Sociology

MIGNON N. LIEBERMAN died of natural causes July 1, 2007 at her home in Phoenix, AZ. Born Mignon Newman in Baltimore, MD, she graduated from Western High School and, what is now known as, Towson University. While attending Towson University, she met her future husband, Sidney Lieberman D.D.S. They married in June of 1938. Together they opened Dr. Lieberman's dental practice on Eutaw Place, which subsequently moved to Park Heights Avenue. Before the birth of her two sons, she taught elementary school for Baltimore City School System.

Academic, activity and leadership awards were presented to seven area students at the annual Spring Awards Ceremony at Western Maryland College.Laura Boesler of Westminster, a junior mathematics major, won the Charles J. Miller Award for Excellence in Mathematics.Gaelen Cross of Sykesville, a junior biochemistry major, was given the Harry Clary Jones Scholarship in Chemistry. The award, along with a scholarship in physics, honors the memory of Jones, a longtime faculty member at WMC.Lindsey Drager of Eldersburg, a junior history and English double major, was given the James D. Essig Memorial Scholarship.

WITH WORD THAT Hustler publisher Larry Flynt will pay $1 million to any woman who can prove that she had sex with a member of Congress, columnist Susan Reimer has taken a brief leave of absence to pursue this important development.Reimer reports that she will attempt to get Flynt to pick up the tab for a pair of movie tickets for her and her husband - if the happy couple can agree on a movie.While she is busy negotiating financial sponsorship of her marriage, Reimer has left the following true facts to consider.

IF AMERICANS have learned anything from the political traumas of the last 30 years -- the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the war in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard M. Nixon, the Iran-contra scandal that almost did the same for Ronald Reagan -- it is that their government has much to hide. The final words of Oliver Stone's controversial film, "Nixon," tell us that the former president spent the last 20 years of his life fighting for control of 4,000 hours of conversations secretly recorded during his years in the White House, and that all but 60 hours remain locked up. What secrets are hidden in that vast archive of Nixon's compulsive talk with the handful of men he trusted about his fears, his enemies, his plans, his past?

"Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music," by Simon Frith. Harvard University Press. 352 pages. $27.95.One of the great terrors of junior high school math was the proof. As none of us particularly cared what, if y equaled 26, x might turn out to be, the notion of supporting those calculations with layers of mind-numbing logic seemed especially perverse. Sensing this, the teachers tried to put our puny efforts into perspective by observing that university-level mathematicians were expected to work lengthy proofs demonstrating that one plus one did, in fact, equal two.Many of us, I suspect, gave up then and there.

"Saints and Schemers: Opus Dei and Its Paradoxes," by Joan Estruch. Translated by Elizabeth Ladd Glick. 352 pages. New York: Oxford University Press. $27.50On May 17, 1992, more than 200,000 people, including 33 cardinals and 200 bishops, assembled under the hot sun in Saint Peter's square to watch Pope John Paul II beatify Monsignor Josemaria Escriva de Balaguer. It was a mere 17 years after Msgr. Escriva's death and seemed to betoken a swift ascent to sainthood for the founder of Opus Dei, the secretive traditionalist organization within the Catholic Church whose ties reach from Franco Spain to Latin America and the Philippines, with allies as various as Belgium's Queen Fabiola, Italy's Northern League and influential members of the Vatican curia.

William Manning Rountree, 78, a veteran diplomat who served under six presidents and was an ambassador to Pakistan, Sudan, South Africa and Brazil, died Friday in Gainesville, Fla. He also was assistant secretary of state for Near East, South Asia and African affairs in his 38 years of government service. He was a top aide to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and was awarded the State Department Superior Service Award for helping negotiate the admission of Greece and Turkey into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Josephine Garland, who headed the sociology and anthropology department at the College of Notre Dame of Maryland from 1967 to 1986 and had taught there from 1962 to 1965, died Saturday of cancer at Union Memorial Hospital. She was 69.Dr. Garland lived on Stony Run Lane in Baltimore.Her teaching career had also included periods at Marygrove College in Detroit, Catholic University in Washington, University of Scranton, Misericordia College near Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1987 and 1988, she taught criminal justice at the University of Baltimore.

COLLEGE PARK -- University of Maryland College Park instructor Scott McKearney wanted his 60 sociology students to address social problems through projects that pack a punch.He felt pummeled by their response. "I had the most earth-shattering experience," Dr. McKearney said this week. "Seven women over the course of three days came into my office, sat down, and told me they had been raped. I was seeing entirely too many tears," he said.Born of those students' tears was yesterday's 90-minute teach-in about acquaintance rape, at which women undergraduates read the words of students expressing shame and trauma in enduring assault at the hands of men they had trusted.

Being rich, it seems, isn't what it used to be.Once upon a time, wealth meant a lifestyle of leisure, luxury and protection from the hassles of everyday survival.But these days, what it takes to qualify is a $100,000 household income, according to President Clinton. The figure set off alarm bells across America because the president previously cited $200,000 as the threshold for those who will pay much higher tax rates.In any case, the president has focused a spotlight on the question of who is rich.

