The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-20)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9

Obituaries

BY HARRISON SMITH

Martin Tolchin, a veteran polit-
ical journalist who covered Con-
gress for the New York Times,
served as the founding publisher
and editor of the Hill and came
out of retirement to advise an
upstart publication called Politi-
co, died Feb. 17 at his home in
Alexandria, Va. He was 93.
The cause was cancer, said his
partner, Barbara Rosenfeld.
In a four-decade career at the
Times, Mr. Tolchin worked his
way up from a job as a copy boy —
he made $41.50 a week in the
1950 s, based out of a smoke-filled
newsroom where many reporters
kept liquor bottles at their desks
— to become a city hall bureau
chief and congressional corre-
spondent, scrutinizing power
plays and backroom machina-
tions on Capitol Hill.
An adroit chronicler of politi-
cal patronage, legislative horse-
trading and the idiosyncratic per-
sonalities of U.S. senators, he cov-
ered major stories including the
Iran-contra affair and the Su-
preme Court confirmation hear-
ing of Clarence Thomas. He also
profiled such figures as Senate
Majority Leader Howard Baker
for the New York Times Maga-
zine, writing in a 1982 article that
Baker was politically skillful but
gave “the appearance of a man
who has lost his way and wan-
dered onto the Senate floor.”
At age 65, in 1994, Mr. Tolchin
retired from the Times to launch
the Hill, a weekly newspaper ded-
icated to covering political life in
the nation’s capital. The publica-
tion was bankrolled by Jerry Fin-
kelstein, the chairman of a com-
munity newspaper chain in the
New York City area, and sought to
compete with Roll Call, which has
covered Congress since 1955.
Starting a newspaper from
scratch had its difficulties, Mr.
Tolchin told The Washington
Post: “It’s like launching a battle-
ship when all you’ve done is play
with toy sailboats in your bath-
tub.” But the Hill published its
first issue just a few weeks before
the Republican Revolution, when
the GOP won a majority in the
House of Representatives after

four decades of Democratic con- trol, and soon emerged as a feisty source of political news, and as an incubator for ambitious young journalists. “Marty really knew Washing- ton inside and out. He wanted us to find the juicy story,” said Alex- ander Bolton, a senior staff writer hired by Mr. Tolchin. “He loved to expose the self-serving motiva- tions of people in power, and to explain to readers how Washing- ton really worked. So often it came down to patronage and money.” Under Mr. Tolchin and Albert Eisele, another founding editor, the Hill broke major stories, including the details of an unsuc- cessful 1997 coup in the Republi- can Party, when some members tried to replace Newt Gingrich as

speaker of the House. The newspaper broke even financially after three years before starting to make a profit, according to Mr. Tolchin. It now reports a print circulation of over 24,000 and draws many more readers to its website. Mr. Tolchin stepped down in 2003, as the newspaper moved to increase its frequency to several days a week, but came out of retirement for two years to help media executive Robert Allbrit- ton launch a new political publication. Tentatively called the Cap- itol Leader, it evolved into the Washington news site Politico, which started in 2007 and was sold last year to the German conglomerate Axel Springer for about $1 billion. In addition to his work in

journalism, Mr. Tolchin was a senior scholar at the Wilson Cen- ter in Washington and wrote eight books about politics with his wife, political scientist Susan Tolchin. They dissected the en- during phenomenon of political patronage in “To the Victor ...” (1971) and “Pinstripe Patronage” (2011), and also chronicled the challenges that women faced on the campaign trail in “Clout” (1974), which Times reviewer Richard R. Lingeman called “thoroughly researched and timely,” in addition to being “a useful how to manual for future forays into the males-only bar- room of politics.” Mr. Tolchin said that he and his wife developed a method of divid- ing each book’s research and writing, although editing one another’s work proved a little more difficult. “She came from academia — she was writing tiny, marginal notes. I come out of a newsroom, so I had a big red pencil and just tore through it,” he told Washing- tonian magazine in 2011. “When I looked up, she wasn’t pleased. I realized there was more than a book at stake here. Now when we give back chapters, we always start with a lot of praise: ‘This is really brilliant, but if I can make one tiny suggestion ...’. ” Martin Tolchin was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 20, 1928, to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His mother was a home- maker, and he was 14 when his father, a furrier, died of a heart attack. Mr. Tolchin graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, studied at the University of Utah and earned a law degree in 1951 from New York Law School. He served for two years in the Army and received what he described as a “less than honorable” dis- charge, after the Army learned he had been involved in so-called “subversive” activities, such as joining a Marxist study group while in high school and attend- ing a Pete Seeger concert. The charges ended his legal career before it started. Told that he would have to identify his left-wing “friends” if he wanted to

join the New York bar, he de- clined. “Three years of law school went down the drain,” he wrote in a 2019 memoir, “Politics, Journal- ism and the Way Things Were.” In search of a new profession, Mr. Tolchin turned to journalism and landed a job at the Times in

