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Vic Ziegel, Longtime Daily News Sports Fixture, Passes at 72
by NATHANIEL VINTON
New York Daily News sportswriter
Renowned New York Daily News newspaperman Vic Ziegel died peacefully Friday morning at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx. The cause was lung cancer. He was 72.
An award-winning sportswriter who covered Muhammad Ali and the earliest Mets teams, Ziegel was also a
beloved editor who helped millions of New Yorkers keep their fingers on the pulse of the city's vibrant sports world.
"Vic was a wonderful writer and a tremendous colleague," said Daily News Editor-in-Chief & Deputy Publisher Martin Dunn. "He totally understood the Daily News sports reader, and his columns brought sports alive for them. The sports world will miss him."
Ziegel grew up just off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, and although he spent his boyhood playing stickball not far from Yankee Stadium, he was the most ardent of Giants fans. In honor of Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World" in 1951, he taught his pet bird to recite, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"
He is survived by his wife of 34 years, Roberta; his daughter, Katy; and his sister, Shelly Goldfeder of New Rochelle.
"Vic was a beloved colleague to all of us on the Daily News sports staff. His brilliant sense of humor, unique voice and elegant style made him among the best newspapermen in American journalism," said Daily News managing editor for sports Teri Thompson. "He was an inspiration to everyone he worked with."
Although he was not a smoker, Ziegel learned he had lung cancer in November, and spent his last weeks receiving well-wishes from a long line of friends who recalled his passion for movies, jazz, sports and family.
Victor Ziegel was born in New York City on Aug. 16, 1937. He attended Yeshiva Salanter in the Bronx, Taft High School and City College, where he first began to indulge in his joy of being around newspapers. Soon he was writing about high school basketball for the now-defunct Long Island Press.
Ziegel was soon hired by the New York Post, where he worked as a night sports editor, a baseball beat writer and a columnist until 1976, when he left to pursue a series of journalism projects that included columns for Rolling Stone, New York magazine and Inside Sports, and the creation of a television series based on Jim Bouton's book "Ball Four."
In 1985, Ziegel became the executive sports editor at the Daily News, and remained at the paper for 25 years, becoming a sports columnist. For a time he wrote a column for the city side of the newspaper called "Helluva Town."
"It was really cool," said Ziegel's wife, Roberta. "It was about unusual people in the city, like the man who changes the light bulbs in the Statue of Liberty, or the one-legged bicycle messenger. He was a great storyteller."
Among the numerous awards Ziegel won were the Red Smith Kentucky Derby Award, in 1992 and 1998, and the Nat Fleischer Award for boxing writing in 1983. A member of the Jersey Jazz Society for 20 years, he also belonged to Young Israel of New Rochelle.
"I loved Vic Ziegel. I really loved him. He'd tell you a lot of good stories," horse trainer Nick Zito said Friday at Saratoga. "I remember him telling of the time he interviewed Mike Tyson at the Indiana prison. He was a New York guy. I enjoyed being around him. I miss him. I'm sorry for his family and the Daily News."
Former CBS News Executive Joe Dembo (1927-2010)
from CBS News March 15, 2010
Joseph Dembo, the CBS Radio executive and news correspondent who transformed WCBS Radio in New York City from a struggling station into the all-news format it still successfully broadcasts today, died this morning in Manhattan, where he had lived for many years.
In a 28-year career at CBS, he played several prominent roles in radio and television, including as anchorman of the CBS Radio Network's "News-on-the-Hour" national
broadcasts in the late 1970s. He also was the executive producer of "The CBS Morning News" network television broadcast from 1974 to 1976 and ran CBS News bureaus in Rome and Athens
from 1971 to 1974.
All-news radio was a fledgling format in the early 1960s. The first models failed and there were just a couple of stations in the U.S. when, in 1967, CBS Chairman William Paley decided to make WCBS, his also-ran flagship radio station, an all-news outlet.
He picked a hard-news veteran to do it. Dembo had been running the network's radio news operation as its director, having been brought to the network after stints as news director and executive producer at WCBS Radio, where he initiated the "Up-to-the-Minute" news concept. He had additional hard-news experience from his time at NBC in the 1950s as a producer and reporter for the network and its local television station, WNBC-TV.
Dembo was put in charge of WCBS Radio as its vice president and general manager and assembled a team that included anchors Charles Osgood, Lou Adler, Steve Porter, Jim Harriot and Robert Vaughn, street reporters Ed Bradley and Steve Flanders and sportscaster Pat Summerall.
He also hired a future president of CBS News, Ed Joyce, to be his news director.
