silurians

Milton Esterow

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:18:22 GMT

Milton Esterow, Who Brought an Investigative Edge to Stories About Nazi-Looted Art, Dies at 97

Editor’s note: On October 9, one week after Milton Esterow’s passing, his daughter Judith Esterow informed The Silurians of his death. She wrote, “Milton was a long-time member of the Silurians as well as a multiple recipient of the Silurians award. His first was in 1967 for his Page 1 New York Times story on a fake Greek horse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other awards followed during his tenure at ARTnews. He died peacefully at home at age 97, and had been working on a freelance piece for the Times until three weeks before. He loved attending the monthly Silurians lunches and much enjoyed chatting with old colleagues and meeting new fellow journalists.” Here are excerpts from the obituary that appeared in the New York Times by staff reporter Jeré Longman.

Milton Esterow, a New York Times arts journalist who, in 1972, bought and reinvigorated ARTnews magazine and, at both media outlets, helped bring an investigative edge to culture reporting, especially regarding artwork looted by the Nazis, died on Oct. 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 97.

Mr. Esterow joined The New York Times as a 17-year-old copy boy in 1945, became assistant to the director of cultural news before he left the paper in 1968, and returned nearly a half-century later as a freelancer.

A draft of his final article, about the restitution of art stolen during the Holocaust was submitted before he died and remains scheduled for publication in the near future.

Mr. Esterow found his niche at The Times by bringing the toughness of his early coverage on the crime beat to culture reporting. On Nov. 16, 1964, his article about treasures stolen by the Nazis appeared on the front page of The Times under the headline “Europe is Still Hunting Its Plundered Art .” It inspired him to dig further into the topic, leading to his book “The Art Stealers” (1966).

“This had never been done at the paper before, doing investigative journalism, getting behind the scenes and interviewing the key players, the artists, the collectors, the dealers, the scholars,” Mr. Esterow said in a 2009 lecture at the University of Southern California.

Itching for a bigger role, he left The Times to run the publishing division of Kennedy art galleries in New York and, in 1972, to lead an eight-person investor group in purchasing ARTnews from Newsweek, then a division of The Washington Post Company.

ARTnews, a monthly founded in 1902, was the nation’s oldest arts magazine, but it was adrift financially, with a circulation of only about 30,000. Mr. Esterow instituted a makeover, moving beyond the publication’s traditional focus on reviews to broaden and sharpen its coverage of what he called the “fascinating and mysterious” happenings of the art world.

Under his stewardship as publisher and editor, ARTnews became one of the most widely circulated art magazines. It won a National Magazine Award for general excellence in 1981 and George Polk Awards for cultural reporting in 1980 and 1991, the latter for investigating art stolen by the Soviets during its occupation of Germany after World War II.

In 1984, Mr. Esterow received a tip that a monastery in Mauerbach, Austria, was rumored to house thousands of artworks confiscated by the Nazis. (An estimated 25,000 Jewish homes were sacked in Austria.) He and his wife flew to Vienna, where the minister of the Federal Monuments Office of Austria, pounding on his desk, declined to let him visit the monastery, as Mr. Esterow recounted in his 2009 lecture.

He told the minister that such a defensive posture made him suspicious and “that maybe you’re hiding something.” The interview quickly ended.

Back home, Mr. Esterow assigned a contributing editor, Andrew Decker, to the story. It was published in December 1984 under the headline “A Legacy of Shame.” Almost every year for a decade, ARTnews continued to report on what the Austrian government acknowledged was its deficient handling of the return of the monastery art objects to their rightful owners and heirs.

In 1985 , Austria announced a plan to return 8,000 works of art and other objects taken from Jews by the Nazis. According to ARTnews , 77 paintings and 236 other objects were returned. In 1995, the remaining objects were transferred to the Federation of Jewish Communities of Austria . They were auctioned in 1996 by Christie’s, raising more than $14 million to help needy Holocaust victims and their heirs.

Mr. Esterow sold ARTnews in 2014, after its circulation had risen to 80,000, for an undisclosed amount. Afterward, Mr. Esterow contributed freelance articles to The Times and continued to report on the Nazi looting.

In 2016, Austria’s consul general, Georg Heindl, honored Mr. Esterow and Mr. Decker on behalf of the country, saying they had “contributed to Austria facing its past honestly and thereby becoming, in a way, a better country.”

Milton Esterow was born on July 28, 1928, in Brooklyn. His father, Bernard Esterow, owned a small grocery. His mother, Yetta (Barash) Esterow, managed the home. At 10, Milton published a neighborhood newspaper that he sold for two cents a copy. On joining The Times, his first assignment as a copy boy was to buy the latest edition of The Daily Racing Form for the managing editor, who placed his horseracing bets with Mr. Esterow’s boss, the chief copy boy.

After being promoted to reporter in 1948, Mr. Esterow dropped out of Brooklyn College, figuring he would learn journalism by practicing it over studying it.

In addition to his daughter Judith—a former associate publisher of ARTnews—he is survived by another daughter, Deborah Rothstein; three grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; and four step great-grandchildren. His wife of 74 years, Jacqueline (Levine) Esterow, died in May.

Myron Rushetzky

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:07:50 GMT

The ‘Heart and Soul of the New York Post,’ Myron Rushetzky, 73,
Loses Battle with Cancer

Myron Rushetzky, 73, the legendary gatekeeper to the raucous New York Post’s City Desk during a 40-year career there who later served on the Board of the Silurians Press Club, died of glandular cancer on August 15 at NYU Langone Hospital in Manhattan.

“He fell in love with newspapers at the New York Post, and newspapers and the Post loved him back. He became the heart and soul of the paper,” said journalist and author Susan Mulcahy, who began her career as a copy girl at the Postunder Myron in 1978 and graduated to write for the famous Page Six gossip page. In 2024, she and Frank DiGiacomo coauthored Paper of Wreckage: The Rogues, Renegades, Wiseguys, Wankers, and Relentless Reporters Who Redefined American Media, an oral history of the Post from 1976 to 2024. It surprised no one when Mulcahy and DiGiacomo dedicated the book to Myron Rushetzky.

After his retirement from the Post, Myron became a Silurian and was soon invited to join its Board of Governors where he served for more than a decade. He worked closely with me to plan and make sure that the annual Silurians “Excellence in Journalism” Awards Dinner ran smoothly. Myron also was a regular at the check-in table at the Silurians popular monthly lunches.

As the gatekeeper of the Post’s City Desk, Myron said he was “in the eye of the hurricane,” answering incoming calls that in pre-internet days was the paper’s connection to breaking news.

