In Sunday's "Backstory" column, Fred Rasmussen tells the unusual story of book wrapped in tragedy, yet with a small happy ending. It involves a copy of Baltimore on the Chesapeake -- the first off the press -- that author and former Sun editor Hamilton Owens gave to his son, Gwinn (shown here). Here's how Fred tells the story:

While going through Gwinn’s byline files from the newspaper’s library before writing his obituary, I stumbled upon a 1977 clipping that he had written about his father’s book for The Evening Sun. ... "This gesture [of getting the first book] wasn’t because I was a favored child, but a sentimental recognition that I was the only one of his five children who had chosen to follow his journalistic calling," wrote Owens. ... "What pleased me the most of all, however, was the inscription inside."

His father had written: "For Gwinn, who will probably write a better one some day.

"Love, Father."

"Naturally, it became the most honored book in my library," wrote Owens, who was a longtime resident of Locust Avenue in Ruxton. Years later, Owens lent the book to an old friend, Lester H. Gliedman, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University, who lived in Lutherville.

In 1958, Gliedman and his wife, Gertrude, were returning from a convention in San Francisco when their Baltimore-bound Capital Airlines Viscount collided with a National Guard jet trainer over Frederick County. Twelve lost their lives in the midair crash, including the husband and wife, whose four children, ranging in age from 5 to 16 years, were left orphaned.

Owens, who at the time was a reporter for The Evening Sun, received an "alarmed call" from Gliedman’s office. "I had the burden of informing his colleagues that, yes, the couple had been killed," Owens wrote. "It was an appalling tragedy." Owens was aware that his book was still rested at the family’s home, but to ask about it, he wrote, would have been insensitive. It was, after all, a "trivial possession."