Family Car

Sheila Horsey used to leave her South Baltimore home at dawn and board the first of four buses with her young daughter. The pair rode two buses together to the 9-year-old's school, and Horsey took two more buses to her job near Druid Hill Park. The end of the day meant four more buses. Grocery shopping was limited to what she could carry on the bus and, without a family car, the child could not join many activities. A 1996 Honda Civic, which Horsey acquired through Vehicles for Change, a nonprofit business in Halethorpe that refurbishes clunkers and doles them out to low-income families, has made life "a lot better and easier," she said.

Minutes after being pulled over by a state trooper on the side of Interstate 95 in White Marsh this week, 23-year-old Bel Air resident Scott Kampes was slumped over in the driver's seat of the car he was driving — fatally wounded from a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, according to Maryland State Police. Police said the shot, from a .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun found in Kampes' lap, was not heard by the two state troopers at the scene or by his uncle, who was also there.

A 3-year-old girl was fatally injured when she wandered behind the car her mother was driving and was struck in the family's driveway at Fort Detrick in Frederick, military authorities said yesterday. The girl, Vada Schoon, walked out of the house Wednesday while her mother was repositioning her Ford Escape, said Chuck Dasey, a Fort Detrick spokesman. She suffered severe head injuries in the accident and was treated at the scene by emergency medical technicians, then taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

For the NFL, it's a milestone moment: Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers takes on John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens in the first-ever meeting between brotherly head coaches. It's being billed as the HarBowl. For little sister Joani, it was called "childhood. " She's had a front-row seat for the battlin' Harbaugh brothers since she can remember. She was their designated runner in games of pickle and their capacity crowd of one when they waged basketball wars in the basement on a hoop made out of a wire hanger.

For the NFL, it's a milestone moment: Jim Harbaugh of the 49ers takes on John Harbaugh of the Baltimore Ravens in the first-ever meeting between brotherly head coaches. It's being billed as the HarBowl. For little sister Joani, it was called "childhood. " She's had a front-row seat for the battlin' Harbaugh brothers since she can remember. She was their designated runner in games of pickle and their capacity crowd of one when they waged basketball wars in the basement on a hoop made out of a wire hanger.

DENTON -- The last time Norville R. Griffin spoke to his only child, Jamie, the 17-year-old high school senior asked for $20 to help pay for a weekend retreat with friends in a religious youth group."

My youngest child has earned her driver's license, and I think I am officially out of a job. The baby girl is driving herself to school and back, to sports practices and back, and to the mall and back. I am surprised to find that this, not her departure for college, is the signal for me to find real work. The job description of a parent includes many things -- feeding, clothing and sheltering among them. But on any given day, being a parent is mostly about driving. To school, to the doctor's office, to a friend's house, to Grandma's for Thanksgiving.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Margie Coffeen was born in the front seat of her parents' car on a cold February day 31 years ago while her father was driving her mother to Children's Hospital in Buffalo, N.Y."He jokes that he held out his hands and caught me," says Margie Coffeen, who now lives in Eagan, Minn.Yesterday, Margie Coffeen was on the other end of the catch game when her husband, Paul, delivered their son in the front seat of the family car while on the way to the University of Minnesota Hospital.

Thank goodness there's no law against driving and eating lollipops.Whenever things got particularly rough on our recent cross-country car trip, I pulled out the candy. For us, not the kids."Not again," my husband groaned when the back-of-the-van chorus demanded the same story tape for what seemed like the 500th time.I just handed him his favorite cherry lollipop and played the tape, an audio version of the TV show "Dinosaurs." When we were still driving at midnight, I grabbed a chocolate pop and reminded myself that getting there is supposed to be half the fun.Of course, there's a lot to be said for family car trips.

IT'S SUMMER VACATION time, and I'm sure you can't wait to jump into the family car and drive to fun and exciting new places, preferably before the family wakes up and realizes you're gone.But before you hit the road, you should make sure your car is in proper mechanical condition. Drive to your local gas station, beep your horn, and when a friendly, competent mechanic comes out to help you, ask him to please call the mental hospital, because you are hallucinating. There are no friendly, competent mechanics at gas stations anymore; there are nervous cashiers locked inside bulletproof enclosuressurrounded by smokeless-tobacco products.