He got his start as a reporter
while writing about family life for
what was then known as “the
women’s page,” and covered May-
or John V. Lindsay before moving
to the Washington bureau in 1973.
A decade later, he received the
National Press Foundation’s Ever-
ett McKinley Dirksen Award for
congressional reporting.
A brief early marriage ended in
divorce, and in 1965 he married
Susan Goldsmith, who died in

Their son, Charlie, an au-
thor and advertising executive,
died of complications from cystic
fibrosis in 2003 at age 34. In
addition to his partner of five
years, the widow of former Wash-
ington Post editor and columnist
Stephen S. Rosenfeld, survivors
include a daughter, Kay Rex
Tolchin of Niwot, Colo., and a
grandson.
By all accounts, Mr. Tolchin
was recruited to the Hill follow-
ing a recommendation from one
of his childhood friends, Times
columnist William Safire, who
had worked with the publica-
tion’s owner.
When Safire published a 1995
espionage novel, “Sleeper Spy,”
Mr. Tolchin arranged for the Hill
to run a review written by Aldrich
Ames, the CIA officer sentenced
to life in prison for spying for the
Soviets. Mr. Tolchin said he rev-
eled in the controversy that fol-
lowed, as some readers wrote
angry letters and canceled their
subscriptions, outraged that the
Hill would offer publicity to a
convicted traitor.
“We didn’t do it to be cute,” he
told The Post at the time. “We
thought it’d be interesting to get a
superspy to review a book about a
spy.”
Plus, he added, “The price was
right”: Ames was barred by law
from accepting payment for the
piece, although Mr. Tolchin said
he would not have paid him any-
way.

MARTIN TOLCHIN, 93

Longtime journalist co-founded the Hill, advised on Politico

DON HOGAN CHARLES/NEW YORK TIMES Martin Tolchin joined the New York Times in 1954 and worked his way up from a job as a copy boy. He is seen here in 1966.

BY EMILY LANGER

Valerie Boyd, a journalist who
chronicled the life of Zora Neale
Hurston in a critically acclaimed
biography and edited a forthcom-
ing compilation of the journals of
Alice Walker, thus illuminating
African American women of let-
ters from the Harlem Renaissance
to the present day, died Feb. 12 at a
hospital in Atlanta. She was 58.
The cause was pancreatic can-
cer, said her friend and power of
attorney, Veta Goler.
Ms. Boyd spent nearly two dec-
ades as a reporter and arts editor
at her hometown newspaper, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
training the journalistic eye that
she would turn on Hurston in the
biography that became her first
major literary achievement of her
own.
“Wrapped in Rainbows: The
Life of Zora Neale Hurston,” pub-
lished in 2003, was the result of
nearly five years of research. Ms.
Boyd charted Hurston’s life from
her birth in 1891 in Notasulga,
Ala., to her upbringing in the
all-Black town of Eatonville, Fla.,
through her literary activity dur-
ing the Harlem Renaissance of
the 1920s and 1930 s and her an-
thropological exploration of Afri-
can American folklore, to the cir-
cumstances that led to her death
in penury in 1960 in Florida,
where she was buried in an un-
marked grave.
“Because I am a Black Southern
woman, I felt very close to Zora, as
if I could paint a picture of her life
almost from the inside out,” Ms.
Boyd told an interviewer for the
online magazine In Motion. “I
wanted to give readers a sense of
what it was like to be Zora, to walk
in her shoes, to live inside her
skin.”
Ms. Boyd was an undergradu-
ate student at Northwestern Uni-
versity in Evanston, Ill., when she
first read Hurston’s best-known
work, the 1937 novel “Their Eyes
Were Watching God,” a coming-
of-age story about a Black woman
named Janie Crawford.
“I was just amazed,” Ms. Boyd
said, “that a book published in
1937 could speak to me so clearly
and so resonantly through the
decades.”
Years later, she became a regu-
lar attendee of the annual festival
held in honor of Hurston in Eat-

