Sam Eastman, press secretary to D.C. mayor, dies at 89

Sam Eastman, right, with Walter E. Washington
 in an undated photo. (Family Photo)

Sam Eastman, a press secretary for the last of the District’s unappointed chief executives and for the city’s first modern mayor, Walter E. Washington, died Dec. 3 at a hospital in Rockville, Md. He was 89.

The cause was complications from hip surgery, said a daughter, Jennifer Eastman.

When Mr. Eastman began his career in 1946 as a copy boy for the Washington Star, the District had not held mayoral elections in nearly 80 years. The city was instead administered by powerful congressional committees that oversaw its legislation and budget, as well as a three-member Board of Commissioners appointed by the president.

Mr. Eastman was reporting on Capitol Hill and D.C. politics for the Star when the District commissioners appointed him head of a newly formed public affairs office in 1966. Under commission President Walter N. Tobriner, he acted as liaison between the commissioners and the Hill’s D.C. congressional committees.

In 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson reorganized the District government, consolidating power under a single commissioner and an appointed nine-member City Council. Tobriner’s replacement, Washington, became the first African American to lead a major American city.

“Although I was a former reporter with the conservative Washington Star and a white carryover from the Board of Commissioners era, Mr. Washington kept me on,” Mr. Eastman recalled in a 2003 letter to The Washington Post. “I am proud to say we also became friends.”

After the passage of the Home Rule Act under President Richard M. Nixon, which provided for an elected mayor and an elected city council, Washington was elected mayor in 1973.

Despite Washington’s years in office, prejudice toward the city’s black chief executive remained stubbornly persistent, Mr. Eastman recalled.

In his 2003 letter to The Post, Mr. Eastman wrote that he once applied to buy a condominium at Tilden Gardens, a development in Washington’s predominately white Cleveland Park neighborhood. Mr. Eastman said he believed he was rejected by the board “because of the remote possibility that the city’s black mayor might be our guest in its private dining room.”

Washington lost his 1978 reelection bid to council member Marion Barry, who would go on to his first of four terms as mayor. Mr. Eastman then served as a special assistant to the D.C. Department of Human Resources from 1980 until retiring in 1998.

Samuel Thomas Eastman was born in Little Rock on Jan. 18, 1926, and grew up in Alexandria, Va., where he graduated in 1943 from George Washington High School. He served in the Army during World War II and was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.

Attribution: Harrison Smith - washingtonpost.com

Full articles: Sam Eastman

Willem D. Scheltema, March 19, 1957 - November 6 2015

Washington Star sports desk 1978—1981; inserted the last sports agate in the final edition. Died on Friday, November 6th at 58. He resided in Greenbelt, Maryland with his two cats "Hunter" and "Thompson."

Photo attribution: William Castronuovo

Maria O'Leary, July 22, 1930 - October 13, 2015

Maria Teresa Eneim O'Leary, 85, died on Tuesday, October 13, 2015 at home in Old Town, Alexandria, Virginia. She was born on July 22, 1930 to Adelina Felix Eneim and Arturo Guadalupe Eneim in Los Angeles. In 1955 she married Jeremiah Aloysius O'Leary, Jr. who preceded her in death in 1993. Together they raised five children, son Timothy A. O'Leary of Alexandria and Manila, Philippines, son Brendan T. O'Leary of Alexandria, daughter Deirdre O'Leary Stamper of Alexandria, daughter Caitlin O'Leary Gage of Alexandria and daughter Moira O'Leary of Austin, Texas.

Maria opened Nuevo Mundo in 1966 and made it a premier destination in the Washington area for fashion and art. Her store was an extensive and expertly curated collection of antiques, artifacts and jewelry from around the world; many collected through her travels abroad. Her love of textiles and religious reliquary made her a sought after expert in these areas. She loved running Nuevo Mundo and felt as though all who entered were as guests in her home. Nuevo Mundo was more than a boutique, it was a salon where people gathered to share in the community that Maria created and tended to with love and attention. Daughters Deirdre and Caitlin worked with their mother beginning in their teens until the Nuevo Mundo closed its doors in 2011.

Attribution: washingtonpost.com

Bill Garner, longtime Washington Times cartoonist, dies at 79

Bill Garner stopped drawing political cartoons for The Washington Times six years ago, but he never stopped being an artist.