Joyce Anne Causey, a retired Social Security Administration supervisor who later became a real estate agent, died of cancer Nov. 5 at Gilchrist Hospice Care. The longtime Cedarcroft resident was 76. Miss Causey was born and raised in Tarboro, N.C. She earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.. in 1955. After earning a master's degree in sociology from North Carolina State University, she worked briefly as a social worker before taking a job with the SSA in North Carolina.

Like most NFL defensive tackles, Haloti Ngata has an insatiable appetite. The 6-foot-4, 345-pound Ravens lineman loves to devour Italian food (except during the season when he tries to keep healthy), anything with curry and his latest favorite - Maryland steamed crabs. At Glen Burnie's Seaside Restaurant, Ngata will go through a dozen of the largest crabs without breaking a sweat. If you try to interrupt him, the affable Ngata has been known to strike a glare that would make Kansas City Chiefs running back Larry Johnson shudder, showing he has become a true Baltimore guy. "When he's eating crabs, you don't really get many words out of him," said his wife of two years, Christina.

John Iverson Toland Jr., a retired sociology professor and former chairman of the department of sociology at Towson University who also volunteered at a Govans food pantry, died Saturday of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly called Lou Gehrig's disease, at St. Joseph Medical Center. He was 79. Dr. Toland was born in Birmingham, Ala., and was raised in Atlanta and Columbia, S.C., where he graduated from high school in 1948. After serving in the Navy from 1949 to 1951, he served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.

TELEVISION SWINGTOWN / / 10 p.m. Thursday. WJZ (Channel 13) ....................... One of the summer's more promising new dramas, Swingtown looks at life in a Midwestern suburb as the sexual revolution of the 1960s starts to permeate everyday, mainstream, middle-class American life in the '70s. Ultimately, the quality of the series will rise or fall on how committed the producers are to exploring the sociology -- as well as the sexuality -- of the times. So far, it looks like lots of sex -- not so much social anthropology.

A report prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families suggests that men's contribution to housework has doubled over the past 40 years, and they tripled the amount of time spent with the kids. The report, which is to be presented at the council's annual conference this week in Chicago, links these developments to marital health and a decreased likelihood of divorce. There is even the suggestion that the more husbands pitch in, the more willing wives will be to have sex. The key factor in the division of household chores seems to be her employment.

Vera D. Guttmann, a former Sister of Mercy and educator whose academic interests were sociology and Eastern religions, died Monday of cancer at Stella Maris Hospice in Timonium. She was 82 and had lived in the Glendale section of Baltimore County. Born Ruth Helen Duvall in Baltimore, she was raised in Govans and Waverly. After graduating from Seton High School in 1942, she entered the Sisters of Mercy and received the religious name Sister Mary Vera. She taught from 1946 to 1948 at Mount Washington Country School and from 1948 to 1949 at a parochial school in Mobile, Ala. Dr. Guttmann earned a bachelor's degree from Mount St. Agnes College in Mount Washington and a master's degree in sociology from Catholic University of America in 1951.

MIGNON N. LIEBERMAN died of natural causes July 1, 2007 at her home in Phoenix, AZ. Born Mignon Newman in Baltimore, MD, she graduated from Western High School and, what is now known as, Towson University. While attending Towson University, she met her future husband, Sidney Lieberman D.D.S. They married in June of 1938. Together they opened Dr. Lieberman's dental practice on Eutaw Place, which subsequently moved to Park Heights Avenue. Before the birth of her two sons, she taught elementary school for Baltimore City School System.

Mignon N. Lieberman, who donated works of art to Towson University as a memorial to her two sons, died in her sleep July 1 at her Phoenix, Ariz., home. The former Mount Washington resident was 93. Mignon Newman was born in Baltimore and was a 1931 Western High School graduate. She received a degree at what is now Towson University, where she met her future husband, Sidney Lieberman, a dentist. After their 1938 marriage, they worked together at his Eutaw Place dental practice, which moved to Park Heights Avenue in 1955.

Drs. Jose and Maria Ruiz of Clarksville, MD are happy to announce the marriage of their daughter, Maria Teresa Ruiz to Christopher Jason Zaneski, son of Mr. and Mrs. Chester and Kathleen Zaneski of Sykesville, MD on April 22, 2006. The ceremony was held at Saint Louis Church in Clarksville and the reception was held at Turf Valley Resort in Ellicott City. The bride holds a BS in Biology and Information Systems and works as a software developer in Rockville. The groom holds a BA in Sociology focused on Criminal Justice and works as an insurance broker in Columbia.

William W. O'Connor, a retired sociology teacher and activist who opposed the Vietnam War, died of cancer Aug. 28 at his Charles Village home. He was 83. Born in Baltimore and raised on Aiken Street, he was a 1940 graduate of City College and earned a bachelor's degree from Loyola College. He served in the Army Signal Corps in Germany during the U.S. occupation. Mr. O'Connor taught at a private school in Brussels, Belgium, and at Baltimore's Brehms Lane Elementary School. He retired in 1980 from what is now Baltimore City Community College, where he taught sociology and social issues as reflected in the daily news.