Lamps

Gerard Albert Ancel Sr., a retired high school French teacher, died of pancreatic cancer Feb. 6 in Clearwater, Fla. The former Hampden resident was 72. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he graduated from St. Joseph, a French Jesuit University there, and later taught French in the American Embassy there. He moved to Baltimore in 1961 and received two master's degrees in education, from Loyola College and the Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Ancel was a State Department interpreter for visiting dignitaries before beginning a teaching career at Boys' Latin School.

Samuel C. Chase Jr., an official in the sand and gravel industry and an antiques collector, died Sunday of cancer at his Pasadena home. He was 52.Mr. Chase had worked more than 20 years in the sand and gravel industry.At his death, he was plant superintendent at Lafarge Corp.'s quarrying operations in Chase, owned and operated by Redland Genstar until last year.A casual dresser who favored striped oxford shirts and blue jeans, he started his career in 1966 as a heavy-equipment operator for the former J. E. Owens Co., a landscape developer.

Knights in shining armorA city skyline comes alive on a chessboard designed by Baltimore architect David Kerivan (left). The pieces, in black and clear anodized aluminum, resemble buildings, but each has attributes that define its role in the game and its hierarchy. The tops of the pieces are grooved or notched to indicate how the pieces move. A bishop, for instance, has two diagonal grooves, indicating it can move an unlimited number of spaces along diagonal lines. Each piece also has channel-like grooves around the base that indicate its point value in the game.

Nose rings are out. Halter tops are passe.Here comes the newest craze for America's teen-agers ...Would you believe home furnishings?Yep, hip teen catalogs are filled not only with the funkiest fashions but also with TV tables, sheets, lamps, chairs and storage units.IKEA and other furniture chains are targeting 12- to 19-year-olds.Clothing companies like Tommy Hilfiger, Old Navy and Banana Republic have introduced home-accessory lines that appeal to older teen-agers.Seventeen magazine has a new monthly column that shows how readers are decorating their bedrooms.

W. Raymond Wilson, who established the venerable Wilson Electric Co. in Towson, died Sunday of complications from Alzheimer's disease at Edenwald Retirement Community. He was 95.Mr. Wilson opened the business in 1919 with his father in an old clapboard house in the 400 block of York Road, a site now occupied by Borders Books and Music.At a time when most houses relied on gaslight or kerosene lamps for illumination, Mr. Wilson and his father were responsible for installing electricity in many Baltimore County homes and businesses.

In today's shrink-wrapped, fiber-optic world, few know the pause. Many have forgotten it. It's that inspired half-beat after a phonograph's arm swings out in a short half-arc, but before the needle drops into the expectant grooves spinning as slow and sure as a Marvin Gaye ballad.Except for the most die-hard of vinyl advocates, the majority of serious music fans boxed up their turntables years ago, instead embracing the cleaner sound and quicker gratification of compact discs.But, if you buy into the old truism that everything shunned eventually resurfaces into the cultural wellspring as retro-hip -- think lava lamps -- then it's only a matter of minutes before Rolling Stone runs a "record rebirth" or "trendy turntable" piece.

DOWNTOWN Reisterstown is looking good these days -- aesthetic street lamps, new brick sidewalks, a freshly paved main drag.But what is that big field of dirt at the north end of town, just opposite the High's store and the Lamplight Lounge? Alas, we know what it is, or rather, what it is going to be.It's going to be a parking lot for a strip shopping center going up, and, this being America, where the world revolves around the automobile, there must be a conspicuous sea of asphalt.But why must it be that way?

Lamps and lighting fixtures are necessary decorative objects in a room. Each period of design has lamps that furnish the type of light possible with the power source available. Lamps also have been designed to blend with the furniture of the day.Most 18th-century homes were lighted by candles or oil lamps. The dim light was all that was available, so most people rose with the dawn and went to bed at sunset.The 19th century brought several lighting improvements. Whale oil lamps and oil and kerosene lamps were designed to give more light at night.

Ready to pack a bit of panache into a room slowly fading from summer? Traditional or contemporary, rooms can recover from the dreary doldrums when injected with a dose of fashion aimed at interior design.You can do this without bankrupting the budget by turning an eye to room accessories -- little new items that punch up a design scheme and don't require a moving van to deliver. Current favorites are a mixed bag of items that reflect a wide range of style and design. The secret is how to use them in a room.

IN ANY non-monastic life, you cannot assume your stuff is on your side.Stuff assessment does not come naturally. It happens only with moves, new flooring or painting projects of irrational scale. Natural disasters help, too. Without these upheavals, household objects simply accrete, multiply, age and get moved one space over to fit just one more thing.If you don't move it -- and move every bit of it -- every so often, you cannot appreciate your stuff, its extent, weight, age or thickness of its dust coating.

