Service Station

An armed bandit robbed an employee at the Gunpowder Cove Mobil gas station in Joppa last Sunday evening, the county Sheriff's Department said.Police gave this account of the robbery: A man entered the service station in the 500 block of Joppa Farm Road about 7:30 p.m., walked behind the station's attendant and placed a weapon against the employee's back. The employee did not know what kind of weapon the man used.The suspect grabbed cash from the employee's shirt pocket and then fled. The suspect was described as a black male, 26 to 30 years old, wearing a bright green jacket.

At first, the soldier's behavior was puzzling. He appeared to be having hallucinations. He was anxious. He became belligerent. A drug test identified the problem: The young man had become the latest service member at Fort Meade to experience an adverse reaction to synthetic marijuana. Commanders at the Army base in Anne Arundel County, home to the National Security Agency, the U.S. Cyber Command and other sensitive activities, are cracking down on cheap, widely available and dangerous marijuana substitutes that have been linked nationally to suicides and homicides.

Leroy Haupt, a retired Northeast Baltimore service station manager, died of pneumonia Wednesday at Good Samaritan Hospital. The Parkville resident was 87. Born in Baltimore and raised on Fairmount Avenue and Mosher Street, he attended seven grades of city public school and went to work as an auto body painter to help support his family. During World War II, he served in the Army in North Africa, Italy and Southern France. He drove an amphibious vehicle. After the war, he managed an Amoco station at Mount Royal Avenue and St. Paul Street until 1959, when he starting running what was then an Esso station at the Alameda Shopping Center.

From the man who tried unsuccessfully to use his car as a getaway vehicle for a theft — but ultimately carried the loot to the Linthicum light rail station — to repeated damage that threatened to cost him a take-home car from work, Bruce Henkel has had enough of problems he says the station has brought to his neighborhood. The Anne Arundel County plumbing inspector lives a stone's throw from the station — as he says damage to his property indicates. In the past year, youths have pitched stones from the station that broke two windows and dented his take-home car, and damaged his home.

Henry R. "Bud" Kuczinski, longtime Baltimore County service station owner and pool player, died Saturday of cirrhosis of the liver at his Essex home. He was 71. Mr. Kuczinski was born in Baltimore and raised near Patterson Park. Two days after graduating from Patterson High School in 1954, he enlisted in the Navy and served as a communications technician for eight years. After his 1962 discharge, Mr. Kuczinski purchased a Gulf station on Highland Avenue, and subsequently purchased and sold three more service stations before buying what became Bud's Exxon on Eastern Avenue.

The owner of Hilltop Service Station and Garage in the 2700 block of Hanover Pike in Manchester escaped serious injury yesterday when a 250-gallon oil tank exploded.Glenn C. Renfro, 41, said he was standing on a ladder trying to restart the garage furnace and blower, which hang from the ceiling above the oil tank, when both ends of the metal tank blew out.Mr. Renfro said he does not know how he got down from the ladder to stand on the concrete floor next to the burning oil. He suffered only minor smoke inhalation, rescue officials said.

A former Severna Park family filed suit yesterday against a neighborhood service station, claiming the station polluted their well water, making them so sick they needed hospital treatment.Gregory Braun Sr., Lillian Braun and their four children allege in a suit filed in county Circuit Court that while living at 38 Robinson Landing Road from 1977 to 1991 they drank and bathed in well water tainted by the Severna Park Shell station in the 500 block of Ritchie Highway.The suit alleges the station's management negligently repaired and maintained its underground gasoline pipes, so that gas and gas fumes seeped into the drinking water of the Braun home.

BOWIE -- When drivers peer at the prices on the gasoline pumps at the Pleasant Hill Sunoco station on Reisterstown Road, they get angry. Now station owner Rick Caudill says he is getting angry back."

Miriam G. "Murph" Hoxter, a retired state unemployment claims supervisor who owned a filling station, died of cancer Monday at Memorial Hospital at Easton. The Stevensville resident was 71. Born in Timonium, Miriam Howard was a 1950 graduate of Towson High School. She was a claims supervisor with the state's old Department of Employment Security in Towson and was an owner and operator of the Valley Exxon service station at Falls and Joppa roads in Brooklandville. She retired in 1985. She enjoyed painting ceramics and Chesapeake Bay fishing.

FINKSBURG - Two men held up a gas station Friday night and made off with an undetermined amount of cash, state police said. Shortly after 10 p.m., two robbers entered the Sandymount Amoco station in the 2100 block of Baltimore Blvd. One man ordered a cashier to open the cash register while the other pointed a handgun at the cashier, police said. The cashier turned over the money and the men fled.

