Year In Baltimore

Joseph Longo, one of the oldest practicing barbers in Baltimore, died Wednesday of an aneurysm at Harbor Hospital Center. He was 82.He began working in his father's Lee Street barber shop in 1916, as a 4-year-old, sweeping the floor and brushing off customers with a whisk broom. When he was 12, he began mixing shaving lather and giving shaves with a straight razor. He gave his last haircut Sunday."He detested hair stylists," said Steve Zinz, a Montgomery Street resident and longtime friend.

In recent weeks, the man I call the most interesting manager in the world has looked like the most irritated manager in the world as he scowls away in the Orioles dugout. Then again, I would be pretty ticked off, too, if the Yankees put up double digits in the first inning against my team's latest fading pitching prospect. These past two months have been the most turbulent of Buck Showalter's first 12 on the job. On June 2, his Orioles were four games below .500 and within a Nick Markakis throw of the rest of the AL East.

Gladys Elizabeth Wallace, a retired elementary teacher who taught for 37 years at Baltimore's Samuel Coleridge Taylor Elementary School, died Sunday of heart failure at the University of Maryland Medical Center. She was 88.The Northwest Baltimore resident began teaching in Baltimore in 1931 after moving here from Winston Salem, N.C., where she began her teaching career in 1928 in a segregated school.When she joined the faculty at Samuel Coleridge Taylor, it was the first school built in the city for black students.

Although the program's suspension was announced in July, AAA Mid-Atlantic would like to remind Marylanders that the free Tipsy?Taxi! service will not run this New Year's Eve, says Public and Government Affairs Manager Ragina C. Averella. The last Tipsy?Taxi! service provided in Maryland was for July 4 of this year. The service was established in 2006, and it gave free taxi rides during popular holidays known for their partying. Averella says one of the main reasons for the suspension was lack of funding.

Police were investigating a fatal shooting that occurred Wednesday night in Northeast Baltimore, the district's seventh homicide of the year. About 10:55 p.m., police were called to the 1600 block of E. 31st St. in the Coldstream-Homestead-Montebello neighborhood for a reported shooting. Inside a home, they found Martez Anthony Hall, 22, who had been shot several times in the torso. Hall was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 11:32 p.m., police said.

Marian Shriver McSherry, long-time devotee of Maryland's Catholic aristocracy and mother of 12 children, died on July 24 of breast cancer at her home in Frederick. She was 85. A second cousin of R. Sargent Shriver, Marian Macsherry was born in Baltimore and grew up in Roland Park, spending her summers at Union Mills, the Shriver family homestead. She graduated from Noroton School of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Conn., and attended Manhattanville College in New York for one year before she got married.

Edgar S. Massey Jr., a Baltimore County educator for 26 years who, as principal of Lansdowne Middle School, was considered a "top of the rung" administrator, died Thursday of cancer at St. Agnes Hospital. He was 48.Mr. Massey of Catonsville became principal of Lansdowne Middle in 1995. He was known by students and teachers as an educator who went out of his way to get to know all those at the school and learn about their lives."He truly cared about everyone at the school," said Kris Marino, an English teacher for three years.

John Billingslea, the Franklin High School psychology teacher named yesterday as Baltimore County's Teacher of the Year, said that growing up on the family farm in northern Harford County taught him much about the value of hard work and the endurance he would need to sustain a career in education. He said his grandmother, Inez Billingslea, a kindergarten teacher, drilled into him the value of a good education. "My grandmother used to always, at dinnertime, tap me on my forehead and say, 'John, remember, they can't take this away from you,'" Billingslea recalled yesterday in a phone interview from the 97-acre farm in White Hall that he and his wife, Ellen, tend.

With a wellspring of an estimated $900 million to $1 billion dedicated to the poor, the Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation -- the legacy of a dying financial wizard -- became yesterday one of the nation's 12 largest charitable organizations and Baltimore's largest philanthropic enterprise.This grand act of public service seemed an unlikely legacy from Harry Weinberg, an enigmatic man who wanted only to be left alone as he made his millions. In his hometown of Baltimore, he sought no monument, no headlines, no projects in steel and concrete to which his face and name might be affixed.