The Don of Mafia Reporters

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

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

Iconoclastic Reviewer of Our Most Popular Medium

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.

Restaurant Critic Extraordinaire

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.

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’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

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).

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