Fairbanks

Dan Hosek, from Alexandria, Va., shot a 1-under-par 69 for a 36-hole total of 143 and took a three-stroke lead in the annual Middle Atlantic Golf Association's Men's Amateur championship at Baltimore Country Club yesterday. Darkness suspended play with six players left to complete their rounds this morning. Hosek, 39, a civilian engineer with the Army who first saw the East Course in a practice round, had four birdies, three bogeys over the historic 6,781-yard course. The birdies included a 7-iron shot to six inches at No. 4 and a downhill, 4-foot putt at the 17th, where the ball would have been off the green if it had not fallen.

PICTURE THIS homeowner nightmare scenario: You send in your monthly mortgage payment on time, but the mortgage company says it never received it. The company sends you a letter warning that you're one month behind and you owe late fees. During the next couple of months, you send in additional payments on time, but the mortgage company counts you as 60 to 90 days in arrears. Worse yet, it sends you a letter informing you that it has no record of a hazard insurance policy on your home, and it is "force-placing" coverage of its own - at a premium charge far above prevailing market rates.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CHEVY CHASE -- There was a wholesale onslaught by players relatively new to the Maryland State Amateur championship, as play in the 76th event moved through two rounds at Columbia Country Club.Although defender Bobby Bilbo, past champion Marty West III and Phil Fairbanks are still in contention, gone are medalist and former titlist Chuck Freedman; Virginia star Barry McCarty; former Washington District champion Richard Holland, and Joey Chuasiriporn, medalist in recent local U.S. Open qualifying.

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.

A 13-year-old Arnold boy has been charged with making the pipe bomb that exploded in his family's garage last week, injuring him and forcing the evacuation of his neighborhood.Blaine Fairbanks of the 900 block of College Drive was charged as a juvenile with manufacturing a pipe bomb and reckless endangerment, a county fire official said.The youth was fingerprinted and released Monday to the custody of his parents, the fire official said.The incident occurred Thursday when a pipe bomb about the size of a roll of quarters exploded and authorities destroyed a second device in the Fairbanks home, police said.