Family Ties

Astudy showing that keeping children at home, even if there are problems, is better than putting them in foster care reinforces the importance of family ties and the need to view foster care as the exception, not the norm, when dealing with troubled families. That's a lesson that Maryland is now trying to apply - and wisely so - after too many years of bad practices. The recently released study, by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, examined 15,000 cases in Illinois from 1990 to 2002, one of the largest studies of the effects of foster care.

For the first time in more than a month, the players will have a rare weekend off as coach John Harbaugh sent them home to take care of their families and tie up loose ends before the start of the regular season. And with the Ravens slated to open the season on Monday, Sept. 10 and many of the starters kept out of Thursday night's preseason finale against the St. Louis Rams, the players will enjoy a rare extended chance to rest and relax. Harbaugh said the time off should be a significant benefit for the players.

An article in the Dec. 28, 1961 edition of the Herald Argus and Baltimore Countian reported an area resident's holiday was made even brighter after a chance phone call led to a reunion with two sisters he had not seen in 16 years. Christmas was made happier for a Lansdowne resident, semi-orphan John Glade , 21, who now resides at the home of Mrs. Betty Volkman of 3201 Hilltop road. John's mother died when he was three years old, leaving him and two older sisters.

Kevin Marshall and Buddy Evans, like many cousins, are close. They keep in touch regularly and enjoy talking over a cup of coffee when they can get together. The two, who have spent much of their lives on the Chesapeake Bay as watermen, even took their cordial relationship to land to play in a softball league together. But when the 41st annual Crisfield Boat Docking Classic takes place Sept. 2, none of that will matter. Asked whether they were on the same team, Evans laughed at the thought.

Mo Vaughn's father grew up in Baltimore and once tried out for the Colts. His grandmother still resides in Pimlico, and his Baltimore relatives also include an uncle and several cousins.Interesting.Vaughn's parents, Leroy and Shirley, live south of Richmond, in Midlothian, Va. They fly to almost all of Mo's games in Boston. They could drive to Camden Yards in less than three hours.Even more interesting -- especially to Vaughn.Calling Baltimore "definitely one of my top spots," the potential free agent spoke yesterday of playing closer to his family and said he could be flexible in his contract negotiations if the Orioles maintained their reluctance to pay a position player more than Cal Ripken.

If grating is what you are looking for, then by all means, don't miss Because I Said So. Watching this movie, with Diane Keaton cast as the ne plus ultra of irritating, overbearing mothers, is roughly the equivalent of listening to fingernails on a chalkboard for nearly two hours. With her skittishness and her near-constant state of fluster, Keaton as a comic actress can be wonderfully endearing, the sort of lovable ditz you can laugh with and desperately want to protect. But here, as a mother who can't bear the thought of her lovelorn daughter (Mandy Moore)

Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend will flex the muscle of her maiden name tonight at a fund-raiser in Washington. Host of the event is her uncle, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, one of the most prominent members of Congress. The price of admission is $1,000 per person, with an expected take of about $100,000. The news media are not invited. It is among the first overt displays of Townsend's family ties in the three weeks since the eldest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy formally announced her bid for governor of Maryland.

Good morning--Dale Earnhardt Jr.--You will be richly rewarded for cutting the family ties.

Just off busy Butler Road, in Glyndon, a road narrows and passes through two stone gates into a quieter time — a time when neighbors knew each other and enjoyed each other's company on their front porches. It was a time when friends routinely shared picnics and hymn sings on weekday evenings, and worship services and fried chicken dinners on Sundays. That's still the gentle way life flows during the warmer months at Emory Grove — a place that, as one visitor observed, "forces you to slow down and enjoy nature, and become part of a community.

Once a year on Thanksgiving Day, families all over America sit down together for dinner. When you think about it, that's pretty amazing. It's one of the few times nowadays people regularly gather for a family meal. If we aren't careful, though, it's a day that can go by in a gluttonous blur of giblets gravy and pumpkin pie. To keep that from happening, some families make a conscious effort to savor the holiday through their rituals and traditions. The ritual can be something as simple as going around the table and having people say what they're thankful for. Or as elaborate as working together in a soup kitchen Thanksgiving morning before returning home to enjoy the big meal.

An article in the Dec. 28, 1961 edition of the Herald Argus and Baltimore Countian reported an area resident's holiday was made even brighter after a chance phone call led to a reunion with two sisters he had not seen in 16 years. Christmas was made happier for a Lansdowne resident, semi-orphan John Glade , 21, who now resides at the home of Mrs. Betty Volkman of 3201 Hilltop road. John's mother died when he was three years old, leaving him and two older sisters.

