Local city police and county officers are still keeping a sharp lookout for a 24-year-old state penitentiary escapee, who is believed to be headed for this city.
On Saturday, a man answering the escapee's description told five 16-year-old boys that he was headed for Hagerstown. The boys had picked the man up as a hitch-hiker outside Pikesville, and dropped him off at a Pikesville drugstore.
The escapee, who gave Baltimore as his home, stands but 5 feet 2 inches, and weighs 124 pounds. He broke out of the stone prison by slightly bending two window bars with a homemade bar spreader and wriggling through the opening only 6.25 inches wide.
The warden said he believed someone inside the walls might have helped the man escape.
The escapee was serving a 20-year term for the 1954 holdup of a bank in East Baltimore.
Week of Aug. 12, 1982
When Paul Pottorff Jr. pulled into a gas station Wednesday afternoon to fill his tank, he didn't think it would take 40 minutes, five rescue workers, a can of grease and two hacksaw blades to get him out.
But he didn't think his finger would get stuck in the gas tank, either.
Pottorff was trying to unjam a spring mechanism protecting his tank from the evils of leaded gasoline when the device "popped shut", taking his right index finger captive.
A healthy application of grease couldn't get his finger out. Neither could a wire hanger. Even removing the entire gas pipe to Pottorff's Ford Futura didn't free the fickle finger.
Community Rescue Service workers sawed through the metal gas pipe and freed his finger, which was just a bit swollen and scraped.
As rescue workers began packing up wrenches and screwdrivers, laying them neatly into a box appropriately labeled "hand tools", Pottorff walked calmly into the service station and plunked down $4 for the gasoline.
The Anne Arundel County Council unanimously passed a resolution urging rejection of a plan that would have had county residents go to West Virginia in the event of a nuclear attack alert.
The plan was labeled "unrealistic and unworkable". Councilman William Brill, an Annapolis Democrat, said the plan did not make "any practical sense" because "nuclear war is not survivable".
The largest monthly increase in gasoline prices in eight years helped push overall wholesale prices up 0.6 percent in July, the Labor Department said today.
Gasoline costs rose 7.9 percent last month, nearly twice the increase posted in June, and the largest jump since March 1974.
While real consumer spending rose at a 3 percent annual rate in the April to June quarter and is expected to continue, capital spending on new business plants and equipment was weak. Many companies have announced unusual summer shutdowns in response to weak demand.
F.W. Woolworth, the nation's fourth largest retail chain, reported a second-quarter loss of $9 million, bringing its January to June loss to $25 million.
- Compiled by Kelly Moreno