His reach was global, reflected in this obituary which appeared in The Jerusalem Post: “Like a triage official in a hospital, he knew exactly where to send such calls—news editors, beat reporters or the rewrite desk. And he knew when to hang up on the crazies.” Hannah Brown, who wrote the obituary, also had been one of Myron’s copy girls and credited him with getting her started in a journalism career. She was not the only one.

One of Rushetzky’s duties at the Post was overseeing the training and scheduling of copy boys and girls—the support staff in pre-digital days that ran copy, photos, layouts wherever they had to go. Generations of future well-known journalists got their start running copy for Rushetzky, including New York Times White House correspondent and Silurian Maggie Haberman.

Early in his career at the Post, Myron began sending birthday and anniversary cards to colleagues at the Post and at other newspapers; eventually, he also sent greeting cards to their children. Year after year, his list grew and grew to hundreds of recipients. Point in question: Myron became well known to Hallmark Cards staff who enrolled him in a special rewards program that provided him with discounts.

And then there was Bank Myron. In the 1980s when ATMs were scarce, Myron provided interest-free loans to his Post colleagues. After he took a buyout from the Post in June 2013, Myron established Post Nation, a large email community of his former Post colleagues, reporting to them on births, book events, honors, retirements and deaths.

When he was diagnosed with cancer in the spring of 2025, Myron only shared the news with a few close friends. As a result, many Post and Silurian colleagues and friends were unaware of his grave condition. But as word slowly trickled out, friends and colleagues rallied as best as they could.

In fact, on Friday afternoon, August 15, scant hours before Myron’s death, former Silurian President David Andelman and his wife, Pamela, spent 30 minutes at his bedside at NYU Langone. David told us that Myron “was breathing, yet totally unconscious” and that “laying atop his stomach was a copy of that day’s New York Post.”

Rest in peace, Myron.

Richard Burgheim

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 13:51:10 GMT

Top Editor, True-Blue Silurian, July 5, 1933-June 1, 2025

Richard Burgheim , who spent his entire career as a journalist at Time Inc., where he was a founding editor of People magazine and a top editor at Time, Life and Money magazines, died on June 1 at Weill Cornell Medical Center. He was 91.

In addition to his work as a magazine editor, after retiring in 1993 he was a consulting editor to People and volunteered at non-profits.

Richard Burgheim was born on July 5, 1933, in St. Louis. After graduating from Harvard University in 1955 with a liberal arts degree, he enlisted in the Coast Guard and served from 1955 to 1959. After his service, he moved to New York and launched his career at Time Inc. in 1960.

Burgheim is survived by his wife, Ricki Fulman, who is also a long-time Silurian and a former member of the Board of Governors

“Dick loved mentoring young journalists,” Fulman said. “And he loved coming to Silurian lunches and saying hello to a lot of old—and new—friends.”

Max Frankel

Wed, 30 Apr 2025 17:04:39 GMT

Fiercely Intelligent, Courageously Honest, Judicious

It was an article that Max Frankel was destined to write.

On Nov. 14, 2001, in a special section marking the 150 ^th anniversary of the New York Times, an article by Max-- as everyone knew him—chronicled in disturbing detail how the Times had buried news of the mass killings that composed the Holocaust in its inside pages or in absurdly short reports. He called the Times coverage the “the century's bitterest journalistic failure.”

It was breathtaking that a former executive editor of the Times would pen such a piece and it was to the credit of the Times and the Sulzberger family that it could so publicly admit its failure and explain its cause: the reluctance of the paper’s Jewish publisher during the war years to appear to be making a special pleading for Jews.

Yet it was standard Max—fiercely intelligent, courageously honest, yet judicious. He had the stature, credibility and compassion to carry off such an assignment even as it must have pained him more than a little to take to task the organization that had been the home of his stellar fifty-year, Pulitzer Prize-winning career.

But as a person with strong principles, Max, who died March 23 at the age of 94, must have seen exposing the Times’ miscarriage as unfinished business, a long-needed correction required by his unsparing code of journalistic candor.

Of course, it was no random circumstance that it was Max who had written the piece. His life had been shaped by the Holocaust. He fled Nazi Germany with his mother and as a 9-year-old settled among other refugees in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood. For seven often lonely years he did not see his father, who had been trapped in Poland by the outbreak of war and then sent by the Soviets to a Siberian logging camp on the trumped-up charge of being a German spy. Max never saw his grandparents again.

Years later, this ordeal must have made him acutely sensitive to the way his staff might be shaken by the slings and arrows of a life in journalism. As executive editor after the transformative but tumultuous reign of Abe Rosenthal, he infused more kindness and decency into the Darwinian tensions of a newsroom.

At Max’ shiva, his wife, Joyce Purnick, another Times alumnus, recalled that her first encounter with Max came soon after he took the helm of the paper and she received a “herogram” for something she had written. She was elated, though she soon found out many other reporters had received such valentines. Max was signaling that the temperature of the newsroom needed warming.

It was no small matter that Max as executive editor also enhanced the journalism of the Times. He told Metro reporters in the boroughs or suburbs to cover their beats as foreign correspondents might, spurning stories of only parochial interest for those that anyone anywhere might want to read. He urged writers to get to the main point by the fourth or fifth graph, reflecting his impatience with long-winded anecdotal leads that did no favor to the straphanger manipulating a broadsheet on a crowded subway.

He brightened the front page with stories that emerged from the arts and style staffs that revealed meaningful changes in how people managed their lives. And with 24-hour cable television getting the hard news out almost instantaneously, he often gave preference to interpretive versions of a story over the straightforward headline version.

In many ways Max was the public ideal of a Times man, polished, erudite and well spoken, but he loved a good joke and responded with a hearty laugh. At home, he liked to sing—in high school he even contemplated an opera career but gave it up, he wrote in his memoir, because "I may be another Richard Tucker. But if not, or if something goes wrong with my throat, I'll spend my life singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs." He was also a talented painter, reigniting a childhood pastime by taking up watercolors in his last decades. Most of all he loved spending time with Joyce, at their Upper West Side apartment or at their Fire Island beach house, and with his three children and six grandchildren.

“He was a father every day,” his son Jon said of him.

Blessed with a deftly analytical mind, Max could be intimidating as he questioned editors or reporters about stories they were pitching. Yet he was a genuine listener and open to changing his mind. He urged the adoption of Ms. as an honorific and, strove, though not always successfully to diversify the newsroom. He insisted that the Times use the word gay without quotation marks and, as Adam Nagourney wrote, encouraged Jeff Schmalz, who told Max he was gay and had AIDS, to “bring his particular perspective to covering the epidemic.”

