Archive: October 2009
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. If you've ever served on a jury, you've probably noticed the court reporter, sitting over a little machine taking notes at the speed of speech. Coley Griffin was a court reporter, but he used a fountain pen with purple ink. He took notes at 260 words per minute,...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 21, 2009; 8:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Farewell, Joe
Before his mug shot disappears from the Murderers' Row atop our blog, we want to say farewell to our colleague Joe Holley, who has just left the Post to begin plying the journalistic trade as a political writer for the Houston Chronicle. Joe, as longtime readers know, is a Texan...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 20, 2009; 4:45 PM ET | Comments (0)
'Dr. No' Dies
The stage actor Joseph Wiseman, who died Monday at 91, had an acclaimed career on Broadway and was a memorable supporting actor in films such as "Detective Story," "Viva Zapata!" and "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz." But Mr. Wiseman was forever linked to "Dr. No," the first entry in the...
By Adam Bernstein | October 20, 2009; 10:57 AM ET | Comments (5)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. Some cult leaders are ridiculous, and others are just sad, but few are as successful as Elizabeth Clare Prophet, or "Guru Ma," spiritual leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant. Outsiders looking in saw a dangerous collection of people and guns who didn't trust outsiders, willing to believe...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 20, 2009; 8:15 AM ET | Comments (2)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning and happy Monday. With all the talk of swine flu and vaccines, I found the obituary on Ruth L. Kirschstein, 83, a pathologist who helped increase the safety of the polio and measles vaccines, timely and interesting. In addition to this work, Dr. Kirschstein was the first woman...
By Lauren Wiseman | October 19, 2009; 6:30 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning on a rainy Friday (at my house, anyway). Were your hopes of becoming the next Wilt Chamberlain dashed when you failed to shoot up past 4-foot-10, sprout? Did your layout lay about and when you set a pick, others picked you off? Is that what's troubling you, bunky?...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 16, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (1)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, insiders. After the deaths of "Bid 'em up" Bruce Wasserstein, wrestler Captain Lou Albano and Nan Robertson, who chronicled the lawsuit that basically made well-paid careers possible for female journalists, it's going to be interesting to see what news comes today. William Wayne Justice, whose rulings changed the...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 15, 2009; 8:13 AM ET | Comments (0)
Death of Nan Robertson
Nan Robertson, 83, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote about her nearly fatal struggle with toxic shock syndrome, then wrote a book about gender discrimination that's become a standard text in journalism, died last night of heart disease at Collingswood Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rockville. She lived in Bethesda....
By Patricia Sullivan | October 14, 2009; 4:28 PM ET | Comments (0)
Captain Lou Dies
AP reports the death of Captain Lou Albano, which the news agency describes as "the charismatic professional wrestler who appeared in Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' video." He died Oct. 14 at age 76 of undisclosed causes....
By Adam Bernstein | October 14, 2009; 2:34 PM ET | Comments (1)
Queen of Libya
The Times of London has a first-rate obit today clearly written by a Libyan expert who could make sense of the tangle of tribe loyalties and royal intrigue surrounding the life and death of Fatima al-Sanussi, the last queen of the North African country. After they were ousted and Gaddafi...
By Adam Bernstein | October 14, 2009; 11:38 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good autumn morning. Raise a glass (but just one) to Joseph Barboriak, who found that a few drinks a day helps to lower choloesterol. But no more than one or two and no more than one ounce of the hard stuff. Al Martino whose smooth ballad crooning was popular in...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 14, 2009; 8:24 AM ET | Comments (0)
Not exactly an obit
This isn't really an obit, since Herblock died awhile ago (sorry if most of the links on that page don't work -- blame the ever-evolving nature of web archives), but the Library of Congress and others are celebrating the long-time political cartoonist's 100th birthday with an exhibition and the Post's...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 13, 2009; 4:01 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, all. A Jewish refugee who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, helped liberate Nuremburg, interrogated Nazi war criminals and then helped RCA create color television has died. Richard Sonnenfeldt died Friday at his home in Port Washington, N.Y. after 86 years of changing the world. The first...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 13, 2009; 8:15 AM ET | Comments (0)
Autumn and Obits
At Salon, Garrison Keillor writes of autumn -- and obits: "That is what fall means in St. Paul, Minn. It's maple trees telling us about mortality and that life is short and can't be put on Pause and each of us is as fragile and forgettable as a maple tree....
