Memorial Wall

Arthur Queen, a longtime Baltimore-area funeral director and owner of two funeral homes, died of Parkinson’s disease April 1 at BridgingLife Dove House, a hospice facility in Westminster. He was 83.

Mr. Queen was born in Nutter Fort, West Virginia, to Minter A. Queen Sr., a pottery maker, and Bessie Mae Queen, a homemaker. He was the youngest of five children.

He started working at his uncle’s snack bar in Nutter Fort at the age of 9.

“He was always very busy,” said Wilma Brandenburg, his sister. “He always had a lot to do.”

As a teenager, he decided he wanted to become a funeral director. Mr. Queen would often accompany his father when he visited friends at various funeral homes in Clarksburg,  West Virginia.

“He said he always wanted to be a funeral director in high school,” his sister said. “Whenever they asked what do you want to be growing up, that’s what he would say.”

After graduating from the old Roosevelt Wilson High School in Clarksburg in 1958, he went to Cincinnati College of Mortuary Science, formerly known as Cincinnati School of Embalming.

Mr. Queen started in the funeral business over 60 years ago at Davis-Weaver Funeral Home in West Virginia when he was a teenager, his sister said.

In 1992, Mr. Queen purchased what is now Burrier-Queen Funeral Home and Crematory, P.A. in Winfield in Carroll County. Until he died, the Sykesville resident was involved with all aspects of the funeral home as owner, president, director and crematory operator. He also owned Loring Byers Funeral Directors in Randallstown.

Arthur Queen enjoyed woodworking and creating stained and fused glass.

“He was the epitome of a true funeral professional,” said Jim Covey, vice president of Burrier-Queen. “The community has lost one of a kind.”

He was a member of the former Liberty Exchange Club, a community service organization, Covey said.

Jeff passed away peacefully in St Luke's Hospice, Plymouth, on Thursday 4th April following a battle with Parkinson's Disease and Dementia. He was surrounded by his loving family who will miss him dearly. Jeff was a loving husband, father and grandfather.

Former boxer Arthur Serwano, aka the Jesus Kid, died March 5, and in California after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2020. Serwano, a former UNLA soldier, won the IBF USBA junior middleweight title in 1989, retained it thrice and vied for other titles, and did aviation mechanics. 

Thomas Lee Phillips of Newport Coast, California, died peacefully at his home on Thursday, April 18, 2024, surrounded by his four children and his loving caregivers. He had fought a courageous battle with Parkinson’s Disease for over a decade. Tom was born in Camden, New Jersey on December 25, 1941 to parents Helen Hutchinson Phillips and Jules Ludin Phillips. He lived most of his adult life in Montgomery County, Maryland before moving to northern Virginia in 1998 and then Orange County, California in 2010. He earned a B.A. in political science from Dartmouth College and a M.A. in journalism from The American University. He also served in the U.S. Army and was employed with two large national advertising agencies and a Washington, D.C. publishing firm. In January 1974, Tom started Phillips Publishing (which later became Phillips International, Inc.) with his wife Jan in the garage of their home in Chevy Chase, Maryland with a $1,000 investment. After launching two newsletters with three employees, the company grew into one of the most important print publishing firms over the next three decades. The firm published newsletters, magazines, and directories and later online information services for consumer and business-to-business marketplaces. The wide range of industries included health, personal investing, telecommunications, banking, aerospace, and energy. A very successful subsidiary of the company also marketed several doctor-formulated lines of nutritional supplements to the health newsletter subscribers. He sold the final Phillips subsidiary in January 2007. Tom was also Founder and Chairman of Eagle Publishing, Inc., which he started in 1993. Eagle Publishing was a leading source of books and periodicals that included Regnery Publishing, a politically conservative book publisher founded in 1947, and Human Events, a leading conservative newspaper. He sold this company in 2014 to Salem Media Group. Tom founded The Phillips Foundation, a non-profit organization which sponsored programs for print journalists and the Ronald Reagan Leaders Scholarship Program. It was later merged into The Fund for America Studies. He was a founding member of the Newsletters Publishers Association and served as its president. In 1989, Tom was named Newsletter Publishers Association “Publisher of the Year” and in 1994 he was elected as the first member of the Newsletter Publishers Hall of Fame. Tom served on the Board of Directors of Young America’s Foundation, chaired the Board of Governors of the National Journalism Center, and was a member of the Reagan Ranch Board of Governors. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fund for American Studies and Chairman of the Board of Visitors for the Institute on Political Journalism. He served for many years on the Board of Junior Achievement of the National Capital Area and on the Board of the Boy Scouts of America National Capital Area Council. A generous man, Tom was extremely proud to be part of the purchase of the Reagan Ranch, President Ronald Reagan’s Western White House in Santa Barbara, by Young America’s Foundation. He worked closely with The Fund for American Studies, which fosters programs that teach the principles of limited government, free-market economics, and honorable leadership to students and young professionals in America and around the world. He often hosted events and political fundraisers at his homes on the east coast and Orange County and loved to throw a good party. Tom took his entire company to Disney World in Florida in September 1993 in recognition of the 20th anniversary of the company. It was a 3-day, 2-night stay and included all employees and their families. A second trip, a Disney cruise, followed ten years later in September 2003 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the company (which was officially founded on 1/1/1974). Again, the trip included all Phillips Publishing employees, their families, board members and some vendors of the company who had been with the firm for many years. Tom considered his employees like family and wanted to make sure they knew how appreciated and valued they were. Tom enjoyed collecting art (mainly American Impressionist) and traveling and loved all forms of chocolate, blueberry pie, and lemon bars. His favorite flower was the rose. When he lived in both Maryland and Virginia, he had beautiful rose gardens. He would bring a pail of these roses to his business office and hand them out to his new employees, making sure he personally thanked them for joining the team. Tom Phillips is survived by Karen (Christopher) Broussard and Mark Thomas Phillips, children from his first marriage, and Reagan Thomas Phillips and Parker James Phillips, sons from his second marriage. He is also survived by five grandchildren, a sister Katherine (Dorsey) Hunt, a niece and a nephew, an uncle and a cousin.