The newsroom that emerged fostered freer, even incendiary conversation between the so-called “Blue Wall”—the masthead editors—and the staff. As Todd Purdum wrote on the Facebook Times alumni group the “climate of fear” dissipated.

“When he took over the 43d Street newsroom, it was as if the windows had been thrown open and a gentle breeze had blown In,“ Purdum said.

When the Times decided to publish the name of the victim who accused William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of Senator Ted Kennedy of raping her, many reporters voiced their outrage. Max stuck to his guns, arguing that NBC had already published her name, but he allowed for dissenting voices to be heard. Nagourney said the confrontation was unthinkable in a pre-Max era.

In private or online remarks, reporters spoke of how they always felt liked by Max, that he not only appreciated their hard work but let them know by his banjo eyes and generous smile that he liked them as people. They also singled out his integrity.

I especially like a story Terry Smith told. In the early 1970’s Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to Richard Nixon, summoned Max to his West Wing office to complain about the supposed inaccuracies in a story by Smith. Max, then the Washington bureau chief, said he would only go if Smith came along. He would not go behind a reporter’s back. At the meeting, Max, puffing on a pipe, allowed Kissinger, a fellow refugee from Hitler, to fulminate. But when the Kissinger resorted to conversing in their shared language of German, a language Terry did not know, Max, signaled that he was on to Kissinger’s stratagem.

"Henry, this meeting is over!” Max said with a chuckle.

Even Kissinger had to laugh.

Selwyn Raab

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 01:44:42 GMT

The Don of Mafia Reporters

By Clyde Haberman

(Excerpt from March 4, 2025 obituary in the NY Times )

Selwyn Raab, an investigative reporter for The New York Times and other news organizations who in exacting detail explored the Mafia’s many tentacles, and whose doggedness helped lead to the exoneration of men wrongly convicted of notorious 1960s killings, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 90.

His son-in-law, Matthew Goldstein, a Times reporter, said the cause of his death, at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was intestinal complications.

Though the phrase surely fit him, Mr. Raab didn’t much care to be described as an investigative journalist. Rather, he said, “I believe in enterprise and patience.” He had both qualities in abundance across a long career, whether looking into fraudulent methadone clinics, or the life sentence given to a boy who was only 14 when convicted of murder, or the Mafia’s grip on New York City school construction.

He was also the author of a number of books about the mob, including one that became the basis of the 1970s television police drama “Kojak.”

[Raab, a longtime, active member of the Silurians, more recently was consulting producer for a project to turn his book, American Godfathers, into a television series. The actor Michael Imperioli is executive producer for the series.]

On a blind date in 1962, he met a social worker named Helene Lurie. They were married on Dec. 25, 1963. Mrs. Raab, who helped her husband with his research, died in 2019. Mr. Raab is survived by his daughter, Marian, who is chief executive of Ridge Street Productions, a film-production company.

Malachy McCourt

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:27:59 GMT

Author, Actor, Politician, All with Irish Flair, 92

Malachy Gerald McCourt, who was at various points – and in no special order – an actor, a saloonkeeper, an author, a dishwasher, a dock worker, a radio host, a smuggler and a Bible salesman – chose in 2006 to add political candidate to his résumé. He ran for New York governor that year.

Actually, showing his Irish roots, he said that he was “standing for office.”

Why American pols run for office and those on the other side of the Atlantic stand is not clear. Could it be that our politicians need a head start? In any event, Malachy ended up quite admirably in third place as the Green Party nominee. If only he had managed to pick up another 3,044,544 votes, he would have edged out the fellow who did win, Eliot Spitzer.

The sad part of it, he decided when I interviewed him before the election, is that American politics can be hopelessly grim. Their essence is “the inculcation of fear – fear and the evil of your opponents, what awful, dreadful, less-than-human beings they are,” he said. “Until elected. Then they say ‘We have to get behind them.’ ” Not much has changed on that score except perhaps the get-behind-them part.

Malachy died in March at age 92, weighed down with more ailments than need be listed here. Inevitably, he was at times paired and compared with his older brother, Frank McCourt, who died in 2009 and whose runaway best seller, “Angela’s Ashes,” affirmed that being wretchedly poor is not an ideal way to grow up. “I was blamed for not being my brother,” Malachy lamented. But he bore that burden well. Fact is, he had a best seller of his own in 1998, “A Monk Swimming,” the title evoking how as a boy he had misheard the Catholic reference to Mary as “blessed art thou amongst women.”

In his splendid New York Times obituary, Sam Roberts quoted Malachy’s advice to anyone writing a memoir: “Never show anything to your relatives.” Back in 1977, the brothers McCourt were trying out a play they had written, “A Couple of Blaguards,” which they declared to be “a lighthearted look at Ireland.” Unfortunately for them, their mother, Angela, was in the audience during one performance, and she stood up and said, “It wasn’t like that! It’s all a pack of lies.”

As the years passed, Malachy decided that “every day above ground is a good one” and that a desirable goal for us all is to “stay on right side of the grass.” When I interviewed him during his race for governor, he dutifully ran through his campaign themes – serious matters for sure, like his opposition to capital punishment, to tuition charges at public colleges and to the then-raging war in Iraq. But he had other issues as well. Perhaps reflecting an instinctive Irish distrust of anything British, he wanted New York to drop its claim to be the Empire State. He favored a tax on tobacco so high that a single cigarette would cost the same as a gallon of gas.

Oh, and he was prepared to triple the tax on chewing gum. Gum chewers look stupid, he decided. And then all too many of them simply spit it out. “It does terrible things to the sidewalk and the subway,” he said.

But while his gubernatorial race was in no way intended as a joke, he cautioned against taking oneself too seriously.

Terminal solemnity is the curse of all too many in the political class, he said (and, he might well have added, of more than a few journalists). To reinforce the point, the well-read Mr. McCourt offered a quotation from the English writer G.K. Chesterton: “Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

Ed Flancher

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:21:20 GMT

Village Voice Co-Founder, Publisher, Soldier, Psychologist, 100

Courage – that’s the quality I first think of when I remember Ed Fancher, who died last September (2023) at the age of 100. Sure, there were a great many things to admire about Ed. After all, he was a man of many parts.

Along with Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer, he had been one of the founders of The Village Voice in 1955 and then had served as the paper’s publisher for the next 20 years. He was also, during his years at the Voice as well as for decades afterwards, a practicing psychologist.

Perhaps it was his training as psychologist that helped make talking to him such a pleasure; his eyes would fix on you with a deep and genuine interest and he always listened with a polite attention. And he was a tweedy, elegantly handsome man; he cut quite a figure in his bachelor days in the Village before his marriage to Vivian (who died in 2020) and his becoming a father to Emily and Bruce.

