Super Pride

The people hanging around the Cherry Hill shopping center weren't ready to celebrate the news that a market was coming to the old Super Pride spot. They've heard such promises for nearly two years and still don't have a full-service grocery. That could change this summer. The city's Board of Estimates approved this month a $50,000 grant needed to bring a market back to this neighborhood of 11,000 people south of the Hanover Street Bridge. To date, $750,000 in loans and grants from public and private agencies have been lined up, with $50,000 from the developer, Integrity Foods LLC. Yet residents are sticking to a "I'll believe it when I see it" attitude.

~TC Baltimore police assigned special units to patrol shopping center parking lots near the edges of the city yesterday to try to stem the tide of armed robberies at supermarkets and fast-food restaurants that has been rising since last fall.The move came one day after holdups by gangs of armed men at two more supermarkets brought the area's total to 19 and four days after police thought they had broken up the gang responsible for the robberies with six arrests Friday night.Now, police think they are faced with copycats trying to imitate the other gang, spokesman Dennis S. Hill said yesterday.

John Parker, the manager of a Howard Park hardware store, remembers the days when he walked to the nearby Super Pride to grab a few items for lunch. "I used to love to get something from that supermarket, bring it back here and cook it," Parker recalled. The Super Pride store closed five years ago, creating a major inconvenience for Parker and others in the Northwest Baltimore neighborhood. With the loss of their only supermarket, Howard Park residents must drive miles to grocery stores in other communities.

Tonya Rice's cart overflowed with snow-day comfort foods: boxes of ice cream, bags of Utz chips, fat cans of Glory collard greens, 2-liter bottles of ginger ale and the packet of Gummi worms her daughter Imani dipped into while they shopped. Two months ago, shopping at another store far from her East Baltimore home, such a full cart would have meant a costly hack ride for Rice. Yesterday, the 29-year-old mother discovered the benefits of shopping at a neighborhood grocery store: a quick walk home carrying her bags.

George L. Small, a philanthropist who founded a wildlife preserve in Kenya and helped set up an alternative school there for at-risk Baltimore pupils, died Monday at his Roland Park home from complications of a brain tumor. He was 81. From 1945 to 1976, Mr. Small ran his family's York, Pa.-based food distribution business, P.A. & Small Co. The business had been in his family from the 1700s, until it merged with another company in 1976. The real love of his life was the outdoors. He was an avid fisherman and canoeist who, in 1969, inherited from his brother a 50,000-acre, 20-mile-long ranch in Kenya called Mpala.

PIKESVILLE -- A flatbed tractor-trailer laden with steel overturned yesterday morning on Interstate 695, injuring the driver and her passenger and stalling traffic for more than two hours.The accident occurred about 11: 30 a.m. as the truck rounded the curve near Interstate 795, said Sgt. Robert Lipsky of the Maryland State Police. The load of steel shifted and broke through the restraining straps, causing the truck to flip over, Lipsky said.Driver Loraine White, 58, and passenger Jim White, 68, were taken to Sinai Hospital for treatment of minor injuries, where they were in good condition yesterday, hospital officials said.

Kevin Cox, whose case involving a 1996 crime spree was initially dismissed by a Baltimore judge for procedural errors, was picked up by FBI agents Thursday night, hours after he and a co-defendant were indicted on federal charges stemming from the spree.Apparently oblivious to the publicity surrounding his case, Cox reported to a probation office Thursday in Hyattsville. A probation officer called the FBI, and Cox was arrested and transported to a Baltimore County jail in Woodlawn.Yesterday, FBI agents brought Cox to U.S. District Court in Baltimore for his first appearance on the federal indictment, handed up Thursday against Cox and co-defendant Christopher Wills.

A 25-year-old Westport man has been arrested and charged in the Friday night robbery of a Liberty Road supermarket that may have been the latest in a string of holdups by a roving gang of shotgun-wielding bandits, police said.The theft of $5,100 from the Super Pride store in the 7400 block of Liberty Road came one night after a group of robbers took about $800 from 27 patrons of a Chi-Chi's restaurant in Timonium.However, Baltimore County police spokesman Sgt. Steven Doarnberger said police have no hard evidence that Thursday and Friday's robberies are linked, except for similarities in weaponry, types of dress and method.

A neighborhood meeting in Northwest Baltimore to discuss a new supermarket opened with soft organ music and bowed heads, demonstrating the importance of such a facility to a community that has done without one for more than a decade. "We pray this night for this area, called Howard Park, in particular," the Rev. Donald Sterling said Friday at the pulpit in New All Saints Catholic Church, off Liberty Heights Avenue. On either side of the altar were displayed plans for a 68,000-square-foot state-of-the-art grocery store with more than 200 parking spaces.

Reaction to letters, phone calls and faxes to Greg Kane, the notorious B.R.U.T. (Black Racist Uncle Tom):Dan Donavon, whose comments appeared in this column Wednesday, has a keen sense of the inferences people make. Human beings, when they make inferences, embrace instinctively the one that is least valid. Hence Donavon's concern when he read the following in my column."Dan Donavon, the business manager for Canaan [Discount Food Outlet] who said he has 15 years' experience at a meat director for Super Pride and Stop, Shop and Save, claimed freezing meat with expired sell-by dates is standard procedure for food stores.