Archive: September 2009
Sam Carr, Bluesman, Dies
Blues guitarist and singer Terence McArdle works on the local desk at The Post, and whenever a blues figure dies, he's clamors to write the story. His story on Jelly Roll Kings drummer Sam Carr, who died Sept. 21, will appear tomorrow. McArdle writes: The music of the Jelly Roll...
By Adam Bernstein | September 30, 2009; 12:44 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning! We in the obituaries game love librarians and researchers and archivists of all kinds so the Philadelphia Daily News obit of Keith Doms doesn't surprise in the least. "There is something magical about walking through the Free Library's main branch with Keith Doms, something enchanting and exhilarating, like...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 30, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning everyone. Former president Guillermo Endara, who led Panama to democracy after the U.S. invasion that toppled dictator Gen. Manuel Noriega, died Monday. He was 73. Maybe you didn't know that Milwaukee, that stalwart blue-collar city in the middle of the U.S., had a Socialist mayor for a dozen...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 29, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Just in Case
Among the many speeches Bill Safire wrote for Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew was one he was surely glad Nixon never had to give. On the occasion of the Apollo moon landing in July 1969, he wrote two speeches -- one congratulating the astronauts and one eulogizing their sacrifce in...
By Joe Holley | September 28, 2009; 4:00 PM ET | Comments (0)
RIP Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds
Lucy Vodden, who provided the inspiration for the Beatles' classic song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," has died after a long battle with lupus. She was 46. (Be sure to check out all three pictures of her there.) There's a story associated with how Julian Lennon's preschool drawing of...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 28, 2009; 3:58 PM ET | Comments (1)
Bootie Wilson Dies
The A.P. reports the death Sept. 21 of John "Bootsie" Wilson, a former lead singer and last surviving member of the soul group the Silhouettes. He was 69 and lived in Spartanburg, S.C. After leaving the Silhouettes, which is best known for its hit "Get a Job," Rev. Wilson...
By Adam Bernstein | September 28, 2009; 1:36 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning already. In case you didn't hear the news yesterday, conservative political columnist and "oracle of language" William Safire died Sunday. Lovely obit by Timesman Robert D. McFadden; our own cleanup hitter, Joe Holley, penned a quick piece on deadline. Donald G. Fisher, co-founder of the Gap, has died....
By Patricia Sullivan | September 28, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
William Safire dies
William Safire, 79, conservative political columnist and word maven, died today at a hospice in Rockville, Md., reportedly of pancreatic cancer. The full Washington Post obit can be found here. Mr. Safire, who won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1978 for his scathing columns on the Carter White House...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 27, 2009; 2:47 PM ET | Comments (23)
The Fed's Canary in the Meltdown
As I read the investigation into the Federal Reserve on the front page of this morning's Washington Post, I remembered an obit from about two years ago of a Fed governor, Ed Gramlich. Sure enough, not far into the story about how the Fed failed in its duty to enforce...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 27, 2009; 12:14 PM ET | Comments (4)
Alicia de Larrocha, pianist; updated
Long ago, in my fast-receding youth, I studied piano for several years. Well, let me rephrase that: I took piano lessons. Alicia de Larrocha, the exquisite Spanish pianist who has died at the age of 86, studied piano. I've always been short, though not as short as Ms. de Larrocha's...
By Matt Schudel | September 26, 2009; 1:07 PM ET | Comments (4)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, all. Susan Atkins, convicted of eight murders for her part in the Charles Manson gang that perpetrated a 1969 mass murder, has died in prison. She broke open the case when she bragged of her participation in the slayings to cellmates; she also taunted her jury that they...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 25, 2009; 8:32 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, everyone. We have a trio of obits about medical researchers: Leon Eisenberg, a pioneer in autism studies; Eloise Giblett, whose work on blood made transfusions safer; and John J. Wild, who invented a way to find tumors using ultrasound. You have to like a guy who kept old...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 24, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Willy Ronis's Views of Paris
Anyone with lingering mental images of the romantic balconies and side streets of Paris owes a debt of imagination to Willy Ronis. The Hungarian-born photographer, whose sweet, unadorned pictures of Parisian life practically echo with the sound of accordion music and clinking coffee cups, has died in Paris at the...
By Matt Schudel | September 23, 2009; 5:42 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. Who thinks over a seafood dinner of the fisherman who risked his life for the scallops? Martin Manley started out as a deckhand and became a cook and engineer as he worked his way up to captain. In 1954, he made headlines for bringing back a record-setting 42,000-pound...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 23, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, and welcome to autumn. A Dallas-based federal judge, Jerry Buchmeyer, who died Monday, made at least two landmark rulings that had impact beyond Texas. In 1985, he ordered relief for public housing families that ultimately changed how many other cities handle public housing. And he also ruled that...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 22, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
And we remember....