Maurice Leon “Mel” Opotowsky, a former newspaper editor and tenacious free press advocate who was known for helping to advance 1st Amendment rights, has died.

Opotowsky died April 18 at Claremont Manor retirement community, where he lived with his wife, Bonnie Opotowsky, according to their son, Didier Opotowsky. He said his father’s cause of death is not certain, and that he had Parkinson’s. He was 92.

Opotowsky was a top editor at the Riverside Press-Enterprise when the paper brought two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court that resulted in landmark rulings advancing the public’s right to view certain legal proceedings. He was later a founding board member of the First Amendment Coalition, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the free press and preserving access to government records and meetings.

“I don’t know that there’s another single person in California who had such a positive and long-lasting impact on open government in our state,” said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. Opotowsky remained an active board member until his death and had emailed Snyder suggesting work the organization could take up just weeks ago, he added. “His longevity, his persistence and his tenacity are the stuff of legend.”

Opotowsky joined the Press-Enterprise in 1973 after working as an editor at Newsday. He was known for fostering a culture that emphasized hard news and accountability journalism, said former columnist Dan Bernstein, who worked at the Press-Enterprise from 1976 to 2014.

Back then, the news organization put out two papers: the morning Enterprise and the afternoon Press, which were later merged. Opotowsky eventually climbed the ranks to become managing editor of the combined edition.

“He was pretty much on everybody’s shoulder as they wrote and reported stories, because he was a very tough and aggressive editor who was skeptical of government and skeptical of politicians,” Bernstein said. “And none of us wanted to be left not asking the question that he would have looked for immediately.”

In January 1984, the paper won the first of two Supreme Court rulings that are still often cited by attorneys seeking access to court proceedings.

“He was reputed to know as much about constitutional law as a lot of lawyers did,” he said. “Whether it was government meetings, courtrooms or records, he was pretty much adamant that all records should be open and all courtrooms should be open.”

Opotowsky retired as editor of the Press-Enterprise in 1999, becoming an ombudsman, tasked with investigating and responding to reader complaints. In addition to his open records advocacy work, he taught at Cal State Fullerton.

He was rightly known for being unsparingly direct, said Kris Lovekin, a former education reporter at the Press-Enterprise. She recalled one story in which Opotowsky demanded that a reporter unmask a donor to UC Riverside who wanted to remain anonymous, figuring that a public university must be required to disclose its backers. After he resolved to get an attorney involved, the Press-Enterprise’s then-publisher, Howard H. “Tim” Hays, was forced to disclose that it was he who had, in fact, made the donation, Lovekin said.

At the same time, Opotowsky was also kind and compassionate when warranted, she said. A keen chronicler of the world around him, he was creating journalism up until the end of his life, she said.

“He was still writing stories about people in Claremont Manor, about the people he lived with,” Lovekin said. “He would post it on Facebook and we would read about the other residents.”

Opotowsky was remembered for his dry wit that at times leaned acerbic. He had a soft spot for practical jokes and an even softer spot for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his son said. He loved horseback riding, fox hunting and trying different restaurants, he said.

Opotowsky was born in New Orleans on Dec. 13, 1931. His mother was ill, so one of her sisters-in-law filled out the registration card and submitted it to the city to produce a birth certificate, Didier Optowsky said. The sister-in-law named him Maurice Leon after their father — contrary to a tradition among some Jewish people that dictates babies should not be named after living relatives, he said.

“My grandmother was so furious she refused to call him Maurice, refused to call him M.L.,” Didier Opotowsky said. “So she called him Mel.”

His father did not learn his legal name until he was drafted into the Army, Didier Opotowsky said.

True to his roots, Opotowsky was also known to make enormous batches of red beans and rice — enough to feed the entire family for weeks, his son said. “They were good,” he said. “But we would get tired after the fifth day or so.”

He is survived by his wife Bonnie; son Didier; daughters Joelle Opotowsky, Keturah Persellin and Jamie Persellin; 18 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren. He is preceded in death by a daughter, Arielle Opotowsky, who died as an infant.