Groundskeeper

Joe N. McKella, a retired groundskeeper and World War II veteran, died of heart failure Friday at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Baltimore. The longtime city resident was 84. Mr. McKella was born in Quitman, Ga., and raised in Miami. During World War II, he served with an Army infantry unit in Europe. He moved to Baltimore in 1945 and went to work as a miller at the William G. Scarlett Seed Co. near Little Italy. After the company closed in the mid-1980s, he took a job as a groundskeeper at the Carriage Hill Village apartments in Randallstown.

Nicole Sherry, head groundskeeper at Camden Yards, was a 13-year-old growing up in Delaware when the legendary Pasquale "Pat" Santarone, who had a similar job for 23 seasons at Memorial Stadium, announced his retirement two months before Opening Day 1991. Santarone, considered one of the leading groundskeepers in the country during his career, had learned the business from his immigrant Italian father, Val, groundskeeper at Elmira, N.Y., then a Double-A-Orioles affiliate, as a 7-year-old cutting grass.

Joseph Earl Somers, a retired Memorial Stadium groundskeeper and softball umpire whose license tag read THE UMP, died of heart disease Monday at St. Agnes HealthCare. The Violetville resident was 77. Born in Baltimore and raised on North Payson Street, he attended city public schools until the fourth grade and picked up the rest of his education on his own. As a young man, he played baseball and boxed. He served in the Army from 1946 to 1947 and fought in a lightweight class while stationed in Alaska.

Weeks of cold and dreary weather seemed to melt away in the sunshine at Oriole Park on Sunday as groundskeepers and their mowers filled the air with the fragrance of fresh-cut grass and laid down a crisp diamond pattern on the emerald turf. It was the next-to-last cutting before the season's home opener at 3:05 p.m. Monday. And head groundskeeper Nicole Sherry was there to make sure the place looks its best by the time the players and fans arrive. "We'll put the finishing touches on the home opener logo [the painted insignia at home plate]

Baseball groundskeepers are like offensive linemen: You don't hear much about them until something goes wrong, or unless they happen to grow pretty good tomatoes.Paul Zwaska, in his second season as the Orioles' head groundskeeper, doesn't have the famous green thumb of his well-known predecessor. Nor does he yet have Pat Santarone's high-profile reputation. But when several prominent members of the Orioles pitching staff followed Rick Sutcliffe's lead by openly criticizing the mound at Camden Yards, Zwaska found himself in a spotlight different from the kind Santarone usually experienced.

The last thing Till Strudwick, a Loyola College groundskeeper, expected yesterday was to hear himself hailed as a campus hero, the embodiment of the standards Loyola strives to teach.But Saturday, on a campus street, Mr. Strudwick found an envelope holding $2,200 in cash. Stunned to be holding that much money, and worried about the person who lost it, Mr. Strudwick gave the cash to security, who returned it to a freshman.His good deed did not go unnoticed. Yesterday, when college employees gathered for the annual start-of-the-school-year program, Loyola's president, the Rev. Joseph A. Sellinger, S. J., led the applause for an overwhelmed Mr. Strudwick.

The blisteringly hot, sticky weather is an answer to Vince Patterozzi's prayers.The chief groundskeeper for the Ravens had been hoping for a hot spell to perk up the new field, which, until recent days, was pocked with brown spots and thin patches -- leading some to wonder if it would be ready by the first preseason game, against the Chicago Bears on Aug. 8."I was hoping for this about two weeks ago," Patterozzi said.He's been watering the field heavily and, a few weeks ago, did some light reseeding, hoping to revive the grass from its winter nap. The half-natural, half-artificial field was brought over from Memorial Stadium in strips and augmented with some fresh growth trucked in from Florida.

The Baltimore Orioles are more than two months away from their season opener, but they incurred two big losses yesterday.Pat Santarone, the club's colorful head groundskeeper, and Joe Hamper, the chief financial officer and one of two members of the original front-office staff in 1954, have announced plans to retire.Both will assume part-time consulting roles for an indefinite period."To most of us, Pat and Joe are as much a part of the Orioles' history and tradition as any player," said team president Larry Lucchino.

Prosecutors in Prince George's County are investigating whether a Laurel cemetery removed bodies, caskets and burial vaults from some graves and reburied them in unmarked areas of the property.The investigation stems from allegations made by a former cemetery groundskeeper, Frank Della of Fairfax, Va., after he was fired in August from Maryland National Memorial Park in Laurel.According to documents provided to investigators, interviews with former employees and a source in the criminal justice system familiar with the probe, Mr. Della told the state's attorney's office that between February 1986 and July 1990, there were as many as a dozen such reburials at the cemetery.

Thomas cannot read or write. He lives with his mother in a two-story house in Hamilton, purchased with rolled change and savings from working as a groundskeeper at the Johns Hopkins University. He has longed to escape Baltimore and buy a ranch house in the country with a fenced yard and a room large enough for a pool table. Now, Thomas, 43, knows he'll never get that - because two people he trusted stole his entire life savings. Two weeks ago, Joseph L. Moody, a groundskeeper who worked with Thomas for a decade, and Moody's girlfriend Janet Gilmore pleaded guilty to stealing more than $150,000 from Thomas.

