Post Mortem: March 1, 2009 - March 7, 2009
Fashion Foot(ball) Forward
Not many people nowadays remember George McAfee, one of the greatest football players of the 1930s and 1940s. He was an all-American at Duke and two-way star for the Chicago Bears -- and scored a touchdown in the Bears' famous 73-0 championship shellacking of the Washington Redskins in 1940. (Obituary...
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Matt Schudel
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March 7, 2009; 6:22 AM ET |
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Zimbabwe PM's Wife Killed
Zimbabwe Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a biiter rival to despotic President Robert Mugabe, faced terrible news today. Tsvangirai's wife died in a car crash, raising immediate speculation that Mugabe was somehow responsible. It seems far-fetched to assign him blame for the death, even given Mugabe's miserable failings as a leader...
By
Adam Bernstein
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March 6, 2009; 6:04 PM ET |
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Overseas Obit
From our British friends at the Telegraph comes this touching and cautionary obituary of Joan Turner, an entertainer I had never heard of before. "At the pinnacle of her career Joan Turner became the highest-earning female singer and comedienne in the country, with a recording contract, her own radio and...
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Matt Schudel
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March 6, 2009; 4:49 PM ET |
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Newspaperman as Savior
Newspaper editor James Bellows died Friday aged 86 near Los Angeles. He made a career as the top editor at a series of failing newspapers -- the New York Herald Tribune during its last hurrah in the early 1960s, the Washington Star as it struggled as an afternoon daily in...
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Adam Bernstein
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March 6, 2009; 4:19 PM ET |
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March 5 deaths
Patsy Cline, a 30-year-old singer who reached the top of the country charts and once sang in Carnegie Hall, was one of five people killed in the crash of a private plane near Camden, Tenn. on this date in 1963. She's buried near Winchester, Va. Can you name the other...
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Patricia Sullivan
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March 5, 2009; 2:00 PM ET |
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Son of "Little Tramp" Dies
Sydney Chaplin, 82, a son of movie comedian Charlie Chaplin who went on to his own acting career in film and on Broadway, including a Tony Award-winning performance in the long-running musical "Bells Are Ringing," died March 3 at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He had a stroke...
By
Adam Bernstein
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March 5, 2009; 11:54 AM ET |
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Sex Lives of Astronauts
Over the weekend, I wrote the obituary of a remarkable but little-known NASA scientist named Mel Averner. He was, among many other things, the coauthor of the first serious scientific article proposing how human beings could live on Mars. He was a brilliant man, learned in all kinds of sciences,...
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Matt Schudel
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March 5, 2009; 11:20 AM ET |
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Playwright Horton Foote is Dead
Horton Foote, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American dramatist who wrote "The Young Man From Atlanta" and won an Oscar for his screenplay adaptation of the Harper Lee novel "To Kill a Mockingbird," died today at age 92. The Post will have a full obit tomorrow. Foote forged a writing career that...
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Adam Bernstein
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March 4, 2009; 7:40 PM ET |
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How Many Womanhours Lost...
Whenever I write an obit about a socialite, such as Virginia Warren Daly, I'm reminded of how far we are from those days of society balls and the social season. The amount of time a "certain class" of women devoted to parties! The expense of it all! The amount of...
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Patricia Sullivan
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March 4, 2009; 3:44 PM ET |
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Pay Up
Ah, credit companies. Apparently not even death gets in the way of seeking the balance on one's credit card bill. The NYT had a front-page story today on one credit company and its approach to calling distraught relatives to collect on unpaid bills of the deceased. Reminds me of a...
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Adam Bernstein
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March 4, 2009; 12:11 PM ET |
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Ego-Googling for all ages
You don't have to be under 40 to be adept at the latest technology, as many people know who read obits know. Lauren Wiseman, the newest addition to the obits desk, chortled this afternoon when reporting a feature on a Holocaust survivor who recently died. Lauren asked a friend of...
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Patricia Sullivan
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March 4, 2009; 1:31 AM ET |
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Wheels Spinning in Blood
Broadcaster Paul Harvey's passing last week prompted stories and anecdotes from both his fellow broadcasters and his many listeners across the country. One of those listeners was Michael McGill, who in the late 1960s was a junior Foreign Service officer assigned to the Economics Bureau at the State Department. "I...
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Joe Holley
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March 3, 2009; 5:51 PM ET |
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TV's McMahon, Barry Said to be Ailing
Professional sidekick Ed McMahon is seriously ill, which is sad news for those who recall the dependable TV personality in his heyday. He was mostly known for his longtime professional relationship with Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show." In one interview he gave Entertainment Weekly, McMahon recalled the pleasure of...
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Adam Bernstein
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March 3, 2009; 12:48 PM ET |
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Paul Harvey: Good Day
By now you've seen the news about Paul Harvey; perhaps you haven't HEARD him. Ace Post columnist Marc Fisher, who knows radio, has a great reminiscence here -- it's an excerpt from his book, "Something in the Air: Radio, Rock and the Revolution That Shaped A Generation." Also, on...
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Patricia Sullivan
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March 2, 2009; 10:31 AM ET |
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