Hull

It's a fascinating but tragic tale: Only 18 months after emigrating from Russia, a young college-educated man gets a job delivering pizza and is murdered during a botched burglary.It's a true story and the subject of a new drama, "Rim of the Wheel," by Baltimore playwright Daphne R. Hull.Co-produced by the Howard County Arts Council and the Director's Choice Theatre Company, "Rim of the Wheel" is one of 11 Baltimore Playwrights Festival presentations put on by area theater companies this summer.

What could possibly ruin a night out at the Emmys with George Clooney?For Revlon model and former MTV VJ Karen Duffy, known to fans as "Duff," it was a crippling headache."

BEHIND EVERY feel-good moment, there is often a quiet hero -- that one person who helped out in a last-minute, unexpected pinch and then slipped back into life's daily activities without giving the kind deed a second thought.While I watched the Westminster Fallfest parade last week, I thought of a quiet hero who made it possible for the Westminster Business Association to ride in the parade and advertise activities for Midnight Madness, late-night shopping, music and dancing in downtown Westminster.

If it moves and it has a Lockheed Martin nameplate, it's probably an airplane or a spacecraft.But now the aerospace giant's last major facility in Baltimore is helping lead the company in a new direction as a builder of ships.Last week, Lockheed Martin Launching Systems in Middle River won a contract to build a Navy research vessel. At $42.3 million, the job is not as huge as the multibillion-dollar contracts Lockheed Martin is used to winning for fighter jets or rocket boosters.Many eyes are on it, though.

WASHINGTON -- Lying in the cold and dark, on the hostile bottom of the Atlantic 2 1/2 miles down, the wreckage of the Titanic hardly seems like a scene where sightseers would gather.But the broken hull of the famous White Star Line luxury steamship has been visited more than five times, and a wildly popular Hollywood movie has made the site even more appealing to the curious. Now, access to the scene has become a legal dispute awaiting a reaction from the U.S. Supreme Court.R.M.S. Titanic Inc., the New York-based company that has gained exclusive rights to the wreck, wants the Supreme Court to put the hull and the area around it off-limits to everyone else, from anywhere in the world, unless they visit with the company's supervision.

Time doesn't quite strike true at the Hull Federal Savings Bank, a Locust Point rowhouse office with a varnished plywood teller counter where computers work in tandem with an old Royal typewriter.These idiosyncrasies have seeped into the bank's operating system, which leads past president and current financial officer Wilbur Baumann, 83, to declare: "We stopped taking new customers."Baumann, who's been there for 48 years, knows the bank could make more money, but he said Hull Federal is organized to help people buy houses and pay for mortgages.

Nature gives no interviews, nor previews for pundits who write for rustic almanacs. Nor does she let others in on her plans -- those interested for practical or aesthetic reasons to know what kind of winter or fall we are in for.Nature doesn't dribble out reliable hints either: Trust not temperature charts, nor annual precipitation lists. Put no faith in woolly bears.So what to do?Hope. That's all one can do. Hope that the woods ignite with color. Hope that the show, when the curtain finally goes up, runs longer and offers more variety than that pallid travesty of an autumn that dashed all expectations and closed so forlornly last year.

Blackhawks: The team drew its second-largest crowd, 22,390.Blues: The team has a five-game winless streak (0-4-1) and is 4-6-1 since Brett Hull left the lineup with a broken bone in his hand. The Blues were 22-13-6 before the injury to Hull, who is expected back within a week.Bruins: Boston is 1-18-2 in its past 21 games in Pittsburgh, including the playoffs.Pub Date: 1/25/98

A Severn man died early yesterday after collapsing in an Annapolis apartment with stab wounds to his chest, according to Annapolis police.Capt. Zora Lykken, city police spokeswoman, said that shortly after midnight, Howard E. Hull, 33, of the 8200 block of Deerfield Circle, came to the apartment of Amanda J. White, 27, of the 1100 block of Madison St. in Annapolis, where he apparently had been expected.Lykken said that when White opened her door, she asked Hull where he had been, and he responded, "I'm sorry that I'm late."

Donald Hull of Westminster recently received a Service Award from the Maryland Society of Accountants.The society's board of trustees presented Hull with the honor for his continuous service to the organization the past several years.The society, with headquarters in Westminster, held its annual convention June 21-25 at the Wintergreen Resort in Virginia, where awards were presented and officers installed.Pub Date: 7/12/98

Driving over the Bay Bridge on his way to work about four years ago, Luis Elizondo routinely found himself thinking about the large ships he saw waiting in long queues on their way to Baltimore to unload their cargo. Elizondo figured the waiting that crews endure at ports around the world must be wasteful and costly. So he put his analytical mind to work. Researching the shipping and cargo industry, he and his partner, John Robert, came up with a new way for ships to move cargo around the world.