But for me, it was his courage that always filled me with respect and a large measure of awe.

Ed’s courage was, in one very large part, nothing less than sheer bravery. Raised in upstate New York, he had attended the University of Alaska largely because he liked to ski. But when World War II broke out, he joined the Army and, because of his prowess as a skier, found his way to the elite 10th Mountain Division. The unit was thrown into combat in the snow-covered mountains of Northern Italy. Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, and Ed made his way through it all resigned, he told me, that he would never come out of it alive.

He didn’t like to talk about the war, but there was a photograph in his study in his penthouse apartment on 11th Street that caught my attention and, when I pressed him, he shared a story. It was a photo of a rifle-carrying Ed in combat fatigues standing alongside two partisans. As Ed matter-of-factly explained, the three were a scout team that had made their way up the seemingly insurmountable rocky cliffs of Riva Ridge in the dead of night. And it was their daring reconnaissance that provided the intelligence which enabled the 10th Mountain Division to launch a successful surprise attack against the Germans encamped in the Po Valley. And Ed, despite the risk, had led the way — once in the recon mission, and then again in the attack.

But Ed also had a moral courage, too. In the Sheridan Square office of the Voice (where I had first met him) he shared an office with Dan Wolf, and together the two men formulated the paper’s guiding philosophy. It would be a writer’s paper, a paper that would speak the truth to power, and also let its writers share their thoughts and ideas, no matter how divergent, from the mainstream. It took a great deal of courage to do this back then, just as this sort of no-holds-barred journalism requires a great deal of courage now, too.

But Ed never backed down. Not in war. And not in peace. He was a man of honor, and he will be missed.

Howard Blum is a former staff writer for the Village Voice who, after working as an investigative reporter at the New York Times, went on to write several bestselling books. “When The Night Comes Falling: A Requiem for the Idaho Student M

Marvin Kitman

Thu, 01 Aug 2024 11:56:39 GMT

Iconoclastic Reviewer of Our Most Popular Medium

Marvin Kitman once claimed he never watched television until someone paid him to do it.

“I may be crazy,” he said, “but I’m not stupid.”

Nonetheless, Kitman devoted much of his life — including more than 35 years as the television critic at Newsday — in front of a TV. His views of the medium weren’t exactly what television executives wanted to read, but that mattered little to Kitman, whose iconoclastic, irreverent and witty verdicts made his syndicated column one of Newsday’s most popular features.

A long-time Silurian who made several appearances as a luncheon speaker over the years, Kitman died of cancer on June 29 at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, N.J., not far from his home in Leonia. He was 93.

Kitman’s critiques had nothing to do with the size of a particular program’s viewing audience. He was generous with praise for such innovative programs as “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld,” “M*A*S*H” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” and he skewered numerous shows that drew major audiences — “Laverne & Shirley,” “Three’s Company” “Dallas” and “Charlie’s Angels,” for example — labeling them “pap.”

As befits a critic, he exuded self-confidence. While enrolled at CCNY in the 1950s, he wrote a column for one of the student publications. It was modestly called “I’m Never Wrong.” He titled his first book, a 1966 memoir, “The Number One Best Seller.” It wasn’t, but it launched his career as an author. Other books that followed included “George Washington’s Expense Account” (1970), a Kitmanesque view of how the nation’s first president handled his swindle sheet, and “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly” (2007). His last book was “Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era” (2020).

His honors include a Folio Award in 1988, a Humor Writing Award from the Silurians in 1991, and a Townsend Harris Medal from City College in 1992. In 1982, he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

In 1964, Kitman gave himself a ringside seat to presidential politics, playfully entering the New Hampshire primary as a “Lincoln Republican.” He said he was against slavery and declared, “I would rather be president than write.”

“My purpose was to satirize the campaign,” he explained to a reporter in 1972. “Eventually, I got caught up in it and my purpose was to become the president. People are always bringing it up, but I’d like to forget the whole thing. I’m a sore loser.”

Kitman was born on Nov. 24, 1929, in Pittsburgh. His family moved to Brooklyn, where he graduated from Brooklyn Tech High School, one of the city’s elite institutions. After graduating from CCNY in 1953, he served two years in the Army, writing for the post newspaper at Fort Dix, N.J. (“the last time I did anything to fight communism”).

He went on to hold a variety of jobs, including writing copy for Carl Ally, a Madison Avenue ad agency, and freelancing for publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and Monocle, a politically impudent humor magazine.

In 1967, during the Nixon administration, he was hired as a TV critic for New Leader Magazine. Two years later, on Dec.7,1969, he began writing for Newsday, “a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”

As the newly minted TV critic for one of New York’s daily newspapers, Kitman quickly proclaimed that his qualifications for the job were outstanding.

“I once ran for president, so I can interpret political stories,” he said. “When Dick [Nixon] does — or doesn’t — hold a press conference, I know what he’s doing. I went through all that myself. And I have no background in TV, per se. I never used to watch it. As a freelance writer, I was afraid of becoming addicted. As a result, I have a fresh eye. And the reruns . . . a lot of critics are against reruns. I love them. I never saw the program the first time.”

Kitman’s fear of becoming addicted to the tube once he became a critic proved groundless.

“I’m too busy writing about television to actually watch it,” he said.

His last column for Newsday ran on April 1, 2005.

From 1981 to 1987, Kitman himself appeared on television as a media commentator on “The Ten O’Clock News” on WNYW (formerly WNEW) in New York. His commentaries were also heard on the old RKO Radio Network.

When his days as a columnist were over, Kitman presented his thoughts on a blog, commenting on everything from websites run by multimillionaires who exploit writers by underpaying them to political scandals involving the people who run his state.

Commercials, he once said, provide television’s most educational moments.

“If you can teach a kid, at an early age, that advertisers lie,” he said, “that’s educational.”

Stephen M. Silverman

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 18:00:11 GMT

Stephen M. Silverman, age 71, reporter and historian of popular culture, died on July 6, 2023. The New York Post’s chief entertainment correspondent for years and a founding editor of people.com, he has contributed to publications across the United States and abroad, and taught journalism at Columbia University. Among his more than a dozen books are “David Lean,” “The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America” and “The Amusement Park: 900 Years of Thrills and Spills, and the Dreamers and Schemers Who Built Them.” There will be a celebration of his life this fall after the publication of his last work, “Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy.” He is survived by a niece, Sarah Silverman, and many devoted friends. Memorial gifts in Stephen’s name can be sent to PEN America (pen.org).
Published by New York Times on Jul. 9, 2023.

