Wagon

We had planned to keep our beloved 1997 station wagon. Then something happened. On the way home from picking up a small, new SUV, its air conditioning stopped. Its temperature soared and the needle on its temperature gauge flew past "H. " The towing company took it to our trusted, longtime mechanics, Tony and Steve, who said repairs would cost about $3,000. As much as we loved that little white wagon, we could not indulge in that repair after we had just bought a new car. On April 23, we bid the wagon adieu.

We had planned to keep our beloved 1997 station wagon. Then something happened. On the way home from picking up a small, new SUV, its air conditioning stopped. Its temperature soared and the needle on its temperature gauge flew past "H. " The towing company took it to our trusted, longtime mechanics, Tony and Steve, who said repairs would cost about $3,000. As much as we loved that little white wagon, we could not indulge in that repair after we had just bought a new car. On April 23, we bid the wagon adieu.

WEDNESDAY morning, at 9: 32, a big event in my life took place. The odometer on our 1993 station wagon hit 100,000 miles. It happened on the Beltway, on the inner loop, as I passed the Charles Street exit. One minute the digits on the odometer read 99,999. A short distance later they read 100,000. It was thrilling. I felt both a sense of accomplishment -- the car and I had survived the last seven years together -- and a sense of renewal. All those zeros signaled a clean slate on the road ahead.

One of the most popular topics for legislators today is restricting gun ownership in some form or fashion ("Guns: Old issue, new hurdles," Feb. 10). They have labeled some firearms as "assault" weapons and likened them to those used by the military. I spent 23 years in the U. S. Marine Corps, and I have never heard the term assault weapon used there. The fact is, the word "assault" is not an adjective. Second, only people who don't understand firearms believe that a gun purchased from a local firearms dealer has the same capability as those used by our military or police.

Baltimore police have launched an internal investigation of an arrest Monday night that ended with the death of a drug suspect in a police patrol wagon.Robert Eugene Privett, 29, of the 1900 block of W. Belvedere Ave., was pronounced dead at the Southeastern District after police found him on the floor of the vehicle.A ruling on the cause of his death was officially listed by the medical examiner's office as "pending," but an informed source reported that Mr. Privett had suffered body trauma and a ruptured spleen.

Tooling around the Beltway last Saturday, I had the strange sensation of being fashionable. I was driving a station wagon, the vehicle type that trend spotters say is making a comeback. At auto shows from Detroit to the one in Baltimore this weekend, wagons from BMW, Audi, Volvo, Subaru, Saab, Mercedes-Benz, Dodge and Chrysler have been drawing crowds. Automotive writers at Business Week, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Road & Track have recently penned pieces that proclaim, in the words of a Road & Track scribe, that "high-powered horsepower wagons are back and badder than ever."

There has to be an easier way to see the world than on a horse-drawn wagon.Russians Petr Plonin and Nikolay Davidovsky began the American leg of their world tour in June. Since then, they have had to beg for food for their horses, eat cat food samples, sleep in a parking lot and work in a Bronx circus.After a six-month delay in New York, they were on the road just a few weeks when one of their horses got sick and died of an embolism, leaving them with a $2,000 veterinary bill.Now with a new team of horses, the adventurers are waiting once again -- this time at Goucher College in Towson -- while a horse shoe is repaired.

Santa and Mrs. Claus rode into Pigtown yesterday perched atop an a-rab's wagon -- and both wearing sunglasses.It was a spectacle even for skeptical eyes.One toddler inspected them from West Ostend and Ward streets in Southwest Baltimore."Are you the real one?" 3-year-old Bill Metheny asked Santa.He nodded and replied, "Give me five!""Told you," Bill said to his 10-year-old sister, Kayla.Santa and Mrs. Claus continued their journey past the neighborhood's modest brick and Formstone rowhouses until they reached Paul's Place Community Outreach Center in the 1100 block of Ward St., where more than 100 children flocked to greet their arrival.

One of the first pick-ups postal clerk Edwin Shriver had on the inaugural day of Carroll County's Rural Free Delivery service was a greased pig. It was Dec. 20, 1899, and the beginning of the nation's first countywide free rural postal delivery service. "I'm sure he [the customer] did it as a joke," Shriver said in a newspaper interview afterward. "But I slapped a 42-cent stamp on its rump and delivered it. That pig squealed the whole way." The original mail wagon was invented and designed by Shriver, who is called the father of Rural Free Delivery.

