Grace Bassett, reporter who chronicled urban legislation in Congress, dies at 93

Grace Bassett, a journalist who covered District affairs on Capitol Hill for The Washington Post and the old Washington Star, most notably chronicling passage of the constitutional amendment giving D.C. residents a voice in presidential elections, died June 8 at a nursing home in Annandale, Va. She was 93.

The cause was complications from dementia, said her friend and power of attorney, Robin Renner.

Ms. Bassett worked at The Post from 1953 to 1957 and won a Washington Newspaper Guild Award for her coverage of the District’s response to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board outlawing racial segregation in public schools.

At the Star, where she spent about a decade, her beat was urban legislation in Congress. The American Political Science Association honored her for excellence in political reporting for the two years she spent following the campaign for the 23rd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Ratified in 1961, it authorized D.C. residents to choose electors in presidential elections.

Attribution:  Adam Bernstein, washingtonpost.com
Full Story: Bassett

Joseph Volz - Journalist March 6, 1935 - May 23, 2020

Joseph Volz died Saturday, May 23, 2020, following a stroke complicated by diabetes; he was 85. He discovered his career as a journalist in high school while covering sports for the Newark daily newspaper. He'd like to say "I've shut down six newspapers," including the Washington Star.  In more than 30 years as an investigative journalist for the New York Daily News, Washington Star, Washington Daily News, and Newark News, Joe Volz covered everything from the police force to Watergate to the Pentagon. He ended his career as a columnist for the Copley News Service and the Frederick News-Post.  Joe was a Pulitzer Prize finalist with the New York Daily News for his reporting on military preparedness.  Joe was born in Newark, New Jersey on March 6, 1935. He graduated from Rutgers University. While awaiting his draft notice, he took a world tour visiting New Zealand, Australia, and Tahiti.

Attribution:Legacy.com
Full Story: Volz

Calvin Duffey Cramer - Printer April 29, 2020

LAKE WALES - Calvin Duffey Cramer of Lakeland, Fla., died April 29, 2020. He was 91.

Calvin was born in Washington, D.C., on June 26, 1928, the youngest of three boys (brothers Hugh H. Cramer 1920-1980 and Admiral Shannon Davenport Cramer, Jr. 1921-2012), to Shannon Davenport Cramer and Mary Eileen Hazen (née Duffey) Cramer.
He graduated in 1947 from Washington's Central High School, where he was class president and lettered in football, basketball and track.
After briefly attending Princeton University, Calvin returned to Washington and married his high school sweetheart, Carol Joanne Seaman in 1948. Starting as an apprentice, he worked in all aspects of the printing trade, including for Washington's Evening Star newspaper and in a small printing shop he ran with his best friend from high school. He played for the Union Printers basketball team in Washington's industrial leagues, and he and Carol were also youth leaders at St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Kensington, Md.
In 1963, Calvin took his printing skills to the U.S. Civil Service Commission. But dissatisfied with being a government bureaucrat, he made a leap of faith and took a job as director of Sky Lake United Methodist Church Camp in Windsor, N.Y., in 1970. For the next 20 years, he followed his passion for outdoor Christian education there and at other administrative positions in western and central Pennsylvania.

Attribution: legacy.com
Full story: Cramer

Peter Anthony Bozick, Sr. - White House Press Corp., February 24, 2020

Peter Anthony Bozick, Sr, age 94, died peacefully February 24, 2020 in Salisbury due to a fall the week before. He was an avid reader from an early age, largely self-taught, excelled in school and skipped two grade levels before high school. He graduated from Towson High School, while taking a night class at John Hopkins University. Being proficient in multiple languages, Pete enlisted during WWII and was placed into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and trainedas a spy. He was captured by the Nazis in the former Yugoslavia and rescued shortly thereafter by British forces. He was awarded a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross for his service.

After the war, he attended the University of Maryland, where he met his wife Marilyn Scuderi. Before he and Marilyn were formally introduced, Pete memorably told his friend that he would "marry this girl". They married in 1949 for 65 years until her passing in 2014. Pete began a journalism career with Washington Evening Star newspaper, worked his way to news editor and was a member of the White House Press Corp.

Attribution: Legacy.com
Full Story: Bozick

Daniel Watkins Taylor - Gifted and Prodigious Writer and Photographer

Daniel Watkins Taylor, age 90, passed away on January 29, 2020, in Willow Street, Pennsylvania, where he resided for the past seven years. Born on July 3, 1929, in East Haven, Connecticut, he was the son of Robert Mitchell Taylor, MD, and Margaret Lyles Watkins Taylor. Daniel had a brother, Robert Mitchell Taylor II, late of Branford, Connecticut.

Daniel attended the Choate School, in the class of 1947, and went on to study English at Washington and Lee University, graduating in 1952. After college, he became a Lieutenant Junior Grade in the United States Navy, serving on the USS Delta and the USNS General John Pope during the Korean War. He was released from active duty in 1954.

A gifted and prodigious writer and photographer, Daniel began his career as a reporter on several newspapers from 1954-1959: The Times Herald Middletown, NY), the Hartford Courant (CT), and the Washington Evening Star (DC). He turned to public relations in 1959, when he began working for the Federal government in Washington, DC, as a public information consultant for the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers (National Academy of Sciences), and then the Public Information Branch of the National Science Foundation, where his work included speech writing for the Director.

Attribution: lancasteronline.com
Full Story: Taylor

Legendary Columbia West Coast A&R exec RON OBERMAN has passed away

from Michael Oberman

Ron Oberman 8/28/1943 to 11/21/2019

Ron started as a copyboy at age eighteen in 1961.  He quickly moved to the position of dictationist.  From 1964 to 1967, Ron wrote the weekly Top Tunes column in addition to general assignment reporting.

In 1967, Ron went to work at Mercury Records in Chicago as Director of Publicity.  Later, Ron became VP of A & R (artists and repertoire) at Columbia Records.  After a long stint at Columbia, Ron became Executive VP of A & R at MCA Records.  When he retired from MCA, Ron played poker.  Ron passed peacefully in his sleep in Reno, NV.
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from allaccess.com
Legendary COLUMBIA WEST COAST A&R exec RON OBERMAN has passed away.  During his storied career OBERMAN helped shape the careers of artist like DAVID BOWIE, BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, THE BANGLES, TOAD THE WET SPROCKET, WARRANT, WILDERNESS ROAD, MARTIKA and many others.

OBERMAN had been suffering from dementia for the last decade. Details on services are pending.
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from TimesofIsrael.com
David Bowie didn’t start his first trip to the United States with a drug-filled party or a wild show, but instead with a quiet evening at the home of a Maryland Jewish family.

The now-iconic English rocker had just released the album “The Man Who Sold the World,” which built on the success of his popular “Space Oddity” album in Europe. But he wasn’t yet a household name in the States when his first US tour was set to kick off in January 1971.

Bowie’s North American publicist, Ron Oberman of Mercury Records, invited him to stay at his parents in Silver Spring for a night before setting out to play shows in cities from New York to Los Angeles.

The Rev. James M. ‘Mike’ Coram, who had dual careers as an Episcopal priest and a newspaperman, dies - November 15, 2019

The Rev. James M. Coram worked in The Sun's
Howard and Carroll bureaus.
The Rev. James M. “Mike” Coram, who had dual careers as an Episcopal priest and a Baltimore Sun newspaperman, died Nov. 15 of complications from a blood infection at Mercy Medical Center. The Columbia resident was 80.

“Mike was a straightforward reporter, and the best thing I can say about him was that he had a great wit,” said William T.M. Grigg, a former Washington Star reporter and newspaper colleague. “Then he chucked his newspaper career and went into the ministry and then came back to newspapers when he joined The Baltimore Sun.”

