Paratroopers

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Ridgely Gaither, a pioneer paratrooper who served as police commissioner of Annapolis after retiring in 1962 as commander of the 2nd Army at Fort Meade, died Monday of heart failure at the Fairfield Nursing Center in Crownsville.Services for General Gaither, who was 89 and lived in Annapolis Roads, will be conducted at 11 a.m. Monday at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, in Church Circle in Annapolis, followed at 1 p.m. by services at Arlington National Cemetery.Born in Baltimore, he was a graduate of Boys' Latin School and began his career as a military officer in 1924 after his graduation from St. John's College in Annapolis.

William Robert McMahon Jr., a retired ironworker and World War II paratrooper, died of cancer Thursday at his home in Conover, N.C. He was 81 and a former resident of Anne Arundel County's Poplar Ridge neighborhood. Born and raised in South Baltimore, Mr. McMahon left school in the ninth grade to help support his family. During World War II, he enlisted in the Army and was assigned as a paratrooper to the 101st Airborne Division, known as the Screaming Eagles. On June 5, 1944, the eve of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, Mr. McMahon's 501st Parachute Infantry unit was flown to France, where it jumped and landed behind Utah Beach to prevent German reinforcements from reaching the area.

A Maryland National Guard paratrooper was killed Friday night while making a practice jump at a baseball stadium in Delaware before the home opener for the Wilmington Blue Rocks minor league baseball team.Master Sgt. David C. Horan Sr., 50, of Kent Island, was killed about 4 p.m. when he got tangled in a cable and fell about 90 feet, hitting a fence outside the stadium, said Capt. Drew Sullins, a National Guard spokesman. Horan was pronounced dead at Christiana Hospital in Delaware.The parachute program scheduled to take place during opening day ceremonies for the Kansas City Royals farm team was canceled, but the game was played.

WASHINGTON - Chances are, you've never heard of culturally essential Americans such as Enid Bissett, Orla Watson and Earl C. Tupper. Their genius will be on display in a new traveling Smithsonian Institution exhibition of sketches, patent illustrations and factory drawings for products that shaped the nation in profound but humble ways. Take Charles Brannock of Syracuse, N.Y., the inventor of the Brannock Device. You know it as the shoe-store gizmo that measures foot length and width.

Guy Gilbert Mealy, an insurance agent who flew behind German lines on missions to drop paratroopers before the Normandy invasion, died Monday of lung cancer at Stella Maris Hospice. He was 69.A lifelong Baltimore resident, he attended city schools and in 1942, during World War II, he left the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute to enlist in the Army Air Corps. He was 17.He was an armorer in the 366th Fighter Group of the Ninth Air Force in Belgium, France, England and Germany."He flew behind enemy lines when they dropped the paratroopers the night before the [D-Day]

It was the soldier's smile that struck mourners who viewed images of Spc. Ari D. Brown-Weeks yesterday as they filed into Mountain Christian Church in Harford County. The video montage of family photos spanned Brown-Weeks' 23 years of life, from beaming infant to proud uniformed soldier whose first name means "lion." "That smile stands out in all the pictures," said the Rev. Victor Harner, pastor of the church on Mountain Road in Joppa. "It is the key to his inner spirit. And that name is fitting for a warrior and hero."

Maryland has a wonderful state treasurer in Richard N. Dixon.Just ask him."I'm the most qualified treasurer in the country. And as I talk to my fellow treasurers, it's clear I'm the most powerful," Dixon says.Son of a janitor and a product of segregated schools, Dixon first drew notice in Annapolis as a member of the House of Delegates.He impressed people with his knowledge of the budget -- and with his style, tooling around in a red Corvette, smoking cigars and wearing a mink overcoat.But the former Army paratrooper and stockbroker from Carroll County seems to have found his calling as Maryland's chief financial steward.

KARBALA, Iraq - Four U.S. soldiers were killed late Thursday night and early yesterday in two incidents - a roadside bombing in Baghdad and a brief, fierce firefight between U.S. paratroopers and gunmen in this Shiite Muslim holy city south of the capital. Their deaths brought to 336 the number of Americans reported killed since the war began March 20. The Karbala clash also marked the deadliest incident for U.S. troops since Sept. 18, when three soldiers were slain near the city of Tikrit.

CHESTERTOWN -- A 19-year-old paratrooper from Kent County, eight months past his high school graduation, was killed in an accident outside Baghdad, becoming the eighth casualty from Maryland since U.S. forces invaded Iraq nearly a year ago. Pvt. Bryan Nicholas Spry, a driver with the elite 82nd Airborne, died Friday after the Humvee he was driving turned over, landing upside down and pinning the former junior varsity baseball player in a water-filled ditch,...

IN THE SKIES OVER NORTHERN IRAQ - More than 1,000 U.S. Army paratroops opened the war's northern front in dramatic fashion yesterday when they jumped out of low-flying jets in the dark of night and seized an airfield in Iraq's Kurdish-controlled region. The bold, carefully planned mission by the 173rd Airborne Brigade was the 29th combat jump in U.S. history and one of the largest paratroop drops since World War II. The paratroops, many of them Army Rangers, flew directly from Aviano Air Force Base in northern Italy, near their base in Vicenza.