If you want to talk about street and road courses, Penske driver Will Power is the man to start with. Over his seven-year career, Power has won 14 races — 13 of them on the twisting roads. But the 30-year-old Australian says dominating the streets isn't something that comes naturally. It's a skill he's been working on for more than three decades. "It takes about a decade of just doing street races to perfect the skills," he said. "I grew up doing that. The U.S. is the only place for ovals.

Michael Harris of Catonsville is a serious bicycle enthusiast, 56 years old, who races with an Annapolis team and trains on a 33-mile course in the Baltimore suburbs. After reading last week's column about bicyclist-motorist interactions, he sent me this account of a recent ride on semi-rural Landing Road in Howard County: As I was approaching the intersection of Ilchester Road a group of young men in a 4-door Jeep came within 6 inches of my handlebars. One jerk yelled in my ear an obscenity as the vehicle passed by. I could hear the laughs as they came to a halt at the intersection.

Sheila Horsey used to leave her South Baltimore home at dawn and board the first of four buses with her young daughter. The pair rode two buses together to the 9-year-old's school, and Horsey took two more buses to her job near Druid Hill Park. The end of the day meant four more buses. Grocery shopping was limited to what she could carry on the bus and, without a family car, the child could not join many activities. A 1996 Honda Civic, which Horsey acquired through Vehicles for Change, a nonprofit business in Halethorpe that refurbishes clunkers and doles them out to low-income families, has made life "a lot better and easier," she said.

A 3-year-old girl was fatally injured when she wandered behind the car her mother was driving and was struck in the family's driveway at Fort Detrick in Frederick, military authorities said yesterday. The girl, Vada Schoon, walked out of the house Wednesday while her mother was repositioning her Ford Escape, said Chuck Dasey, a Fort Detrick spokesman. She suffered severe head injuries in the accident and was treated at the scene by emergency medical technicians, then taken to Frederick Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Beth Berry dashes into the house from work with just enough time to change into shorts and sneakers before loading her 1999 Chevrolet Venture minivan with her two kids, two neighborhood children and their sports gear. Pulling out of her driveway at exactly 5 p.m., she stops to pick up another child before making the nearly 30-minute trek south from her Silver Run community near the Pennsylvania line to a soccer practice in Westminster. "We have an average of four practices a week, then games on Saturdays and Sundays," said Berry, who teaches health and physical education at Spring Garden Elementary in Hampstead.

A Glen Burnie woman was killed and her husband and their three children injured Monday night in a two-vehicle collision on Route 3, Anne Arundel County police said. Wanda Jean Schulze, 34, was pronounced dead at North Arundel Hospital about 10 p.m., about an hour after the car in which she was riding collided with a pickup truck at Route 3 and Old Stage Road in Glen Burnie, according to a news release issued yesterday. Police said Schulze, her husband, Terry Matthew Parker, 44, and the children were in the family's 1993 Ford Taurus about 9 p.m. when Parker, the driver, attempted to turn left at a yellow light from Route 3 onto Old Stage Road.

THE STATISTICS are sobering: Not only are teen drivers more likely to be charged with speeding and reckless driving violations than other drivers are, but they account for more than their share of deaths related to motor vehicles. Driver inexperience is one major cause, a fact not lost on Barbie Schluth of Ellicott City, parent of a 16-year-old on the verge of receiving her driver's license. "Because of her inexperience, I fear she won't react quickly enough to other drivers' actions," Schluth says.

The family road trip is a journey for the brave of heart, especially when it involves tension between driver and navigator. Enter the Global Positioning System, which offers a measure of harmony to the family car. It was a four-week cross-country summer car trip that made me, the technology-averse navigator, a GPS believer. Here is how GPS works: a constellation of satellites transmits radio signals that allow receivers on the ground to pinpoint longitude, latitude and altitude. A network of ground stations known as the WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System)

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Growing up in the Joe Gibbs family, J.D. was the quiet one. The thoughtful one. Nothing much seemed to worry him, and it was rare that he felt so strongly about something that he would make a point of it. "But when those times happened, he had this thing he'd do," said car owner and Washington Redskins coach redux Joe Gibbs. "His finger would come up and he'd point it at his mom and me and say very directly and very slowly, `I'm ... telling ... you.' He was doing that to me a lot more lately.