said her physician, Dr. Janet Horn, who with her husband financed the publication of 3,000 copies of Miss von Trapp's memoir, which she wrote to set the record straight about her family's exploits.
NEWS
May 7, 2010
There once was a village vexed by the pillage of motorists who sped through its streets. "Do something inventive, cunning and preventive to rid us of this terrible plague! Anything will do, maybe a gizmo two, so long as no new taxes are raised!" With no chance of more spending to keep people from upending the limits on motorists' speed, The police chief devised what the mayor soon prized as a quite good solution indeed. Instead of cops on the beat, speed cameras would watch the street, and keep drivers who passed under scrutiny, The better to catch on that straight little patch those who flouted the law with impunity.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Michael Sragow | michael.sragow@baltsun.com and Sun Movie Critic | February 14, 2010
Imagine "McCabe & Mrs. Miller," "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Deadwood" hand-stitched together and given a novel slant as a mini-epic of Chinese immigrant life. That suggests the polyglot vitality of Baltimore writer Christopher Corbett's new nonfiction book, "The Poker Bride." An unofficial follow-up to his rollicking frontier saga, "Orphans Preferred: The Twisted Truth and Lasting Legend of The Pony Express" (2003), "The Poker Bride," a juicy combination of social history and deconstructed myth, pivots on the fact-based Old West legend of Polly Bemis.
NEWS
By FREDERICK N. RASMUSSEN | November 8, 2009
Twenty-nine Novembers ago, I wrote a story for The Sun about New York tinkerer Peter Cooper and the circumstances surrounding his building of the Tom Thumb, the nation's first steam locomotive, which rolled over the rails of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, the nation's first common carrier railroad, founded in Baltimore in 1827. The genesis for my story was a B&O Museum exhibition, "Cooper's Locomotive," that opened that autumn and had been researched and curated by John P. Hankey. Hankey, then 27 and the museum historian, had spent a considerable amount of time researching the Tom Thumb story in Baltimore, New York City and Washington.
ENTERTAINMENT
By Tim Smith and Tim Smith,tim.smith@baltsun.com | May 28, 2009
Imagine the vintage sitcom Sanford and Son somehow fusing with Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and you get some idea of what to expect in The Soul Collector, the bright and inventive play by David Emerson Toney receiving a robust world premiere production from Everyman Theatre. The Soul Collector, at heart, is a fable, and like any good fable, it gets its moral across while spinning an entertaining yarn. Toney's tale manages to pull several surprises along the way, some purely theatrical in the best sense of the word, others involving little sidesteps of plot.