Mimi Sheraton

Sat, 15 Jun 2024 12:09:21 GMT

Restaurant Critic Extraordinaire

At The New York Times in the late 1970s, a newly divorced man had no better friend than Mimi Sheraton. Needing tasters as she headed off to a restaurant destined for her scrutiny, she on occasion rounded up colleagues whose marriages had broken up. In those days they were almost always men, the sort who tended to be short on cash and even shorter on decent meals. Whatever restaurateurs may have thought of Mimi – and more than a few of them felt irredeemably bruised by her reviews – she had her colleagues’ hearts.

Mimi, who died on April 6 at age 94, was The Times’s restaurant and food critic from 1976 to 1983, but the newspaper was only one of her way stations across six decades of thinking about food, caring about food and, of course, writing about food, typically in no-nonsense prose and a brook-no-disagreement voice.

Her career took her to a slew of magazines, among them New York, Vanity Fair, Time and Condé Nast Traveler. She wrote a shelf’s worth of cookbooks, restaurant guides and a resource for trenchermen, “1,000 Foods to Eat Before You Die.” As Bob McFadden noted in his stately obit for The Times, Mimi “calculated in 2013 that she had eaten 21,170 restaurant meals professionally in 49 countries.” One of the 49 was Israel, which she visited in the early 1990s with her husband, Richard Falcone. I was then The Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief and spent some time with them. After a few meals, Mimi decided that Israel was in no danger of landing on any discerning diner’s list of countries one absolutely must visit.

As the first woman to review restaurants for The Times, she resorted to various wigs and glasses, though how successful she was at disguising herself may be debatable. Suzanne Charlé, a Silurians board member who first met Mimi in 1973, recalled a time when Mimi, while ordering a meal, “turned her head quickly, and the wig tilted on her head.”

A memorial service was held on April 17 at Frank E. Campbell. In what may very well have been a first for the funeral home, pews were dotted with laminated copies of a recipe for chicken soup. It was, of course, Mimi’s recipe. No, the first step was not to steal a chicken. But it did begin with an admonition that “root vegetables are essential to this soup.”

The final speaker at the service was her son, Marc Falcone, who mentioned his mother’s disguises. “My dad, however, dined with her always and never wore a disguise, inspiring a short-lived rumor that Mimi Sheraton was, in fact, a man,” Marc said. “Her instinct about wearing the disguises was never so clearly confirmed as it was when an expensive restaurant seated us at a table so uncomfortably close to the kitchen door that every time the door swung open it revealed a photo of her with a large caption that said THIS IS MIMI SHERATON.”

Mimi’s diligence was legendary. How many people would gather 104 pastrami and corned beef samples in a single day to evaluate their viability in sandwiches? Or taste all 1,196 items sold in Bloomingdale’s food department? Or brew 97 pots of tea to test their worthiness?

She knew what she liked and didn’t like, whether the cuisine was haute or basse. Take the bagel. Who better to discuss its merits than Mimi, author of a book on the bialy, first cousin to the bagel. I once rang her up for a column on the state of New York bagels, and she wasted no time telling me, “In general, I think it’s deplorable.” Ideally, a bagel should be about 3.5 inches in diameter, she explained, but most tend to be a good deal larger. Their thickness “makes them like rubber tires,” she said.

As suggested by the lunches with no-longer-married colleagues, hers was a generous spirit. Linda Amster, the Times’s former chief researcher and editor of “The New York Times Jewish Cookbook,” said that Mimi wrote not just the introduction but also the prefaces to sections about each course of a meal. “And,” Linda said, “she also joined me at a Barnes & Noble appearance to publicize it.”

That generosity was evident in Mimi’s return to Midwood High School in Brooklyn, where, as Miriam Solomon, she had graduated in 1943. In 2004 she went back to help teach a writing course. She stretched the students’ vocabulary via meals. “Everybody eats and has opinions about food,” she said. No exception, her students found the school cafeteria’s French fries to be soggy and the hamburgers rubbery. And don’t start them on vegetables. “You can lead a horse to water,” Mimi said with a sigh, “but you can’t make it eat the broccoli.” – By Clyde Haberman

Grace O’Connor

Mon, 10 Jun 2024 12:12:54 GMT

Grace O’Connor, a Silurian since 1997, an award-winning reporter and editor for the Albany Times Union for 22 years, and one of the first women installed in the Hall of Honor of the Women’s Press Club of New York State, died October 29, 2022 at Branford Hills Health Care Center in Connecticut.

Paul Grondahl, a former colleague at the Albany Times Union, was moved to write an appreciation, excerpted here in part:

“She was old enough to be my mother and she kept a Holy Bible atop her beige metal desk, next to an IBM Selectric typewriter and rotary telephone.

Grace O’Connor did not drink or curse, which, along with the Bible, made her an outlier in the rough-and-tumble bygone era of newspapering.

She was on a first-name basis with half of Albany. There was only one Grace.

“She was beloved by her readers and coworkers alike,” said Barb Zanella, who began as an editorial clerk at the Times Union in 1973 and worked for Grace, whom she considered a mentor and later a dear friend.

A former Baptist Sunday schoolteacher, Grace brought out the better angels of the hard-drinking, cynical 20-something reporters who worked alongside her….

“There was nothing phony about Grace. She was aptly named,” said Fred LeBrun, who arrived at the Knickerbocker News in 1967, moved to the Times Union in 1970 and worked as reporter, editor, restaurant critic and columnist and who still contributes a monthly column.

Grace became a kind of den mother to an unruly crew of scribes who helped pound out the first draft of history.

She regularly quoted Scripture in her feature stories, which graced the Times Union from 1969 to 1991. She got her start writing for the paper’s five weekly neighborhood supplements, known as the Suns, and later served as the Suns’ editor before becoming a general assignment reporter for the main broadsheet….” For more: https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Grondahl-Remembering-a-newsroom-full-of-Grace-17567547.php

Born in Long Branch, NJ on September 13, 1927, O’Connor graduated from Manasquan High School in 1945, and attended Monmouth Junior College in Long Branch and Rutgers South Jersey in Camden, NJ. While a teacher and director of Bethesda Lutheran Nursery School in New Haven, she was published regularly in magazines, including “Ingenue,” “Teen,” and religious publications.

As a community leader, she was President of the East Camden (NJ) Junior Women’s Club and a member of the state board of the New Jersey Federation of Jr. Women’s Clubs in the 1950’s, a member of the Branford, Connecticut Women’s Club in the 1960’s, and served on the board of the Community Dining Room in Branford.