“Mike was a wonderful guy, and we called him ‘Captain’ in those days when we were kids in the Howard County bureau,” said Mike James, a former Baltimore Sun editor who is now national editor for USA Today. “His beat was government, but he was a jack of all trades and could cover anything.”

Anne Haddad, a North Baltimore resident, was a reporter with Mr. Coram in The Sun’s Westminster bureau, where they were staff reporters on the paper’s old Carroll Sun zoned edition.

Charles Thomas Alexander - Professor Emeritus, Assistant City Editor - November 15, 2019

Professor emeritus, the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, passed away November 15, 2019 in Alexandria, VA at 91. A long-time Alexandria resident, he is survived by his wife of 68 years, Elizabeth Brown Alexander; daughters Elizabeth "Liza" Alexander Marshall (John) of Arlington, VA; Lucy Alexander Murphy (Braden) of Potomac, MD; grandchildren Charlie and Emma Marshall.
Born in Minneapolis, MN on September 21, 1928 to Dr. Charles Thomas and Mary Stinson Alexander. His family home was in Mount Vernon IN. He received his BA from Duke University in 1950. After two years military service during the Korean War, Ft. Belvoir, VA, and two years studying at Boston University School of Theology, he obtained an MS from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He began his journalism career with the Washington Star (1956-61) as assistant city editor, followed by managing editor of the Wilmington (DE) Morning News and Evening Journal (1961-66), and editor and publisher of the Dayton (OH) Journal Herald. He returned to Washington, DC in 1975 as professor of journalism and director of the Medill News Service, retiring in 1994.

He had a lifelong love of sports, music, theater, travel and the church, serving as elder of the Georgetown Presbyterian Church for over 30 years. A memorial service will be held at Georgetown Presbyterian Church Jan 4, 2020 at 2 pm. Interment in 2020 at Christ Church, St. Simon's Island, GA. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions should be made to Georgetown Presbyterian Church, 3115 P St., NW, Washington, DC 20007.

Published in The Washington Post on Nov. 22, 2019

Attribution: Legacy.com
Story: Alexander

Diane Woolley Bauer, Investigative Reporter, 1932- 2019

She was a muck-raking investigative reporter, a cab driver, a U. S. Senate press aide, a merchant seaman, and a mother of four who served on Berkeley's Waterfront Commission as well as two terms on the Berkeley City Council. She was briefly hospitalized, and died surrounded by family on June 7th, 2019 after a few years of declining health. She leaves a legacy of extraordinary work both as a journalist and as a Berkeley councilmember dedicated to serving District 5's neighborhoods.

Diane Woolley Bauer's father was a writer with MGM in Los Angeles, where she was born, but had been a commander in the British Royal Navy who served in World War I. He was called back for World War II and stationed in Jamaica, where Diane spent a portion of her young life. After the war the family moved to Washington D.C. where during her college years Diane took a two-week job as a vacation replacement for what was then called a copy girl at the Washington Post and her career as an investigative reporter began.

She became the youngest reporter in Washington D.C. Then-owner of the Post, Eugene Meyer, set aside the rule requiring that reporters have a college degree to put Bauer in charge of what is now called the Style section of the Post covering "politicians, diplomats and debutantes", as she put it, doing the layout and writing an advice column for college girls under her picture and byline. It should go without saying that women were an uncommon part of such workplaces.

She continued to work part-time as a young wife and mother writing ad copy, serving as a U.S. Senate press aide and a campaign director, but excelled as a self-taught journalist. She is credited for doubling the Washington Daily News' Maryland circulation with her hard-driving public interest stories, often scooping the full-timer reporters at the Washington Post and Evening Star. When the Daily News folded into the Evening Star she was one of the few reporters who were kept on. She wrote, investigated, and consulted for public interest research and law firms working special assignments for Newsweek, CBS television, panels, and documentaries such as ABC's "The Paper Prison" specializing in courts, police and prisons, juvenile detention, privacy and records-keeping, and medical ethics. One of her pieces on juvenile offenders' treatment provoked a letter from J. Edgar Hoover defending the FBI's procedures; she kept the letter.

Her work was so thorough it is cited in several books on civil liberties, behavior modification, privacy, and bioethics as well as some Supreme Court cases. Her writing is credited for playing a role in highlighting atrocities and instituting reforms at Maryland's infamous Patuxent Institution where she revealed an expensive behavior modification scandal. Author Nat Hentoff wrote a story about her tireless investigative journalism, including the illumination of "a hitherto hidden plan...to form a secret intelligence unit to combat organized crime" which her writing revealed arranged to violate, among other things, privacy laws. The unit had to be scrapped.

Attribution: Carol Denney, berkeleydailyplanet.com
Full Story:  Bauer

Robert Pear, scrupulous chronicler of health care for the New York Times, dies at 69

In the hands of many Washington reporters, the ins and outs of Medicare and Medicaid, the Clinton administration’s failed health-care overhaul and President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act could be insufferably technical. But health policy is also intensely personal. For millions of Americans, it determines what conditions their health insurance will cover, how much insurance — if any — their grown children can afford, and how their elderly parents will pay for prescription drugs.

By all accounts, Robert Pear of the New York Times was one of the most relentlessly probing journalists on the health-care beat, enlightening readers and rankling partisans with the clarity of his reportage and his savantlike understanding of the federal government and its arcana. With a seemingly ever-present byline on Page One of the Times, Mr. Pear was a constant and authoritative presence in Washington for four decades.

He died May 7 at 69 at a hospice center in Rockville, Md. The cause was complications from a severe stroke that he suffered April 29, said his brother, Doug Pear.

Attribution: Emily Langer, washingtonpost.com
Full Story: Pear

The Rev. Arnold Godfrey Taylor August 24, 1925~March 20, 2019

Arnold Taylor, 93, an Episcopal priest who served as rector of Christ Church, Durham Parish, in Nanjemoy, MD, from 1971 to 1993, died March 20, 2019 in Washington, DC.

Mr. Taylor was born in Providence, R.I., and grew up both in the city and on a farm. He served in WWII as a military policeman with the 99th Infantry Division in Germany.

After earning a degree in journalism at Pacific University in Oregon, Mr. Taylor settled in 1952 in Washington, DC, where he worked at the Evening Star, advancing from copy boy to photographer to assistant picture editor.

He married Lilian Bedinger on July 3, 1954, and they had three children.

In 1965, Taylor left the newspaper business to attend Virginia Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1969.

He served first as assistant rector at Christ Church in Clinton, MD. In 1971, he was called as rector of Christ Church, Durham Parish, where he served for 22 years. He was a gifted pastor, always ready to meet people where they were. In the larger community, his contributions included organizing a Boy Scout troop and helping to establish Hospice of Charles County.

Attribution: somdnews.com
Full Story: Taylor

Shirlita H. Bolton, Author, Producer and Talent Agent - January 9, 2019

Shirlita H. Bolton, 86, of Orlando, Florida, passed away on January 9, 2019 at Cornerstone Hospice & Palliative Care. She was born on February 29, 1932 in Kingsport, Tennessee to Maurice Lee Hutchins and Alberta Jane Hutchins (Foglesong). Her parents named her Shirley Jean Hutchins. She attended Dobbins Bennett High School in Kingsport. She and her husband Herb Blizzard moved to Washington, D.C. when she was 19 years old so he could work in the construction field. He would later return to Kingsport, but Lita, as she would be known, preferred the exciting big city to small town life, and remained while the couple divorced. While working for the Washington Star Newspaper, she was attracted to the growing Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. She married Captain Joseph L. Stephenson, a veteran WWII Buffalo Soldier when interracial marriage was illegal in many states and disapproved of by society in general.

