Native Son

In the late 1940s, architect Alexander Cochran built himself a house on Lake Avenue in North Baltimore. It is no exaggeration to say that North Baltimore was shocked.Because instead of the usual, comfortably conservative building, Alex Cochran's house was -- gasp -- modern; it was low-lying and flat-roofed, with floor-to-ceiling windows that let the indoors and outdoors flow into one another. Moreover, Cochran and his wife, Caroline, filled the house with modern furniture and art, and they spent the next several decades there championing causes from integration to world federalism.

Towson native John Kassir has always been a performer.At one time or another during his childhood, he fancied himself a football star, a circus clown and a Western cowboy.Now a resident of Los Angeles, Mr. Kassir, 37, has been a street mime, a stand-up comic and a television actor. He also moonlights as the voice of cartoon characters like Mittens on "Eek the Cat" and Buster Bunny on "Tiny Toon Adventures." But the job that has been drawing attention to him lately is that of the Crypt Keeper, a character he has been playing for six years.

Pittsburgh -- Since Andy Warhol fled his native Pittsburgh for New York at a young age and never looked back, some think he hated the place. He'd have hated the idea of an Andy Warhol Museum located there, they say. Well, he might have hated the idea, but it's a good bet he would have loved the museum, which opens tomorrow.Housed in an eight-story former warehouse building, the museum is devoted to Warhol from top to bottom. It will open with an installation of 500 of the artist's works, covering his career from the 1950s until his death in 1987.

I have often wondered why Maryland has never fully commemorated its greatest native son, Frederick Douglass. Is the old free-line state embarrassed by its slave heritage? Is it still a slave to the racial prejudice that produced slavery? Or are we just indifferent to the quintessential democratic ideals that this heroic American embodied?These principles -- liberty, freedom, equality, justice, opportunity were all partially rooted in the soil of Maryland and more deeply embedded in the soul of Douglass, its greatest champion.

Lillehammer, Norway. -- I've had my picture taken here more than Dan Jansen.Wherever I go, lights flash and cameras roll. Kids stare in awe, but I won't give autographs.It's hard for an African-American to fit in here in Norway.It's even worse when you're a 6-foot-2, 279-pound African-American, a former college football player.People stare. People point. They laugh at me.I stare back. I point. I laugh, too, even though it's at my own jokes.My wife warned me about this. She was a foreign exchange student from Franklin High, living in Finland in the late 1970s.

CSX made it official yesterday. Baltimore, where the American railroad industry was born over a century and a half ago, will lose the last vestiges of a railroad headquarters later this year, when 350 jobs are transferred to Jacksonville, Fla."The key decision-making operations will be consolidated in one headquarters in Jacksonville," Donna W. Rohrer, a spokeswoman for CSX Transportation, said yesterday.That decision culminates the gradual erosion of Baltimore's importance as an administrative center for CSX Transportation Inc., the railroad arm of CSX and one of the nation's biggest railroads.

Say "Paul McCartney" and what's the first name that comes to mind?The correct answer nowadays no longer need be John Lennon. It could be Carl Davis -- the Brooklyn-born, London-residing composer-conductor, who happens to be conducting the Baltimore Symphony today through Saturday in a mostly Gershwin concert in Meyerhoff Hall.The 55-year-old Davis is a well-known film and TV composer -- his work includes the scores of such films as "The French Lieutenant's Woman" and he has won several Emmys -- but he is now best known as the co-composer of what is called "Paul McCartney's Liverpool Oratorio."

When it comes to basketball in Indiana, loyalties stop at the state line. Hoosiers bleed Indiana red, or Purdue black-and-gold, or they don't bleed at all.So it should come as no surprise that when Eric Montross, a native son from Indianapolis, returns home with his North Carolina teammates for the NCAA's Final Four this weekend, he likely will hear the backlash of his decision to cross that line.Montross expects to be booed, native son or not."I don't think I expect a totally warm welcome," the 7-foot freshman center said, choosing his words carefully, once the Tar Heels secured a berth in the national semifinals against Kansas.

DALLAS -- Just when he was about to join the list of former football coaches at the University of Texas, possibly the first in 50 years with a losing record, David McWilliams finally became a genius this year. He didn't get any smarter, at least not much. He did win more games.He has the Longhorns back in the Cotton Bowl for the first time in six years, all blown up and bragging with a 10-1 record, the only loss to top-ranked Colorado. If they beat the Miami Hurricanes today and Colorado and Georgia Tech lose, they'll put in a strong bid for a national championship.