Postmaster

William L. Ridenour is scheduled to be sworn in as Baltimore's 39th postmaster at 1:30 p.m. today at a ceremony in the War Memorial Building. John E. Potter, the U.S. postmaster general, is to attend. Ridenour will oversee the postal operations at the main downtown post office and 30 stations and branches, with a total of 2,200 employees. He most recently was postmaster of Alexandria, Va. He began his postal career in 1980 as a mail carrier in Baltimore.

WASHINGTON -- The House of Representatives received another black eye yesterday when House Postmaster Robert V. Rota resigned amid reports that the scandal-plagued post office improperly cashed lawmakers' congressional and campaign checks.Mr. Rota, who has been postmaster for 20 years, announced his resignation on his 57th birthday in a brief letter to House Speaker Thomas S. Foley, D-Wash. He becomes the second House official to resign in the past week. House Sergeant-at-Arms Jack Russ, sharply criticized for the way he ran the now-closed House bank, quit on March 12 just before lawmakers agreed to identify all 355 House members and former lawmakers who wrote overdrafts at the bank.

Retired Baltimore Postmaster Warren M. Bloomberg's patriotism during the Vietnam War inspired him to create a poster: "This is Our Flag, Be Proud of It!"The poster became the all-time best seller at the Government Printing Office.Mr. Bloomberg died Wednesday at his home in Catonsville. He was 84 and suffered from heart disease.Mr. Bloomberg, who supervised mail service across Central Maryland from 1966 until his retirement in 1984, was one of the few postmasters of his time to rise through the ranks from clerk instead of being selected because of political connections, according to postal officials.

Henry Lester Long Jr., a longtime Ellicott City postmaster who helped develop and implement the placement of cluster mailboxes in Columbia, died Friday at Howard County General Hospital of a lung disease. He was 74.A resident of Ellicott City and its postmaster from 1947 to 1977, Mr. Long helped revise the county's mail system in the mid-1960s, when Columbia was in its infancy and expecting a population boom.Mr. Long believed that cluster mailboxes -- in which the mail for a dozen or more homes is placed in separate boxes of a large, centrally located mailbox -- would allow neighbors to mingle and become friendly with each other as they retrieved their mail, said his son, Henry Long III of Columbia.

Margaret K. Anders, the former postmaster of Oella and a longtime soup kitchen volunteer, died of pneumonia Feb. 5 at Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville. She was 88. Born Margaret Kilduff, she was the eldest of 10 children of an Abingdon blacksmith. After graduating from St. Stephens High School in Bradshaw and Mount St. Agnes College in Baltimore, she married Cecil Trinkhaus, the Oella postmaster in 1941. Mrs. Anders became the assistant postmaster and, when her husband died, she took over as postmaster in Oella.

When William L. Ridenour was sworn in yesterday as Baltimore's postmaster, it was the high point of a 27-year career that began when he became a letter carrier and steadily rose through the ranks of the U.S. Postal Service. Ridenour, who was born and raised in Baltimore, is the first Baltimorean to serve as the city's postmaster since 1966. It's a huge leap from the days when he endured rain, snow and barking dogs to deliver the mail in city neighborhoods. "This was really the job I strived for since I was a letter carrier in Baltimore," said Ridenour, who lives in Essex with his wife of 23 years, Anna.

Kelvin Mack, a 21-year veteran of the United States Postal Service, will take the oath of office today to become Baltimore's 36th postmaster. Mack, 47, who steps up to the postmaster position from being officer in charge in Baltimore, has run post office operations in Washington and managed mail processing operations at the Merrifield, Va., processing and distribution center. "The most important thing to me is to improve service to levels that we've never seen before, especially in the retail and delivery areas," he said yesterday.

WASHINGTON -- Postmaster General Anthony M. Frank's 20-month quest for a 30-cent first-class postage stamp ended in defeat yesterday when the Postal Service's board of governors refused to raise the basic rate from 29 cents.Six of the nine governors voted to approve the proposed "correction" in the cost of mailing a first-class letter, but the 1970 law that mandated the present pay-as-you go Postal Service system requires a unanimous vote to raise rates.Mr. Frank initially had sought a 30-cent first-class rate in March 1990, when the basic rate was still 25 cents.

A mail carrier who rose through the ranks became Baltimore's 35th postmaster during an induction ceremony yesterday at the U.S. District Court building.With his hand on a Bible, Michael S. Furey, 42, was sworn in by U.S. District Judge Frederic N. Smalkin, officially taking the seat HTC he had been warming since he took the job of acting postmaster last September.The scene -- akin to a wedding, with a judge and a priest present, as well as a color guard of Vietnam War veterans -- was in marked contrast to Furey's days as a mail carrier in Northern Virginia in the late 1970s and early 1980s when, he said, "I was chased by dogs, but they never caught me."

Lineboro 21088 is not the title of a new TV show. It's the post office and ZIP code for the small North Carroll hamlet where Maryland blends into Pennsylvania and straddles the Mason-Dixon Line.The Lineboro post office is in the former front parlor of Joyce O'Donnoghue's home at 4225 Main St. It is hard for the visitor to imagine that this is some far-flung tentacle of the U.S. Postal Service, but it is, right down to the FBI's Most Wanted posters thumbtacked to a bulletin board and a notice announcing a chicken potpie supper planned by the Lineboro Volunteer Fire Department next month.