Attribution: orlandosentinel.com/
Full Story: Bolton

Tim Warren - Award-winning Journalist And Critic, January 26, 2019

Photo courtesy - Paul McCardell  Baltimore Sun Librarian 
TIMOTHY PHILIP MICHAEL WARREN "Tim"  August 19, 1951 - January 26, 2019
Award-winning journalist and critic Tim Warren died January 26, after an eight-year battle with cancer.

Tim was a multi-skilled journalist with more than 40 years experience as a writer, editor, and copy editor for several daily newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Star. He also served as a contributing writer for Smithsonian, Washingtonian and other magazines.

Newsday managing editor Robert F. Brandt - December 28, 2018

In an often hard-charging newsroom world, Newsday managing editor Robert F. Brandt excelled with brilliant editing, unflappable calm, even when catastrophic events erupted around the world, while always taking care of his colleagues.

“As the night managing editor, Bob had tremendous impact; ultimately, he decided what got into the paper, and what didn’t, and how much attention a story should receive,” said Howard Schneider, a former Newsday editor and founding dean of the School of Journalism at Stony Brook University.

Brandt, who died Friday in a Maryland hospice at age 72, completely redid the paper the night TWA Flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, his former colleagues recalled, killing all 230 passengers on July 17, 1996.

When he retired after serving more than 15 years as managing editor, Brandt said he was proud of his role in converting Newsday from an afternoon to a morning newspaper, in the mid-1980s when afternoon papers were struggling. He also advanced Newsday’s efforts to hire more minority staff members.

Before joining Newsday in 1981, Brandt had worked at the Tampa Tribune, Hartford Courant, Miami Herald and Washington Star.

Attribution: Joan Gralla - newsday.com
Full Story: Brandt

Barry Kalb, Journalist & Teacher - December 19, 2018

It is with great sadness that we heard the news of the passing of Barry Kalb on Wednesday, 19 December 2018, at the age of 75.

Barry was a long-time lecturer at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre (JMSC) at The University of Hong Kong, spending close to a decade teaching the fundamentals of reporting and writing before retiring in 2014. He continued his association with HKU however, running regular English-language grammar boot camps for students.

A journalist with more than 30 years of experience, Barry started his career in journalism in 1967 at the Evening Star in Washington, D.C. After eight years, he moved to Hong Kong in 1975, briefly for NBC News, and then as a staff correspondent for CBS News. In 1979, he joined Time magazine as Eastern Europe bureau chief, based in West Berlin, and subsequently moved to Rome, New York and back to Hong Kong.

Barry took a 14-year break from journalism to pursue entrepreneurial ambitions in Hong Kong including running Il Mercato, a notable Italian restaurant in Central. In late 2002, he returned to journalism, as an editor at the Voice of America bureau in Hong Kong.

His career included coverage of many remarkable news events, including the Watergate corruption scandal in Washington, D.C., the deaths of Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong and the return to power of Deng Xiaoping in China, the beginnings of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in Rome, among many other stories.

Attribution: Cal Wong - https://jmsc.hku.hk
Full story> Kalb

Walt Wurfel - Reporter, Press Secretary, Editor, General Manager, November 29, 2018

Walt Wurfel, whose career spanned the worlds of radio, print and politics in colorful ways, died last Thursday at The Kensington, a Falls Church, VA assisted living facility, where he had been living for the last year and a half. He was 81. In radio circles,

Wurfel is perhaps best known for his decade of service to the National Association of Broadcasters, where he was senior VP of Communications from 1986-1997. That put him at the center of industry lobbying efforts that contributed to passage of the landmark Telecom Act of 1996. Before joining the trade group, Wurfel was already well known on Capitol Hill, having served as White House deputy press secretary under Jody Powell during the Carter administration and as press secretary to Hubert Humphrey’s presidential primary campaign in 1972.

Wurfel’s media career ranged from show leather reporting to corporate positions in the C-suite. He was operations director of radio stations in Middletown and Utica, NY at Straus Broadcasting Group and assistant news director WTSJ-TV San Juan, Puerto Rico. A graduate of Stanford University and the Columbia University School of Journalism, Wurfel worked as a reporter for the Washington Evening Star and as foreign editor and then political editor at the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times. His newspaper career took him to the VP of Corporate Communications position at Gannett Co.

Attribution: insideradio.com/
Full Story: Wurfel

Richard Wilson Lee - December 25, 1934 - November 10, 2018

Dick Lee, who passed away Nov. 10 in Brookings, was former head of the journalism department at SDSU. He arrived there in 1978, when I was managing editor of this newspaper. Getting to know him was my good fortune because he was one of the best journalists, and men, that I ever knew.

  He knew his craft and he knew people. His avuncular manner allowed him to form relationships with those from all walks, including some who distrusted the media.

He was well educated, with a doctorate degree in mass communications. He came from a newspaper family. He had practical experience to bolster his academic credentials, working on weekly and daily newspapers, including the Washington Star.

Attribution:Noel Hamiel, brookingsregister.com
Full Story: Journalist

Orva Walker Heissenbuttel, "Antiques and Americana" columnist, 91

Orva Walker Heissenbuttel, 91, Gallia County native, passed away at her home in Montross, Virginia on October 31, 2018. Born October 27, 1927 near Cora, Perry Township , she was the eldest daughter of Zelma Phillips and Jackson Tandy Walker.

 During her decades in the Washington area she taught hundreds of students and eventually reached many more with her "Antiques and Americana" column for the Washington Star newspaper. She had a knack for bringing people with shared interests together, forming the American Antique Arts Association (18 chapters) and other groups devoted to Heisey, Duncan, and Imperial glassware.

Attribution: Legacy.com
Full Story:  Orva

Steve Guback, Award-Winning Sportswriter - October 1, 2018

Steve Guback died peacefully on October 1, 2018 at the age of 91. He was a former award-winning sportswriter with The Washington Evening Star. He also served as Director of Information for the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports for eight years. In 2016 Guback marked a 75-year career as a Sportswriter. Steve was inducted into the United States Basketball Writers Hall of Fame at the 1989 NCAA basketball championships in Seattle, WA. He also was elected to the Virginia Sports Hall of Fame in 2005. During his 20 years with The Washington Star, Steve covered a wide variety of sporting activities, including NCAA basketball championships, more than a dozen Super Bowls, heavyweight championship fights, collegiate football bowl games, tennis, baseball and track. He also covered the Washington Redskins on a daily basis for more than a dozen years and worked with the Redskins for two years on special projects after the Washington Star ceased publication in 1981.

Guback was voted the Virginia/DC Sportswriter of the Year three times, served on the Professional Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee, served as president of the Atlantic Coast Sportswriters Association and was president and later executive director of the U.S. Basketball Writers Association. A graduate of Indiana University, Guback was voted the Outstanding Journalism Graduate in 1950 and was one of the first recipients of the Ernie Pyle Scholarship, awarded to outstanding journalism majors in honor of the late Scripps-Howard war correspondent. He also was elected to Beta Gamma Sigma, the international business administration honor society.

During World War II he served two years in the U.S. Navy. Three scholarships in his honor are awarded annually at Indiana University where he also served as a member of the University's public affairs council. Prior to joining the Star, Steve wrote for the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch and the Winston-Salem (NC) Journal. He also contributed to numerous national publications, including Newsweek, The Saturday Evening Post, The Sporting News and TV Guide. With the President's Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, Guback handled media inquiries, special promotions, various fitness-related projects and was responsible for the Council's public service messages on radio, television and in print. He accompanied chairman Arnold Schwarzenegger on a 50-state tour promoting the need for improved youth fitness. Guback also served as an Acting Executive Director of the Council for five months under President Bush in 1989 and served on the Board of Directors of the United States Olympic Committee.

