Ontario

Lawrence "Larry" Albert Kopp, a national drag racing champion who began as a Rosedale tow-truck operator and mechanic, died of pancreatic cancer Monday at his Rosedale home. He was 56. For the past three decades, he rebuilt Chevrolets for racing, including Corvettes, and drove a quarter-mile in 7.594 seconds. He won the 1976 National Hot Rod Association Modified Eliminator Championship in Ontario, Calif., and the 1998 Pro Stock Truck title in Pomona, Calif. Mr. Kopp also appeared in Chevrolet advertising for its 1999 S-10, a small version of a pickup truck.

FORT EUSTIS, Va. -- Watch your step.You might not see rats -- the food's long gone -- but topside on some of the rusting ghost ships in the James River Reserve Fleet, you can see through holes to the deck below.Grass grows on the deck of the cargo ship Marine Fiddler, moss and weeds on others. Pigeons leave foot-high hills all over the World War II Liberty ship Arthur M. Huddle. Peeling paint hangs in strips from cabins in the oiler Saugatuck. Water covers floors in the tanker Truckee. Peregrine falcons are protected on another ship, but they didn't show up this year.

The old Baptist minister climbed the gangway of the old Liberty ship. By the time he reached the slanted deck, his eyes had moistened. For the first time in 56 years, since he was a teen-ager in the U.S. Navy Armed Guard, Richard W. Hass of upstate New York was back aboard a ship he thought no longer existed: the SS John W. Brown. "I can't keep the tears back," said Hass, now 75, as he boarded the Brown in Buffalo, N.Y. "I fired the Brown's five-inch gun at German planes in the [Mediterranean Sea]

SEVERN SCHOOL student Ebony Flowers will be traveling to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario this month as part of an environmental studies program.Ebony, 15, will work with scientists, taking soil samples, testing the water and analyzing the trees and animals during her 14-day stay.The park, the largest in Ontario, is north of Toronto, near the Quebec border.The trip is being funded by a grant to the Severn School from an alumnus. Teachers chose Ebony, a member of the Environment Club at the school.

TRAPPE -- Goose netting is a cold and calculated business.It's cold and you're calculating: Are there enough geese close to the net? Is it time to drop the nets yet? No, wait, there might be more in a minute or two. Another minute, and another. Watch. Wait. Calculate.Such was the reasoning early yesterday of Larry Hindman, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources waterfowl biologist, as he sat in a duck blind on a Talbot County farm.Mr. Hindman and about a half-dozen helpers had come to the farm before 8 a.m. to net geese in an effort to monitor the migratory waterfowl, whose numbers have dropped so low that hunting was banned this year along the Atlantic flyway, the birds' north-south migratory route.

CHICAGO -- Continuing a trend among large companies of cutting employment even in times of prosperity, the Whirlpool Corp. said yesterday that it would close two North American factories and reduce its worldwide work force by 3,200, more than 7 percent.The cutbacks will result in a one-time charge of $240 million against earnings in the current quarter, but are expected eventually to save $150 million in annual operating expenses. Whirlpool, based in Benton Harbor, Mich., has earned $249 million on sales of $6 billion in the first nine months of the year.

Flying from Baltimore to the Great White North will become one step easier when Air Ontario inaugurates non-stop service from Baltimore-Washington International Airport to Toronto July 6, state officials announced yesterday.The new seven-day-a-week service follows the March announcement by Israel's El Al airline that it would offer connecting service via North American Airlines from BWI to New York and on to Tel Aviv beginning June 22.The airline said it plans to petition the U.S. Department of Transportation for direct flights after the feeder service begins.

TORONTO -- The new socialist premier of Ontario, Canada's largest and richest province, spent most of his first weeks in office trying to dispel widespread fears that he is a dangerous radical.Robert Keith Rae, 42, an affable, boyish-looking Rhodes scholar who never thought he'd actually be elected as the nation's second-most-powerful politician, insists that socialism is "not a swear word," but a proud tradition in Canadian politics."This is all part of the 'I am not a wacko' campaign," Mr. Rae deadpanned to a steady procession of visitors.

Q: I want to go to the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, Canada, this fall. Could you tell me when it is on, how to get there without a car and how to get accommodations?A: The Shaw Festival Theater has been presenting plays by Shaw and his contemporaries (1856 to 1950) for 35 years in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a village founded in the 1780s by United Empire loyalists fleeing the American Revolution.In the summer of 1962 a local lawyer, Brian Doherty, converted the assembly rooms of the town's historic court house into a theater, and that year eight weekend performances of "Don Juan in Hell" and "Candida" were presented.

Gustavus A. McLeod, a Montgomery County businessman, sat out a snowstorm yesterday after flying into 50-mph head winds Wednesday as he attempted to be the first pilot to fly an open cockpit biplane to the geographic North Pole. McLeod, 45, took off from Montgomery County Airpark in Gaithersburg at 8: 56 a.m. Wednesday, carrying the ashes of a former flying buddy, Doug Loring Duff, in his 1939 Boeing Stearman. Duff, who died when his traffic plane crashed in fog near Bowie in November 1998, had promised to fly the support plane when McLeod made his polar flight.