Writer

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - Luxury appointments abound in the 7,000-square-foot, 12-year-old Victorian-style mansion overlooking Great Bay, such as a marble fireplace that once graced a Biddle estate mansion, a crystal chandelier that at the touch of a button lowers from the 30-foot foyer ceiling for cleaning, and boat slips big enough to berth a pair of yachts. A "smart house" system controls window treatments, lighting, heating, air-conditioning, and music. Slate-covered turrets, little secret gardens, and gingerbread-laden porches make the exterior look more like Cape May than Ocean City.

A West Chester high school swim coach, who allegedly posed as a swimmer's father, plied her with beer and had sex with her multiple times, was arrested Wednesday and charged on felony sex assault counts and corruption of a minor. Kenneth William Fuller, 47, was head coach of the Rustin High School swim team. A member of the team, a teenage girl, told police that she had had several assignations with Fuller at parks and coffee shops outside of school before he took her on April 27 to a Kennett Square hotel.

PHILADELPHIA basketball is less a sport than it is a community: past and present, college and pro, the people and their stories woven together. Phil Jasner, the premier chronicler of that community, as well as one of its most cherished members, died last night at age 68. A Daily News staff reporter since 1972 and the paper's 76ers beat writer since 1981, Jasner distinguished himself by his generosity and his even-handedness and his persistence most...

Joseph E. Hunter, 83, of Delran, a talk show host, journalist, and jazz aficionado who hosted the public-affairs show Perspective: Youth on Channel 6 (WPVI-TV) for more than 15 years, died of heart failure Dec. 10 at Lourdes Medical Center of Burlington County in Willingboro. Mr. Hunter began his career in the Philadelphia media at a time when doors weren't always open to African Americans. He was a top graduate in the journalism department at Pennsylvania State University in 1950, but while other bright prospects were securing reporting internships, Mr. Hunter was offered a post as a copy boy. A writing career had long been his goal, so Mr. Hunter took the job. He became one of the first African Americans to work as a copy boy at The Inquirer and later the first to work in the library at the newspaper, said Acel Moore, associate editor emeritus of The Inquirer.

There are two sides to Michael Vick's athleticism. At times, his breathtaking talent conjures gains from thin air when the defense is closing in. But last season, Vick's unfailing belief in his own ability too often led to risky plays and game-changing turnovers. "He gets caught sometimes doing too much, trying to do too much, and that's where he gets in trouble," Eagles quarterbacks coach Doug Pederson said Monday in advance of full-team practices that begin Tuesday. "We eliminate those and keep him within our system, and positive things are going to happen.

I'm standing at a cocktail party in Wayne, eyeballing the dip, when a Junior League-ish young matron walks up with a conversation-opener: "I hear you're a writer. " I nod, but I'm chary. There's something about being a writer that seems to call for an explanation. This is especially so along the Main Line, where finding a writer in their midst merely verifies popular suspicions. "You guys," began a well-lubricated Devonite one evening not long ago, "You're always writing about the bland, soulless suburbs.

If too many cooks may spoil a broth, the new Brat Productions offering is evidence that a theater piece can also have too many creative chefs. The program for Once lists a head writer, a cowriter, a contributing writer, and the three performers as cocreators. In addition, director Madi Distefano says in a note that a dramturg and sculptor participated in early discussions. That's a lot of input, and it could explain why the show at Mum Puppettheatre is a fragmented piece that fails to weld its separate parts into a coherent, meaningful whole.

Shawna, 11, is a writer. She always has a pad and pencil in her hands so that every thought can be captured on paper before it escapes her. She writes stories and then writes letters to the characters in the stories. She writes routines and cheers for the cheerleading club, and she makes many entries in her diary. It's an outlet for her feelings of joy, sadness and anger. Therapy is helping her deal with abuse and neglect that she endured in the past. When Shawna reads, however, she prefers picture books.

Novelist, story-writer and critic Ann Petry, 77, will be honored for her "lifetime achievements and her inspiration to contemporary writers" at ceremonies during the fifth annual Celebration of Black Writing, to be held in Philadelphia Feb. 4 and 5. The two-day series of panels, workshops and receptions has been organized by the nonprofit educational organization Moonstone Inc. and will be held at various locations. Petry, who is the author of a number of novels and story collections, including The Street (1946)

Writer of O, a literary doc about the woman behind the pseudonym of the once-scandalous erotic novel Story of O, features interviews with academic types, journalists, French publishing veterans, and the wonderfully sweet-looking octogenarian author, Dominique Aury. The film, by Pola Rapaport, also juices up this fairly dry business with "reenactments" from the book - supposedly penned by Pauline Reage and published in Paris in 1954. As a narrator reads naughty bits about a woman and her adventures in submission, voyeurism and multiple-partner sex, an attractive young actress dressed (and undressed)

  RECENTLY RETIRED Daily News sports writer Bernard Fernandez, for the 11th consecutive year, had placing entries in the Boxing Writers Association of America writing contest, known as the "Barneys" in honor of the late former president of the BWAA, Barney Nagler. Fernandez took first place in the column category, for an analysis of why retired former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson still mattered in a division dominated by Eastern Europeans and bereft of compelling American contenders.