Guback was born in Wallington, NJ, and was brought up in Norwalk, CT, where he began writing sports as a high school youngster for the Norwalk Hour. He was inducted into the Norwalk High School Wall of Honor in 2001. He married the former Irene Lapish of Statesville, NC, in 1964. They made their home in Alexandria, VA, and served in leadership capacities at Aldersgate United Methodist Church where they funded the construction of the youth wing into a multi-purpose Guback Center, and also funded the renovation of Founders Hall. Since his wife's death in March, 2009, Guback resided at Greenspring Village, a retirement community in Springfield, VA. He remained active giving sports talks to various groups and video presentations to senior centers and other groups in Northern Virginia on the world-wide travels that he and his wife made over the years. He was host/founder of four TV/forum programs at Greenspring. He also established a scholarship for a student interested in a media-based career who has the opportunity to serve as an Intern at Greenspring.

Attribution: Legacy.com

Clyde Day, Route Manager - August 7,2018

Clyde Morgan Day, 91, of Hagerstown, MD, passed away on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 in Hagerstown.

Born Saturday, October 30, 1926 in Templeton, MA, he was the son of the late Calvin Day and Ina (Harris) Day.

For over 20 years, Clyde worked for the Washington Star in Washington, D.C. as a route manager. In 1981, he moved to Hagerstown and worked for the Review and Herald Publishing Company until his retirement.

Clyde worked full time into his late seventies and held many part-time positions, including: bus driver, truck driver, milk route driver, and a stint at the National Zoo Snake House. The zoo experience alone made for great stories, and Clyde always amused family and friends with his wonderful and detailed anecdotes.

Clyde joined the United States Navy during World War II; serving two years. He received the World War II Victory Medal and the American Theater Medal. After the war, he attended Columbia Union College where he was one class shy from receiving his bachelor’s degree.
Throughout his adult life, Clyde was a member of the Spencerville Seventh Day Adventist Church.

David Moore Stack 1938-2018

David Moore Stack was born on March 4, 1938 in Mount Holly, North Carolina and died at home June 23, 2018 in Leesburg, Va.

During his life, Mr. Stack was a newspaperman and reporter for the Alexandria Gazette and the Washington Star. He then became a Communications Professional and Instructor for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. For the last 25 years, he was an advocate for those struggling with addiction.

Attribution: loudounnow.com

Dorothy Baliles Shank, August 12, 1923 - June 5, 2018

Dorothy Baliles Shank, 94 of Roanoke, Va., passed away peacefully at home after a brief illness on Tuesday, June 5, 2018.
She was very proud to be the Valedictorian of the last class of Blue Ridge Mission School in 1941 in Woolwine and enjoyed school reunions for many years. After graduation Dorothy moved to Washington, D.C., and worked for The National Geographic Society and The Washington Star newspaper. She returned to Stuart in 1948.

Full article: Shank roanoke.com

Star Staff Writer David G. Braaten, July 25, 1925 – June 3, 2018

Star Staff Writer David Braaten died June 3, 2018 of complications from a blood infection. He was 92. He worked at the Star from 1962 til he took a buyout in 1978. The pics are from the front page mockup his friends made him upon his early retirement. A copy of the whole front page hangs outside the men's room at Mr. Henry's, Dave's favorite restaurant for extended lunches.

Walt Swanston-NuevaEspana, Diversity Champion, Dies

Walterene Swanston-NuevaEspana, a decades-long champion of diversity in the news media as a former print and broadcast journalist and journalism association executive, died Friday at a Fairfax County, Va., hospital in the Washington, D.C., suburbs. She was 74 and suffered a massive heart attack a week ago, said friend and fellow journalist Wanda Lloyd.

“Walt was one of the sweetest, most gentle souls, and someone who was dedicated to the success of every organization for which she worked, every project she led and every young journalist who needed her help,” messaged Lloyd.

“Over the years I traveled with Walt around the country and across the ocean, attending conferences for NABJ, AAJA, NAHJ and to many other meetings where we shared our passion for journalism. Now she is gone and journalism has lost one of its most dedicated professionals.”

The references are to the National Association of Black Journalists, the Asian American Journalists Association and the National Association of Hispanic Journalists.

She had worked with all of them, as well as with Unity: Journalists for Diversity, the collaboration that consists of AAJA, the Native American Journalists Association and the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association. She was Unity’s interim executive director from 2012 to 2014, having previously been executive director of Unity: Journalists of Color, which included AAJA, NABJ, NAHJ and NAJA, and spearheaded the Unity ‘94 and Unity ‘99 conventions. She had also been director of diversity management at NPR, a consultant for the American Society of News Editors and from 1993 to 1995, executive director of NABJ.

In addition, she worked for the Radio and Television News Directors Foundation, directing the organization’s diversity, educational and international programs; for the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, where she directed diversity programs; and for Knight-Ridder Inc., where she was a consultant.

NPR host Michel Martin remembers Swanston’s time at that network. “From the minute I set foot in the door at NPR, Walt was a source of friendship and wise counsel,” Martin said by email. “And I don’t think I’ve ever met a person with a more diverse network of friends, colleagues, and mentees. Diversity was something she did, it was what she was, a way of life. She was a walking, talking example of how it can and should be done.”

Keith Woods, who succeeded her as diversity executive at NPR, said by email Saturday, “Walt was one of the most resilient, persistent, and, above all, empathetic people I’ve known. She believed deeply in the work of diversity, and so many of us who have done this work found themselves at one time or another following in her path. Walt was a true champion, and journalism is particularly poorer with her passing.

“I knew Walt for more than 20 years. She had a rough time at NPR and struggled to make progress in the newsroom. Still, she strongly encouraged me to follow in her footsteps and offered herself as a coach because, above all, the work she did was out of love and passion. No organization or obstacle ever beat her. I’m heartbroken to have lost her.”

NuevaEspana was known mostly to fellow journalists as Walt Swanston before she remarried in 2015, after the 2006 death of her first husband, public relations executive David Swanston.

She was hospitalized on Jan. 12 and died in the early hours of Jan. 19, according to her daughter, Rachel Swanston Breegle.

The former Walterene Jackson was born in Clinton, La., and attended segregated schools there before she, her sister Bettye Jackson and brothers Raphael “Ray” Jackson and Ruffin Lane “Buzz” Jackson were put on trains for Oakland, Calif., where they lived with an aunt and uncle so they could attend integrated schools.

When presented with the Ida B. Wells Award from NABJ in 2011, she thanked her parents for enabling her and her siblings to leave Louisiana. “None of the children ever went home to live there again,” she told the NABJ audience. Still, she regretted that the move broke up her family,

At her alma mater, San Francisco State University, she met David Swanston, and as a young journalist, worked at the San Francisco Examiner and the old Washington Star. Later she was a copy editor and contributor to the Washington Post’s Style, weeklies and real estate sections; a reporter and producer at Washington public television station WETA and executive editor at WUSA-TV, the Gannett-owned CBS affiliate.

Attribution: Richard Prince - journalisms.theroot.com
Full story: Diversity Champion

Sports Writer Charles "Charlie" J. Rayman 1933—2018

Charles "Charlie" J. Rayman, 84, of Rockford passed away Saturday, January 13, 2018, at Presence St. Anne Center. Born April 16, 1933,  Charlie attended the University of Maryland, where he earned his bachelor's degree in Journalism. He was a sports reporter, starting his career for the Baltimore Sun and writing later for the Rockford Register Star, retiring in 1998.