Thomas cannot read or write. He lives with his mother in a two-story house in Hamilton, purchased with rolled change and savings from working as a groundskeeper at the Johns Hopkins University. He has longed to escape Baltimore and buy a ranch house in the country with a fenced yard and a room large enough for a pool table. Now, Thomas, 43, knows he'll never get that - because two people he trusted stole his entire life savings. Two weeks ago, Joseph L. Moody, a groundskeeper who worked with Thomas for a decade, and Moody's girlfriend Janet Gilmore pleaded guilty to stealing more than $150,000 from Thomas.

Mike Palulis paced the right field warning track, then stood with hands on hips, shifting from foot to foot as he looked out over his realm - a slowly filling Camden Yards. He seemed more antsy than nervous, like something inside needed to get out. He adjusted his uniform, took some practice swings with an imaginary bat; then he paced some more. Palulis had gotten his assignment - he was to head to the bullpen in the fifth inning - and now he was taking a moment to focus. The Orioles had, after all, just lost their 15th-straight Sunday game.

Casey Amos Groundskeeper Queenstown Harbor, Queenstown Salary: $10.50 an hour Age: 24 Years on the job : Two How she got started : After working in office and customer-service-related jobs, Amos wanted to work outdoors. She decided to try her hand at landscaping and was hired to maintain the flower beds at the 735-acre Queenstown Harbor golf course. "I just kind of gave it a shot. The job evolved from there." Typical day : For the first three or four hours each morning, starting at 6 a.m., she is one of about 20 groundskeepers who mow the greens and fairways.

While the Orioles produced some of the best teams in baseball over three decades, beginning in the 1960s, they went unchallenged when it came to their garden. The tomato plants that grew at old Memorial Stadium, and the competitions between head groundskeeper Pat Santarone and manager Earl Weaver that sprouted along with them, are almost as legendary as any championships that were won. Santarone died unexpectedly Tuesday at his home in Hamilton, Mont. He was 79. "Pat and I were very close.

WALDORF -- Now that the World Series is over, most baseball fans will resign themselves to other pursuits until spring training. But not Murray Cook of Ellicott City. For him, there's always another baseball diamond to contemplate. And right now, that field is in China. Cook, a consultant to Major League Baseball, is helping with the construction of the Wukesong Olympic Baseball Fields in Beijing. "The groundskeeper is the 10th man on a team," says Cook, who routinely travels to such distant sites as China, Japan, Taiwan, Spain, Nicaragua and Colombia to construct and design fields.

It's too early for former Orioles groundskeeper Pasquale "Pat" Santarone to put in his tomato plants. After leaving Baltimore and his old turf at Memorial Stadium in 1991, he has been living in the Rockies in Hamilton, Mont. - elevation, 4,000 feet. The grass in his valley is now green, but a storm this week deposited fresh snow on the Sapphire Range a mile from his home. He lives there with his English-born wife, Pam, whom he married after his wife, Delores, died in a 1998 automobile accident.

Between 1986 and 1995, a cemetery in Laurel secretly buried two bodies in a single plot "on multiple occasions," a former groundskeeper at the cemetery alleges in a $7 million lawsuit.The lawsuit, filed in Prince George's County Circuit Court, claims that the groundskeeper, Francis E. Della of Fairfax, Va., was wrongfully fired in August after he told supervisors at Maryland National Memorial Park he would not perform any more double burials.The suit is the first time that Della, who started working at the cemetery in February 1986, has made his charges public.

While the Orioles produced some of the best teams in baseball over three decades, beginning in the 1960s, they went unchallenged when it came to their garden. The tomato plants that grew at old Memorial Stadium, and the competitions between head groundskeeper Pat Santarone and manager Earl Weaver that sprouted along with them, are almost as legendary as any championships that were won. Santarone died unexpectedly Tuesday at his home in Hamilton, Mont. He was 79. "Pat and I were very close.

Nicole Sherry would rather you forget her name. You see, if Sherry and her team are doing their jobs, no one should notice. The vibrant green outfield grass, the riot of spring color in the flowerpots, the crisp stripes of white from home plate to foul poles should all appear as if by magic. "We're behind the scenes, and that's how I'd like to keep it," the Orioles' new head groundskeeper says. Easier said than done this week. As only the second woman in the major leagues to be a head groundskeeper, Sherry has been grooming her public relations image almost as much as the turf.

A Baltimore County school system groundskeeper is recovering from injuries suffered Tuesday when a plastic bottle filled with a liquid exploded after he picked it up while mowing grass at Middle River Middle School, police said. Keith Duckworth, 41, was cutting grass at the school when he saw the bottle, police said. He put it in a trash bucket on the mower, The bottle exploded, causing minor injuries to his face and neck.