Saul

Two men suspended in baskets painting the inside of a 90-foot water tank at the BGE power plant in Pasadena yesterday got a scare when one of the baskets fell, leaving the worker suspended by just a harness.Baltimore Gas and Electric spokesman Darcel Guy said that neither worker was hurt, but county EMS/Fire/Rescue workers spent about 45 minutes getting them out of the tank after a rescue attempt by BGE workers failed.Gilberto Saul and Mark Boucher of M P Industrial Coating in Sparrows Point were contracted to sandblast and paint the inside of the tank at the power plant in the 8000 block of Fort Smallwood Road.

Taiwan enlarges Lockheed pactLockheed Martin Corp. received a $123 million increase to an existing order from Taiwan for F-16 fighter jets, the Defense Department said.The company's Lockheed Fort Worth division is assembling 150 F-16s for Taiwan. The additional money awarded yesterday will help the company complete that work.The U.S. Air Force is acting as a middle man in this transaction under regulations governing foreign military sales.U.S. seeks change in trade warHoping to avoid more high-profile showdowns, the United States is seeking new methods to head off and solve trade disputes with Japan, a top U.S. trade official said yesterday.

The same whiz-bang computer magic that has compressed encyclopedias onto CD-ROM disks is about to be applied to the dusty rituals of browsing library shelves and reading jacket flaps.An interactive program that will allow teachers, parents and youngsters to quickly find just the right children's science books among 3,000 recent titles is under development at the University of Maryland Baltimore County."It's work that would take hours, and we can do it at lightning speed," said Dr. Wendy Saul, an associate professor of education at UMBC.

The Taneytown City Council last night passed an ordinance that will make it legal to build on lots existing before June 1972 that the town had previously considered too small to develop.Mayor Pro Tem W. Robert Flickinger said the proposal would affect about 22 lots.Under the new law, lots smaller than 7,500 square feet could be developed if the buildings could meet other requirements, such as setbacks from streets.Also last night, Steven D. Saul of the Community Map Co. of Pottsown, Pa., asked the council to distribute a map of the city that his firm would prepare.

Legg Mason Inc. plunged further into commercial mortgage banking yesterday, announcing it had purchased the $1.6 billion mortgage-servicing division of Chevy Chase-based B. F. Saul Co."The addition of B. F. Saul Co.'s commercial mortgage division is a good strategic fit for Legg Mason," said Raymond A. Mason, the company's chairman."We are able both to increase our mortgage-servicing portfolio and add strong new mortgage-banking capabilities in the Virginia and Washington, D.C., area.""The transaction is the sale of servicing rights to the loans, not the loans themselves," said Peter Sellwood, a B. F. Saul vice president who will become executive vice president of Legg Mason's mortgage-banking operation.

Legg Mason Inc. plunged further into commercial mortgage banking yesterday, announcing it had purchased the $1.6 billion mortgage-servicing division of Chevy Chase-based B. F. Saul Co."The addition of B. F. Saul Co.'s commercial mortgage division is a good strategic fit for Legg Mason," said Raymond A. Mason, the company's chairman. "We are able both to increase our mortgage-servicing portfolio and add strong new mortgage-banking capabilities in the Virginia and Washington, D.C., area.""The transaction is the sale of servicing rights to the loans, not the loans themselves," said Peter Sellwood, a B. F. Saul vice president who will become executive vice president of Legg Mason's mortgage-banking operation.

SAUL BELLOW: A BIOGRAPHY OF THE IMAGINATION.Ruth Miller.St. Martin's.385 pages. $24.95.Is Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow a great man, a luminary who can illuminate us? Or is he a slapstick comedian, a victim of his own shticks? Is he a genius or a jerk?Few American writers possess Saul Bellow's elegantly humane dignity, his personal grace. Few can match his world-recognized accomplishments, which seem to be a fulfillment of the fantasies of characters in his early novels -- or duplications in real life of the success of fictional creations like Henderson or Benn Crader.