Rayman covered the Orioles for the Baltimore Sun before behind hired as the baseball writer at the Washington Star shortly before the Star folded. That's when he was hired by the Register Star. Rayman's main sports beats over the years at the Register Star included Rock Valley College, bowling and softball.

Charlie Rayman wasn't so much a sports writer at the Rockford Register Star as he was a sports "character."

"He was a real character both inside and outside the office," Randy Ruef, former longtime sports editor of the Register Star, said of Rayman.

He'd wear plaid shorts, knee-high black socks and sandals. You could always see him chewing on his pen, walking around carrying 10 pounds of newspapers with information for his fantasy baseball leagues. He was a fast talker. You add the look, the talk, the newspapers, the black socks, all those things combined  made him so unique.

Attribution: Matt Trowbridge rrstar.com
Full Story: Charlie Rayman

Dennis Lewis, July 27, 1939 - November 2, 2017

A former Washington journalist, union activist and a veteran, died peacefully November 2, 2017, of apparent heart failure at the Potomac Manor nursing home in Potomac Md. He was 78. Lewis, a native of Norristown, Pa., worked as a columnist at both the "Washington Star" and the "Washington Times" during the 1970s and 1980s, writing about local radio and television news and personalities. He later worked 15 years as a production editor at the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), a newsletter publishing company now owned by Bloomberg Inc. and headquartered in Arlington, Va. While working as a radio-television columnist, Lewis frequently interviewed Howard Stern and Larry King, who were then working in Washington in the early stages of their careers. While at the "Washington Star" and BNA, Lewis was an activist with the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild (WBNG), the union which represented employees at both companies. He was a co-chairman of the BNA unit for a number of years, served on the WBNG Executive Council, and participated in several Newspaper Guild national conventions. Lewis was a member of St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill, and an active participant with the St. Mark's Players theater group, performing in various roles and writing program articles. Lewis, whose original name was Richard Dennis Kennedy, changed his name as an adult after researching his family history. A few years after graduating from Norristown High School in 1957, he enlisted in the U.S. Army and received journalism training at the Defense Information School (DINFOS) at Fort Slocum in New York State. He served at a post in Saudi Arabia during part of his enlistment. As a teenager Dennis become very interested in politics and was an avid member of the "Young Democrats of America." This led him to a lifelong passion and involvement with the party and the issues of the day. Lewis was born July 27, 1939.

Attribution: Legacy.com
Full article Dennis Lewis

John Whiteside, Commercial Flight Instructor, Newspaper Distributor

John Whiteside, 77, a commercial flight instructor in the late 1960s and 1970s with the American Flyers Airline Corp., died Sept. 28 at a hospital in Fairfax, Va. The cause was complications from sick sinus syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder, said a brother, Phil Whiteside.
Mr. Whiteside was born in Miami Beach and moved to the Washington area in 1958. He worked for the Washington Star and later The Washington Post as a newspaper distributor until he retired in 2005.

Attribution> washingtonpost.com staff report

James O.E. Norell - April 12, 1943 - September 25, 2017

NRA has lost one of its greatest communicators with the sudden passing of James O. E. Norell. Norell passed while vacationing in Chincoteague, Va., on Sept. 25, 2017. He was 74 years old.
For more than four decades, Norell crafted many of the compelling arguments on behalf of NRA leadership that motivated millions of NRA members to continue their staunch defense of their constitutional Right to Keep and Bear Arms—often successfully reaching out to and converting those who held opposing beliefs about gun ownership. As the first Director of Communications for NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, Norell was once considered the voice in Washington when it came to public dissemination of NRA’s message.
Prior to his tenure at NRA-ILA, Norell worked as a journalist for various newspapers, including the Washington Star, before becoming press secretary to Idaho Senator James McClure. After his NRA-ILA service, Norell went on to work at Legal Services Corporation. Norell was an avid hunter, gun collector and fisherman. He was an NRA Benefactor member, and was a member of NRA's Public Affairs Committee. Norell also has many award-winning screenwriting and filmography credits to his name. He appeared regularly on American Rifleman TV as a subject matter expert on certain firearms.

Attribution: americanrifleman.org
Full article: NRA's Voice for Freedom

Kirk Oberfeld, Editorial Writer - July 28, 2017

Kirk Oberfeld, 72, a former reporter, editor and editorial writer with the old Washington Star and the Washington Times, died July 28 at a hospital in Grand Rapids, Mich. The cause was multiple organ failure and liver disease, said a brother, Keith Oberfeld.

Attribution: WashingtonPost.com

Mr. Oberfeld was born in East Orange, N.J. A former reporter at the Philadelphia Bulletin, he worked for the Star from 1979 to 1982. He then went to the Times and was managing editor of the newspaper’s Insight magazine from 1985 to 1995. Later he was marketing director for ProFunds, an investment organization, and editor in chief of Philanthropy magazine. In 2007, he moved to New York City from Bethesda, Md., and was director of Business Executives for National Security, a nonprofit organization. He moved to Grand Rapids about five years ago.

Edward Kirk Oberfeld of Grand Rapids, Michigan, aged 72 years, passed away on July 28, 2017, after a brief illness. Kirk was born in East Orange, New Jersey, to Edward and Charlene Oberfeld, and grew up in New Jersey, Michigan and Ohio. Kirk graduated from Kalamazoo College with a B.A. in Political Science, and after additional post graduate work in Germany, took his M.A. in Journalism from Ohio State University.

Kirk lived most of his adult life on the East Coast, in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, Bethesda, Washington DC, and New York, but made frequent trips home to visit his parents in Grand Rapids, for famous holiday meals including his favorite oyster dressing. Kirk, as a conservative, and his brother and parents as liberals, engaged in many spirited discussions over the holidays. Kirk and Pam met and married in Washington D.C., and enjoyed living in there for many years.

Kirk's first love was journalism. He began his career in Columbus, Ohio, for UPI, and later went to work as an editorial writer for the Battle Creek Enquirer. He reported and editorialized for the Philadelphia Bulletin for many years, and sold and collected artworks in Baltimore for a time. He moved to Washington D.C. to work for the Washington Star and went on to create the first new weekly news magazine to be published in fifty years. That magazine, "Insight on the News", became one of the first strong conservative voices in Washington. Kirk later worked in fundraising for two large National Security non-profits. Kirk made frequent appearances on the Financial News Network, CNN, CNBC and C-Span as an expert political commentator. Kirk's passion was collecting period glass, furniture and art, primarily from the Art Nouveau period.

Attribution:
obits.mlive.com

Jack Monroe Kneece, Jr., 80, March 2, 1937 - July 10, 2017

Jack M. Kneece was a longtime author and newspaperman whose news reporting career started with United Press International in Atlanta, Georgia. A seasoned journalist with an impressive list of credentials, Kneece worked with publications across the world, with his work having appeared domestically in California, Alaska, Washington, D.C., Louisiana, and Virginia newspapers. He was a congressional reporter with the Washington Star, a national editor for the Washington Times, and in the Washington bureau of the Associated Press on Capitol Hill. For his work with the Oakland Tribune in California, he was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Alameda Newspaper Group.

In the 1960s, Kneece sold his first major story to Playboy Magazine and was the first reporter to land an interview with Bobby Baker during the Baker/Lyndon B. Johnson scandal of 1967. Kneece also worked internationally to establish Singapore's afternoon newspaper and served as a correspondent in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Kneece graduated from the University of South Carolina with a degree in English and a minor in journalism. He is the author of Family Treason: The Walker Spy Case, which has sold more than twenty-eight thousand copies. He writes for Go magazine of Charlotte, North Carolina, a Triple-A publication. In 2005, at the request of his alma mater, Kneece began teaching journalism as an adjunct professor.

