Talbot County

The family of a Talbot County waterman who was shot and killed by a Natural Resources Police officer last year has filed a federal lawsuit against both the department and the officer, seeking $80 million in damages. Officer 1st Class Hubert F. Brohawn shot waterman Thomas S. Sherwood Jr., 49, three times in the chest on a dock in Bellevue in August. Brohawn said Sherwood was advancing toward him and swung a bumper jack, and the officer said he felt threatened. Sherwood died at the scene.

F. Hooper Bond, a former law firm partner and Talbot County school board member, died Tuesday of complications from pneumonia at Memorial Hospital in Easton. He was 78. Born and raised in Baltimore's Mount Washington neighborhood, Mr. Bond graduated at 16 from St. Paul's School in 1944. He then enrolled at the Johns Hopkins University. In 1946, Mr. Bond enlisted in the Army. He was based at Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, according to his family. After a brief stint in the Army, Mr. Bond returned to Hopkins to finish his studies and joined the campus ROTC program.

TRAPPE -- For nearly 40 years, beach-bound Marylanders have sped past the old ferry that sits, squat and square, ever-changing yet seemingly indestructible, at the western end of the Choptank River bridge. The Hampton Roads' nine-lives kind of history has been limited only by the whimsy, vision and money of a procession of entrepreneurs. Among its incarnations: an upscale restaurant with white tablecloths, some lesser eateries, two or three different bars. There were a couple of antiques businesses -- including one set off by a red-white-and-blue paint job to mark the 1976 Bicentennial -- and an indoor flea market.

HELEN BALDWIN RICHARDSON; beloved wife of Norbert J. Richardson, Sr., widow of William H. "Buzz" Baldwin, died Monday, January 8, 2007, at Talbot Hospice House, Easton, MD. Mrs. Richardson is survived by her husband, two daughters, four grandchildren, a great-granddaughter, a nephew and three step-children. She lived most of her life on the Western Shore in Baltimore and Howard County, where she spent 20 years helping to establish the Glenelg Country School. In 1974 she and Buzz moved to Waverly House where they worked on restoring the house and gardens.

Arthur R. Higginbottom, a retired Talbot County public school official and former county YMCA president, died of heart failure Thursday at Memorial Hospital in Easton. The longtime Tunis Mills resident was 97. Mr. Higginbottom was born and raised in Millbury, Mass., a suburb of Worcester. At Clark University in Worcester, he earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1932 and a master's in chemistry and guidance in 1941. While directing the New York Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund's camp on the Hudson River during college summers, Mr. Higginbottom met and fell in love with the former Roberta MacRae, who also worked for the program.

Two college students with ties to Maryland were among 32 Americans selected to be 2007 Rhodes scholars, it was announced yesterday. They are Casey N. Cep, a senior at Harvard University who grew up on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and Sean A. Genis, a senior at the U.S. Naval Academy who is from Pennsylvania. Winning the scholarship means both students will spend two or three years studying at Oxford University in England starting in October. Cep and Genis were selected from among 896 applicants at 340 colleges and universities in the United States.

EASTON -- A month after citing a landlord for dozens of housing code violations, embarrassed Talbot County officials are struggling to find homes for eight low-income families who are facing eviction Sunday from dilapidated bungalows barely a stone's throw from the cafes and boutiques in this upscale county seat. Landlord Norris E. Taylor ordered his tenants on Brickyard Lane to leave by Oct. 1 so he can repair the houses or demolish them. County officials issued more than 100 pages of emergency repair orders for the houses, which are just outside town.

Seal discovered in Talbot yard released in ocean A 50-pound hooded seal discovered in a Talbot County backyard has been released into the ocean. Liz Fischer of Royal Oak noticed the seal in her yard Thursday morning. She called the state Department of Natural Resources, which asked the National Aquarium in Baltimore to retrieve the animal. Aquarium workers hosed down the seal, put it in a dog carrier and drove it to Assateague State Park, where it was released in the Atlantic. It was the third hooded seal found in Maryland in the past decade, according to Connie Barclay of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Program.

Roberta M. Higginbottom, a retired Eastern Shore educator who was active in her church, died of pneumonia Thursday at her Tunis Mills home where she had lived since 1950. She was 87. She was born Roberta MacRae in New York City, the daughter of immigrant parents from Scotland, and raised in Jamaica, N.Y. She earned a bachelor's degree from Smith College in 1939, and a master's degree in zoology from Wellesley College in 1941. "My parents met each other when they were both working for the Herald Tribune Fresh Air Fund and were married in 1941," said a daughter, Pamela Lee Carey of Towson.

With its pillars and stone walls on a prominent hilltop in Ellicott City, the Patapsco Female Institute was once a 19th-century vision of a Greek temple: an academy to educate and refine young ladies and "future mothers." But in southern Anne Arundel County, a humble, even homely one-room structure built several decades later was all the Nutwell School could offer its students. The myth of the little red schoolhouse has only a kernel of truth, says James G. Gibb, an Annapolis-based archaeologist.