I don't know about you but I found last night's Emmy telecast pretty boring. This is strange for me since usually I love award shows. Not surprising, though, was that my favorite part did not disappoint--the "In Memoriam" segment. With Sarah MacClahlan singing her hit, "I will Remember You,"...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 21, 2009; 2:23 PM ET | Comments (3)
The Daily Goodbye
Good Monday morning, weekend athletes and underachievers alike. Arthur Ferrante, of those lush, piano-driven movie tunes in the 1960s, died this weekend in Longboat Key, Fla. His musical partner, Lou Teicher, died just a year ago. Zalman Lavan saw the future in solar energy back in the 1970s and moved...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 21, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Who Will the Emmys Remember?
While many will gather around the tube on Sunday night, oohing and aahing over television celebrities on the red carpet and guessing which nominees will take home Emmy awards, we on the obituary desk at the Post are playing another game. We would like to know which celebrities who passed...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 18, 2009; 5:00 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. A physician and politician, Stanley Haidasz played a major role in bringing medicare to all Canadians, passing the Canadian Pension Plan and the Clean Air Act. He was the country's first multiculturalism minister. He died last month in Toronto. Linda C. Black, who wrote those newspaper horoscopes that...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 18, 2009; 8:17 AM ET | Comments (0)
Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary
Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame, has died at the age of 72. We didn't hear about her until about 9 p.m. Wednesday, when the obits staff had already gone home to rest after several onerous days of work -- we've had a ton of major obits in...
By Matt Schudel | September 17, 2009; 1:15 PM ET | Comments (0)
Trevor Rhone, Jamaican Author, Dies
Terence McArdle, a bluesman who works in the newsroom, is occasionally recruited to help out on musical obituaries. He wrote one today for Jamaican playwright Trevor Rhone. McArdle writes: Rhone's greatest impact with American audiences occurred with the screenplay he co-wrote with director Perry Henzel, "The Harder They Come" (1972)....
By Adam Bernstein | September 17, 2009; 11:36 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, obit fans. Here's a thoughtful piece on why it seems that so many celebrities have died this past summer. In sum, it's not them, it's us. And along those lines, we learned of the deaths yesterday of Henry Gibson of Laugh-In, Mary Travers of the folk trio Peter,...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 17, 2009; 8:25 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, compadres. Juan Almeida Bosque, a comrade of Fidel Castro since the start of his guerrilla struggle more than half a century ago, died of a heart attack Friday in Havana, government media announced. He was 82. Zakes Mokae, the Tony-winning South African actor who appeared in such films...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 16, 2009; 8:18 AM ET | Comments (0)
Tell Us Your Favorite Swayze Film
To honor actor and dancer Patrick Swayze, who died yesterday, we wanted to hear from our readers. So we created a poll. Please let us know which Swayze film is your favorite. If you have another to add to the list we would love to hear from you. POLL...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 15, 2009; 12:33 PM ET | Comments (1)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, after a late night. Nothing like a pair of big obits late in the day to get your motor running. I speak, of course, about Patrick Swayze and Jody Powell, an unlikely pair who died within hours of each other. The real-life Norma Rae, Crystal Lee Sutton, died...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 15, 2009; 8:20 AM ET | Comments (0)
Spotlight: Patrick Swayze
Say it ain't so. Patrick Swayze, the hunky, sexy, smooth-talking dancer from that iconic film, "Dirty Dancing," has died. I've watched the movie hundreds of times. Heck, I even owned the soundtrack (on a cassette no less.) Tell me, what 13-year-old girl didn't want to be swept onto the dance...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 14, 2009; 9:14 PM ET | Comments (2)
Punk Rocker, Poet Dies, Dies
Jim Carroll, 60, a poet-turned-punk rocker whose book "The Basketball Diaries" chronicled his descent from elite high school basketball star to Times Square drug addict, thief and prostitute, died Sept. 11 at his home in Manhattan after a heart attack. In addition to the autobiographical account of his early teen...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 14, 2009; 4:10 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, readers. After a battery of deaths over the weekend, including the truly estimable Norman Borlaug, what do we have this morning? A notable fly fisherman, whose prose, as quoted, reminds me of Norman Maclean (and if you don't know who he is, you probably shouldn't read tales of...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 14, 2009; 8:31 AM ET | Comments (2)
Father of the Green Revolution
It's easy to conjure up the names of the notorious who've been responsible for the deaths of millions -- think Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot -- but what about the name of a man responsible for saving millions? As writer Gregg Easterbrook noted in 1997, "America has three living winners of...