Canada By Richard Ford Ecco. 432 pp. $26.99 There are two Richard Fords. Let's call them Richard Ford East and Richard Ford West. Richard Ford East starts a novel like this: "In Haddam, summer floats over tree-softened streets like a sweet lotion balm from a careless, languorous god, and the world falls in tune with its own mysterious anthems. " Richard Ford West, on the other hand, starts a novel in this fashion: "First, I'll tell about the robbery our parents committed.

Maurice Sendak, 83, artist and writer, who told stories about the truth, light and dark, to children and adults alike, died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He had had a stroke four days before. Studded with groundbreaking successes such as Where the Wild Things Are (which won the 1964 Caldecott Medal, for the best American picture book for children) and In the Night Kitchen (1970), Mr. Sendak's 65-year career was that of a son of immigrants, a high-school graduate who carved out a singular, permanent place in writing history - and not only for kids.

NEW YORK - Retired Associated Press feature writer Sid Moody, 83, who chronicled major events of the 20th century from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to the Iranian hostage crisis, has died. Moody's son Clarke Moody said Tuesday that his father died Sunday at a hospital in Morristown, N.J. A longtime resident of Bernardsville, N.J., Moody spent his last years at a retirement community in Bernards Township, N.J. During his almost four decades at the AP, Moody covered such events as the Warren Commission report on Kennedy's assassination, the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald's murderer Jack Ruby, the Detroit race riots, the My Lai massacre, North Korea's capture of the spy ship USS Pueblo, the kidnapping of a bus full of school children in Chowchilla, Calif.

ED BARKOWITZ PETER LAVIOLETTE won't be the league's coach of the year, the Blues' Ken Hitchcock will. But Laviolette has done a remarkable job keeping the ice beneath the Flyers' skates from turning into water. His reward for leading the Flyers to 103 points is getting the Penguins (108 points) in the first round. What it lacks in fairness, it makes up for in wonderful intrigue. The Flyers have to stay out of the penalty box and physical defenseman Nick Grossmann, who missed the last week of the season with a knee injury, has to be at least 85 percent.

Christine Brooke-Rose, 89, an English experimental writer known for wielding words with the ardor of a philologist, the fingers of a prestidigitator and the appetite of a lexivore, resulting in novels that exhilarated many critics and enervated others, died March 21. Her death was announced on the website of her British publisher, Carcanet Press. Fittingly for a writer whose work could take artful pains to dispense with seemingly indispensable linguistic foundation stones (she once wrote an entire novel without using the verb "to be")

Harry Crews, 76, an author best known for his gritty tales of the rural South, died Wednesday in Gainesville, Fla. He had suffered from neuropathy, said his ex-wife, Sally Ellis Crews. Mr. Crews, author of 17 novels and numerous short stories, also taught graduate and undergraduate fiction-writing workshops at the University of Florida from 1968 until he retired in 1997. In a 1992 interview, he said about writing: "If you're gonna write, for God in heaven's sake, try to get naked.

BOXING'S ALREADY exclusive club of unforgettable characters became a bit more so on Sunday with the death of Bert Randolph Sugar, 75, the raconteur/historian known as much for his one-liners and ever-present fedora and cigar as for the 80 books he authored. Coming a little more than 7 weeks after another true original, Angelo Dundee, passed away at 90, the loss of "The Hat" is enough to sadden anyone who has been around long enough to understand that outsized personalities such as theirs are as close to irreplaceable as it ever gets in the fight game.

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. - Bert Sugar, an iconic boxing writer and sports historian who was known for his trademark fedora and ever-present cigar, died Sunday of cardiac arrest. He was 75. Jennifer Frawley, Sugar's daughter, said his wife, Suzanne, was by his side when he died at Northern Westchester Hospital. Sugar also had been battling lung cancer. "Just his intelligence and his wit and his sense of humor," Frawley said when asked what she will remember about her father.

THE POLISH filmmaker Agnieszka Holland wrote to me in January 2010, before filming began on her new movie. "Believe me, I know the importance of your mother's achievements and I deeply value them," she wrote. "The reason she's not in the script is that we had to compress and partly fictionalize the events and characters in order to make the story compact and interesting . . . We didn't want to add some fictional story line to her, knowing how important a Holocaust figure she became after the war because of her own activity and your writings.