O’Connor is survived by her daughter Patricia and her son-in-law Carmen Cavallaro, grandsons and beloved great grandchildren who called her “Grandma Grace.”

A celebration of her life and memorial service will be held at the First Baptist Church, 975 Main Street, Branford Connecticut on November 12 at 11:00.

Jim Lynn

Thu, 23 May 2024 12:27:46 GMT

A swell fellow, a proud Silurian, that all-round nice guy, Jim Lynn , left us on Aug. 10 due to complications from Covid. He was 88 and a retired editorial page writer at Newsday, where he had worked for 30 years.

Jim, a Princeton University graduate, went to Newsday in 1972 after stints at The Long Island Star-Journal, Newsweek, New York Herald Tribune, WABC-TV and WMCA radio. He was the Trib’s Albany bureau chief in 1966, on vacation in Europe when he got word that the paper had shut down.

His former colleagues at Newsday had nothing but awed references to Jim’s intelligence and wit. James Klurfeld, editorial page editor for Newsday from 1987 to 2007, remembered his friend and colleague as someone who represented old-fashioned virtues. “He was a terrific editor, a very careful fine, fine editor who always improved your writing,” Klurfeld said. “He improved my writing. I won an award for best editorials one year and I owe it all to Jim who I often showed my material to before I published it.”

Carol Richards, editorial page deputy editor from 1987 to 2006, said that during those years the editorial board was strong with smart, passionate people whose political leanings covered a wide range of beliefs. Lynn was the person to count on to be informed on liberal politics. “When we were having a debate about some issue, almost always political or governmental, Jim had opinions that people would listen to,” she said. “He wasn’t a knee jerk liberal; he was a well-informed liberal.”

“He always said he felt so lucky to have had the opportunities that he had,” his daughter, Nina Lynn said. “He also felt a great responsibility to use what he had been given, well and honorably.”

James Dougal Lynn was born in Houlton, Maine, and graduated from high school in Mount Lebanon, Pa., where a teacher recommended that he apply to Princeton. His experience there set him on a life-changing course, his daughter Nora Curry said, which included his first introduction to bagels. “His world opened up in so many ways. He made lifelong friends, he got to be with other people who loved reading and writing and thinking the way that he did, he’d not had that before.”

Dora Potter, Newsday alum, fellow Silurian and his devoted partner of 30 years, said Jim was “thoughtful of everyone.” Besides obvious acts of community service such as after he retired volunteering as a dispatcher for the local fire department, he would do unexpected, ordinary things that would never occur to others. He packed up his extensive collection of Playbills and took the train in from Long Island to give them to an Aids center for actors. He lugged interesting beer cans he’d picked up all over Europe to the delight of a friend back home who had a collection. “He never stopped thinking of others,” Potter said. “He was a steward for us all, he took care of us.”

His daughters agreed, saying their father gave them a set of values to live a life with empathy and public service.

He made one final act of public service: he donated his body to science. “To my dad it was sensible,” Nora Curry said. “It’s like ‘someone can use this and learn from it.’”

A memorial was scheduled for Nov. 6 at the Nassau County Museum of Arts in Roslyn, where Jim was a docent. Potter said it would be both in person and on Zoom. She said she particularly wanted that option so people can choose to be safe, since both she and Jim had suffered from Covid.—By Theasa Tuohy

Frank Leonardo

Tue, 21 May 2024 21:47:47 GMT

Frank Leonardo’s gifts of gab and camaraderie were on full display about once a month when a group of us pre-Murdoch New York Postniks congregated for breakfast at an Upper West Side diner to schmooze and reminisce. It was like Old Jews Telling Jokes except two of us were Italian. We told newspaper war stories. We vied for equal time, like GOP wannabe presidential candidates at a Fox News debate.

Frank was often a step ahead. He was the only shutterbug among a bunch of scribes but that didn’t matter. He was well-read, a polymath and just as attuned to the literal side of a news story as any writer. He sometimes pissed off his reporting partner at interviews when he would lay down his camera and pose his own questions for the subject. Most of us, however, tolerated the habit.

“They were good questions,” said Clyde Haberman, a charter member of the breakfast club.

While Frank may at times have thought a word was worth a thousand pictures, that didn’t mean he wasn’t a crack photographer: He won two awards from the New York Press Photographers Assn., first prize in breaking news for a photo of a fireman carrying a rescued child down a ladder; and second prize for the photo of a diving polar bear, which is still a source of mirth for the Leonardo family.

“I know that category was called ‘animal,’” said Frank’s wife Barbara Garson, “because I remember laughing at the plaque, which read ‘Frank Leonardo Second Class Animal.’”

He did not seek plaudits. “He never entered photos into any contest including the Press Photographers,” Garson said. “In that case, I believe a former girlfriend did it for him.”

Frank was born in Brooklyn in 1937. His father Thomas, also a photographer, was killed in action in World War II when Frank was eight years old. He and his mother Helen then moved to the Parkchester section of the Bronx. This early history of loss and upheaval became the blueprint for a bumpy road. Garson said young Frank dropped out, or was kicked out, of five New York City high schools before receiving a diploma from Theodore Roosevelt Night School in the Bronx. He then somehow won a scholarship to NYU, where he earned a degree in geology.

Along the way, Frank met and married his first wife, Dorothea Snyder, mother of his two children, Cecilia and Thomas, who survive him.

His early interest in geology waned and — Voila! — he landed a job as a news photographer for the French news service Agence France-Presse. His 40-year career was launched by catching the magic in a moment of history: Frank was the pool photographer on the roof of Montreal City Hall on July 24, 1967 when General Charles de Gaulle electrified thousands of wildly cheering Quebecois — and stirred an international uproar — by declaring, “Vive le Québec libre” (“Long Live Free Quebec”).

Though Frank, says his wife, was not dazzled by celebrity, he was deeply impressed by de Gaulle’s magnetism and stature. No record exists of whether he felt the same way about The Fab Four when, on February 7, 1964, when their Pan Am Boeing 707 landed in New York. A photo of their raucous arrival at JFK records his presence among the scrum of photographers gathered behind a metal barrier.

Frank also appeared in the famous documentary movie “Harlan County, USA” where he is seen filming a picket line of striking coal miners in rural Kentucky. He also witnessed the real-life event that inspired the 1975 Sidney Lumet movie “Dog Day Afternoon” when three shotgun-toting men besieged a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn in an abortive attempt to trade hostages for money.

Frank had little interest in the glamorous or thrilling sides of his profession. In his leisure time he enjoyed puttering with his 20-foot-long Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham (“He could fix anything,” said a family member) and he was an avid kite flyer. He owned dozens of kites that he liked to fly in the Sheep Meadow using a deep sea fishing rig to “have his own set of wings to become a bird in flight,” to paraphrase Mary Poppins.

