Legacy

Edgar Allan Poe and his legacy will be lost to Baltimore if funding cannot be found to keep Poe's house open and in repair. City officials say that they do not have sufficient funds to pay the salary of the executive director of the Poe association, who is also the custodian of Poe House. The Sun reported a year or so ago that a group of Philadelphians wanted to remove Poe's body from his grave at Westminster Hall and bring him to Philadelphia. Fortunately that did not happen. Annual activities at Westminster Hall are beneficial educational and social events as well as sources of revenue for the city.

A fellow named Joseph contacted me the other day. He's one of Baltimore's many drug addicts, still alive at 33, clean for once, and looking for a job. "I started smoking crack at the age of 14, shooting heroin at the age of 16," he says. "I am on parole and probation, and I can't find a job anywhere ... It seems like every time I get an interview, everything is great until they do a background check. I'm going to [violate my parole] soon due to non-payment of the [parole] supervision fees.

As an entertainment entrepreneur, Earl Monroe is engaged in putting together a reality television show with a woking title of "What If?" As a Hall of Famer who wears a ring he received for being one of the NBA's top-50 all-time players, Monroe asks the same question of himself. What if he had not been traded from the Baltimore Bullets to the New York Knicks early in the 1971-72 season? "I would have been revered as a different type of player, who would have accomplished all the things that I started out to accomplish," Monroe, 67, said this month, sitting at a table at Samos Restaurant in Greektown.

Close to the southeastern fringe of 540 acres of rolling farmland, Martha Anne Clark lives in the Ellicott City farmhouse where she grew up, the same house where her father, state Sen. James Clark Jr., resided for nearly 50 years until his death in 2006. In another house on the property lives her 24-year-old daughter, Nora Crist, who has introduced pigs and chickens to the working farm on Clarksville Pike for the first time in its 214-year history. And just over a grassy knoll or two in the other direction is the petting farm Clark opened 10 years ago with her father's enthusiastic support.

Isn't the governor supposed to represent the views of the constituents who elected him to office? The governor is opposed to the death penalty, so no murderers have been executed. Does that represent the wishes of the majority of Marylanders? The governor is for in-state tuition for illegals, which the majority of Marylanders are against. UnderMartin O'Malley's administration, we have seen increases in our taxes, tolls and fees. Now this man wants to add more to the already-high cost of gasoline.

As we approach the 2012 election, the fear that many Americans will be denied their right to vote is increasingly becoming a reality. A growing number of states have enacted voter suppression laws that will require identification to vote, impose stricter voter registration requirements or prevent early voting or same-day voting - tactics that will push out many Americans from the electorate, particularly the elderly, people with disabilities, low-income...

Katherine Williams, a second-year student at the University of Virginia, never had the opportunity to meet Yeardley Love. But like other students who arrived on campus after Love's death in May 2010, Williams lives with her legacy. "I took a class on women's health," Williams, 20, said, "and we discussed what happened here. " What happened was Love's murder at the hands of her one-time boyfriend, George Huguely. He was convicted last week during a trial in which testimony characterized him as an out-of-control drinker who had previously physically attacked and threatened her. He faces up to 26 years in prison.

All three Harford County municipalities will be recipients of state Community Legacy Program grants announced by the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development Wednesday. Havre de Grace will get a $100,000 grant to make landscaping, signage and other beautification improvements at the entrance to the Hatem Bridge and along Superior Street. The city will also receive a $20,000 grant to develop a living fence of shrubbery and other plants at its downtown water treatment plant.

When she was 12 years old, Christina Lewis Halpern was caught in the collision between great good fortune and terrible luck. And the suddenness and severity of the impact jolted her deeply, though it would take years for her to experience the full effects. And yet, after the pioneering African-American businessman Reginald F. Lewis died of a brain tumor on Jan. 19, 1993, just seven weeks after the disease was diagnosed, his youngest daughter took pains to conceal her shock. She didn't cry. Instead, she reacted by becoming responsible and very quiet.

Every Republican presidential candidate claims to be the heir to Ronald Reagan's legacy. For years, Republican partisans have carried Reagan's memory before them as the ancient Israelites carried the Ark of the Covenant. Just invoking his name proved your ideological purity, and would smite the dreaded RINO (Republican in name only). Problem is, those who most fervently claim to adhere to Ronald Reagan's principles don't seem to understand Reagan's greatest principle: decency. Ronald Reagan practically has been deified as a small government, anti-tax, pro-life, all-American conservative who never compromised his principles.