onville. In 1994, she said, she attended a speech there by Robert E. Hemenway, the author of a 1977 biography of the writer. By Ms. Boyd’s account, Hemen- way surveyed the shortcomings that he said were inherent in his book as a work about a Black woman written by a White man. According to Ms. Boyd, he said that Hurston was owed a new biography, by an African Ameri- can woman. “When I heard those words, I felt it was my calling,” Ms. Boyd told an interviewer with North- western. “But even though it felt like something I would do, the thought of doing it was just fright- ening.” She put off the task, judging herself not ready. Less than two years later, a literary agent called to ask if she might be interested in writing a biography of Hurston. “I felt like fate was calling me — and that Zora herself was calling me,” Ms. Boyd said. Hurston had complicated the job of any future biographer, Ms. Boyd wrote, by disguising “many truths of her life in a confounding but crackable code.” To obtain schooling at a Baltimore high school, she reported her age as 16

when she was in fact 26. Her 1942 autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” however skillfully written, proved an unreliable account of the facts of her life. With the passage of time, more dust, as it were, had clouded the story of Hurston’s life. It had been partially cleared by Hemenway’s book and by volumes including “Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters” collected and edited by Carla Kaplan (2002). But in “Wrapped in Rainbows,” reviewer Jake Lamar wrote in The Wash- ington Post, Ms. Boyd produced a “scrupulously researched, grace- fully written” work that will “most likely remain the definitive Hur- ston biography for many years to come.” Ms. Boyd’s project was a journalistic odyssey, in which she lo- cated the few living acquaintanc- es of Hurston and scoured the archival records of her life. But it was also an “intuitive, spiritual process,” she said. “Sometimes,” she told the Northwestern interviewer, “it seemed as if Zora would look at me in a very approving way, and sometimes she seemed to be look- ing at me like, ‘Oh, please.’ And I would dutifully press delete.”

Ms. Boyd often reflected on the sisterhood of African American writers, observing that “Zora’s, Alice’s and my generations are holding hands.” Alice was Alice Walker, the author of the 1982 novel “The Color Purple,” which received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for fiction, and was adapted into a 1985 film starring Whoopi Goldberg. Walk- er had helped reawaken interest in Hurston with an article, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” published in Ms. magazine in 1975. Ms. Boyd happened to meet Walker during her research for the biography and said that Walk- er, upon learning of her work, touched her face and said, “Bless you, my child.” Some years after the publication of the Hurston biography, when Walker set out to publish her journals from the years 1965 to 2000, she selected Ms. Boyd as her partner in the endeavor. “Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walk- er,” edited by Ms. Boyd, is slated to be published April 12, according to the publishing house Simon and Schuster. “Valerie Boyd was one of the

best people ever to live, which she did as a free being,” Walker said in a statement provided by the Joy Harris Literary Agency. “Even though illness was stalking her the past several years, she accom- panied me in gathering, tran- scribing, and editing my journals. ... This was a major feat, a huge act of love and solidarity, of sisterhood, of soul generosity and shared joy, for which she will be remembered.” Valerie Jean Boyd was born in Atlanta on Dec. 11, 1963. Her father ran a gas station and tire shop, and her mother was a home- maker. Ms. Boyd received a bachelor’s degree in journalism from North- western in 1985 and a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction writing from Goucher College in Towson, Md., in 1999. In addition to her work at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Ms. Boyd freelanced over the years for publications including The Washington Post. She was a senior editor at the publication the Bitter Southerner. In recent years, she was a writer in resi- dence and professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. At the time of her death, according to Simon and Schuster, Ms. Boyd was at work on an an- thology titled “Bigger Than Brav- ery: Black Resilience and Recla- mation in a Time of Pandemic.” Her survivors include two broth- ers. Ms. Boyd noted that, in defer- ence to her subject, she had visit- ed Hurston’s grave in Fort Pierce, Fla., before embarking on the biography. “I wanted to make a connection with Zora,” Ms. Boyd told the Journal-Constitution, “so I took an offering of Florida oranges, which she loved, and some money — she never had enough money in her life — and a pack of Pall Malls.” Just as she was leaving, she saw a black crow similar to the one that had circled over the inaugu- ral Hurston festival in 1990. At- tendees had named it “Zora.” Ms. Boyd took the sign as permission to proceed. “I believe that it was something that I was put here to do,” she told the Orlando Sentinel in 2003. “My destiny led me to Zora.”

VALERIE BOYD, 58

Acclaimed biographer felt called to cover Black literary greats

SUSAN BIDDLE THE WASHINGTON POST “I wanted to give readers a sense of what it was like to be Zora, to walk in her shoes, to live inside her skin,” Valerie Boyd said of why she wrote a biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Ms. Boyd is seen in 2009.

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PEOPLES

IN MEMORIAM

CARLAKINGROCKELLI November10, 1941-February19, 2019

In LovingMemory Lovinghusband,Paul E. Rockelli andsister,BrendaJ. King

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The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-20)

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