Frank Leonardo’s final job before retirement was as photo editor at CMP, a computer trade magazine. In this position he once asked a major photo agency to send him photos of subway turnstiles. One of the photos bore his own byline.

‘He called them wondering where they got it and they volunteered some pay,” said Barbara Garson. “That was the only time he ever followed up any newspaper photo of his.”

That was Frank.

He died of cancer on July 26 at age 86.

The shutter fell and the light is extinguished. —Anthony Mancini

Warren Hoge

Tue, 21 May 2024 21:38:56 GMT

What was he doing there?

Though it turned out superb journalists and writers, the New York Post that Warren Hoge worked at in 1971 was a place filled with rough-edged people like me from blue-collar, borough, or striver backgrounds and more than a handful of oddball characters, all led by a Bogart-tough editor-in-chief. The City Room itself, located in a rundown building along West Street’s elevated highway viaducts, was exquisitely gritty, with its battered typewriters, spikes, pencils and carbon-copy writing “books.” This engaging seediness was especially true of the lobster shift—1AM to 8AM– that I was first assigned to as a rewrite man.

Yet there was Warren, our night city editor, suave, cultured, urbane not urban, with the blueblood credentials to match–a Silk Stocking district upbringing with stops at Buckley School, Phillips Exeter, and Yale—and he was delighted to be there.

Warren, who died on August 23 at the age of 82 at his home in Manhattan, reveled in the rough-and-tumble of deadline journalism as if this was real life and where he came from a fairy tale. But he was never haughty or condescending. He traded New York and Washington gossip with the best of us, graciously bemused at times but not dismissive. He was a cunning observer. If memory serves, he explained Dolly Schiff’s clinging to a money-losing Post because she didn’t want to wind up as just another “old lady on the Upper East Side with a small dog.”

I remember, too, how he hired Joyce Wadler as a reporter. After first rejecting her, telling her that the Post needed to hire more minority reporters, he swiveled after she responded with a letter peppered with mock Spanish phrases claiming she had discovered that she was an adopted Puerto Rican. “So, White Boy, if you’d like to discuss this development over a plate of rice and beans, call me,” she said. Warren not only got a good chuckle out of the letter but was grateful for having struck a goldmine of edgy humor.

Of course, he had a different man-about-town life outside the Post, squiring movie and journalistic stars like Sally Quinn and Candice Bergen. More than a few of us wished we went through life with his grace and joie de vivre. And, damn it, he was movie star-handsome as well.

When he made it over to the Times in 1976 the place seemed a more appropriate fit, even though Abe Rosenthal, Arthur Gelb and many other editors and reporters had the same proletarian pedigree as those at the Post.

Warren’s talent as a journalist snared him assignments in Rio de Janeiro and London (in his career he reported from more than 80 countries) and titles at the Times of foreign editor, Sunday magazine editor and assistant managing editor. But whatever his job, Warren savored the tightly managed frenzy of putting out a paper every day.

Warren was as graceful, sophisticated a writer as he was a person. His magazine profile of Cary Grant, a fortuitous match of writer and subject, stands out in my mind for its revealing, lilting portrait of the icon of debonair charm. A line Warren elicited from Grant when Warren asked him how he viewed death still resonates: ”You know, when I was young, I thought they’d have the thing licked by the time I got to this age.”

He also issued tender profiles of the residents of the hillside favelas, beleaguered by violence and poverty, and of ordinary Brits mourning the improbable death of Princess Diana. And he was a sensitive, appreciative manager, as countless responses to his death made clear.

Warren was a longtime and avid Silurian and it was at one of our dinners a little more than a year ago that Warren, pale, shockingly thin and walking with a cane, told me, “I’ve been thrown a curve”—a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. But Warren did not hide his illness, showing up at events like the Silurians’ awards dinner last June in a wheelchair, aided by his wife Olivia at his side, and enjoying the camaraderie even as he knew it would not be long before he would, as he put it, be “leaving.”

Warren was born April 13, 1941 in Manhattan, the son of a trademark lawyer with ancestral roots among the early colonizers of Virginia. His mother was a socially prominent patron of opera and classical music and Warren had a lifelong passion for choirs and opera.

A stint as a reporter for the old Washington Star led to a Washington bureau chief appointment at the New York Post. In 1970 he moved to New York as city editor and later was elevated to assistant managing editor. The Times hired him in 1976 as a reporter and within a year he was named deputy metropolitan editor.

After three years in New York, he was posted to Rio de Janeiro, where he married Olivia Larisch, the daughter of a Spanish count and countess. They had a son, Nicholas, who survives him, along with Olivia; two stepdaughters, Christina Villax and Tatjana Leimer; his brother, James, who served as a publisher if the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Daily News ; his sister Virginia Verwaal; and six step-grandchildren. His other sister, Barbara Hoge Daine, died in 2001.

A fitting epitaph for Warren might be an adaption of a line he used in his evocative 1977 profile of Cary Grant. “The newspaper world that created Warren Hoge is now the stuff of sepia photographs. Warren, however, still radiates in living color. ” —Joe Berger

For the NY Times obituary of Warren, click here (paywall).

Lou Sepersky

Tue, 21 May 2024 21:30:12 GMT

You couldn’t miss Lou Sepersky at a Silurians luncheon.

Tall and lanky at 6’4, with a rakish head of salt-and-pepper hair, he would tower over the table with his unassuming personality and ever-ready smile. Lou, a journalist who found his true calling in community leadership, advocating for issues ranging from transportation to women’s rights and civil rights, died of cancer on Sept. 18 at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.

“He had a progressive mind and understood that civil and women’s rights were everyone’s concern,” said Leida Snow, his wife of more than 41 years and a fellow Silurian. Lou went south during Freedom Summer in 1964.

From 1962 through 1975, Lou reported for the Staten Island Advance, The New York Post under Dolly Schiff, UPI, and McGraw Hill, as well as two New Jersey newspapers: the Herald News in Passaic and the Hudson Dispatch in Union City. But as a lifelong Democrat and New Yorker, with a Bachelor’s degree in political science from Drake University and a Master’s in history from the University of Michigan, Lou decided “to get his PhD in New York politics,” Leida said.

From journalism he segued to community activism, serving for more than 50 years on Community Board 6, which encompassed his home district of Manhattan’s East Side. First appointed to the board by Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, he was subsequently reappointed by every succeeding borough president.

