Archive: April 2008
Are You Sure?
Many, many years ago, on my first government job -- picking up trash and dead dogs for the Texas Highway Department -- I came across a puppy carcass beside IH-35 and, sadly, tossed the little body into the back of our converted gravel truck. An hour or so later, I...
By Joe Holley | April 30, 2008; 3:14 PM ET | Comments (0)
Remembering Texas City
Imagine an explosion so powerful it blows two light planes out of the sky, kills more than 500 people -- including a number of firefighters incinerated at the scene -- injured more than 7,000 others and destroyed 500 homes. All that happened on April 6, 1947, when the Grandcamp, a...
By Joe Holley | April 30, 2008; 11:47 AM ET | Comments (0)
Another Craigslist Wannabe
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor is hoping to wrest control of obituaries and death notices from the newspaper industry, just as he did with employment postings....
By Patricia Sullivan | April 28, 2008; 4:44 PM ET | Comments (0)
Watergate's Enduring Stories
One of the major reasons that the Washington Post became nationally prominent was its coverage of the Watergate scandal, starting in 1972. It's a complex story but the ramifications continue to this day. (The Post's online operation has a pretty good special report, with a useful timeline.) The key players...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 28, 2008; 6:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
Pearl Harbor?
So I was thinking I might write an obituary on this slow Sunday for "la Dinamitera" (the Dynamite Girl), an 88-year-old heroine of the Spanish Civil War named Rosario Sanchez Mora. But then I remembered an interview with the writer Susan Jacoby on C-Span yesterday. Jacoby told her interviewer, Nick...
By Joe Holley | April 27, 2008; 4:31 PM ET | Comments (2)
What Women Can Expect
Very interesting report, article and talk about life expectancy for women dropping for the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918. The culprits are, at least in part, those old bugaboos, smoking, poor diet and lack of exercise. Or, as medical writer Dr. David Brown writes: The trend appears...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 22, 2008; 11:35 AM ET | Comments (0)
Remembering the Lusitania
On May 7, 1915, little Barbara Anderson, a month shy of her third birthday, was having lunch with her mother in the main dining room of the Lusitania. The little girl was eating pudding when, at 2:28 in the afternoon, a German submarine fired a torpedo into the giant ocean...
By Joe Holley | April 21, 2008; 1:11 PM ET | Comments (1)
Boomers Face Reality
As boomers age, obits and end-of-life issues grow more prominent (in their minds, at least). Reading the April 7 issue of the New Yorker (Oh, admit it, you don't read it all the moment it arrives, either), I came across an entertaining Michael Kinsley piece on what he's learned in...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 21, 2008; 6:00 AM ET | Comments (0)
The Spy Game
John Guilsher was a quiet, modest man who spent 50 years as an officer and consultant for the CIA. For most obituaries of CIA officers, that's about all the information we get. But the story of John Ivan Guilsher is something special. For Sunday's Local Life, I was able to...
By Matt Schudel | April 20, 2008; 5:12 AM ET | Comments (0)
Of Parakeets and Freezers
Washington Post obituaries will often include a person's hobby or interest. Often this means a vague enthusiasm for pets ("he liked dogs," "she adored lizards"). Today, I heard a vivid tale of animal bonding. Josephine Czapp, who died April 6 at 89, raised many kinds of pets. But she had...
By Adam Bernstein | April 19, 2008; 10:00 AM ET | Comments (3)
Are You Ready for Some Football?
So you've never heard of Buzz Nutter, eh? Well, pull up a chair -- and a copy of today's obituary -- and let me tell you about the man who snapped the ball to Johnny Unitas in the Greatest Game Ever Played. Buzz Nutter, whose given name was the elegant...
By Matt Schudel | April 18, 2008; 11:01 AM ET | Comments (1)
The Local Angle
John Wheeler, one of the best-known physicists of his generation, died April 13. Newsday's headline for his obit reminded me of the Bronx Home News account of Charles Lindbergh's 1927 Transatlatic flight: "Lindbergh Flies Over the Bronx on Way to Paris."...
By Adam Bernstein | April 17, 2008; 11:56 AM ET | Comments (0)
A Shudder and a Giggle
We write a lot of obits here, but the endless variety of people's lives still give us a giggle (and sometimes a shudder). For example, here's a guy you wouldn't want to run into if you were in a dark alley carrying goods of uncertain origin. Chopper Howard was a...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 10, 2008; 11:30 AM ET | Comments (2)
Everybody's Blogging
Even the semi-cloistered Visitation Sisters of Georgetown, which I discovered when I wrote an obit for a nun who'd been there for 61 years. BTW, one of the sisters tells me that as of 6 a.m. this morning, 12 hours after this original note went up, they've had 125 hits...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 8, 2008; 6:09 PM ET | Comments (0)
Holocaust Witnesses
The obit we ran today of Eddie Willner is the sort of story that makes even non-Jews vow "Never again." He was an amazing man and his willingness to recount a terrible moment in history serves all of society. I've used the website affiliated with the U.S. Holocaust Museum from...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 8, 2008; 1:24 PM ET | Comments (0)
Slug This Story "Oops"
As I tracked down the story on this fake advertisement , I was reminded of something that Bob Woodward asked me eight months ago: Do obit writers check to make sure the people we write about really are dead? When he first got to the Post, his old pal Carl...
By Patricia Sullivan | April 2, 2008; 12:06 PM ET | Comments (2)
