William Donald Schaefer

Two side-by-side townhouses that were once home to former Gov. William Donald Schaefer and his longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops, go on sale Thursday in Pasadena's Chestnut Hill Cove community. Schaefer has donated both properties to the Baltimore Community Foundation, which hopes to sell them and use the proceeds to help endow the William Donald Schaefer Civic Fund, the foundation announced Wednesday. The fund, created a year ago with Schaefer's leftover campaign funds, supports a program that awards neighborhood grants.

Walters Art Museum bigwigs know perfectly well how things turned out for Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone's vault, thank you very much. But they're plowing ahead anyway with a plan to let the public in tonight as they break open two recently discovered wooden crates belonging to museum founder Henry Walters. The Baltimore industrialist died in 1931, leaving his city 22,000 pieces of art - plus two wooden crates that somehow escaped notice until now. Secured with heavy padlocks and bearing the initials "H.W.

Amayor, transportation officials and road planners underestimated the diminutive woman with the black beehive, whose tenacious love of her Locust Point community and knack for grass-roots organizing changed the course of Interstate 95 during the 1970s. Ann Shirley Doda, who died Wednesday of a heart attack at her Fort Avenue home, successfully stopped I-95 and a proposed bridge from being built over historic Fort McHenry. The retired funeral home owner was 74. In 1972, Mrs. Doda and her husband, Victor, organized the Locust Point Civic Association to fight an elevated highway that would have sliced through their community as the final inner-city link of I-95 between Washington and Delaware.

EVERY new mayor benefits from his or her predecessors' achievements -- or is penalized because of their mistakes.In 1971, when William Donald Schaefer became the city's chief executive, a number of projects were under way that would bring him international recognition. Theodore R. McKeldin had outlined the vision for a new Inner Harbor nearly a decade earlier and started land acquisition. Thomas J. D'Alesandro III had launched pivotal urban renewal programs.Martin O'Malley, too, is likely to profit from works in progress left behind by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke -- if they go ahead.

He started out as a patrol officer in West Baltimore. Now, 25 years later, he's coming back as Maryland's top FBI man."I have roots in Baltimore," says Richard M. Mosquera, who was named yesterday as head of the Maryland-Delaware office of the FBI. "When I was a bodyguard for William Donald Schaefer, I saw the transition of the city from the rat-infested pier to the Inner Harbor."Mosquera, 47, is a 21-year FBI veteran who has traveled the world, from his days in an undercover heroin investigation in Hong Kong to his experiences in Moscow helping to combat Russian organized crime.

The Baltimore Sun abounds with women and men whose writing reaches far beyond the pages of this newspaper -- though we like to believe that their best work appears here. When books by them are published, I read them. I want to see the work of colleagues. But, also, rather than risk straining your credulity that any reviewer on these pages would be iron-bound to objectivity, I often write about those books.There are two new biographies by Sun writers, one out soon, the other just arriving in shops.

Enforcing `couch tax' helps retailers and the state's treasuryBarry Rascovar's Opinion Commentary column "Crackdown on the sofa scofflaws" (May 30), which was highly critical of state Comptroller William Donald Schaefer's initiative to collect the use tax Maryland residents owe on major purchases made out of state, avoided some of the facts.Maryland retailers urged Mr. Schaefer to take action to curtail retail sales moving outside the state to avoid Maryland sales tax.Last year, nearly $100 million of home furnishings entered Maryland from outside state lines.

Don't close curtain on Legislative Follies, the session's antidoteI read with unbelieving eyes that the Legislative Follies is apparently to be no more ("Curtain falls on Legislative Follies," March 9). Say it isn't so!Surely reporter C. Fraser Smith must have gotten this story wrong. The Follies kaput? Never. Not so long as there is a Maryland House and Senate, an annual session and enough material each year for an entire season on Broadway. How can lawmakers, staff, lobbyists and reporters, all aboard for the annual 90-day cruise, get through to sine die without the wit and release of the Follies?

Continuing to broaden the scope of his new job, Maryland Comptroller William Donald Schaefer has invited local officials to bring him their problems.The invitation, sent in a Feb. 17 letter to leaders across the state, was open-ended."

1970: Marvin Mandel is elected governor1970: 3.9 million live in Maryland1971: William Donald Schaefer is elected mayor

Wait a minute, where in the ceremony program did it say Schaefer speaks? No where, but no matter. William Donald Schaefer was going to speak. He was going to slowly get up to the lectern and speak to the crowd of more than 1,000 at the Inner Harbor on Monday that had already heard from one of his longtime aides, from Gov. Martin O'Malley, from Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon, from the artist who created the bronze Schaefer statue that was being unveiled...

