Hambleton

Students in 12 Baltimore-area schools will be learning their Three R's -- as well as other subjects -- through lessons in the arts as part of a pilot program initiated by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.The names of the schools chosen to participate in the six-year, $2 million project were announced yesterday by BSO officials. They include nine city and county public schools and three private schools.Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke, who came to Meyerhoff Symphony Hall to congratulate the principals of the chosen schools, said the program would be "a true partnership" between the symphony and community educators.

Mission: To make music of the highest quality, to enhance Baltimore and Maryland as a cultural center of interest, vitality and importance, and to enter the 21st century as a model of institutional strength.Accomplishments: The BSO is celebrating its 83rd season -- a year that has presented the great masterpieces of Beethoven. In addition to a critically acclaimed performance at Carnegie Hall, the 1998-1999 season featured more than 150 concerts ranging from classical to pops and educational to family.

Mission: To engage a theatrical audience in the work of the artist. Values integral to the mission are the centrality of the artistic vision to all institutional decision making; the courage to take artistic risks; a commitment to diversity onstage, in personnel and in the audience; and fiscal integrity. The award-winning resident professional theater, located in Baltimore's historic Mount Vernon Cultural District, was founded in 1963.Accomplishments: Center Stage completed its 35th season this month.

The death of Pan Am Corp. ends an often-glorious 64-year history of an airline which for decades was regarded as this country's flagship carrier.The early days of Pan American were a series of pioneering feats in commercial aviation under the firm's visionary founder, Juan T. Trippe. In 1927, the airline inaugurated the first scheduled international flight -- a mail run between Key West, Fla., and Havana. After becoming the first U.S. airline to develop four-engine flying boats, Pan Am launched the first scheduled trans-Pacific service in 1935.

Sewell Stansbury Watts III, an investment banker who headed the board of Center Stage, died Saturday at his Guilford home of complications from back surgery. He was 72. Born in Baltimore and raised on Overhill Road, he attended Calvert School and was a 1950 graduate of Gilman School. At Princeton University, where he graduated in 1954, he majored in economics and was a member of the 1953 national championship lacrosse team. He took graduate studies in business at the Wharton School in Philadelphia.

Little Charlie has gone north to his vacation home in Maine. Big Charlie, Bucky, Gertie, Harry and the rest of the dog group at the Broadmead retirement community are celebrating summer the same way they celebrate every season: by gathering at their spot in the meadow, near the vegetable garden, right on the edge of the so-called wetlands, for their daily walk. The Broadmead Dogs form an amiable pack: Lab, standard poodle, Norwich terrier, bichon frise, Jack Russell terrier, Japanese Chin, Australian shepherd.

CREATIVE AND inventive use of colors, designs, beautiful furniture and accessories has transformed Selsed House into the 15th Symphony Decorators Show House, a fund-raiser to benefit the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. The house opens to the public on Sunday and continues through May 19.Selsed House is a magnificent English-style manor house on Seminary Avenue in Lutherville. It was built in the 1920s and is owned by Mary Hocking Marburg, who made the house available to the Baltimore Symphony Associates for this annual event.

Charles W. Ruff, 70, owner of roofing company Charles W. Ruff, former owner and president of Charles F. Ruff & Co., died Jan. 28 of a massive heart attack at St. Agnes Healthcare. The Catonsville resident was 70. Mr. Ruff was president from 1954 until retiring in 1998 of the commercial and residential Baltimore roofing company that his father established in 1939. During his career, he and his company installed roofs on some of the most important buildings in Maryland, including the State House in Annapolis, Baltimore City Hall, Zion Lutheran Church in City Hall Plaza and the Civic Center, now known as the Baltimore Arena.

"This castle hath a pleasant seat."Shakespeare buffs might be reminded of Duncan's words as they mount the long, tree-shaded private drive that leads up to Selsed House. Everybody else might just think, "Wow!"Selsed is not quite Macbeth's Glamis Castle, but it's just about as close as the Baltimore area gets, with its stone construction, massive pegged oak doors, leaded windows, and the medieval arches on what look suspiciously like battlements -- not to mention the seigneurial view.Contemporary visitors, however, will find a much warmer welcome than did Duncan at Macbeth's place.

Francoise Sagan, 69, author of the best-selling novel Bonjour Tristesse about seduction and infidelity among the idle rich, died Friday of heart and lung failure at a hospital in Honfleur, France, near her home in Normandy. She wrote Bonjour Tristesse ("Hello, Sadness") in six weeks while a student at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1953. Published in 1954, the book sold more than 2 million copies worldwide and was translated into at least 15 languages. Born Francoise Quoirez, Ms. Sagan, who selected her pen name from a character in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, went on to write 30 novels and compilations of novellas as well as nine plays.