A city police posse continued to search today for two modern-day rustlers who stole 11 aluminum storm windows from the back yard of a north Baltimore home and made a clean getaway in a horse-drawn junk wagon."

A collision in Edgewater Tuesday afternoon claimed the life of a 78-year-old man. Gene Herbert Byrd of the first block of Tarragon Lane in Edgewater died at Anne Arundel Medical Center within a few hours of the 2:53 p.m. crash at Solomons Island Road near Lee Airpark Drive, investigators said Wednesday. Byrd was making a left turn on the green signal from Lee Airpark Drive when his Volvo station wagon was struck on the driver's side door by a GMC Yukon traveling south on Solomons Island Road, Anne Arundel police said.

James B. Cooper, a lifelong arabber turned stable manager and wagon builder, died April 1 of lung cancer at his West Baltimore home. He was 76. "He is a wonderful and colorful character and is among the last of the arraber wagon builders and restorers," said Elaine Eff, veteran state folklorist, who is co-director of the Maryland State Arts Council's Maryland Traditions. "Mr. Cooper lived and loved the streets of Baltimore. He would show up unannounced at the Arts Council — his eyes sparkling, an impish smile — just to tell us that he had discovered a lumber supplier on Pulaski Highway plastered with historic arraber photographs," said Dr. Eff, who is also folklorist-in-residence at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

A fiery, late-night accident in Lutherville left a man dead after his Volvo station wagon left the road at high speed, crashed and burst into flames, Baltimore County police said Friday. The car was registered to a 45-year-old Phoenix man, but police were awaiting a positive identification of his remains from dental records that were being provided to the medical examiner's office in Baltimore. Lt. Robert McCullough, a spokesman for the Baltimore County police, said the 2007 Volvo XC70 was traveling rapidly northward on Dulaney Valley Road after midnight when it "failed to negotiate a curve" near Pot Spring Road and struck three boulders, a road sign and then a tree.

DALE RICKARDS, 88 Hollywood horse wrangler Dale Rickards, a self-styled cowboy who wrangled horses for Hollywood and turned his Malibu ranch into a faux Western town for location photography, died of emphysema Dec. 29 at his home in the hills above Malibu, Calif. After Mr. Rickards bought 11 acres in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1957, he built a home. By the early 1980s, he had opened a business there selling and renting Western props such as steers' heads, wagon wheels and horse troughs.

Inside the Doughy Dog truck, workers are preparing more than hot dogs, breakfast sandwiches and mini-doughnuts. They're preparing themselves for more stable lives, working toward increased self-sufficiency one chubby hot dog at a time. This is food with a social mission: The big red Doughy Dog truck is a business venture of the Arundel House of Hope, a 17-year-old nonprofit organization in Glen Burnie that helps homeless people. The organization's clients get paid job experience and growing self-confidence.

Los Angeles has its taco trucks, but now we can do them one better. As of a couple of weeks ago, Baltimore has the Kooper's Tavern Chowhound Burger Wagon. You can find out where the roving hamburger stand is going to be on any given day by checking its Web site (KoopersChowhound.com) or Facebook, or signing up for Twitter updates. Last Wednesday when it landed at Tide Point, more than 100 people were standing in line at one point, according to an owner, Patrick Russell. What are they standing in line for?

Dressed smartly in a yellow and navy-checked blazer and matching skirt, Jan Petrides deftly hikes up a steep, muddied hill in a new housing development in Woodbine. Her destination is a stately, just-built home at the top of a wooded lot."We go through anything," Petrides says as she checks her flower-festooned wicker basket and prepares to meet the Jones family. "I always have three pairs of shoes in my car."A good Welcome Wagon representative is always prepared.The 68-year-old company -- known for welcoming new residents to town with a brimming basket of key chains, pens, refrigerator magnets and other gifts from local businesses seeking new customers -- is making a comeback in the Maryland suburbs.

North Laurel:9700 block of Covered Wagon Drive: A red 1993 Ford Mustang was stolen Wednesday.

One by one, they stood and walked up the blue carpet to the front of the chapel to pay their respects to Edward William Eldridge Jr. They were retired police colonels and active police majors in dress blues, black mourning bands stretched across their badges. A current Baltimore councilwoman and a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives. A police chaplain and a war veteran. The Baltimore County state's attorney. Neighbors, one-time friends and former colleagues. Strangers who felt it necessary to say goodbye.