By Joe Holley | October 12, 2009; 11:04 AM ET | Comments (1)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning! Harriett Allen, who knew a good desert when she saw one, has died after of lifetime of protecting the dry California environment. In her early 80s, a fellow activist spotted her in the Mojave Desert "camped in her sleeping bag at a 5,000-foot elevation -- and loving it."...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 12, 2009; 8:11 AM ET | Comments (0)
How I Got the Story: Ben Ali of Ben's Chili Bowl
I had never spoken to Nizam Ali before, but somehow his call to the paper ended up at my desk. I picked it up my phone around 11:30 a.m. Thursday and learned that Ali's father had died the night before. His father was Ben Ali, who wasn't exactly a public...
By Matt Schudel | October 9, 2009; 11:10 AM ET | Comments (12)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, and farewell to Ben Ali. Pedro Elias Zadunaisky, an Argentine astronomer and mathematician whose calculations helped determine the orbit of Saturn's outermost moon, Phoebe, as well as Halley's Comet, died Wednesday. He was 91. Lest you think all shoemaking has been outsourced to high-end Italy or low-end Asian...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 9, 2009; 8:15 AM ET | Comments (0)
Ben Ali of Ben's Chili Bowl Dies
Ben Ali, the founder of Ben's Chili Bowl, a landmark D.C. eatery that has fed presidents, celebrities and the common folks of the city, died last night of congestive heart failure at his home in Washington. He was 82. (Our full obituary is here; be sure to read it...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 8, 2009; 11:41 AM ET | Comments (66)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, readers. There's nothing newspaper writers like better, other than other ink-stained wretches, than photographers, and Irving Penn's death yesterday brought out the full range of obits from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and the Associated Press. Just as Washington...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 8, 2009; 9:02 AM ET | Comments (0)
Russert's Office to Museum
I guess the display of Julia Child's kitchen in the Smithsonian broke the ground for this type of thing, but it's still startling to see that broadcaster Tim Russert's office will be displayed in the Newseum next month. Russert, who just died in June 2008, was a working stiff, but...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 7, 2009; 4:24 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning, everyone. Rev. Angus Finucane, a Dublin priest who became a missionary to Africa, died Tuesday. "There can be few Irish people, of his generation or of any other generation, who have contributed as much to improving the lives of so much of humanity," said the current head of...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 7, 2009; 8:16 AM ET | Comments (2)
Dying Too Soon?
One of our ace health reporters asked and answered the important question: Are Americans dying too soon? The answer is yes. In this front-page story, Ceci Connolly writes "When it comes to "preventable deaths" -- an array of illnesses and injuries that should not kill at an early age --...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 6, 2009; 1:11 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning. Just the thought of a cup of Coca-Cola in a cake makes my tongue shrivel this morning, but it was popular with Bernice Watson's family, friends and (of course!) customers of the Coke cafeteria in Atlanta. Alvena Smith Lupo, the manager of a New Orleans movie house who...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 6, 2009; 8:10 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Happy Monday. Grammy-winning singer Mercedes Sosa, an Argentine singer who often sang of the political struggles and turmoil of the Argentine people, died. Her politically infused songs earned her the nickname, the "voice of the voiceless." She released 70 albums over a career that spanned six decades and sang with...
By Lauren Wiseman | October 5, 2009; 8:08 AM ET | Comments (0)
'Voice of the Voiceless Ones'
It would be hard to overestimate the power and influence of Mercedes Sosa, the Argentinian-born folk singer who died October 4 at age 74. As Adam Bernstein recounts in The Post, she released 70 albums over a career spanning nearly six decades. Known for her rich contralto voice and her...
By Joe Holley | October 4, 2009; 5:05 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Daily Goodbye
Good morning and welcome to Friday. I'll bet you never thought about the history of dentistry. Dr. John M. Hyson Jr. could have filled you in. Before his death last weekend, he wrote about the history of the toothbrush, George Washington's dental health and his wooden dentures, African-American contract dental...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 2, 2009; 8:09 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Obit You'll Never See
It can get monotonous, but we do background checks and information searches for every obituary we do, even it it's a local person of no particular renown. Most of the time, we find nothing -- the vast majority of people lead their lives out of the public eye in more...
By Matt Schudel | October 1, 2009; 4:23 PM ET | Comments (4)
The Daily Goodbye
Good (brrr) morning. If you want to be really chilly, read about Charles Houston's adventures in the Himalayas. He almost gasped his last in 1953 during an epic retreat on K2, the world's second highest mountain, and later immersed himself in the study of why we get sick at high...
By Patricia Sullivan | October 1, 2009; 9:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