By Joe Holley | September 13, 2009; 4:37 PM ET | Comments (1)
The Daily Goodbye
Good rainy morning, and what a sendoff for the founder of the Weather Channel. The 1960s division between hardhats and hippies was often more rhetoric than fact, as shown by the life of David Irish Sullivan (no relation), a social and political activist who became a construction worker himself. True...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 11, 2009; 8:08 AM ET | Comments (0)
Frank Batten Sr.; created Weather Channel
Frank Batten Sr., a Norfolk, Va., publisher who founded the Weather Channel and was the 190th richest person in America, has died at 82. We'll get an obituary up as soon as we can get one prepared....
By Matt Schudel | September 10, 2009; 12:27 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good healthy morning. You may have never heard of Ernesta Rachel Dunbar, but maybe you just aren't worldly enough. She was very big in Taiwan, China, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in Asia. In the U.S., she performed with Philly soul singer Teddy Pendergrass, saxophonist Grover Washington...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 10, 2009; 8:25 AM ET | Comments (1)
Walter Cronkite Memorial
We streamed the video of Walter Cronkite's memorial service, and here's the edited, archived verson; add your thoughts in our new discussion forum....
By Patricia Sullivan | September 9, 2009; 11:06 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. It's interesting to note the impact of a movie on contemporaneous obits. Take the hit film "Julie and Julia," Nora Ephron's homage to chef Julia Child. I'm thinking that without it, we would have paid a lot less attention to the deaths of Sylvia Schur and Silver Palate...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 9, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Bedford Boys
In my September 5 obituary for Elliot Berlin, I mentioned that the Alexandria-based documentary filmmaker had recently completed work on "Bedford: The Town They Left Behind." I noted that the documentary explores "the impact of the D-Day invasion upon a small southwestern Virginia town that lost several of its young...
By Joe Holley | September 8, 2009; 3:05 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, and I hope you survived "Terrible Traffic Tuesday." Pretty slow news day for interesting obits, but here are a few. Rocky Bridges spent only nine years on the San Jose, Calif. police department, but he earned a legendary reputation. He survived an ambush by armed robbers, and years...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 8, 2009; 8:20 AM ET | Email a Comment
The Daily Goodbye
Happy Labor Day, workers of the world, and all those who toil for a medium of exchange. Robert Spinrad, director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center when the technology that led directly to the modern personal computer, the ethernet local area network and the laser printer was developed, has died....
By Patricia Sullivan | September 7, 2009; 8:08 AM ET | Comments (0)
Diz and Buddy
Baseball fans of a certain age will remember Buddy Blattner, the baseball broadcaster who teamed with Dizzy Dean throughout the 1950s on "Baseball's Game of the Week," first on ABC-TV, then on CBS. The duo also broadcast Mutual's "Game of the Day" on radio. Blattner died of cancer Sept. 4...
By Joe Holley | September 6, 2009; 5:44 PM ET | Comments (1)
Faking Accomplishments
It doesn't take very long on the obits beat to learn that families routinely exaggerate the importance of their deceased relative's achievements. Occasionally, the deceased person has participated in the deception; often it's simply a matter of relatives who extrapolate from stories they heard or who don't think it's such...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 4, 2009; 3:43 PM ET | Comments (2)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, all. The retail empire Talbot's is a godsend for the professional woman over the age of 35 who faces a universe of shopping geared toward the pubescent, trendy, non-serious fashionistas. A woman was behind that empire: Nancy Talbot, a self-described "pushy Midwesterner" who with her husband turned a...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 4, 2009; 8:02 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. A little bit of history and a little bit of bizarro news this morning. Elizabeth Mary Leen may not have been able to stop a man from attacking her daughter but she showed a mother's fierce will for the next 28 years, working tirelessly to prevent the man...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 3, 2009; 7:57 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Sweet Sound of Gospel
Today I wrote the obituary for Marie Knight, a gospel singer with a powerful voice who during the late 1940s and 50s teamed up with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, an influential gospel singer who blurred the lines between gospel music, R&B and the blues. While Knight was not as well-known as...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 2, 2009; 12:31 PM ET | Comments (0)
Erich Kunzel, "Prince of Pops," Dies
Emily Langer, who works in The Post's Outlook section, wrote today's obituary of conductor Erich Kunzel. Langer writes: You've probably heard Mr. Kunzel's music even if you didn't know his name: Since 1991 he had conducted the National Symphony Orchestra in the Memorial Day and July Fourth concerts on the...
By Adam Bernstein | September 2, 2009; 11:06 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning! Even if you've never endured the July 4 crowds on Washington's subway, the voracious mosquitoes on the National Mall and life-sapping humidity along the Potomac River to listen to the concert and see the fireworks, you probably heard Erich Kunzel's work. He was the guest conductor of the...
By Patricia Sullivan | September 2, 2009; 8:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
For us on the obituary desk, there is always an exciting story to tell. In today's Post, Adam Bernstein wrote the obituary for Chris Connor, a 1950's jazz singer who helped define the genre with her smokey sound. She herself said, "You either have it or you don't have it."...
By Lauren Wiseman | September 1, 2009; 6:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