Attribution: Pelicanpub.com

Roger Wilkins, Champion of Civil Rights, Dies at 85

Roger Wilkins, who championed civil rights for black Americans for five decades as an official in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, a foundation executive, a journalist, an author and a university professor, died on Sunday in Kensington, Md. He was 85.

His daughter Elizabeth confirmed his death, at a care facility. The cause was complications of dementia.

A black lawyer in the corridors of power, Mr. Wilkins was an assistant United States attorney general, ran domestic programs for the Ford Foundation, wrote editorials for The Washington Post and The New York Times, taught history at George Mason University for nearly 20 years and was close to leading lights of literature, music, politics, journalism and civil rights. Roy Wilkins, who led the N.A.A.C.P. from 1955 to 1977, was his uncle.

Roger Wilkins’s early mentor was Thurgood Marshall, the renowned civil rights lawyer who became the Supreme Court’s first black associate justice. And he organized Nelson Mandela’s triumphant eight-city visit to the United States in 1990 as millions turned out to see that living symbol of resistance to apartheid after his release from 27 years in prison in South Africa.

Beyond attending a segregated elementary school as a boy and being arrested once in a protest against apartheid, Mr. Wilkins had little personal experience with discrimination. He waged war against racism from above the barricades — with political influence, jawboning, court injunctions, philanthropic grants, legislative proposals, and commentaries on radio and television and in newspapers, magazines and books.

Outwardly, he was a successful, popular black man with more white acquaintances than black friends. The second of his three wives was white.

A lean, intense, soft-spoken intellectual, he grew up in a genteel middle-class family. The customs, attitudes and social currencies of everyday black life “evolved away from me,” he said in a memoir.

“I didn’t know how to talk, to banter, to move my body,” he said.

It mattered. As he rose to prominence, he came to regard himself as a token black in institutions and social circles that were overwhelmingly white and privileged. It troubled him deeply. In the memoir, “A Man’s Life: An Autobiography” (1982), he cited struggles with depression, suicidal thoughts and drinking problems, and acknowledged years of unease with his blackness, of trying to live up to the expectations of whites.

“Instead of standing with my nose pressed to the window, I often found myself inside rooms with people whose names were Mailer, Vidal, Javits, Kennedy or Bernstein,” he wrote. He was surrounded at work by middle-aged white men, while “my night world was virtually lily-white,” he added. “It was as if, by entering that world at night, I was betraying everything I told myself I stood for during the day.”

A University of Michigan Law School graduate, Mr. Wilkins went to Washington on a wave of New Frontier fervor in 1962 to join the Kennedy administration. He became special assistant to the head of the Agency for International Development. He was soon spotted as a savvy, if outspoken, Democratic asset, and joined campaigns for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson named him the administration’s chief troubleshooter on urban racial issues. He became an assistant attorney general, ostensibly to calm the unrest racking cities. He spoke dutifully against violence and met mayors and community leaders, but did not see his principal task as the suppression of disturbances.

“I am a firm believer in the view that the riots are not the real problem,” Mr. Wilkins said, calling for more jobs, housing and help for the poor. “The real threat to American life is our inattention to the really depressed and anguished conditions of the minority group people who live in the ghettos of this country.”

In 1966, he and a Justice Department colleague went to Chicago to see the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As he admitted later, Mr. Wilkins harbored suspicions that Dr. King might be an opportunist, Louis Menand wrote in The New Yorker in 2013. The visitors found Dr. King in an airless railroad flat in a slum, talking to 40 or 50 young gang members about nonviolence.

“For hours this went on,” Mr. Wilkins was quoted as saying. “There were no photographers there, no newsmen. There was no glory in it. He also kept two assistant attorneys general of the United States waiting for hours while he did this.”

It was 4 a.m. when Dr. King finished. He woke his wife, Coretta, and she made coffee. “We sat and we talked,” Mr. Wilkins said. “He was a great man, a great man.”

When Richard M. Nixon became president in early 1969, Mr. Wilkins detected a “turning away from the paths of cultural decency” and left government to join the Ford Foundation in New York. For three years, he oversaw funding for job training, education, drug rehabilitation and other programs. But he was powerless to support many projects he considered worthy and became disillusioned with the work.

In 1972 he began a new career in journalism, writing editorials for The Washington Post. He also began to put aside what he called his “desperate search for white approval.” His editorials on the Watergate scandal that drove Nixon from the presidency, along with reporting by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and cartoons by Herbert Block, helped The Post win the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1973.

Mr. Wilkins joined The Times editorial board in 1974 and later became an Op-Ed page columnist. In 1977, he and other minority journalists accused The Times in a federal lawsuit of racial discrimination in hiring and promotions; the case was settled for cash and pledges of improvements. He left the newspaper in 1979 and was an associate editor and columnist for The Washington Star in 1980 and 1981.

From 1979 to 1989 he was a member of the board that awarded journalism’s Pulitzer Prizes. He was also on an advisory panel that recommended Janet Cooke of The Washington Post for a feature-writing Pulitzer in 1981, for her article on an 8-year-old heroin addict. It was exposed as a fabrication after she won the prize. He said the episode had harmed “blacks in newsrooms all over the country.” Ms. Cooke, who returned the prize and resigned, is black.

From 1982 to 1992, Mr. Wilkins was a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank. From 1988 until his retirement in 2007, he was the Clarence J. Robinson professor in history and American culture at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. During his teaching years, he wrote for newspapers and magazines and was a frequent commentator on radio and television.

Roger Wilkins was born in Kansas City, Mo., on March 25, 1932, to Earl and Helen Jackson Wilkins. Some of his ancestors were slaves in Virginia. His father was a journalist and his mother was the first black national president of the Y.W.C.A.; she helped desegregate the organization in the 1960s. In Kansas City, Roger attended the all-black Crispus Attucks School, founded in 1893 and named for a slave killed by the British in the Boston Massacre of 1770.

After his father died in 1941, the boy and his mother joined relatives in Harlem, and three years later settled in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he graduated from high school. At the University of Michigan, he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953 and a law degree in 1956. He tried social work in Cleveland briefly, practiced law in New York City for several years, then joined the Kennedy administration.

Mr. Wilkins had a home in Washington. His marriages to Eve Tyler and Mary Myers ended in divorce. His third wife, Patricia A. King, a law professor at Georgetown University, survives him.

Mr. Wilkins wrote “Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism” (2001). He produced and narrated two PBS documentaries, “Keeping the Faith” (1987) about black churches, and “Throwaway People” (1990), about a poor black neighborhood.

“In a sense,” Mr. Wilkins wrote in his memoir, “I have been an explorer, and I sailed as far out into the white world as a black man of my generation could sail.”

Attribution: Robert D. McFadden/NYTimes.com

Jerry Lipson, reporter and Capitol Hill aide, dies at 81

Jerry Lipson, a former reporter who worked for a decade and a half as an aide to Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill, died Feb. 28 at a skilled nursing facility in Springfield, Va. He was 81.

The cause was complications from cancer, said his son, Jonathan C. Lipson.

Gerald Lipson was born in Chicago on Aug. 27, 1935. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from Roosevelt University in Chicago in 1957 and a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., in 1961.