2 child-care centers will remain open Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon has decided not to close two child care centers, reversing a cut proposed in her initial 2010 spending plan. The mayor determined Friday that federal grant money can be used to keep the centers in Northwood and Waverly open. The centers were among the services the city planned to cut to fill a $65 million gap in the budget that begins in July. The two centers serve 85 children and cost $126,000 yearly to operate. -Annie Linskey Man found dead behind gas station City police are investigating the apparent beating death of a man whose body was found Sunday behind a service station near Northwestern High School in the city's Fallstaff neighborhood.

Charles Talbot Gladstone Jr., a service station owner who founded the Maryland Independent Service Station Dealers Association, died of complications from dementia Dec. 14 at Quail Run, an assisted-living facility in Perry Hall. The former longtime Timonium resident was 73. Mr. Gladstone, the son of a filling station owner, was born in Baltimore and raised on Parklawn Avenue. He was a 1953 graduate of Polytechnic Institute and earned a bachelor's degree in education from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1957.

A plan to bring a gas station and carwash to the Waverly Woods Village Center in western Howard County died Wednesday when the county Zoning Board unanimously voted against a zoning change in the fifth hearing on the matter. "I'm obviously very disappointed in the outcome of the case," Rick Levitan, co-owner of the petitioner, Convenience Retailing LLC, said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. "I'm shocked that this Zoning Board showed no regard for the recommendations of its own Department of Planning and Zoning (DPZ)

A gas station owner will get more time to put together a bid to get zoning changed to allow a service station and car wash in Waverly Woods Village Center. Convenience Retailing LLC has been working on the project for about two years and has attended three public hearings on the matter. A Zoning Board hearing set for last week has been moved to Dec. 12. "We needed a little bit more time to prepare for our final argument," said Rick Levitan, whose company has gas stations in Dorsey's Search, Owen Brown and Pikesville.

A gas station proposed for Waverly Woods is the lesser of two evils in a contest with a possible fast-food restaurant, some residents and business operators believe. Others welcome the service station proposed for Waverly Woods Village Center shopping center by Convenience Retailing LLC as a way to draw new customers and to eliminate a roughly five-mile drive to get gas. "It is definitely better than a fast-food restaurant," said H.J. Pflueger, who lives in Waverly Woods, about six blocks from the service station proposed for the intersection of Warwick Way and Birmingham Way. "Then people come, they eat and they throw it around.

Wells for a half-dozen homes in the Randallstown area have been tested after gasoline contamination was detected in groundwater at a property with a long history of pollution problems, according to the Maryland Department of the Environment. The tests are a precaution - required because concentrations of benzene and MTBE were found recently in shallow groundwater near Charlie's Service Station on Liberty Road near Wards Chapel Road, said Herb Meade, administrator of the MDE's oil control program.

C. Burke "Stoney" Carr of Ellicott City, owner and operator of service stations in Wheaton, Waldorf and Woodlawn from the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s, died Aug. 10 at his home after a five-year bout with cancer. He was 55.Before leaving the service station business for a civilian job at Fort Meade in 1986, Mr. Carr ran the Shell service station at Forest Park Drive and Security Boulevard in Woodlawn. He retired from Fort Meade for health reasons in 1989.He previously worked for Proctor-Silex and SCM Corp.

Inmate admits killing convicted murderer A state prison inmate pleaded guilty yesterday to strangling Richard Spicknall, who was serving life sentences for killing his two young children. Lawrence Joseph Lannin, 37, will see no discernible punishment for the crime: He was sentenced in Anne Arundel County Circuit Court to life without parole, adding to the two life sentences he's already serving for a pair of 1994 murders in Prince George's County. Last Dec. 9, Lannin strangled Spicknall, 34, with his hands, then a cord, in a shower at the Jessup Correctional Institution, where both men were housed in protective custody, separated from the general prison population.

Wilton Andrews Elburn Sr., a former manager of a Falls Road service station and a volunteer, died Sunday of complications from pneumonia at Northwest Hospital Center. The longtime Reisterstown resident was 63. Mr. Elburn was born in Baltimore and grew up in the Medfield neighborhood. After graduating from Polytechnic Institute in 1961, he served in the Coast Guard for several years. In the 1960s, he went to work for Elburn's Garage in the 4400 block of Falls Road, which had been established by his father and grandfather in 1932.