Northern Harford

Del. Donald C. Fry, a Democrat from northern Harford County, was named to the state Senate yesterday to finish the term of William H. Amoss, who died in office last month.Gov. Parris N. Glendening named Fry, 42, a lawyer and two-term member of the House of Delegates, after the Democratic central committees of Harford and Cecil counties voted unanimously late last week to recommend him.Regina Simon, a Fallston businesswoman, also submitted her name to the committees, but Fry was the apparent choice from the beginning.

Jim Galbreath went to the front door of his house in northern Harford County about 9: 30 p.m. Tuesday to call the family's cat -- and instead found a black bear weighing about 150 pounds walking around the front yard."

Sixteen months after its creation, the Mason Dixon Business Association is going strong."The association has really taken off. It has filled a need that was here and we keep gaining membership," said Robert A. Schwalenberg, a founder of the group and regional manager for Forest Hill Bank's northern territory.The business association, which first met in June 1994, is trying to unite the businesses scattered along the Maryland-Pennsylvania line in northern Harford and southern York County, Pa.It also is trying to increase the political clout of businesses in the two counties that frequently have felt ignored by politicians.

Sixteen months after its creation, the Mason Dixon Business Association is going strong."The association has really taken off. It has filled a need that was here and we keep gaining membership," said Robert A. Schwalenberg, a founder of the group and regional manager for Forest Hill Bank's northern territory.The business association, which first met in June 1994, is trying to unite the businesses scattered along the Maryland-Pennsylvania line in northern Harford and southern York County, Pa.It also is trying to increase the political clout of businesses in the two counties that frequently have felt ignored by politicians.

The Renaissance AllSports Athletic Club bills its North Harford 10K as "medium hilly," but most runners who annually do the loop course in Pylesville know better.That's because race director Dave Starnes, the cross country and track coach at North Harford High School, had a hand in outlining the course. Before a Harford County ruling prohibited student running off campus, Starnes would train his teams on much of the North Harford course.In the absence of that, Starnes must content himself with putting the Northern Harford 10K field through his course on the "rolling" hills of northern Harford County.

Saying recent well tests revealed potentially hazardous amounts of aluminum in their drinking water, a group of northern Harford County residents is asking the state to halt work at a private sludge-drying operation.Backing up the request, Harford County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann said the operation, Chesapeake Resource Reclamation Center, should be forbidden to accept any more "alum sludge" until more is known about the potential threat and until ground water flows in the region are investigated further.

Arson was the cause of fires over the weekend in two vacant houses and a barn in northern Harford County, the state fire marshal's office says.The fires occurred two days after deliberately set fires destroyed a home and a Boy Scout cabin in the same area. In the past five months, there have been about a dozen suspected or determined cases of arson in northern Harford, and all probably were set by the same person or persons, says Bob Thomas, spokesman for the fire marshal's office.On Saturday about 11:20 p.m., firefighters were called to a fire at a two-story frame home on Castleton Road in the Darlington area.

Traffic accidents on Maryland roads killed five people over the weekend, including an Arbutus man whose wife and children were injured in a crash in northern Harford County last night.The latest fatality occurred about 7:15 last night on Pylesville Road in northern Harford County, near the Pennsylvania border, where a 1981 Honda Civic and a 1989 Mazda pickup were involved in a head-on crash.State Police said Jay Wayne Delp, 32, of the 1200 block of Forest Hill Ave. in Arbutus, Baltimore County, was driving a Honda sedan south on Md. 165 (Pylesville Road)

A Havre de Grace man accused of helping another man rape a pregnant 19-year-old woman last May has been convicted of first-degree rape during a four-day trial in Harford Circuit Court.Christopher U. Eley, 21, faces a maximum sentence of life in prison following his March8 conviction by a jury of nine women and three men. A sentencing date for Eley has not been scheduled.The other defendant, Richard L. Wallace, 21, of Aberdeen, awaits trial.Wallace was the first to have intercourse with the victim during the May 16 attack at her Havre de Grace home, the woman testified.

BEL AIR -- When Thomas E. Hicks became a volunteer firefighter five years ago, his mother started a bedtime ritual."The last thing I did was I prayed every night for God to bring him home safely," Alice Hicks, a resident of Bel Air, said yesterday. "He took care of him all these years. I guess that's where he is now, with Him. He was a good man."Mr. Hicks, 44, of Pylesville was killed Sunday night while riding on the back of a fire engine that collided with a car at a northern Harford County intersection.