He had several showings of his paintings at an Annapolis gallery. He would sketch passers-by as his wife Patricia Garner did mall-walking. Sometimes people would take notice and ask him to teach them how to draw, which he was happy to do.

“With a line here, a splash of ink there, a shadow skillfully applied, Bill would have a deserving senator, president or other rogue or rascal walking around without his head, exposed for all to see,” said columnist Wes Pruden, who was The Washington Times editor in chief for much of Mr. Garner’s tenure.

“Bill was one of the best,” Mr. Pruden said.

Born Aug. 7, 1935, in Temple, Texas, William Simpson Garner attended the Texas School of Fine Arts and spent a year at the University of Texas at Austin. He enlisted in the Army in 1956, winning recognition as a champion sharpshooter.

After leaving the military in 1962, he was working as an illustrator for the Washington (Evening) Star when editorial page editor Smith Hempstone approached him about drawing editorial cartoons twice a week.

“The editor came and asked him if he’d like to do it,” Mrs. Garner said. “He said, ‘Would you like to try it?’ and [Bill] tried it, and he loved it.”

John Lannan, longtime newsman, dies at 87

John Lannan, a reporter and editor for numerous organizations, including The Associated Press, has died. He was 87.

Lannan, who suffered from Parkinson's dementia, died Thursday at Cove's Edge at Miles in Damariscotta, Maine, said one of his sons, Jonathan Lannan.

He started at the Manchester Union Leader and the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire before joining The AP in Augusta, Maine. He covered the U.S. space program, including the moon landing, for the Boston Herald-Traveler and Washington Star.

During the Nixon administration, he was an assistant to the president's science adviser and filled a similar role for the Salk Institute.

Lannan was owner/publisher of the weekly Summit County Journal in Breckenridge, Colorado, and taught at The School of Mines and the University of Denver.

Attribution: mysanantonio.com

James Bertram Rowland - Reporter for 25 years, June 18, 2015

James B. Rowland, “Jim”, a 35 year resident of Annapolis and previously of Silver Spring, MD, passed away on Thursday, June 18, 2015 at Somerford Place in Annapolis from complications related to Alzheimer ’s disease. Jim was born on October 2, 1928 in Los Angeles, CA, to the late Clarence and Ellen Hetchler Rowland. He was a 1951 graduate of the University of MD, receiving Bachelor’s degrees in History and English. He was a reporter with the Washington Star for 25 years, followed by a 20 year career with the Maryland State Budget Office as a Public Information Officer. During that period he also worked in the Governor’s office for Blair Lee, III and Harry Hughes. Jim was a gifted writer, avid reader and history enthusiast, with a particular passion for American Revolution and Civil War history. He also enjoyed travelling with his companion of 35 years, Mary Ann Porter.

William C. Thompson Jr., 78, of Edgewater, Production Manager

William C Thompson Jr., 78, of Edgewater, MD was born on June 30, 1936 and entered eternal life on June 10, 2015 after a long battle with COPD.

He worked at the Washington Star and Washington Post Newspapers as a production machinist, from where he retired from in 1998. Bill enjoyed life at his home in Ponder Cove fishing and boating on “Lucky Lady,” family crab feasts and cookouts. He was a faithful “Redskin” fan and enjoyed attending the games with his nephews. Bill was an active member of the Elks Lodge in Edgewater and Moose Club in Annapolis.

Attribution: Edgewater-Davidsonville 
Patch

Earle D. Hightower, Washington Star Photographer, June 8, 2015

Earle D. Hightower was born October 8, 1922 in Salt Lake City, Utah, the fifth child of Eugene Clyde Hightower and Alta Theo Fiske and died June 8, 2015 in Pinehurst. He graduated from Salida (CO.) High School and was a journalism major at Mesa College when WW II began. He enlisted in the Army March 1942 and was honorably discharged in 1946. He met Laurene Dale Jones, whom he described as a “beautiful Army telephone operator” at Ft. Knox. They were married 69 years at the time of his death. They moved to Los Alamos, NM , where he was the first civilian Chief of Security at the AEC test site, where the atomic bomb was being tested. He was promoted to Sandia Base and then to the Las Vegas Test Site, and finally to headquarters in Washington, DC.

