Fairbanks

On March 23, 2005, ELLA LORETTA FAIRBANKS; beloved wife of the late Calvin Fairbanks; devoted mother of Gordon Fairbanks, Michael Fairbanks (Martha), Kenneth Fairbanks (Doreen), Deborah Cavey (Gil), Darlene Gamesz (Via), Donna Musick, Denise Coruzzi (Vince) and predeceased by son Lee Fairbanks, Jr.; adored grandmother of thirteen and great-grandmother of nine; loving sister of Betty, Margaret and Hilda. Friends may call at LOUDON PARK FUNERAL HOME, 3620 Wilkens Avenue, Baltimore, on Tuesday from 10 to 11 A.M., where services will begin at 11 A.M. Interment Loudon Park Cemetery.

A memorial service for Francis P. Fairbank, a former supervisor of history for Baltimore public schools, will be held at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Our Lady of the Angels Chapel at the Charlestown Retirement Community, 711 Maiden Choice Lane, Catonsville.Mr. Fairbank, who was 86 and lived at Charlestown, had been in poor health for several months and died Aug. 17 at St. Agnes Hospital.A native of Baltimore, he graduated from Calvert Hall College and later received his bachelor of arts degree in education from Loyola College and his master's from St. Mary's Seminary.

Douglas Fairbanks Jr., son and stepson of screen immortals Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and Mary Pickford, star of more than three score pictures in his own right and one of the last connections to the great silent age that gave birth to cinema, died yesterday. He was 90. A spokesman for Manhattan's Frank E. Campbell Funeral Home confirmed Fairbanks' death but could provide no further details. Although known primarily as an actor carrying on the tradition started by his father, Fairbanks Jr. was also an author, businessman, war hero and friend of British royalty -- accomplishments that may have meant more to him than his film career, which could never entirely shake the idea that it owed more to his famous father than to his own abilities.

THE CURRENT Board of Commissioners in Carroll County has enacted a pair of tax increases, committed to an ambitious school construction program and overseen the draft of a comprehensive land-use plan after 30 years of unsatisfactory piecemeal revision. The trio imposed a growth moratorium and set a limit of 6,000 new homes over six years to deal with the strains of development.The above description indicates that the board was capable of significant accomplishment. Unfortunately, it too often got sidetracked by minor squabbles, penny-pinching and controversies over political appointments when it should have been forging a long-term vision for one of Maryland's fastest growing counties.

An article about campaign signs, which ran in the Carroll County section of The Sun last Sunday, reported incorrectly that county commissioner candidate Carolyn L. Fairbank stapled one her signs onto one belonging to Donald I. Dell. In fact, Fairbank did not deface Dell's sign, and no one has claimed responsibility for the action.The Sun regrets the error.Besides waging intense campaigns for county commissioner, Carolyn Fairbank and Donald I. Dell are engaged in a sign war.Fairbank, frustrated because three of her signs have disappeared from the busy corner of Liberty Road and Monroe Avenue in Eldersburg, stapled a fourth one "right dead in the middle of Dell's" last week, she said.

PHILADELPHIA - While the Quecreek mining accident gave Pennsylvanias an edge-of-the-seat introduction to the problem of flooded old coal mines, few are aware of a far more serious menace beneath their feet: fire. There is Centralia, of course, the luckless Columbia County town that has been slowly incinerated over the last 40 years. But 48 other coal fires - the legacy of two centuries of primitive mining practices - are known to be burning under 1,200 acres across Pennsylvania, more than in any other state.

Most audiences know Douglas Fairbanks Jr. only as the suave 1930s movie star with chiseled good looks and pencil-thin mustache, dressed in elegantly cut double-breasted Savile Row lounge suits, rather than his career during World War II as a U.S. Navy officer who commanded two British gunboats during the invasion of southern France in 1944. Fairbanks, who died earlier this month, was born into Hollywood royalty as the son of the legendary swashbuckler, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., who thrilled silent screen audiences with his heroic roles and dashing good looks.

A routine appointment two weeks ago to the county Board of Zoning Appeals continues to produce political sparks for Commissioner Richard T. Yates in South Carroll, where concerns about development have become paramount for a growing number of neighborhood activists.Slow-growth advocates in the county's fastest-growing area say the appointment Feb. 20 of Yates confidant Hobart D. "Hoby" Wolf Jr. over Carolyn Fairbank, chairwoman of Freedom Area Community Planning Council, was a political payback aimed at punishing them for their activism.

Eldersburg resident Carolyn Fairbank, who appeared to have left the stage late last year as South Carroll's most vocal community activist, has returned singing an old standard.Her repertoire ranges from the incorporation of Eldersburg and working to change Carroll to a county executive-county council form of government. But it is her theme song of opposing residential and commercial development in the county's fastest-growing region that she sings loudest and best.Fairbank belted it out again last month after reading about a developer's plans to seek a zoning change to build a theater complex and several restaurants on an Eldersburg site near the most congested intersection in the county.

Brique has closed in Centreville. The Eastern Shore restaurant lasted just over a year. I liked chef Will Dolan's food very much here. Of course I wondered about the Centreville location, which is a little off the beaten path. Make that very. Brique was still doing good business on weekends, Fairbanks told me, but it was slow on weeknights. "I thought I had a hidden gem," the restaurant's co-owner Billy Fairbanks said. "I didn't. " Fairbanks told me kept Brique open as long as he could, but closed it the very first time he couldn't make payroll, which was this past weekend.