About five minutes after Fran Mathews went to bed, she heard a boom and felt her house in northern Harford County shudder. "I was afraid enough to see if the furnace had blown up," said Mathews, 61. What rattled Mathews and others in northern Harford County yesterday was a minor earthquake at 12:04 a.m. in Lancaster County, Pa. The 3.3-magnitude quake was centered in the Salunga-Landisville area, about 40 miles north of the Pennsylvania-Maryland line,...

With Del. Barry Glassman officially put forth as the choice of county Republican leaders to replace J. Robert Hooper in the state Senate, the focus now turns to the scramble to fill the House seat. On Thursday, the Harford County Republican Central Committee interviewed Glassman, the only candidate who applied. Members voted unanimously to forward his name to Gov. Martin O'Malley, who will make the appointment official. The committee put Glassman through "a rigorous set of questions just as though there were multiple candidates for the job," said Michael A. Geppi Sr., central committee chairman.

Charlie Keithley ambled into Patricia Hammond's computer room at the Mason-Dixon Community Services offices in southern York County, Pa., on a recent cold, clear afternoon and settled down to a red-sugar-sparkly cookie. Between bites, the 10-year-old with buzzed blond hair and mischievous eyes said that if he didn't come to this after-school program for moderate- to low-income kids, he would "roam around Delta," the tiny town where he lives with his dad and grandmother. He could go all the way to Bel Air if he wanted, he said with a certain nod. His schoolmates Tiffany Carraway and Kaitlyn Pritt, sitting across from him, rolled their eyes.

Facing strong opposition from a rock-ribbed farming community, a Delaware-based power company yesterday withdrew a plan to build a power plant in rural northern Harford County near Whiteford. The sudden decision by Conectiv Inc. to withdraw the project followed a meeting Thursday night at a church in Street, where more than 300 angry residents voiced their objections to the power-plant concept before a group of utility officials. "Some of the comments weren't fit for a place of God, but the people told the utility people exactly how they felt," said Bill Hanna, owner of the 150-acre Quigley Farm in Whiteford and vice chairman of the Community Council for Whiteford, Cardiff, Pylesville and Street.

Del. Donald C. Fry, a Democrat from northern Harford County, was named to the state Senate yesterday to finish the term of William H. Amoss, who died in office last month.Gov. Parris N. Glendening named Fry, 42, a lawyer and two-term member of the House of Delegates, after the Democratic central committees of Harford and Cecil counties voted unanimously late last week to recommend him.Regina Simon, a Fallston businesswoman, also submitted her name to the committees, but Fry was the apparent choice from the beginning.

Jim Galbreath went to the front door of his house in northern Harford County about 9: 30 p.m. Tuesday to call the family's cat -- and instead found a black bear weighing about 150 pounds walking around the front yard."

Sixteen months after its creation, the Mason Dixon Business Association is going strong."The association has really taken off. It has filled a need that was here and we keep gaining membership," said Robert A. Schwalenberg, a founder of the group and regional manager for Forest Hill Bank's northern territory.The business association, which first met in June 1994, is trying to unite the businesses scattered along the Maryland-Pennsylvania line in northern Harford and southern York County, Pa.It also is trying to increase the political clout of businesses in the two counties that frequently have felt ignored by politicians.

Sixteen months after its creation, the Mason Dixon Business Association is going strong."The association has really taken off. It has filled a need that was here and we keep gaining membership," said Robert A. Schwalenberg, a founder of the group and regional manager for Forest Hill Bank's northern territory.The business association, which first met in June 1994, is trying to unite the businesses scattered along the Maryland-Pennsylvania line in northern Harford and southern York County, Pa.It also is trying to increase the political clout of businesses in the two counties that frequently have felt ignored by politicians.

The Renaissance AllSports Athletic Club bills its North Harford 10K as "medium hilly," but most runners who annually do the loop course in Pylesville know better.That's because race director Dave Starnes, the cross country and track coach at North Harford High School, had a hand in outlining the course. Before a Harford County ruling prohibited student running off campus, Starnes would train his teams on much of the North Harford course.In the absence of that, Starnes must content himself with putting the Northern Harford 10K field through his course on the "rolling" hills of northern Harford County.

Saying recent well tests revealed potentially hazardous amounts of aluminum in their drinking water, a group of northern Harford County residents is asking the state to halt work at a private sludge-drying operation.Backing up the request, Harford County Executive Eileen M. Rehrmann said the operation, Chesapeake Resource Reclamation Center, should be forbidden to accept any more "alum sludge" until more is known about the potential threat and until ground water flows in the region are investigated further.