Kennedyville

KENNEDYVILLE -- Pat Langenfelder got a preview yesterday morning of the environmental scrutiny that all large Maryland livestock farms might face in the near future.About 25 inspector trainees with the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental offices of surrounding states converged on her Kent County farm.They were looking for evidence of harmful byproducts from the manure streaming from the 2,400-hog operation. Those byproducts could seep into the waters of nearby Morgan Creek and eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay.The inspector trainees looked at the mustard-green slime produced from the flow of hog manure from a breeding barn into a 1 1/2 -acre storage lagoon.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Campaigning in a suit that reeks of cat urine would be a disadvantage for most politicians. But for Wayne Gilchrest, it was a money magnet.Back when Gilchrest was first running for Congress, his wife, Barbara, draped his only suit on a windowsill in their home to air it out. That night, a cat urinated just outside the window. In the morning, Gilchrest was a walking litter box.After a day driving across the Eastern Shore in his Plymouth Horizon, he pulled up to a big house with white columns in Easton seeking a little more money for his low-budget campaign.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Le Verne Kohl didn't pay much attention Monday afternoon when he saw planes and helicopters flying over his 2,000-acre nursery in Kent County.But he remembered the flights Tuesday at noon when 33 armed agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service swarmed his business, blocking every exit, impounding his employment records and shutting off telephone service for hours while they detained 86 Hispanic immigrant workers employed by Angelica Nurseries Inc."We had Waco over there, except we didn't have the fire and the shooting," Kohl, Angelica's president and co-owner, said yesterday afternoon as he described the raid to a friend and fellow agriculturalist, Floyd Price, over lunch at Vonnie's Restaurant.

KENNEDYVILLE -- You'd never know it from the way he ambles about his home here in a ragged T-shirt and muddy work boots, but Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest has suddenly hit the big time in Washington.With his party's takeover of Congress this year, the three-term congressman from the Eastern Shore has been transformed from an obscure, kind of oddball backbencher into a national leader of a band of pro-environmental Republicans -- one of the most influential tribal factions in the party.He's waging floor fights, brokering votes, even tutoring House Speaker Newt Gingrich to try to thwart those Republicans who see many environmental regulations as a kind of government intrusion and are trying to get rid of them.

KENNEDYVILLE -- It was his 12-year-old daughter, Katie -- and not the callers and letter writers from Maryland's 1st District -- who persuaded the congressman to get rid of his whiskers."

Services for Earl Hopkins Pinder, clerk of the Circuit Court of Kent County for 28 years, will take place at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Shrewsbury Episcopal Church in Kennedyville.Pinder, who was 77, died Wednesday at his home near Chestertown after a brief illness.Mr. Pinder spent the early years of his career in the MarylanState Police, where he obtained the rank of first sergeant before leaving in the late 1940s. In the early 1950s, he and his first wife, Emma Knight, opened a stationery store that they operated until he won his first term as court clerk in 1962.

Earl Hopkins Pinder, clerk of the Circuit Court of Kent County for 28 years, died Wednesday at his home near Chestertown after a brief illness. He was 77.Funeral services will be held at 1 p.m. tomorrow at Shrewsbury Episcopal Church in Kennedyville.native of Kent County, Mr. Pinder was a longtime activist in Republican Party politics at the state and regional levels.Mr. Pinder spent the early years of his career in the MarylanState Police, where he rose to the rank of first sergeant before leaving in the late 1940s.

KENNEDYVILLE -- You've been eating oatmeal all your life, then someone puts a juicy steak in front of you. What do you do? Take a big bite naturally.And that's just what the exceptionally scrappy fish of several pounds did to my small Beetle Spin lure before it thrashed on the surface next to the catwalk on 12-acre Goose Valley Lake.Just when I figured I had won, it dove for the bottom under the walk, snagged a plank, and departed with my white soft plastic lure with black lead head still in its jowls.

KENNEDYVILLE -- "San Francisco is tough; it's hard to think they won't do it again," said the big guy at the other end of the goose blind.His credentials were enough to convince me -- and this day he also convinced me of his shooting prowess. He gets a lot of practice. His hunting itinerary is awesome.Since the pro football season started, he has shot waterfowl in Ontario, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Montana and Illinois, pheasants in Iowa, not to mention a trip to Poland for wild boar. Also, he has scored a Grand Slam in sheep: a desert in Mexico, dall in Alaska, big horn and stone in British Columbia.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Farmers are a curious breed. They're always keeping an eye on their neighbor's fields and his farming practices. But this year, farmers around this rural Kent County community are paying more attention then ever to Gary Miller's corn crop.Gary Miller and his three brothers run 3-M's Farm, a grain-growing operation that spreads over 3,000 acres of some of the flattest land in all of Maryland. But it's just a small patch of their farm -- a 400-acre cornfield that butts up against Turner's Creek -- that captured the attention of farmers throughout the county and around much of the rest of the state this year.

