Father

It was business as usual for Patterson junior guard Aquille Carr in Thursday's Class 3A state semifinal game against Tuscarora. At Comcast Center, Carr scored a game-high 24 points in a 70-46 win that sent the No. 3 Clippers to Saturday's state title. The rest of the night - carrying into this morning - was far from the norm for Carr, however.  At approximately 6:35 a.m. this morning, Carr, 18, became a father when his girlfriend, Treshonda, gave birth to a baby girl they named Averi.

My father was a serious man, with a dry wit reserved mostly for those closest to him. He was a private person, and his death, because of the circumstances, was more public than anything he had ever done in his life. Sam Davis Jr. died on Dec. 9, 2009, in a fire at his home in West Baltimore. It was a tragic and abrupt end to the life of a South Carolina sharecropper's son who came to Baltimore during the late 1950s and survived the turbulent 1960s to raise three children, send them all to college, purchase a half-dozen cars and a home.

Gregory A. Rapisarda has answered to the name "father" for decades, but that name will soon take on a much broader meaning. Rapisarda, a 62-year-old widower, father of four and grandfather of five, will be ordained today at the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Mary Our Queen in North Baltimore. The Rev. John C. Rapisarda, ordained in 2008, will perform the vesting honors for his own father, placing on him a cream-colored chasuble, the vestment worn at Mass. And then, for the first time in the 221-year history of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, a father and son will both serve as parish priests, according to church officials.

The retouching on the black-and-white photograph is a giveaway. The good looks of the suave young man peering out from one of Warsaw's Academy of Fine Arts student passbooks rival those of a movie star. The confident gaze, hint of a smile and darkroom-perfected complexion were all characteristic of portraiture in the 1930s and 1940s. Next to the headshot, a red ink stamp pinpoints the date first hinted at by the portrait's signature style: Oct. 31, 1939. That was the last time Jerzy Kajetanski used his bus pass in his native Poland, two months after the Sept.

Here's a sad but true story. It starts with a young couple living in North Carolina, married two years, wife pregnant, husband in the Army Reserves. He's deployed to Afghanistan for a year, and she moves to Maryland to live with her parents and newborn daughter. One year later, a week before the child's father comes home from Afghanistan, the wife texts her husband to say she's divorcing him - she claimed abandonment, even though they had kept in touch weekly - and then takes two thirds of the money they had saved.

The Yankees have announced that Joe Girardi's father died Saturday. News of Jerry Girardi's death broke earlier in the day. He had been battling Alzheimer's disease and was 81. Girardi choked up when talking about the passing of his father at his pregame news conference, saying he kept quiet about the death because he didn't want it to be a distraction. The Yankees host the Orioles in Game 4 of the ALDS tonight at 7:37 p.m.

The 89-year-old father of Baltimore City Council Vice President Edward L. Reisinger III, who had been missing since last week, resurfaced Tuesday night after seeing news reports about his disappearance. Edward L. Reisinger Jr. called his girlfriend after spotting his photograph on TV, his son said. "'He called her up and said, 'Why am I on TV?' " the councilman said. The elder Reisinger, a retired Sparrows Point steelworker, had been staying in a hotel since he left the Morrell Park house he shares with his son and daughter-in-law Friday afternoon, the councilman said.

Both the mother and father should be charged in the case of the one-month old boy who was found buried in Druid Hill Park ("Murder charge in baby's death," March 16). The father led the police to the grave. The baby had been there since some time in February. Department of Social Services had taken away four other children. Neither of them should be let off the hook. The father must have known something about what the mother had done. I don't understand how he could have gone nearly a month and not wondered where his son was. I think he knew what the mother had done.

The nine o'clock news on the radio included a 15-second report that three American servicemen had been killed in Afghanistan. That was it. There wasn't time to mention that these three dead soldiers had mothers and fathers who will grieve for them the rest of their lives. It also left out whether these young men had brothers, sisters, wives or girlfriends — and maybe children, too. And it failed to ask why we were even in Afghanistan in the first place. Edward J. Gutman, Baltimore