Ned

THE DAY after Christmas, feeling a gray shade of blue in a world full of fear, I reached for the book that was my favorite present. Not the elegant memoirs of a former Smith College president. Not the new Philip Roth novel. Not even the indictment of the media in Marvin Kalb's better-than-fiction One Scandalous Story. No, what arrested my attention was the seventh in the multi-volume series of the Nancy Drew Mystery Stories: The Clue in the Diary. So I spent the afternoon absorbed in the company of Nancy and her chums: tomboy George and plump Bess.

One recent morning in Catonsville, Ned Atwater was wielding his bench knife, cutting lumps of dough and shaping them into the two types of bread, Irish brown and Irish soda, that he will offer to Baltimore-area bread eaters on St. Patrick's Day. Like many things Irish, there is a lively debate about what goes in their breads. For example, one traditional version of an Irish brown bread calls for oatmeal. For some, this bread offers a hearty taste of the old country. For others, like Atwater, the loaf can be leaden.

By the time Eric Zwiebelman was 19, he says, he lost his edge for collecting baseball cards and wanted a new hobby. Today, with most of his basement filled with more than 600 die-cast models of NASCAR cars, he stands at the collector's crossroads again. When he was 11, his grandfather encouraged him to start a baseball card collection. Zwiebelman became enthralled with buying, selling and trading the cards. With his grandfather, he eventually opened Hit and Run Baseball Cards in downtown Aberdeen.

Some ladies age gracefully.Just look at Miss Pearl. Sitting in a hangar at Carroll County Regional Airport the other day, her sandstone pearl and crimson red body -- with a metallic gold stripe -- shined. Her plush red velvet seats were spotless.The single-engine, four-seat Piper Pacer, a 1953 aircraft fully and lovingly restored by owner Frank Sperandeo, was flown from Arkansas to Westminster for the Jack B. Poage Airshow tomorrow and Sunday.Miss Pearl will be one of the many aircraft on display, one spectators can see up close during the show.

There are scads of similarities between 1989's epic western miniseries "Lonesome Dove" and tonight's two-hour TV-movie "Ned Blessing" (9 o'clock on CBS, Channel 11).They both, just to pick one similarity at random, have horses in them. And they share an executive producer, Bill Whittliff.Mr. Whittliff took a different approach with this western outing. Instead of bagging stars like "Lonesome Dove's" Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones, this time out he got Daniel Baldwin, who played the womanizing tavern regular "Cheesy" P. Chadwell in the 1990 CBS midseason replacement series "Sydney."

Gettysburg's Geoff Pickett (John Carroll) seems to save his best shots for critical soccer situations.The sophomore forward has four goals, including the game-winner in a 2-1 victory over Susquehanna and the overtime goal that beat Swarthmore, 3-2.* Sophomore Amity Torbit (John Carroll) had a career-high three assists as Barry posted its sixth straight shutout in an 8-0 romp past West Florida. In 12 games, Torbit has five goals and seven assists.VolleyballLaura Cook (Chesapeake, Baltimore County)

William E. "Ned" Eakle, former Howard County executive and county administrator, died Tuesday of heart failure at Gilchrist Hospice in Columbia. The former West Friendship resident was 86. "We lost a part of our Howard County family — a great leader and a great friend," said County Executive Kenneth S. Ulman in a statement. "He was an outstanding public servant who believed in his county, his country and his employees. " The son of an electrician and a homemaker, William E. Eakle was born and raised in Elkridge.

Edward Charles "Ned" Wilson III, a retired Aberdeen Proving Ground information technology specialist and former board member of Maryland Life Magazine, died June 17 of prostate cancer at Gilchrist Hospice Care in Towson. He was 64. The son of farmers, Mr. Wilson was born in Baltimore and raised on the family farm in Darlington, where he eventually built a home and spent his entire life. After graduating from McDonogh School in 1964, he earned a bachelor's degree in 1968 in English from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa. Drafted into the Army in 1968, Mr. Wilson was sent to Phu Bai, Vietnam, after completing training in preventive medicine at Fort Sam Houston in Texas.

After years of talk and not much action, the western is finally galloping back to the airwaves.It begins with "Ned Blessing: The Story of My Life and Times" tonight at 9 on CBS (WBAL-Channel 11), followed by another Western, "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.," premiering Aug. 27 on the Fox network (WBFF-Channel 45).If "Brisco County" is tongue-in-cheek -- and believe me, it is -- "Ned Blessing" is anything but. This one is about as sincere as it gets.We meet Blessing (Brad Johnson) as an older man in a jail cell awaiting his own hanging.