Sanitation

AMONG THE permanent changes of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is this: E-mail has acquired new respectability. Arbiters of social etiquette may quibble about the correctness of e-mailed invitations or love letters. In the end, though, people make their own choices. And to many, e-mail has become less threatening than opening a handwritten envelope. The truly remarkable aspect of this monumental lifestyle change is the speed with which it has been adopted. Until three decades ago, e-mail was just an idea in the head of inventor Ray Tomlinson.

Susan Alvarez knows better than to tell strangers what she does for a living. At least not straight off, when people first ask. Once she answers, the 46-year-old braces for the usual reaction. "Ooooh, how can you do that?" she mimics, drawing out the "oooooohh," and feigning a look of creeped-out curiosity. "That" is running a funeral home. Embalming bodies. Handling caskets. Driving a hearse. Facing the fresh grief of one family after another at Alvarez Funeral Directors, the small business she owns on Chicago's West Side.

Baltimore residents may drop off as many as 10 vehicle tires, with or without rims, tomorrow at the Northwest Transfer Station, 5030 Reisterstown Road. In conjunction with Maryland Department of the Environment's Tire Amnesty Day, the city Department of Public Works encourages residents to clear homes of discarded tires. The state will bear the cost of disposing of the tires. The Public Works department also says residents can place up to four rimless tires with their regular trash twice weekly.

QUESTION OF THE MONTH September's question asked readers to send us photos or write us letters about the "trashy stories" in their neighborhood. Who's to blame for trash: the city or its citizens? This trash has been sitting here for two months. It's behind the 400 block of N. Milton Ave. off Jefferson Street in East Baltimore. The rats playing in this trash are big as cats. Children also play in this area. Repeated calls for a clean up have been unsuccessful. John Parrish Baltimore When I saw the picture of a heap of trash sitting behind a group of rowhouses, it made me wonder: Why would a neighborhood not band together to clean it up ("The City That Reeks," editorial, Aug. 30)

Dog owners in Taneytown can walk their leashed dogs wherever they want - as long as they don't go for a stroll in three of the city's four public parks. Under a new city ordinance, dogs are allowed only at Roberts Mill Park, the city's newest, on Route 194. There, owners must keep dogs on leashes and clean up after them. The ordinance, which went into effect July 10, is something Taneytown has considered for years. It was prompted by the growing number of complaints about dog owners not cleaning up after their animals at parks, and police being at a disadvantage to enforce anything but leash violations.

James Marion Hooper, founder and president of Harford Sanitation Services, died of cancer Thursday at his Bel Air home. He was 83. In 1954, he founded the refuse collection company, which now employs 120 people who work on approximately 50 trucks. Described as a hard-working and religious man, he rose before dawn to get his trucks out and spent the rest of the day farming some family-owned land in Street. He also welded his own trash containers. Born in Reckord in Harford County, he attended Fallston Elementary School.

Trash-strewn streets undermine the effort to better Baltimore On May 31, bills were introduced in the Baltimore City Council that called for increasing fines for violating sanitation and health codes when disposing of garbage and hiring more sanitation police. Trash undermines Baltimore's economic development, as potential employers decide to move their businesses elsewhere, where things are cleaner. It also undermines the city's efforts to fight crime. Along with rats, trash-strewn streets breed indifference and low city pride, neither of which helps the effort to reduce crime.

WHERE DO WE go now that the free hot dogs and sodas have been gobbled up and volunteers of Mayor Martin O'Malley's spring clean-up have gone home? The mayor's trash attack was a success, symbolically: It showed a cleaner city is an achievable goal. Over two days, an army of 3,000 volunteers and 1,000 city workers removed 2,700 tons of trash, including 1,000 tires, from streets, alleys and vacant spaces. Even though that's twice as much as is collected on two days on regular garbage routes, the clean-up hardly made a dent.

Glenda Gentner lives on the right street in the wrong neighborhood.She operates Gentner Bed and Breakfast from a rowhouse in the 2000 block of Park Ave., which has all the flair of a Manhattan penthouse.But beyond her courtyard garden of potted plants and goldfish ponds are several Reservoir Hill alleys that have become lined with minidumps. Heaped with up to 6 feet of trash -- the result of illegal dumping and overflow from residential back yards -- these minidumps have become feeding grounds for rats, and fodder in an escalating blame game.

Dorothy Shipley Granger, former public relations director of -- Baltimore's Bureau of Sanitation, civic activist and editor of "The Shipleys of Maryland," died Sunday of heart failure at Stella Maris Hospice at Mercy Medical Center. She was 99 and a longtime Bolton Hill resident.Mrs. Granger was making preparations for her 100th birthday celebration next month."She would have turned 100 on Jan. 19," said former Democratic state Sen. Julian L. Lapides, a friend of many years and personal representative.