American News Women's Club

Longtime member ELEANOR LYONS WILLIAMS III, whose dedication and wise counsel to the American News Women’s Club helped ensure its viability, died August 29, at Manor Care nursing home in Potomac. She was 86 and had complications from a stroke suffered 12 years ago.

A special memorial service will be held at the club on
Saturday, Sept. 26, at 2 p.m.

In the 1970s and early ‘80s, the club was struggling to get the financial support needed to survive, while also trying to provide scholarships for deserving young local student journalists.

Initially, we raised funds through our Tennis Tournament of Charities, but that ceased after 1981. When Jean Viner Bell became president in 1988, the board decided to create a separate foundation. Eleanor suggested the club change its status, by asking the IRS for a tax-exempt designation so that members and supporters could treat their financial contributions as tax deductions.

Eventually the foundation was closed as a separate entity and in 1994, with the assistance of Eleanor, the club became a 501(c)(3) educational foundation.

Eleanor’s next major fundraising initiative, “Great Expectations: A Tale of Two Dickens,” was held in 1992 with a reception and silent auction at the British Embassy.

The Dickens event was followed in 1993 by a newly established program and event titled “ANWC Newswriter/Newsmaker of the Year Award,” for excellence in journalism or outstanding public service, chaired brilliantly by Eleanor to salute and roast our distinguished member, Helen Thomas.

Following that successful event, Eleanor and I co-chaired a salute and roast in 1994 for our dear friend, patron of the arts, Catherine “Kay” Filene Shouse, among whose many donations included a gift to the United States government of Wolf Trap Farm Park, its only national park dedicated to the performing arts. Kay was later made a special “Distinguished Member Emeritus” of ANWC.

Eleanor continued to serve as chairman of our annual fundraiser/roasts honoring Sarah McClendon (1995), Sam Donaldson (1996), Walter Cronkite (1997), Andrea Mitchell (1998) and was recognized at the 1999 roast of Larry King as the “Founding Chairman” for all of her work as chairman of the past six roasts.

In 2001, to further honor Helen Thomas, the club’s award was renamed the “ANWC Helen Thomas Award,” for excellence in journalism or outstanding public service. To date, there have been 15 roasts, the most recent last May, which recognized Katie Couric.

Eleanor was born on November 22, 1922, in Norfolk, Virginia, where her ashes will be spread. For many years she was a senior executive with American Express in New York City, reporting directly to the chairman of its board. She moved to Washington, D.C., in the 1970s and was director of Washington operations for John J. Mullen Associates, a naval engineering firm. She later held executive jobs at Fraser/Associates, a public affairs firm; the American International Trade Group; and later became vice president of Environmental Energy Systems, Inc. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan appointed her to a two-year term as a member of the Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations.

Eleanor will be remembered for her cheerful ways, her kind and brilliant leadership, her sparkling insightfulness, her able thoroughness, her delightful wit and sensitive disposition. Smiling through her blue eyes, she always spoke with kindness and gave of herself unsparingly. She was, indeed, an inspiration for each of us. She was a beautiful human being and will be greatly missed

WASHINGTON TIMES PHOTOGRAPH
Mrs. Forbes worked as a reporter for The Washington Star before computers and e-mail became common in the newsroom, dictating over the phone to editors late-breaking and 'letter-perfect' news articles

The below are excerpts of
The Washington Times obituary
written by Donald Lambro.

Longtime Washington Times' Commentary Editor Mary Lou Forbes, a trailblazing journalist whose reporting on Virginia's civil rights struggles won a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 and whose editorial leadership helped pave the way for women to rise in a once-male dominated profession, has died after a brief battle with cancer. She was 83.

Mrs. Forbes' career spanned more than six decades as a reporter, news chief and opinion editor, guiding hundreds of journalists from future Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein to nationally syndicated columnist Cal Thomas, whose column debuted in The Times 25 years ago under her tutelage.

Mrs. Forbes died late Saturday [June27] at Inova Hospital in Alexandria, less than two weeks after collapsing and being diagnosed with cancer. She worked at The Times right up until she was stricken with the fatal cancer, in recent months helping to reshape the newspaper's famed Commentary section during a recent update of the publication's opinion pages.

Mrs. Forbes, who took over editorship of the Commentary page two years after the founding of The Times in 1982, was an influential figure in Washington journalism. "She established the signature pages of leading opinion writers in The Washington Times' Commentary section as a pillar of American thought leadership for the past quarter century," Times President Thomas P. McDevitt said. "Mary Lou set a very high bar for all of us as a writer, editor and colleague who blazed important pathways as a woman with a powerful intellect, grit, grace and humor. We will miss her dearly."

Mrs. Forbes, known to her friends as "Ludy," published a veritable Who's Who of conservative columnists and other writers, including government leaders and think-tank experts who spanned a wide range of policymaking and political thought. Indeed, she was a groundbreaker in the formerly all-male profession of journalism, starting out as a 17-year-old copy girl at The Washington Evening Star in 1944 and eventually rising up the ladder in a long and eventful career covering a wide range of state and national issues and officials from governors to presidents
that included Oval Office interviews.

Mrs. Forbes, who was born Mary Lou Werner, won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for her coverage of the Virginia school-desegregation crisis, when state and local officials bitterly opposed the integration of public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., ruling of 1954.

In a period long before computer laptops, e-mail and cellular phones, Mrs. Forbes had to report under almost impossibly tight deadline pressures for an afternoon newspaper with five editions, dictating late-breaking court decisions and state actions "that charted the course of the ultimately unsuccessful 'massive resistance' campaign," author Karen Rothmyer later recounted in her book "Winning Pulitzers." The year Mrs. Forbes won the Pulitzer, Newbold Noyes Jr., a member of the family news dynasty that ran The Star, named her the paper's first full-time female editor, placing her in charge of state coverage of Virginia and Maryland.

Four years after winning the Pulitzer, she married James Forbes, a businessman, and they settled in Alexandria, where they had one son, James. Her husband died in 2002.

In her last years with The Times, after her husband died, she rarely took vacation time off and could be found in her office each weekday, sometimes on weekends, on the phone, asking when a late column would get in, writing headlines and choosing which pieces would make her pages. She said she had "no interest in retiring" and kept an active social life.

A day or so before she entered the hospital, after collapsing in her home, she was at an editors and reporters meeting at The Times with Virginia gubernatorial candidate Robert F. McDonnell, recalling the state's conservative past and asking the former state attorney general to comment on how "politics has changed in the state since those days." When she was inducted along with other newspaper colleagues into the Society of Professional Journalists' Hall of Fame in 1992, she recalled "falling in love with journalism" from the day she started work at The Star as a copy girl.

• Richard Slusser contributed
to this report.

Reprinted with
permission of the Washington Times.

In 1997, the club honored retired CBS News Anchor Walter Cronkite as its annual Gala at the Four Seasons Hotel.
We remember him fondly and salute his many contributionsto journalism.