He served as Board Chair for two years but was happiest working behind the scenes. A list of his leadership positions reads like a paean to grass-roots activism. He was chair of the Transportation Committee, a longtime member of the Land Use and Waterfront Committee, and also served on the Parks, Landmarks and Cultural Affairs Committee, the Public Safety Committee, and other committees.

As a transportation advocate, one of Lou’s most passionate causes was the Second Avenue Subway, which he championed tirelessly as early as 1998. Books, newspaper articles, and reports identify him as a “concerned citizen” who pressed for a “fully built” Second Avenue subway at hearings and meetings and worked with elected officials to assure funding for the project. He also pushed unsuccessfully for the JFK AirTrain to continue through to Manhattan, telling the New York Post in 2001 that the $64 million spent on the train was a “colossal waste of money” since it ends in Jamaica.

When a plan arose for the East 34th Street Heliport to hold events like tai chi, farmers’ markets, and a beer garden, Lou was there to talk sense. The now-defunct New York and Chicago website DNAinfo.com quoted him in 2017: “A pilot traveling in an emergency situation does not have the option of looking out and saying, ‘I can’t land there because there’s a rock concert going on,’” he said.

Lou advocated for affordable housing in the plan to redevelop two Con Edison parcels along First Avenue south of the U.N. Among the ways he showed support for women was by donating to a group now called Women Creating Change, among only a handful of men to do so in 2019. His Letter to the Editor advocating a woman’s right to choose appeared in the New York Times in 1982. His letter on congestion pricing, published in the Times in 2007, still is relevant.

Lou’s other roles included serving as the Community District 6 historian and working as a photographer who gravitated to politicians as his subjects. His photo of the late Democratic Congressman Ted Weiss, who served in the House of Representatives for New York from 1977 until his death in 1992, hangs in the Ted Weiss Federal Building in Lower Manhattan. Other examples of Lou’s excellently composed photos can be found in various local publications, often accompanying an article by Leida Snow.

Born in Brooklyn in 1935, Lou spent his adult life living on Manhattan’s East Side—for decades in the East Fifties with Leida. She described him as a passionate New Yorker who was on “the right side” of every important issue. The couple chose to remain in New York during the Covid pandemic while many others left, just one of the many issues they agreed on.

“Lou loved to walk around the city—everything was a show,” Leida said. “The thing that hurt was he couldn’t do it at the end.”

Upon learning of Lou’s passing, several prominent Democratic leaders contacted Leida, identifying Lou as someone who made a difference. Among those were Congressman Jerry Nadler, former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, and State Senator Liz Krueger. — Roberta Hershenson

Martin J. Steadman

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 12:30:32 GMT

Martin J. Steadman – who had a long, distinguished career in journalism, political consulting and public relations – died on May 31. He was 91.

Soft-spoken and self-effacing, he believed in honesty, loyalty and fair play. He was held in high esteem by everyone who knew him. His low-key personality enabled him to establish close working relationships with demanding clients like Gov. Mario Cuomo, whom Marty served as counselor and chief spokesman, and George Steinbrenner, the late principal owner of the New York Yankees, who was known for his impatience and volatile temper. (He fired and rehired Billy Martin, the team’s manager, five times.)

Through it all, Marty maintained a sense of humor about his clients and their demands. Shortly after he announced that he was leaving the governor’s office, I called to wish him well in his next endeavor. “You know what I’m not going to miss about my job?” he said. “The governor calling me at 6 every morning to read me the front-page headlines and ask why he wasn’t on the front page.”

Marty was a longtime member of the Silurians Press Club and a past president. He was also a member of the Inner Circle press club and a star performer in the organization’s annual lampoon shows. His voice, a high, whispery tenor, had the innocence of a pre-pubescent choir boy. But the lyrics of his songs, most of which he wrote himself, were full of well-aimed barbs that skewered the politicians and public officials of the day. The contrast between Marty’s voice and his lyrics was hilarious, and his performances always drew sustained laughter and applause from the audience.

Marty was an award-winning reporter who worked for The Journal-American in the 1950s and the Herald Tribune in the 1960s. When The Tribune folded in 1966, he ran as a Democrat for a Long Island seat in Congress. He lost, but the experience helped him when he served as a political consultant and strategist later on. He worked as an investigative reporter for WCBS-TV for several years, into the early 1970s. Then he formed his own public relations firm.

He was named counselor to the governor and chief spokesman in 1984. Afterward, he restarted his public relations firm and worked mostly as an Albany lobbyist. Current and retired journalists are usually good storytellers — it’s in our DNA — but Marty was one of the best. He loved to attend social gatherings with other former journalists and swap stories. When I left The New York Post in 1985 to join what was then New York Telephone, I created the perfect venue for him. I had the company buy a table to the Silurians’ semiannual dinners, and I would invite Marty and several other former journalists who knew him well. Marty always had a wonderful time at those dinners.

Marty grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, and graduated from the University of Miami. He lived in Garden City, Long Island, for many years. His wife, Peggy, died six years ago. He is survived by his son, James, and two granddaughters.—By Steven Marcus

Lawrence Malkin

Wed, 20 Sep 2023 12:34:12 GMT

Lawrence (Larry) Malkin spent a long career as correspondent, editor, and author. He died April 19 at home in Manhattan of kidney failure. He was 91. His energy, curiosity, and loyalty to those he loved will be more than missed by his wife of 62 years Edith (nee Stark), his daughters, Elisabeth (Eduardo Garcia) and Victoria (David Mikics), his grandchildren, Eva, Gabriel and Ariel. He reported on the Six-Day War for The Associated Press and the 1978 Afghanistan Revolution for Time Magazine. His dispatches on the 1960s decline of the British economy won an Overseas Press Club award. He wrote from Paris, London, New Delhi, Madrid, and Washington. He later covered Wall Street for The International Herald Tribune. As editor, he worked with former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker on his memoir “Changing Fortunes.” He edited the memoir of Soviet Ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin, “In Confidence,” one of New York Times’ ten best in 1995. He wrote “Krueger’s Men,” about the greatest counterfeit in history: The Nazis selected 140 Jewish prisoners to produce false pound notes in a concentration camp under SS orders. The book was translated into eight languages. Malkin worked with Stuart E. Eizenstat on “Imperfect Justice,” an account of recovering blocked Holocaust accounts, and on “President Carter.” He was born in Richmond Hill, Queens, son of David and Jennie. He is a 1951 graduate of Columbia University and a decorated veteran of the Korean War. His ashes will be placed in the citrus grove of the family’s house in Deia, on the Spanish island of Mallorca. — Published by New York Times on Apr. 24, 2022, https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/lawrence-malkin-obituary?n=lawrence-malkin&pid=201867397