Friendship

"A Sudden Change of Heart," by Barbara Taylor Bradford. Doubleday. 350 pages. $24.Barbara Taylor Bradford's latest novel is about a friendship between two women. The friendship, which began in childhood, lasts throughout their lives, until one dies.The reader is quickly absorbed into this friendship and stays with it, as do the friends while they grow up and make their own lives.Most important, the story's about understanding, the communication needed to achieve it, and the "if only I had known" situations.

FiresSykesville: Firefighters from Sykesville, Winfield, Gamber, and West Friendship and Lisbon from Howard County, responded at 4: 34 p.m. Thursday to a house fire in the 6200 block of Longleaf Drive. Units were out 21 minutes.

FireSykesville: Firefighters from Sykesville, Gamber, Winfield and West Friendship in Howard County responded at 12: 08 p.m. Monday to smoke in a building in the 2400 block of Second Ave. Units were out 15 minutes.Pub Date: 4/07/99

FireSykesville: Firefighters from Sykesville, Gamber and West Friendship, Howard County, responded to a house fire in the 7400 block of Second Ave. at 5: 18 p.m. Friday. Units were out 16 minutes.Pub Date: 8/10/99

They jostled, elbowed and squeezed shoulder-to-shoulder into every corner of Baltimore's stately City Council chambers Monday, hungry to watch the unfolding drama.City Council President Lawrence A. Bell III and his former ally, Martin J. O'Malley, would meet publicly for the first time since O'Malley leapfrogged over Bell to grab the Sept. 14 Democratic mayoral primary victory.As the council session's 5 p.m. starting time neared, the swelling rumble from the back-slapping, hand-gripping, broad-grinning crowd echoed off the chamber's vaulted ceilings.

After losing the 1990 election to Maryland comptroller Louis L. Goldstein, Republican Larry M. Epstein became a fan of the legendary Democratic politician. Over lunches of salads and deli sandwiches, the two formed a friendship -- and Epstein decided not to seek a rematch."I'm an accountant. I'm not a political strategist," Epstein said recently, explaining his willingness to cross party lines and endorse Goldstein four years ago. "I do what I think is right."Goldstein's death in July freed Epstein to enter this year's race for comptroller -- a campaign in which he faces another political titan in former Gov. William Donald Schaefer.

FireSykesville: Firefighters from Gamber and West Friendship in Howard County assisted Sykesville at 12: 15 p.m. Tuesday, responding to an oven fire in the 7300 block of Ash Brook Court.Pub Date: 3/05/98

NEW YORK -- Although the big musicals attract the most attention, the current Broadway season has been an unusually strong one for new dramas.The season featured the most new plays in recent years, and the Tony Award nominees -- Yasmina Reza's "Art," Martin McDonagh's "The Beauty Queen of Leenane," John Leguizamo's "Freak" and David Henry Hwang's "Golden Child" -- faced competition from such high-profile playwrights as David Hare, David Mamet and Neil Simon....

A Severn man died Wednesday of injuries he suffered when his sport utility vehicle slammed into a guardrail and careened into a delivery truck traveling the opposite direction on Route 32 in West Friendship, police said.Matthew Murray, 26, of the 5000 block of Telegraph Road was flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where he died about 5 p.m.Murray was driving his Ford Bronco north about 10 a.m. when he used the shoulder to pass another car, police said. He lost control, struck the guardrail and collided with the delivery truck just north of Parliament Place, police said.

A second person has died from injuries suffered in a collision in West Friendship June 19. A third person in the accident remained in serious condition yesterday.Sandra Lee Foster, 58, of New Windsor, was taken to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center after the accident at 4: 45 a.m. and died early Saturday.Foster, who was wearing a seat belt, was driving a car that was struck by a Nissan Sentra that crossed the center line on Route 32 north of Rosemary Lane, police said.The driver of the Nissan, Vijay Jose, 23, of Ellicott City, was declared dead at the scene.

David H. Tilley, founder of a Baltimore chemical distribution company and a World War II veteran, died Feb. 12 of respiratory failure at Union Memorial Hospital. The West Friendship resident was 88. Mr. Tilley was born in Baltimore and raised in Govans. He was a 1938 graduate of Loyola High School, where he was captain of the ice hockey team. After earning a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Loyola College in 1942, he enlisted in the Navy and served in the Pacific as a gunnery officer.

