Faye Haskins Among 100 Authors At 2019 National Press Club Book Fair, Friday Nov. 1st

FYI: The new history of the Washington Evening Star newspaper is among the books included in the 2019 National Press Club Book Fair, As the author, I will be among the 100 authors to be at the Fair on Friday, Nov. 1 from 5:30-8:30.  For those living in the Washington metro area, please drop by if you can. Thanks.

Faye

 P.S. Reminder I will also be giving author talks at the Peabody Room, Georgetown Branch Library on 11/9 at 1pm; and at the Carnegie Library, Historical Society of Washington DC on 11/14 at 6pm.

Blog Note: Miriam Ottenberg entry update on Encyclopedia.com

Notification was received that an unspecified update was made to the entry

Miriam Ottenberg (1914 - 1982)
photo courtesy of geni.com

Miriam Ottenberg spent two years at Goucher College near Baltimore before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where she received a B.A. in journalism in 1935. Her first job after college was writing copy for a Chicago advertising agency. A year later, Ottenberg became a reporter in the women's department for the now-defunct Akron Times-Press.

In 1937 Ottenberg joined the Evening Star, a Washington daily. Within her first two years on the job, she launched her first full-fledged newspaper investigation. She broke page one stories and exposés consistently over the years. By 1947 Ottenberg's specialization was the investigation of crime and the conditions fostering it. According to the Star, Ottenberg probed "phony marriage counselors, a multi-state abortion ring, high food prices, juvenile crime, sex psychopaths and dope addicts." In 1958 the Washington law enforcement community honored Ottenberg with a testimonial reception and a plaque crediting her contributions.


Attribution: encyclopedia.com
Full story: Ottenberg

Genevieve Nadig, Meet the Mother of New Hampshire's Midnight Voting Tradition

A personal cartoon given to Genevieve by

Clifford K. Berryman of The Washington Star.

CREDIT COURTESY OF THE NADIG FAMILY ARCHIVE

If you follow New Hampshire politics, you’re probably familiar with the ritual of the midnight vote, where a handful of tiny, mostly rural towns stay up late to cast their ballots as soon as election day dawns.

And you would be forgiven for thinking all the credit for this tradition goes to Neil Tillotson, the bespectacled businessman who was so well known as the face of Dixville Notch’s nocturnal vote that he’s honored with his very own bobblehead at the New Hampshire Historical Society gift shop, complete with a ballot box and all.

But New Hampshire’s midnight voting tradition didn’t actually start in Dixville — or with Tillotson. Instead, according to the earliest public record we could find, it started a few miles away, and a few decades earlier, with a 27-year-old woman named Genevieve Nadig.

She was a faithful Republican who delighted in meeting Presidents Nixon and Reagan. Clifford K. Berryman, a famous political cartoonist for The Washington Evening Star, was so enamored after visiting Genevieve he sent her a personalized drawing depicting two stuffed pillows he picked up from her roadside gift shop. That piece still hangs on Rick’s wall today.

“Everybody loved Genevieve,” Rick says. “Everybody.”

Up until the week she died in 1985, Rick says his aunt was still skipping around, vibrant as ever — probably because a tourist just stopped by her shop with a $100 bill.

Attribution: Casey McDermott, nhpr.org
Full Story: Midnight Vote

Faye Haskins Book Reading Schedule, "The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper”

For much of its life, the newspaper you are holding in your hands — or perusing on your computer or smartphone — was nowhere near the best one in Washington. It wasn’t The Washington Post that was thick with ads, peppered with datelines from around the world, full of insider gossip, piercing editorial cartoons and the proclamations of officialdom. It was the Washington Evening Star.

The life of every star is finite, and Washington’s Star was no different. On Aug. 7, 1981, the words “FINAL EDITION” blared from above the paper’s nameplate. It really was.

The life of the paper is recounted in “The Evening Star: The Rise and Fall of a Great Washington Newspaper,” a new book by Faye Haskins, a former archivist and photo librarian in the D.C. Public Library’s Washingtoniana division.

Haskins will be speaking about her book at 1 p.m. Nov. 9 in the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library and at 6 p.m. Nov. 14 at the Historical Society of Washington in the Carnegie Library.

Attribution: John Kelly, washingtonpost.com
Full story: Haskins