It's only natural that J. Scott Wilfong, president and CEO of SunTrust Bank for the Greater Washington/Maryland area, would want to give back to the American Heart Association. After all, heart disease runs in his family. His wife, Susan, suffers from dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the heart weakens and becomes enlarged. Her brother died at the age of 13 and her father at the age of 61 from the same condition. Their daughter, Sarah, 29, has a defibrillator and his sister-in-law has had a heart transplant.

Just off busy Butler Road, in Glyndon, a road narrows and passes through two stone gates into a quieter time — a time when neighbors knew each other and enjoyed each other's company on their front porches. It was a time when friends routinely shared picnics and hymn sings on weekday evenings, and worship services and fried chicken dinners on Sundays. That's still the gentle way life flows during the warmer months at Emory Grove — a place that, as one visitor observed, "forces you to slow down and enjoy nature, and become part of a community.

Soon-to-be princess Kate Middleton has a few prominent Marylanders — and American celebrities — in her family tree. Middleton, a commoner who marries Prince William on Friday, is a distant cousin of "The Star-Spangled Banner" author Francis Scott Key, talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres and Colonial Maryland governor Sir Thomas Bladen, the namesake of Bladensburg, according to "The Ancestry of Catherine Middleton. " Released this month by the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the book traces Middleton's roots back hundreds of years, and ties the 29-year-old to a host of historical figures, from George Washington to World War II Gen. George S. Patton.

On screen, Julie Bowen plays a perfectionist mom, a sane obsessive surrounded by slightly crazy compulsives: the father who married a hottie younger than her. The man-child of a husband she considers her fourth child. The pigeon- and hotel bedspread-fearing gay brother and, well, just about everyone else in her aptly named "Modern Family," last season's breakout TV comedy. In real life, Julie Bowen is another mom but in a decidedly saner family - only her 3-year-old seems out of a sitcom, referring to his twin baby brothers as John and Other John.

In the best-known number from the 1944 musical "On the Town," the northern and southern parameters of New York are succinctly defined: "The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down." For a great idea of a less-celebrated, intensely vibrant neighborhood in between, check out the 2008 Tony Award-winning musical "In the Heights," at the Hippodrome. Conceived by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also contributed the music and lyrics (winning another of the work's four Tonys), this fusion of good old-fashioned showbiz with a contemporary urban/Latin beat is as light and irresistible as a piragua - the Puerto Rican snow cone peddled way uptown in Washington Heights.

STANFORD, Calif. - Did anyone ever call Franklin D. Roosevelt a "Dutch American" or Dwight Eisenhower a "German American"? It would have been resented, not only by them and their supporters, but by Americans in general. These men were Americans - not hyphenated Americans or half Americans. Most black families in the United States today have been here longer than most white families. No one except the American Indians can claim to have been on American soil longer. Why then call blacks in the United States "African-Americans" when not even their great-great-great-grandparents ever laid eyes on Africa?

AMERICAN DREAMER" wears its ancestry, as well as its thematic statements, on its sleeve.This new NBC show, which gets a send-off tonight at 9:30 on Channel 2 (WMAR) before moving into its regular Saturday night at 10:30 slot this weekend, is from producer Gary David Goldberg.Subtlety was never the strength of Goldberg's one big hit,"Family Ties," Michael J. Fox was. Goldberg's characters tend to strut around like ideas in an article out of "Psychology Today" until the actors are given time to flesh them out, and even then the episodes of his shows let you know what they are about by virtually running a banner headline in the opening dialogue."

The Talent Machine Company's July show, The Wiz, a retelling of L. Frank Baum's classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is an excellent vehicle for the skills of the energetic young performers who make up the musical's cast. TMC is a family phenomenon rooted in the traditions of founder Bobbi Smith, who formed the company in 1987 to create a supportive environment for children as young as 5 to participate in polished musical theater performances. After Smith's death in January 2001, her sister, Vicki Smith, and her daughter, Lea Capps, continued the tradition.

Why is it so hard to make a persuasive movie about brothers? Defiance reduced the amazing real-life story of the Bielski brothers, who established "a Jerusalem in the woods" in the Belorussian forest, to a cliched shoot-'em-up with a guilty conscience. Wes Anderson has made a series of films, most recently The Darjeeling Limited, about brothers connected more by tics and grudges than by loyalty and feeling. Films that caught something piercingly intimate about fraternal bonds haunted the childhood hours I spent watching classic movies on TV; I'll never forget the Dumas-derived Corsican Brothers, about twins so close in spirit they literally feel each other's pain.