In a heated debate that at times turned into a candid discussion on race in Baltimore, Canton residents wrestled last night with a proposal to open a new middle/high school in their neighborhood. Some, angered that students at Canton Middle School - which was scheduled to close - have attacked neighbors and destroyed property, opposed any school on the site. Others argued that bringing in a new charter school with a focus on community involvement could lift the area up. "We do get tired of the garbage" and other problems associated with the school, said Julie Kardas, a 49-year-old Highland Avenue resident who was one of the hundreds who turned out for the two-hour meeting.

CHICAGO -- Research tells us that people are happier and more productive when they have good friends at work, but the fact is, most of us don't. Fewer than one in three U.S. employees has a close friend at work, someone in whom they confide, reports a University of Michigan study. Americans also are less likely to extend professional ties outside work than their counterparts in other cultures, even though they feel energized when they do, the study found. "If socializing with co-workers is energizing, why don't we do it more often?"

Neighborhoods in Baltimore, Washington and Cambridge were already burning after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. Annapolis Mayor Roger "Pip" Moyer feared it wouldn't be long before race rioting struck the state capital. He looked for his oldest friend, a small-time thief named Joseph "Zastrow" Simms. Moyer was white and Simms was black, yet they had grown up together on the basketball courts in the segregated city. Moyer sprung Simms from his cell in a Baltimore jail for a few hours, and together they walked the streets of the old 4th Ward in Annapolis, calming the people and sparing the city the destruction wrought in urban areas nationwide.

Joe Bollinger writes from Glen Burnie: "Has the temperature at BWI ever remained at 80 degrees or higher for any 24-hour period?" Not at BWI, according to the National Weather Service. The last time Baltimore's official low failed to drop below 80 was Aug. 29, 1949. But that was a year before the city's official weather station moved out to then-Friendship Airport. Pre-1950, record downtown "high minimums" top 80 for 26 dates in July and August. The hottest nights were 83 degrees, on July 21 and Aug. 5, 1930.

Bridge to Terabithia is much less than it's being advertised as, which makes it much more of a good thing. Pitched to the public as some latter-day Chronicles of Narnia, complete with scads of CGI-driven special effects, Terabithia is a much gentler, wiser film. It's certainly no knockoff. And while the beguiling, bucolic world it brings to the screen may seem overly contrived at times, its core values - friendship, imagination, compassion - are always worth celebrating, especially when depicted with the care and reverence so obvious here.

Friendship: An Expose Joseph Epstein Houghton Mifflin / 270 pages / $24 Grapple your proven friends to your soul with hoops of steel, Polonius tells Laertes in Hamlet. Get yourself a friend, the Talmud tells beginning scholars. If Joseph Epstein skipped those references, he skipped almost nothing else. Friendship combines the wide range, wry wit and generously skeptical viewpoint that made Snobbery: The American Version a best-seller, and The American Scholar such a pleasure to read when Epstein was editor.

1950: Friendship Airport opens Fifty-six Junes ago, Friendship International Airport in Anne Arundel County was dedicated by President Harry S. Truman. Ten miles from Baltimore and 30 miles from the nation's capital, the parcel of 3,200 acres was meant to serve the burgeoning region's aviation needs. Today, the recently renamed Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport is truly an international hub and honors the native Marylander who argued the Supreme Court case that struck down public school segregation in 1954.

Howard County police hav arrested and charged a Baltimore County man in the February robbery of an Ellicott City bank less than a half-hour after he tried to enter another one in West Friendship. Michael Francis Zemanick, 53, of the 500 block of Oella Ave., entered the outer door of Columbia Bank in West Friendship about 12:50 p.m. Feb. 15 wearing a hat and sunglasses, said Pfc. Jennifer Reidy, a spokeswoman for Howard County police. As Zemanick waited to be buzzed into the bank's lobby, a clerk watched him pull his shirt up over the lower part of his face.

They are fuzzy now on where they met - a baseball field or a basketball court - but they are certain that they were not supposed to play together. Not in the late 1940s. But Roger "Pip" Moyer, who is white, and Joseph "Zastrow" Simms, who is black, played together anyway. And when they talk about it now it's clear that it couldn't have been any other way. It was fate that made them friends, they say, and loyalty and respect forged in difficult times that kept them together. So it was that 38 years ago this week, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis, Tenn.