In the 1960s, Mr. Lipson reported for publications including the Wilmington News Journal in Delaware, the old Washington Star and the old Chicago Daily News, where he covered the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the legal case of James Earl Ray, who assassinated civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Lipson embarked on a career on Capitol Hill. He was press secretary for Sen. Charles H. Percy (R-Ill.) and Rep. John B. Anderson (R-Ill.), according to his son, as well as for Rep. John J. Rhodes (R-Ariz.) during his tenure as House minority leader and for the House International Relations Committee under chairman Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.).

In the 1980s, Mr. Lipson returned to journalism, reporting for the New York Post and the Chicago Sun-Times. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, he was spokesman for the U.S. Agency for International Development.

Mr. Lipson was a delegate to the 1980 Republican National Convention in Detroit and campaign manager for Maryland state delegate Constance A. Morella (R) when she was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1986. His memberships included the Washington Press Club.

Attribution: Emily Langer, Washington Post

Kathleen "Kate" Sylvester, Award-Winning Journalist, August 9, `1950 - February 24, 2017

Died on Friday February 24, 2017 in Washington DC. She was born on November 26, 1949 in Syracuse, NY to Lt. J. Martin Nelson (KIA Korea August 9, 1950) and Virginia Doyle Nelson. She was raised by her mother and adoptive father, Lt. Col. Allan T. Sylvester, II in a military family all over the United States. She attended Georgetown University where she received a Bachelor degree in Foreign Service. She was an award winning journalist for 20 years, after which she began work in Public Policy, working at the Progressive Policy Institute, First Focus and the America's Promise Alliance and was the founder of the Social Policy Action Network (SPAN). She also founded the consulting firm Writewell. In addition to her work, she was an unflagging supporter of her Capitol Hill neighborhood and a devoted friend to many.

Attribution: Legacy.com

George Murmann, Star Lithographer, November 21, 1918 - February 11, 2017

George Henry Murrmann passed away Saturday (Feb. 11, 2017) at his home surrounded by his loving daughters. He left the building in grand style with his loved ones singing karaoke of his favorite tunes until the end.

George Henry Murrmann was born in Perrysville, Ind., on Nov. 21, 1918, in an original Sears catalog house on the family farm. His family had moved there to farm (built the Sears model house on their own) on "Murrmann" lane, as it was known. As the youngest of 12 children, his father, George J. proclaimed, "Now I've got my dozen!"

George graduated from Danville High School in 1937 as a decorated member of the swim team. He joined the Air Corps (later known as the Air Force) in 1942 for "four years, eight months and 22 days." While in the corps, he was an instructor responsible for instrument training on airplanes.

After his service, he moved to Minneapolis to attend trade school to become a lithographer. (Linotype was once the only way type was set through a detailed process operating a large machine requiring dexterity and mechanical expertise.) After graduating, he moved to Washington, D.C., to work for Gannett at the Washington Star newspaper.

Bob Greiser, Star Photographer - January 31, 2017

Bobby Grieser, well known in yachting circles as one of the elite photographers in the sport, passed away January 31 after a four month series of illnesses in San Diego, CA. He was 70 years.

Born in Washington, DC, and growing up around the Chesapeake Bay, Bobby took to the outdoor life. He was a photographer at the Washington Star in Washington, DC for 15 years before moving west to work for the Los Angeles Times, where he stayed for 18 years. Bobby covered such diverse topics as riots, war zones in Somalia and White House events over the years.

But in 1998, he left for the excitement of freelancing in the yachting, adventure, travel and leisure industries. His passion to explore and appreciate his surroundings fueled his motor. As a principle with OutsideImages.com, he helped to create a remarkable inventory of stock marine imagery.

He photographed some of the world’s most beautiful yachts, with his event log including several America’s Cups. He became good friends with Dennis Connor, did feature stories on sailing all over the world and later, some bareboat chartering as skipper. Bobby had salt water in his veins.

Attribution: sailingscuttlebutt.com

Sylvia Rector, 'tough editor' in Twin Cities who became beloved food critic in Detroit

Joe Kimball remembers it as a tense period in his career at the Star Tribune: The time when his paper squared off against the rival Pioneer Press with an aggression it had never shown before. Suddenly it wasn’t just the Minneapolis paper; it aspired to embrace the entire metro area.

A Star Tribune news bureau materialized in St. Paul, amply staffed and led by Sylvia Rector, a journalist who had been battle-tested in cities such as Dallas and Washington, where newspaper wars were the norm.

“We felt like troops landing on the beach,” said Kimball, now retired. “It was a landmark moment for the paper, and Sylvia was our field general.”


Rector, who joined the Detroit Free Press in 1992 and became well-known there as the newspaper’s food critic for 17 years, died of colon cancer on Dec. 20 at the age of 66.

Her husband, Charles Hill, a retired Associated Press bureau chief, described her as a “force of nature” as a journalist but also “a very sweet and kind person,” whose passing drew a torrent of appreciative memories from a culinary community that cherished her constructive approach in what can be a cutting line of work.

Rector grew up on a farm in Fancy Gap, Va., and attended a one-room schoolhouse. Scholarships paved her way to college.

She landed first at the Associated Press, then made a number of stops at different newspapers, including the Washington Star. She was state editor at the Dallas Times Herald, supervising reporters at the State Capitol, Austin and other big cities.

She arrived at the Star Tribune in 1984 as an assistant city editor. The move to St. Paul two years later to lead the newspaper’s new bureau there was a dramatic moment in the life of the family, Hill said. A top editor stopped by the house during her maternity leave to ask Rector to take it on, and “she came back early from that leave to do that job.” Editors asked the family to move to the east metro, he said, and they did.

She both applied pressure and felt it, Kimball said. Reporters dreaded the vision of a Pioneer Press laid out across Rector’s desk with “stories we missed, circled in bright orange. She was tough.” But he also remembered her occasionally retreating into her tiny office and shutting off the lights to gather herself.

“We later figured out she protected us [from impatient home-office criticism] more than we knew,” Kimball said.

Journalists who recalled Rector as a driven hard-news leader, demanding of herself and others, may have found it puzzling to see her fetch up as a food writer in Detroit. There was an explanation, her husband said: She was a mother seeking more family time. But she worked hard there and was a formidable presence in the field, said Brenna Houck, of the website Eater Detroit.

“She was definitely the scoop-maker most of the time, especially with big stories. She had made dining into her own space,” Houck said. “If I could ever beat out the Free Press, that was a fun day for me.”

Star Tribune Taste section editor Lee Dean said of Rector: “Food is a wonderful medium for storytelling, and Sylvia embraced it wholeheartedly, weaving tales of her childhood and more into reviews and reports from the kitchen, hers and others. ... Detroit readers were better fed because of her work.”

After Rector died, Houck described her online as “beloved.” In an interview, she said that Rector was never snarky or destructive, and plainly cared about leading readers to great food and bringing out the inner lives of the chefs who cooked it.

Attribution: David Peterson Star Tribune

John Sherwood, Columnist and Features Writer in Baltimore, Washington and Annapolis - December 7, 2016

John Sherwood, who for more than 50 years crafted profiles on an array of working-class characters and fringy eccentrics as a columnist and features writer in Baltimore, Washington and Annapolis, died Dec. 7. He was 84.

Sherwood spent almost 20 years at the former Washington Star newspaper capturing the lives and personalities of ordinary, captivating people in print — most of whom had no idea that they were anything but ordinary. With a Runyonesque flair he brought alive the likes of ferry-boat operators, tea room waitresses, pigeon racers, Linotype workers, tool-booth trolls, tug boat drivers, and hundreds more such ilk who likely never dreamed they were important enough to decorate the pages of a big city newspaper or a magazine — as well as individuals with delusions of grandeur. Better yet, he made the reader understand their importance, too.