He flew through the air like a modern-day Mary Poppins or a balloon in Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Over Harborplace, over the Baltimore Visitor Center, a 7-foot-2-inch bronze statue of William Donald Schaefer was lifted by crane and touched down on the west shore of the Inner Harbor Thursday in preparation for its official unveiling on Monday, Schaefer's 88th birthday. Sculptor Rodney Carroll fashioned a harness that he used to carefully position the 1,100-pound statue onto a marble slab bearing dates noting Schaefer's years of service as City Council member, mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland and state comptroller - 52 years in all. The statue and surrounding garden, on city-owned property between the Light Street Pavilion of Harborplace and the visitors center, are a gift to the city from construction magnate Willard Hackerman.

Two side-by-side townhouses that were once home to former Gov. William Donald Schaefer and his longtime companion, Hilda Mae Snoops, go on sale Thursday in Pasadena's Chestnut Hill Cove community. Schaefer has donated both properties to the Baltimore Community Foundation, which hopes to sell them and use the proceeds to help endow the William Donald Schaefer Civic Fund, the foundation announced Wednesday. The fund, created a year ago with Schaefer's leftover campaign funds, supports a program that awards neighborhood grants.

Telling the story of a remarkable 50-year political career in 60 minutes is no easy task. But Maryland Public Television pulls it off with energy and style in Citizen Schaefer, a political biography of former Baltimore mayor and Maryland governor William Donald Schaefer premiering Monday night. A one-hour documentary cannot be all things to all people, of course. But this is a rich enough production that it should leave several different audiences feeling satisfied as the credits roll.

Citizen Schaefer. Even with the Orwellian, William Randolph Hearst overtones, the title of Maryland Public Television's new documentary seems just right. Yes, William Donald Schaefer was a councilman, a four-term mayor, a two-term governor and comptroller. But these were just titles. He never stopped seeing himself as Don Schaefer, homeowner, a Baltimorean like his father who planted flowers in the backyard, who swept the alleys and wanted garbage collected on time. He thought the city could be greater than its citizens dared to hope, but he knew a greater city would be built from the alleys up. When he saw efforts that made a Baltimore neighborhood brighter, he inducted the homeowner into what he called The Order of the Rose.

Visitors to Baltimore's Inner Harbor may soon be greeted by an 8-foot-tall statue of former Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer, after the city's Public Art Commission gave preliminary approval yesterday to plans for a "Schaefer Sculpture Garden" with his bronze likeness as the centerpiece. The panel voted 6-1 to approve plans to place the statue and garden on city-owned land on the west shore of the Inner Harbor, between the Baltimore Visitor Center and the Light Street pavilion of Harborplace.

Six months after Baltimore banker Edwin F. Hale Sr. dropped out of a plan to erect an Inner Harbor statue to honor former Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer, another local businessman has offered to complete the project as a gift to the city. Willard Hackerman, chief executive of Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., has offered to pay for the Schaefer statue by Baltimore sculptor Rodney Carroll. Baltimore's Public Art Commission is scheduled to meet today to consider revised plans for the project, first presented last year and estimated to cost up to $500,000.

Fells Point is about to lose a celebrity, somebody famous for jumping into a pool. Michael Phelps is still headed there, but William Donald Schaefer is on his way out. The former mayor, governor, comptroller and seal-pool dipper just put his Lancaster Street rowhouse on the market for $225,000. The 2BR, 1BA built in 1820 has a waaay outdated kitchen but unbeatable political provenance, even if Schaefer never really lived there. Though never accused of being a material guy - Schaefer adores fast food and political-convention freebies - he collects houses like John McCain.

THE HENRY A. ROSENBERG SR. DISTINguished Citizen Award Dinner may be an annual fundraising tradition for the Boy Scouts of America. But the 2008 version was anything but traditional. This year, instead of listening to speeches about a chosen honoree, guests at the Maryland Science Center were encouraged to tour the center's smash hit of a show, Body Worlds 2 -- the exhibit that shows the inner workings of the human body using real human bodies. "I happen to be on the board of the Maryland Science Center.

Seems like you'd need special legal authority and uncommon nerve to dupe William Donald Schaefer into moving to a retirement home. But it looks like Lainy LeBow-Sachs only had nerve. The longtime Schaefer aide got him out of his Pasadena townhouse last month on the pretense of a Petit Louis lunch so movers could take his furniture and belongings to the Charlestown Retirement Community. At the time, LeBow-Sachs said she was authorized to move the 86-year-old political icon - against his will - because he had granted her power of attorney.