Sometimes, in small ways, this Getting There gig is downright gratifying. Particularly when it can help a reader get something fixed. One example is an e-mail that came Feb. 16 from Crossan McDonald of Baltimore. For me one of the most hazardous stretches of road that I travel is Keith Avenue, the connector between Interstate 95 [the first exit after the Fort McHenry toll booth] and Broening Highway. To properly appreciate the problems, one has to travel this road at night. On any given evening, over half of the street lights are out of service, and the white paint lane markers are so faint that they are barely visible.

THE PROBLEM: Lights at a Northwest Baltimore shopping plaza have been dark for months. THE BACKSTORY : Watchdog readers often draw attention to unlit street lamps in their neighborhoods. But Shirley Clinton had an unusual problem because her immediate environs include the shopping center across the street from her apartment complex. Clinton is president of the tenants association at the Reisterstown Square Apartments on Eberle Drive. The entrance to the apartment complex faces a Home Depot in Reisterstown Plaza.

With climate change and diminishing resources dominating the news, small business owners are looking for ways to be more environmentally friendly. Simple steps such as recycling soda cans and turning off lights are a good place to start. But there are other ways you can make a difference to benefit both the environment and your bottom line. Take energy use, for example. The Environmental Protection Agency's Energy Star program ( www.energystar.gov)says business-specific energy efficiency upgrades can provide a positive cash flow from the beginning.

If you like sitting out on the patio at night but want to add a little light to your surroundings, there's another choice besides candles and tiki torches. While solar path lighting has been around for years, manufacturers only recently have introduced outdoor table lamps with rechargeable solar batteries. "The beauty of these lamps is that they don't look much different from indoor table lamps that are usually chosen based on decor style," writes Skip Teeters, outdoor lighting product manager for Hampton Bay and Home Depot, which recently came out with rechargeable solar table lamps.

Jenny Hetrick knows that tanning increases the risk of skin cancer, but for two years she's been a regular customer at Electric Beach tanning salon in Odenton. Warnings about exposure to ultraviolet light - from the sun and tanning lamps - are not lost on her. But when the weather warms up, she likes to wear shorts and short-sleeved tops and, like her friends, she wants to look good in them. So she compromises and limits her tanning salon visits to about two a week. "I think it's right that people should be careful.

Nine families at an Edgemere apartment complex were displaced after a fire about 6:45 p.m. Saturday that started when a halogen lamp tipped over, a Baltimore County Fire Department spokesman said yesterday. The blaze was under control within about half an hour, but caused smoke damage throughout the three-story apartment building on Loring Court and heavy fire damage in the unit where it started, said spokesman Glenn Blackwell. "One person was trapped on the second floor and was rescued," he said.

Gerard Albert Ancel Sr., a retired high school French teacher, died of pancreatic cancer Feb. 6 in Clearwater, Fla. The former Hampden resident was 72. Born in Beirut, Lebanon, he graduated from St. Joseph, a French Jesuit University there, and later taught French in the American Embassy there. He moved to Baltimore in 1961 and received two master's degrees in education, from Loyola College and the Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Ancel was a State Department interpreter for visiting dignitaries before beginning a teaching career at Boys' Latin School.

Sometimes, to understand the big thing - like, say, the world - it helps to focus on a small one, like my tattered lampshade. My wife and I set about replacing it one day recently, and our search took us to no fewer than five stores in our fair city. None had the right size. They had plenty of lampshades, all right, but most were much larger than what we needed. They were made for bigger lamps, which were made for bigger tables, which are needed in bigger rooms, which are found in today's colossally bigger houses.

Christopher Saah's atmospheric photographs of Hollywood at night, on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery, clearly are inspired by the luxuriantly decadent cinematography of film directors such as David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino. Saah's Hollywood, with its aura of sex and violence, pays homage to the B-movie version of Hollywood in most people's minds. But it hardly resembles the glamorous movie capital fans imagine when they think of the home of the stars. That Hollywood, if it ever existed, is long gone, having been replaced by a gritty, somewhat tattered urban environment that's a mere ghost of its storied past.

Joan Dolina and her husband have a consuming passion, one that has led to the restoration of eight homes. "We find a house that's falling down and we feel we have to save it," she said. "And this house was definitely falling apart." The home in question is a Roland Park behemoth - an 1895 three-story stone and cedar-shake Edwardian with more than 4,000 square feet. It's embellished with a stone and cedar turret complete with three large stained-glass windows. A small front porch nestled under a sloping roof is one of the home's three that have been comfortably outfitted with tables and cushioned chairs.