Mike Auldridge, Graphic Arts & World-renowned Dobro artist, December 29, 2012

2012 award of the National
 Endowment for the Art’s
highest honor, the
National Heritage Fellowship

Mike Auldridge (December 30, 1938 – December 29, 2012) was widely acknowledged as a premier resophonic guitar (the instrument formerly referred to as a Dobro) player. He played with The Seldom Scene for many years, creating a fusion of bluegrass with jazz, folk and rock.
Born in Washington, D.C.,Auldridge started playing guitar at the age of 13. His main influence through his early years was Josh Graves who also sold him his first Dobro. A 1967 graduate of The University of Maryland, Auldridge worked as a graphic artist for a commercial art firm in Bethesda, Maryland and then for the now defunct Washington Star-News. He did not start playing music full-time until the Washington Star-News folded in 1976.
Auldridge last played with Darren Beachley and The Legends of the Potomac bluegrass band. Past bands include Emerson and Waldron, Cliff Waldron and the New Shades of Grass, Seldom Scene (of which he was a founding member), Chesapeake, The Good Deale Bluegrass Band, and John Starling and Carolina Star (which featured three original members of The Seldom Scene). Mike was also a member of the touring bands of Lyle Lovett and Emmylou Harris.
Auldridge worked with Paul Beard (Beard Guitars) to produce the Beard Mike Auldridge Models of square-neck resophonic guitars, including an 8-string version. Just one day prior to his 74th birthday, he died on December 29, 2012 in hospice care in Silver Spring, Maryland after a lengthy battle with cancer. 

Attribution: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Auldridge

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Mike Auldridge, founding member of D.C.’s Seldom Scene bluegrass group, dies at 73

Mike Auldridge, a bluegrass musician whose broad knowledge of many musical forms helped redefine and modernize the steel guitar known as the Dobro, died Dec. 29 at his home in Silver Spring. He died a day before his 74th birthday.

Larry L. King, playwright of ‘The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,’ dies at 83

Washington Star Writer-in-Residence

Before he became known the world over as a playwright, Larry L. King was a reporter, a Capitol Hill aide, a raconteur, a brawler and a full-time Texan. He helped define the freewheeling New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, partly with an article he wrote for Playboy magazine in 1974 about the Chicken Ranch, a house of ill repute in southeast Texas.
 A few years later, Mr. King and several collaborators refashioned his article into a musical comedy about a brothel that operated for years under the averted gaze of the law. “The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas” ran on Broadway for almost four years and has been in almost continuous production since. In 1982, it was made into a Burt Reynolds-Dolly Parton movie — which Mr. King loathed.
 Mr. King, who had lived in Washington since the 1950s, died Dec. 20 at Chevy Chase House, a retirement facility in the District.
He was 83. He had emphysema, his wife, Barbara Blaine, said.
 He was the author of seven plays and more than a dozen books, including memoirs, a novel and collections of articles and letters. In 1982, he won an Emmy Award as the writer and narrator of a CBS documentary, “The Best Little Statehouse in Texas,” that looked at the legislature’s behind-the-scenes horse-trading.
 Mr. King also was known for his outsized personality, full-bore drinking and an ability to tell outrageously droll stories in a profanity-laced drawl that was almost indistinguishable from his writing voice. “His certain knowledge of his origins informs his point of view and his prose style,” New York Times book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a review of Mr. King’s 1971 memoir, “Confessions of a White Racist.” “And this confidence in his roots is what makes Mr. King’s writing so alive, dramatic, warm, and funny.”

Joe L. Allbritton, communications giant who led Riggs Bank into disrepute, dies at 87

Joe L. Allbritton, a self-made millionaire who built a Washington communications empire and led the once venerable Riggs National Bank as it became embroiled in a massive money-laundering scheme involving Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Houston. He was 87.
He died of heart ailments, said Frederick J. Ryan Jr., president of Allbritton Communications and president and chief executive of Politico.
The son of a Houston sandwich-shop owner, the hard-charging Mr. Allbritton dealt in real estate, banks and mortuaries until he was drawn to the District by a new challenge: reviving an ailing afternoon newspaper in the nation’s power center.
Mr. Allbritton bought the Washington Star in 1974. He won entry into the District’s elite political circles not only as a media magnate but also because of friendships with other Texans who had made their fortunes in the capital city, including lobbyist Jack Valenti and Watergate special prosecutor Leon Jaworksi.
Federal regulations over media ownership forced him to sell the Star just four years after he bought it. But he retained valuable broadcast properties, including the ABC affiliate that soon took his initials (WJLA, Channel 7), and forged ahead with other enterprises including NewsChannel 8, one of the country’s first 24-hour news channels.