Consider Vera — "who won't discuss her age," — the late owner of a Polynesian-style Tiki bar and restaurant on the Patuxent River in a Sherwood piece entitled "Empress of the White Sands."

"Vera upstages everything when she materializes nightly, as if in a vision…She has a vast wardrobe that changes with her moods… Sometimes a huge brass gong is sounded upon her arrival. One of the bartenders immediately pours a shallow glass of champagne as Vera glides inside and settles down on a vinyl, leopard skin bar stool across from a grand piano. When the piano player strikes up a Vera favorite, the outdated 'Sheik of Araby,' it's as though someone has waved a wand and commanded the evening to begin."

Sherwood's great gift was the ability to discern hidden, intriguing facets from the hoity-toity to the hoi-polloi. He could make them talk about themselves, often by asking innocently outrageous questions. Take Tony, an 81-year-old Italian bread baker in Baltimore's Little Italy, who spurned retail customers wanting to buy a loaf from the bake shop below his dingy row house apartment, which his father, "Poppy-pop," had started in 1914. Sherwood asked him about retirement.

"We sell 1,000 loaves a day, that's enough," Tony replied furiously. "We could bake and sell 5,000 loaves a day if I expanded, but what for? I don't wanna be a millionaire. I ain't married. I ain't got children. I want to stay here until I die. Poppy-pop liked it here. I like it here."

John Sherwood was born in Baltimore on Nov. 9, 1932, the son of a physician, and graduated in 1951 from Calvert Hall, a private Catholic prep school. He attended "numerous colleges," including the University of Maryland, before enlisting in the Army and serving a tour in Korea after the war had ended. In 1956 he married Elizabeth "Betty" Cronin, who died in 2000.

He began his writing career with The Baltimore Sun newspapers in 1960, then joined the Washington Evening Star in 1962 as a features reporter. Soon he was one of the writers of The Rambler, a popular daily column dedicated to profiling regional people and places. During his days at the Star he'd become a passionate sailor. When the Star folded in 1981, Sherwood migrated to work at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, then moved on to the Miami Herald, but he deeply missed the Chesapeake Bay and the Annapolis area, where he had a home in Severna Park.

He returned to the region in the late 1980s, writing for a variety of sailing and boating magazines. Single-handing his sleek, classic Sparkman & Stevens-designed 22-foot Sailmaster sloop called Erewhon, he became as familiar a feature to people around Annapolis and the Eastern Shore as the great Bay Bridge itself. Up and down the bay and its many tributaries, people knew and always waved when silver-haired "Capt'n Jack" came gliding by with tiller in hand.

In the 1990s Sherwood began writing a regular monthly column, Bay Tripper for the boating magazine Soundings, which featured the wide variety of people who derived their living, sport and pleasure, from the Chesapeake and its environs, and continued writing it until earlier this year. He never missed a column deadline in all those years.

In 1994, Johns Hopkins University Press published Sherwood's well-received "Maryland's Vanishing Lives," illustrated with photographs by Edwin H. Remsberg, which chronicled the ways of life of Marylanders who, like Tony the baker, worked at tasks that were fast becoming antique. The book is a compendium of the many crafts, occupations and skills which are vanishing not only in Maryland but throughout the country — a testimonial to a disappearing world. It remains in print today.

Attribution: Winston Grooom, Capital Gazette
Full story: Forest Gump author remembers Severna Park sailor and journalist Jack Sherwood

HARRY BACAS 1922 - 2016

Harry Bacas, a longtime Arlington, VA resident and World War II veteran, who rose from copy boy to become a top editor of the Washington Star, died on Thursday, November 17, 2016 in Santa Rosa, CA after a brief hospitalization at age 94. An Arlington, VA resident for over 50 years, Harry had moved to California in 2007.
Born on November 11, 1922, in Washington DC, the son of a Greek immigrant, Harry graduated from Eastern High School and served in World War II as part of the 461st anti-aircraft battalion that stormed Omaha Beach during the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. He fought in all five European campaigns and was awarded two Silver Stars.
On the GI bill, Harry received his BA in English from the University of Maryland, and studied English Literature at Stanford University. While teaching at Mills College in Oakland CA, he met his future wife, Eliza Goddard Weeks, a native Virginian. They returned to Washington, DC and were married in 1952. Eliza died in 2005.
Harry joined the Evening Star (later renamed the Washington Star) in 1951 as a copy boy and was soon promoted to reporter. As chairman of the Star unit of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild, he led the first successful strike at the paper in 1958. He went on to serve as editor of the newspaper's Sunday Magazine, City Desk, and Portfolio sections. After the Star folded in 1981, he wrote for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Nation's Business magazine as a special assignment reporter until retiring in 1988. From the 1960's until the 1980's Harry was an avid auto-enthusiast, competing in road rallies and auto-crosses throughout the greater Washington DC area. His passion for bicycling led to numerous cycle tour vacations in the U.S, and Europe and he was a dedicated swimmer at the Washington-Lee Aquatics Center.

Attribution: Legacy.com
Obit: Harry


Edgar Henry Lichty Jr., 87, Composing Room Manager of The Washington Star,subsequently The Washington Times

Edgar Henry Lichty Jr., 87, of Huddleston, beloved husband, father and grandfather, died Friday, October 21, 2016 at Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital. He was born on Saturday, August 3, 1929 in Bethlehem, Pa., a son of the late Edgar Henry Lichty Sr. and Evelyn Mae Fehnel Lichty. Ed was a retired Composing Room Manager of The Washington Star,subsequently The Washington Times and was an active Masonic member.Ed was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he started his printing career with his father. He married Evelyn Jean Blanchard on August 9, 1950, and was married to her for over 66 years. Soon after he was drafted to serve in the Korean War in the Army Corps of Engineers. Upon returning, he moved to the D.C. Metro area where he continued his printing career at the Government Printing Office. He would soon move to The Washington Star where he worked for 26 years. Ed helped start The Washington Times and worked there for 10 years before retiring to Smith Mountain Lake, where he played in the Kazim band for 22 years.He was a Master Mason at the District of Columbia, Grand Naval Lodge No. 4 attaining 32nd degree status, with memberships in Shriners International, Tall Cedars of Lebanon, Scottish Rite of Freemasonry and Almas Temple.

Attribution: The Roanoke Times

Lewis Liberty “Lou” Bennett, Washington Star 1955 to 1971 Route Manger & Mechanic

Lewis Liberty “Lou” Bennett, 85, of Charlotte Hall, MD passed away on October 12, 2016 at the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home.

Lou was born on July 4, 1931 to the late Frank and Olive M. Earnhardt Bennett in Norfolk, VA.

Lou’s professional endeavors expanded across careers providing public service and a great spirit of entrepreneurship. He served as a Master Mechanic 2nd Class on the U.S.S. Great Sitkin from January 1952 to April 1955 where he was deployed to the Mediterranean supporting mobile ready reserve fleet ammunition, and later in fleet maneuvers in the Atlantic (New York) and the Caribbean. His career included working at the Washington Star from 1955 to 1971 as a route manger and mechanic in Southern Prince George’s County, MD. He also worked for Buck Distributing, Upper Marlboro, MD, and as an Engineer for The State Department, Washington, D.C. where he retired at almost 71 years of age. The Southern Maryland community knew him as owner/operator of Williams Package Goods, Hughesville, MD; and several other small businesses over the years. Lou loved spending time with his family and many friends, especially on his 4th of July birthday. He also loved camping, riding his Harley, and tinkering with mechanical things. He was a member of the American Legion and Moose Lodge.

Attribution: Southern Maryland News Net