Archive: July 2008
Is God Dead? (UPDATED)
In 1966, Time magazine ran a provocative cover with the bold question, "Is God Dead?" The story led to sharp backlash from social conservatives and sparked a public debate about philosophy and religion. The editor responsible for that story, Otto Fuerbringer, has died at 97, and his obituary is in...
By Matt Schudel | July 31, 2008; 1:26 PM ET | Comments (0)
Two Obits of Chile Under Pinochet
I wrote today of the legacy of a U.S. ambassador to Chile during the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. It's a life story I hope readers would find of interest for how the diplomat, David H. Popper, balanced U.S. policy to support anti-Communist military regimes, against public demands from...
By Adam Bernstein | July 31, 2008; 12:58 PM ET | Comments (0)
Report on Steve Fossett
An intriguing report on missing adventurer Steve Fossett, who was legally declared dead in February. But Lt. Col. Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol tells the The London Daily Telegraph Fossett's body "should have been found. ... It's not like we didn't have our eyes open. We found...
By Adam Bernstein | July 30, 2008; 7:26 PM ET | Comments (0)
Head Start Leader, Ex-Surgeon General Dies
Word just arrived that Julius B. Richmond, 91, the first director of Head Start and former U.S. Surgeon General who fought a career-long battle against cigarette smoking, died Sunday at his home in Brookline, Mass. He had cancer. He was someone who had a big impact on public health in...
By Patricia Sullivan | July 29, 2008; 12:36 PM ET | Comments (0)
Johnny Griffin, tenor saxophonist
Johnny Griffin, 80, among the finest jazz tenor saxophonists to develop after World War II and whose robust style -- along with his modest height -- earned him the title the Little Giant, died July 25 at his home in Availles-Limouzine, a village about 150 miles southwest of Paris. No...
By Patricia Sullivan | July 25, 2008; 4:34 PM ET | Comments (0)
"I have experienced a deathbed conversion... I just bought a Macintosh."
"... I knew I'd get nine percent of the audience with that." As noted by the Associated Press today: Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist whose "last lecture" about facing terminal cancer became an Internet sensation and a best-selling book, has died. He was 47. Pausch's Carnegie Mellon...
By David Marino-Nachison | July 25, 2008; 10:15 AM ET | Comments (0)
Chuck Stobbs and Donald Dunaway (UPDATED)
Longtime Washingtonians may remember the name of Chuck Stobbs, a pitcher with the lowly Washington Senators of the 1950s. Stobbs died July 11 in Florida and, much to his chagrin, could never live down his moment in history. On April 17, 1953, in his very first game with the old...
By Matt Schudel | July 25, 2008; 7:54 AM ET | Comments (3)
Obit on the Politics Page
Sometimes you hear a tale about someone from the past so vivid, so funny and so surprising that you wish you had a chance to write his obit. But Jonathan Weisman and Madonna Lebling did a fine delayed obit, on the politics page no less, about John McCain's maternal grandfather....
By Patricia Sullivan | July 23, 2008; 11:54 AM ET | Comments (0)
Why Read Obits?
We'll have a story in tomorrow's Washington Post (here it is ) that is yet another example of why people read obits. A man with the obit-worthy surname of Graves wrote in an e-mail "My father was a pre-eminent reader of newspapers, both the Post and numerous Russian newspapers.... In...
By Patricia Sullivan | July 17, 2008; 1:56 PM ET | Comments (8)
It's All Relative
The "survivors paragraph" in a typical Washington Post obit is fairly rigidly formatted, and for good reason: It's quite common for people, who define family broadly, to seek to include what my grandmother called "shirt-tail relations." It's also unfortunately common for some people to try to exclude a family rival,...
By Patricia Sullivan | July 15, 2008; 11:48 AM ET | Comments (0)
Natural Wonders
In his Salon.com column this week, Garrison Keillor describes dropping in recently on an old friend in Chicago -- old in both senses of the word. His friend is 96, "but with all his faculties intact, which makes him a natural wonder you could exhibit on the carnival circuit for...
By Joe Holley | July 10, 2008; 2:50 PM ET | Comments (0)
The Tragedy of Tom Disch
I was out of the office Monday when Michael Dirda, the Post's longtime book critic, sent me an e-mail about the death of Thomas M. Disch. He had known Disch very well and had commissioned him to write dozens of reviews for the Post's Book World over the years. As...
By Matt Schudel | July 9, 2008; 4:49 PM ET | Comments (2)
Clay Felker's New York
If you're too young to remember the '70s, well, you missed a decade of showmanship, grandiloquent excess, great movies and spirited journalism unlike anything we've seen since. There was more than enough decadence to go around, but it was also a time when great reporting was seen as a way...
By Matt Schudel | July 2, 2008; 11:33 AM ET | Comments (0)
Magazine editor Clay Felker Dies
Clay S. Felker, 82, the visionary editor who founded New York magazine and helped launch the revolutionary New Journalism of the 1960s, died this morning of throat and mouth cancer. Full story....
By Patricia Sullivan | July 1, 2008; 11:03 AM ET | Comments (0)