KENNEDYVILLE - Coaxed to reflect on his 18 years in Washington, Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest acknowledges a single regret. "If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn't have run," he said. "I probably would have rested my days as an outfitter taking people on horseback rides in the northern Bitterroot towns of Idaho. Lived out a peaceful existence, in a log cabin that was still filled up with snow in May." It is a typically idiosyncratic answer from the Eastern Shore Republican, who spent time counting moose in Idaho between jobs as a high school history teacher and a house painter before he won his seat in 1990.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Rep. Elijah E. Cummings had a question for hog farmer Jennifer Debnam as she handed him a plastic bag of boar semen. "UPS delivers this?" he asked, warily. "Yes, UPS or FedEx," Debnam replied as she held the tools used for artificially inseminating sows. "I just did a tour the other morning of UPS," said Cummings, with a chortle. "Now, I have a new appreciation for them." It's less than a two-hour drive from Democrat Cummings' Baltimore district to this Eastern Shore town.

DON'T THREATEN Congressman Wayne Gilchrest. I'm warning you. He'll leave for No Man's Land if you vote him out of office. He has left civilization before. Packed up and moved to the Idaho wilderness, where he had to cross several mountains to reach his closest neighbor. Mr. Gilchrest has represented much of Anne Arundel County, the entire Eastern Shore and a sliver of Baltimore for the past eight years, but he isn't that comfortable in the big city of Washington anyhow. In Congress, he has got to shave and wear a tie. He can't admire the farms or the woods.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Four grainy images flicker on the television screen in Keith Boone's office, monitoring every facet of streamlined efficiency that Horizon Organic Dairy has brought to the 133-acre Kent County farm the Colorado-based corporation bought three years ago. A glance at the video system allows the 41-year-old dairyman to calculate how much feed 520 or so cows are consuming or how quickly things are going in the milking parlor where workers milk...

KENNEDYVILLE -- Pat Langenfelder got a preview yesterday morning of the environmental scrutiny that all large Maryland livestock farms might face in the near future.About 25 inspector trainees with the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental offices of surrounding states converged on her Kent County farm.They were looking for evidence of harmful byproducts from the manure streaming from the 2,400-hog operation. Those byproducts could seep into the waters of nearby Morgan Creek and eventually flow into the Chesapeake Bay.The inspector trainees looked at the mustard-green slime produced from the flow of hog manure from a breeding barn into a 1 1/2 -acre storage lagoon.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Campaigning in a suit that reeks of cat urine would be a disadvantage for most politicians. But for Wayne Gilchrest, it was a money magnet.Back when Gilchrest was first running for Congress, his wife, Barbara, draped his only suit on a windowsill in their home to air it out. That night, a cat urinated just outside the window. In the morning, Gilchrest was a walking litter box.After a day driving across the Eastern Shore in his Plymouth Horizon, he pulled up to a big house with white columns in Easton seeking a little more money for his low-budget campaign.

KENNEDYVILLE -- Le Verne Kohl didn't pay much attention Monday afternoon when he saw planes and helicopters flying over his 2,000-acre nursery in Kent County.But he remembered the flights Tuesday at noon when 33 armed agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service swarmed his business, blocking every exit, impounding his employment records and shutting off telephone service for hours while they detained 86 Hispanic immigrant workers employed by Angelica Nurseries Inc."We had Waco over there, except we didn't have the fire and the shooting," Kohl, Angelica's president and co-owner, said yesterday afternoon as he described the raid to a friend and fellow agriculturalist, Floyd Price, over lunch at Vonnie's Restaurant.

KENNEDYVILLE -- You'd never know it from the way he ambles about his home here in a ragged T-shirt and muddy work boots, but Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest has suddenly hit the big time in Washington.With his party's takeover of Congress this year, the three-term congressman from the Eastern Shore has been transformed from an obscure, kind of oddball backbencher into a national leader of a band of pro-environmental Republicans -- one of the most influential tribal factions in the party.He's waging floor fights, brokering votes, even tutoring House Speaker Newt Gingrich to try to thwart those Republicans who see many environmental regulations as a kind of government intrusion and are trying to get rid of them.

KENNEDYVILLE -- It was his 12-year-old daughter, Katie -- and not the callers and letter writers from Maryland's 1st District -- who persuaded the congressman to get rid of his whiskers."

KENNEDYVILLE -- You've been eating oatmeal all your life, then someone puts a juicy steak in front of you. What do you do? Take a big bite naturally.And that's just what the exceptionally scrappy fish of several pounds did to my small Beetle Spin lure before it thrashed on the surface next to the catwalk on 12-acre Goose Valley Lake.Just when I figured I had won, it dove for the bottom under the walk, snagged a plank, and departed with my white soft plastic lure with black lead head still in its jowls.