Salary: $50,000 Age: 57 Years on the job: 1 How she got started: : Patricia Hull began as a housing counselor more than 20 years ago while working as a real estate agent. She found herself helping primarily low- and middle-income clients find homes. This included researching programs that helped qualify them for mortgage loans, which piqued her interest in housing counseling. In 1987 she decided to take a job with a nonprofit agency that offered housing assistance to low-income buyers.

It started with a searing headache pounding both sides of her head. And then there was the sharp, shooting pain that struck like a lightning bolt inside her head. The pain started on the third day of school for then-high school junior McKenzie Hull, who had been doing homework. "It was like throbbing," Hull said. "It became the worst headache of my life, and it never stopped." That was Aug. 31, 2006. For nearly two years, Hull has had an incessant headache, known as the New Daily Persistent Headache, an incurable condition, for which there is no known cause.

As wide receivers coach at Oregon State, Lee Hull helped devise a game plan that beat Maryland in last season's Emerald Bowl. Now Hull is joining Ralph Friedgen's staff. Hull, 42, was hired to replace Kasey Dunn, who left the Terrapins after two months to pursue a job in the NFL. "We're excited to hire a coach of Lee's caliber so quickly," Friedgen said in a statement released by the school. "We have a lot of talented wide receivers and we're looking for a coach to take them to another level.

On June 2, 2007, MORGAN ELIZABETH ACTON, 28, of Baltimore, MD, departed this world far too soon as a result of a traumatic stroke. A Celebration of Life Service will be held 4 P.M., Wednesday at Bliley's-Chippenham, 6900 Hull Street Road, Richmond, VA. Full death notice in tomorrows edition.

A Harford County house fire that went undetected, possibly for several days, may have caused the death of the 68-year-old homeowner, authorities said yesterday. Raymond A. Hull was the sole occupant of the ranch house in the 300 block of Forest Valley Road in Forest Hill, fire officials said. A family friend, concerned that he had not heard from Hull for several days, discovered the body and the charred living room shortly after noon yesterday and called 911. Volunteer firefighters from companies in Bel Air and Fallston responded but found no evidence of fire outside of the home.

LONDON -- The death of a British lance corporal whose armored vehicle was mistakenly incinerated by a U.S. warplane in Iraq in 2003 was "criminal" and "entirely avoidable," a coroner ruled yesterday. The British inquest's search for investigative material on the case was marked by repeated military roadblocks, but Assistant Deputy Coroner Andrew Walker concluded that the friendly-fire incident showed evidence of error on the part of U.S. pilots. Contradicting the findings of a U.S. inquiry, which concluded that the incident was a "tragic accident," the Oxfordshire examiner said the pilots should have flown lower in order to positively identify the British convoy, which they believed to be Iraqi, before opening fire.

LONDON -- American pilots can be heard cursing and weeping after finding out they just fired on a British convoy in southern Iraq at the beginning of the U.S. invasion, according to cockpit video footage leaked to a British tabloid. Shortly after the British newspaper The Sun posted the video on its Web site yesterday, the U.S. government relented on its refusal to allow the video to be shown in a British court. The 2003 strike near Basra killed a British soldier and wounded several others.

Shirley A. Hull, a retired bank worker and secretary who had been active in Republican politics, died of a heart attack Sunday at her Forest Hill home. She was 67. Born Shirley A. Roberts in Baltimore, she was raised on Valley Street. She was a 1957 graduate of Seton High School and attended business school for two years. She worked for Equitable Trust Co. and Maryland National Bank for 30 years in customer records and computer programming. After leaving the bank in the early 1990s, she worked as a secretary and in the financial operations of Helen Bentley & Associates in Lutherville, a firm headed by former Rep. Helen Delich Bentley.

Nearly a century ago, burning coal turned water into the steam that first pushed the tugboat into the city's expansive harbor. For the next five decades, the Baltimore was the flagship of the city's busy fleet of tugs - breaking ice, tending buoys and toting mayors, commissioners, businessmen and school kids around the harbor. Now the venerable steamer, one of the last of her kind, floats beside a pier at the Baltimore Museum of Industry near the foot of Federal Hill. Tucked away behind a green fence, the Baltimore lies a few hundred feet from her birthplace, awaiting what the museum and volunteers hope will be a major overhaul.