While a new father and full time employee he earned a BA from American University. He later earned a Master’s Degree and a BS from University of Maryland. He retired as Assistant Director of Security for the AEC after 30 years of service. While with the government, he invented and patented various masking and de-bugging devices. In his “off hours” he began two weekly newspapers, the Gaithersburg (now Montgomery County) Gazette, and the Damascus Courier. He was also a professional photographer for the Washington Star, photographing D.C. political and society notables. After retirement he had a second career as a licensed real estate broker and appraiser. He was a tireless animal advocate, rehabilitating crows, treeing poachers until they could be arrested, and nursing various abandoned dogs and cats back to health. In his final years he wrote a book, “The Oppenheimer Conspiracy”, based on his confrontation with the physicist at Los Alamos.

Attribution: newsobserver.com
Full story: Hightower

John R. Allen, Post editor who specialized in layout, Washington Star Sports Stringer, dies at 69

John R. Allen in Barcelona in 2012. (Photo by Christine Colby)

John R. Allen, a Washington Post editor who in 34 years with the newspaper helped design the layout of stories on Page One as well as pages in the Metro, Style and Sports sections, died May 31 in Manhattan. He was 69.

His wife, Jo Rector Allen, said he was stricken with symptoms consistent with a pulmonary embolism or a heart attack. An autopsy is being performed to determine the cause. An Arlington resident, he was on vacation when he died at a hotel.

Mr. Allen joined The Post in 1969 as a copy editor, and he retired in 2003 as deputy news editor. His career spanned an era of change in the technology of producing a daily newspaper, the evolution of hot type to cold type and the use of computers to produce a printed paper.


Ed Thiede, a Post news projects editor, wrote in an announcement that Mr. Allen “helped guide the newspaper from the days of paste-up and black-and-white images through the launch of electronic pagination and color photography and into the days when the Metro section was zoned three ways every day.”

John Robert Allen was born in Omaha on Nov. 27, 1945. He grew up in Arlington, where he graduated from Yorktown High School and was a high school sports stringer for the former Washington Star newspaper. He attended Duke University.

Sam Zelman, pioneer of local TV news who helped start CNN, dies at 100

Sam Zelman created “The Big News,”
a 45-minute local broadcast at L.A.'s KNXT (now KCBS-TV)
that inspired the shift to longer newscasts. (handout,)

LOS ANGELES — Local TV newscasts in the 1950s often consisted of five minutes of news, five minutes of sports and another five minutes of weather.
Broadcast journalist Sam Zelman blew up that formula.

In 1961 he created “The Big News” at KNXT-TV (now KCBS-TV) that presented 45 minutes of local news, sports and weather, kicked off by the regal-looking Jerry Dunphy intoning: “From the desert to the sea to all of Southern California, a good evening.”
Local news was never the same, and Zelman, late in his career, went on to help create another breakthrough in TV news that naysayers said would never work — CNN.
Zelman, 100, died Friday at his home in Tucson, Arizona. The cause was respiratory failure, said his wife, Sally Davenport.
Many in broadcasting thought KNXT was crazy to program a 45-minute local news block. “People said, ‘How ever are you going to fill it?’” Pete Noyes, the first city editor of “The Big News,” said in a 2011 Los Angeles Times interview.
But newspapers, covering a variety of topics, were what Zelman wanted to emulate. “I like the subject to change often,” he told a group of students in Tucson in a 2013 video-recorded class session. “With a newspaper, I can move from one story to another.”
He hired a somewhat hard-bitten group of reporters and editors, many of whom came from newspapers and news services. They brought with them the stereotypical hard-news lifestyle of the era.
“There were bottles of booze in the desks of several writers and producers,” Noyes wrote in his “The Real Los Angeles Confidential” memoir. “The smell of burning trash cans resulted from discarded cigarettes that were still lit.”
But Zelman wanted to give audiences what couldn’t be conveyed in a 15-minute newscast. “He would say, ‘You’ve got to give them stories they will remember. You’ve got to rely on the intelligence of the audience,’” Noyes said in an interview last week.
To front the broadcast, he wanted strong on-air personalities. In addition to Dunphy, who became a Los Angeles institution in four decades of anchoring, the “The Big News” had Maury Green for investigative reports, Ralph Story for on-air essays, former actor and umpire Gil Stratton for sports and funnyman Bill Keene on weather. All predeceased Zelman.
The show had a slow start in ratings, but eventually walloped the competition and was widely emulated across the country.
“He turned TV news into real journalism,” University of Southern California journalism professor Joe Saltzman said.
Zelman was born Oct. 6, 1914, in Washington. As a boy, he had a paper route delivering the Washington Star, earning $6 a month.

