Tribute

On the back of Kristi Zepp's warm-up T-shirt last night was a saying, "It's easier to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission," which sounds like a modern reading of the old saying, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." To her Westminster volleyball teammates, Beth Green, who died last Wednesday driving home from a match, will always be an angel, but she was never afraid to dive in headfirst. "It was her motto," said Zepp, a senior middle hitter at Westminster. "Her dad read it at her funeral.

Call her Maryland's Iron Lady. U.S. Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski was lauded Wednesday on the floor of the Senate for setting the record as the longest-serving woman in Congress, a streak that her colleague, Sen. Ben Cardin, likened to that of another Marylander: baseball's Iron Man. "Marylanders understand longevity records. We're very proud of our Cal Ripken," Maryland's junior senator said of the holder of baseball's consecutive-games streak. "Senator Mikulski's, like Cal Ripken's, legacy is what she has done in office, not the length of it. " For several hours, fellow senators from both parties rose to pay tribute to Mikulski, who joined the House of Representatives in 1976 and the Senate in 1986.

Jack Moseley, the former chairman and chief executive officer of USF&G Corp., has a reputation as a hard-nosed businessman who insists on having his way.That reputation was reinforced yesterday when he didn't show up for a tribute to his civic contributions to Baltimore."

THERE THEY sat. A sporting relic in a small glass box. The pair of crumpled, black, high-top cleats Johnny Unitas wore during his last game as a Baltimore Colt. Someone had left them on a table in the press box hours before the NFL's greatest quarterback was honored in a pre-game ceremony at Ravens Stadium yesterday. The sight of those cleats was enough to send a chill down your spine. At least mine, anyway. Everyone talks about that "Golden Arm," but that arm was only as good as Unitas' iron will, his competitive fire, his radar read of the defense and, yes, the feet.

WASHINGTON -- There were glasses of fine wines, plump Massachusetts oysters dotted with California caviar and plenty of rollicking stories. It was too much of everything and that, of course, made it a fitting tribute for R.W. "Johnny" Apple, who for the past four decades wrote with legendary gusto about politics and food for The New York Times. Yesterday, bright lights from politics, journalism and cuisine filled the 1,100-seat Eisenhower Theater in Washington's John F. Kennedy Center to celebrate the colorful life of the correspondent, who died in October at age 71. After a string of speeches recounting Apple's antics, the crowd was treated to lunch prepared by chefs of Washington-area restaurants.

The King isn't dead, not as far as Ace Anderson is concerned."Elvis -- it's like he never left," says Anderson, a former truck driverfrom Pasadena who now makes his living immortalizing the memory of rock 'n' roll's greatest legend.An Elvis Presley fan who talked his way into the singer's hotel room in 1976 and gradually gained acceptance among his entourage, Anderson, 43, runs an entertainment business that promotes Elvis-related events and bookings. With offices in Hollywood and Anne Arundel, Anderson is trying to go big time.

Katie Daniels, 13, received a hero's medal this month for poetry.The Silver Star, the third-highest military award designated solely for heroism in combat, was a gift from a Vietnam veteran grateful for Katie's tribute to his fallen comrades.The paths of John R. Jones, a retired Marine master sergeant, and the Sykesville Middle School pupil, who wrote "The Memories of the Soldiers in the Vietnam War," crossed at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. He was so impressed when Katie read her poem that he removed the medal from his cap and gave it to her."

Sam Fuller approached few things lightly. And that definitely included his movies, regardless of whether he was making them or talking about them. That much becomes clear in tonight's TCM premiere of The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller, in which the venerated action director, who specialized in making movies that were both on the cheap and on the mark, makes a series of marvelously pithy observations on his movies and the conditions in which he...

A statue intended to honor the man whose motto is "Do It Now" isn't likely to be done anytime soon. Plans to erect a 9-foot-tall sculpture of William Donald Schaefer, the former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor, on the Inner Harbor promenade have apparently collapsed - the result of a volatile combination of a colorful subject, a strong-willed benefactor and a new process for reviewing proposals for public art on city-owned land. The man who proposed the sculpture for a prominent Inner Harbor parcel and offered to underwrite it as a tribute to Schaefer, First Mariner Bancorp Chairman and Chief Executive Edwin F. Hale Sr., has decided not to pursue it any longer.

PEBBLE BEACH, Calif.-Nearly eight months after his tragic death, Payne Stewart was remembered here yesterday in a touching 35-minute tribute that ended with 40 of his peers hitting golf balls from near the 18th green at Pebble Beach into Stillwater Cove. Stewart, who died last Oct. 25 in a private plane crash at age 42, becomes the first U.S. Open champion in 51 years not to defend his title when the tournament begins today. Ben Hogan couldn't defend his title in 1951 because of injuries suffered in a near-fatal car accident.