Gwynn Oak

"Fatti Maschii, Parole Femine," reads the Maryland State Seal, carrying the motto of its founders, the Calvert family: "Manly deeds, womanly voices."Extraordinary advice that, for while boldness and passion may fuel our actions, often we must temper our intensity with measured, disciplined, decorous speech if our inner vision is ever to be made real."Manly Deeds, Womanly Voices: Activism, Empowerment and Change in the Pre-Civil Rights Period, 1895-1963," a highly informative and touching exhibit just opened at the Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis, does a masterful job of showing us that this duality of voices and deeds was an underlying theme of the African-American experience for much of our century.

Woman found dead in Gwynn Oak basement Baltimore County police said they are investigating the death of a woman whose body was found in the basement of a house in the Gwynn Oak area as a homicide. The body of Eula Uverde Osbourne, 49, of the 6800 block of Richardson Road in the Woodlawn area was found Sunday inside the house in the 5800 block of Royal Oak Ave., county police said. The woman was renovating the house. Her boyfriend said he had not heard from her in several days, and he reported her missing last week, police said.

DIRE consequences are predicted should 60 inner-city families be relocated to Baltimore County suburban neighborhoods. But the heavens didn't fall on similar occasions in the past.The clergymen's protest against racial exclusion at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park, on July 4, 1963, was supposed to bring the destruction of thousands of businesses. I remember it vividly. My minister, Rabbi Morris Lieberman of Baltimore Hebrew Congregation, was a leader of the protest, and I had to defend his actions against members of the congregation who disapproved of a rabbi practicing what he preached.

Zella White Johnson, a former housekeeper who cared for the mentally ill in her home, died of breast cancer Monday at Liberty Heights Nursing and Rehabilitation Center. The longtime Gwynn Oak resident was 88. Born Zella Williams in Baltimore and raised in Mount Winans, she was a graduate of city public schools. During the 1930s, she worked as a cook and housekeeper for families in New York City, New England, Washington and Baltimore. With the outbreak of World War II, she went to work at the old Glenn L. Martin Co. plant in Middle River as a riveter.

Three Towson University detectives have been awarded the campus Police Department's Medal of Merit after solving an armed robbery and home invasion in which a student was clubbed with a crowbar. The three detectives, Frank Remesch, Matthew Tewey and Richard Saylor, were among the first officers to arrive when the call for help came from a campus dormitory March 22, but the attackers had already fled. One attacker was armed with a handgun, the other a crowbar, with which he reportedly struck a student on the forehead after bursting into his room, police said.

When three men attacked, punched and robbed a man of his cellphone near downtown last weekend, the muggers apparently forgot about the hundreds of surveillance cameras watching over many of Baltimore's street corners. One of them captured the mugging, and police quickly arrested two men and recovered the stolen cellphone from a suspect's pants pocket. Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III told the story at a budget presentation Monday, in part to argue for the necessity of the camera program.

A little after 1 p.m. on Aug. 28, 1963, Charles Langley arrived at Gwynn Oak Amusement Park with his baby daughter. The 28-year-old black clerk at the nearby Social Security Administration did not belong to a civil rights organization. He had never participated in the many protests at Gwynn Oak. And he certainly had not expected to find a group of reporters eager to record this family outing.But he was smothered by attention as he strolled through the amusement park. After visiting various arcades and looking at the rides, Langley put Sharon on the merry-go-round.

IF MICHAEL Schwerner had never come to Baltimore in 1963, would he have died in Mississippi in 1964? In the summer of 1963, Schwerner was among the hundreds of demonstrators who sought to desegregate the Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. "It was the first demonstration he ever participated in," said Taylor Branch, who has written two books in a trilogy he's doing on the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and was finishing the third even as I interviewed him. In August 1964, Schwerner's body was found in an earthen dam along with those of James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.

After having read your editorial supporting Maryland's red light and speed cameras, I am forced to wonder how you, as journalistic heirs to the great H. L. Mencken, have so completely lost touch with the basic realities of the contemporary world ("The purpose of speed cameras," Dec. 27). These devices have nothing whatever to do with any type of road safety. They were brought to us by a cadre of manipulative, lying, thieving politicians who were too cowardly to openly raise taxes yet desperate for revenue.