Full story: Frederick News Post - Sam Zelman
Attribution: Associated Press - DAVID COLKER

Donald Neff, foreign correspondent and author, dies at 84

Donald Neff, a journalist and author who covered international news from Vietnam to Israel for Time and wrote acclaimed books about political and military strife in the Middle East, died May 10 at a nursing center in York, Pennsylvania. He was 84.

The cause was coronary heart disease and diabetes, said his companion, Janet McMahon, managing editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

After joining Time in 1965, Neff spent nearly two years as a Saigon correspondent and later was bureau chief in Houston (where he covered the Apollo moon landing), Los Angeles, Jerusalem and New York before leaving the magazine in 1979.

He was one of the first journalists to report on the Jonestown massacre in 1978 when more than 900 members of a religious commune in Guyana died of mass cyanide poisoning.

The next year, he chronicled the 1979 nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. Soon afterward, Neff settled in Washington and worked briefly as an editor for the old Washington Star newspaper before embarking as a career as an author and freelance writer.

His books included a trilogy about the Arab-Israeli conflicts of 1956, 1967 and 1973: “Warriors at Suez: Eisenhower Takes America into the Middle East” (1981), “Warriors for Jerusalem: The Six Days That Changed the Middle East” (1984) and “Warriors Against Israel” (1988).

Reviewers praised the volumes for combining narrative thrust with compelling insights on Middle East tensions.

Writing about “Warriors Against Israel” in a Washington Post review, Archibald B. Roosevelt, a grandson of President Theodore Roosevelt and former high-level CIA official with expertise in the Middle East, called the book “not only a well-documented and authoritative account, but a riveting exposé of how Henry Kissinger nudged the United States from its position as umpire in the contest to one of strong alliance with Israel.”

Roosevelt said that he “was impressed by the originality of Neff’s presentation and surprised by his devastating conclusions, assembled from facts previously known to most of us only piecemeal. It is not only a good read, but essential background for serious students of developments in the Middle East today.”

Donald Lloyd Neff was born Oct. 15, 1930, in York, Pennsylvania. He served in the Army from 1940 to 1950 and briefly attended college before beginning his journalism career in 1954 in his home town. He then spent many years in Los Angeles for the old Mirror-News newspaper and United Press International. He joined the Los Angeles Times in 1960, where he was a Tokyo correspondent before moving to Vietnam for Time.

Attribution: Adam Bernstein, The Washington Post

Gail Woolley Dies, Helped Finance Newhouse Students

Gail Campbell Woolley, a reporter for the old Washington Star, the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Times before joining the public relations department of the ExxonMobil Corp., died March 16 at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, her husband, Howard Woolley, told Journal-isms on Friday.

She suffered from sickle cell anemia, Woolley said. She was 58.

The couple donated $50,000 to endow a scholarship at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, where they met, Woolley, a Verizon executive, said. They also sponsored an eye clinic at Johns Hopkins for research on the link between sickle cell anemia and eye problems. In addition, Newhouse hosts the Howard and Gail Campbell Woolley Broadcast Journalism Lab.

"I knew Gail both as a colleague when we worked together at the Baltimore Sun and later as the dean of her alma mater," Lorraine Branham, dean of the Newhouse school, messaged Journal-isms on Friday. "It was great to reconnect with her when I became dean. She was outspoken, compassionate and dedicated to the cause of helping the next generation of African American journalists." Branham added, "Anyone who knows Gail will tell you that she did not tolerate fools."

A wake took place in Washington on Friday, with a memorial service to follow in April.

"Gail loved doing exciting things like shark feeding in Tahiti, safaris in South Africa, or cruising on the Nile, . . ." according to the program for the wake.

"Gail was always courageous and optimistic while juggling a career, family, travel, and managing her Sickle Cell disease. After her 2012 diagnosis of Pulmonary Hypertension, Gail took up scuba diving so she could continue her aquatic activities while receiving oxygen support. Howard stood by her every step of the way. At the time of her death, Gail had written 450 pages of her autobiography describing her lifetime of achievement and adventure while battling the effects of Sickle Cell disease."

Attribution: Richard Prince, mije.org/