By 1970, the transformation was complete. WCBS was broadcasting news all the time and, before long, six more CBS Radio station in major markets switched to the successful and durable formula in which CBS Radio remains the national leader to this today.
Returning to the radio network as bureau chief and correspondent, Dembo reported for the CBS News radio documentary series "Newsmark," in addition to his daily "News-on-the-Hour" duties for the CBS Radio Network, a job he held until November 1978. He was then named executive editor for hard-news broadcasts for the CBS Radio Network. He picked up the added title of news director before being made a network vice president in charge of all of CBS Radio in 1982.
Dembo left CBS in 1988 and joined the faculty of Fordham University, where, until just last year, he was a professor of media studies teaching courses on journalistic ethics, the history of radio and television journalism and a class on the Edward R. Murrow era at CBS.
"I've known Joe Dembo as a boss, mentor and good friend for four decades now," said Charles Osgood, anchor of the CBS Radio Network and television's SUNDAY MORNING.
"It's fitting that he spent his last years as a professor at my alma mater, Fordham. Even as a producer and executive Joe was always a great teacher. He certainly taught me a lot."
Joseph T. Dembo was born in Vienna, Austria, and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He grew up in New Brunswick, N.J., where he was graduated from Rutgers University with a Bachelor of Letters degree in journalism in 1950. He entered broadcasting in 1952 at NBC in New York, where his assignments included Central News Desk supervisor, feature reporter-producer of "Esso Reporter" on WNBC-TV.
He is survived by his wife, Margot and three children, Wendy, David and Robert and grandchildren Elly and Jesse.
Newsday's Rhoda Amon, 85
October 26, 2008 by JENNIFER SMITH, Newsday
Rhoda Amon, a globe-trotting reporter who wrote about social trends and chronicled the lives of ordinary Long Islanders with passion and precision in 42 years at Newsday, died Saturday, October 25th, 2008, at her
home in Port Washington, Long Island. Amon, 85, completed her final story for Newsday last week. She died of complications from breast cancer, diagnosed four years earlier.
An unassuming woman with a tireless work ethic, Amon juggled motherhood and career at a time when newsrooms were dominated by men and fought for equal treatment of women at Newsday.
Rising from the pink-collar ghetto of the "women's pages" to become an accomplished feature reporter, Amon interviewed first ladies; wrote about seismic cultural shifts such as feminism and divorce; and shone a light on poverty on Long Island through her coverage of local nonprofits.
"Rhoda wrote with care about matters of supreme importance to our readers," said Newsday editor John Mancini. Praising the "everyday elegance" of her writing, he said, "We will miss her stalwart presence in the newsroom and Long Islanders will miss her unwavering dedication to her craft."
Empathetic but never a pushover, Amon pursued stories with unflappable discipline and fairness. Those who knew her said she was uncowed by the fame of some of her interview subjects, among them 20th century notables such as Rosalynn Carter, Mike Wallace and Rep. Barbara Jordan.
"It was never about the important people, it was always about the ordinary people," said longtime friend Amy Hagedorn of the Hagedorn Foundation, a Port Washington philanthropic group that promotes social equity.
Amon was known among her colleagues as a professional, graceful writer who spent hours on the phone making sure her stories were accurate down to the last detail. "She had a touch," said Harvey Aronson, a former senior Newsday editor. "There is a spark that you can't teach."
She passed her love of reporting on to her grandson, Michael Amon, now a reporter at Newsday.
"She was my inspiration," said Amon, 29, of Woodside, Queens. "Up until the day she died, I was asking her advice on stories. She was very much a fierce defender of her words and the importance of the things she was writing about."
The daughter of a house painter from Lithuania, Amon was born in Newark in 1923 and grew up in Maplewood, N.J. She attended Upsala College in East Orange and New York University, and broke into journalism during World War II as a stringer for Newark Star, writing about soldiers returning home from combat. In 1950 she married Robert Amon, a journalist and maritime historian who also served as a press aide to New York City Mayor Abe Beame. The couple lived in Oceanside and Baldwin before settling with their children, Robert and Amelia, into an airy, hilltop home in Port Washington.
Her husband encouraged her writing, said Amelia Amon, 52, of Manhattan. "My mother and father used to edit each other's work," she said. "I remember them sitting on the couch, just crossing words out and penciling things in. . . . Late at night there would be the tap, tap, tapping of the typewriter."
Amon worked for the Long Island Press for a decade before she was hired at Newsday in 1966, where she wrote about fashion, family and parenting. But she and other female reporters chafed at the limits of their assignments, and the fact that they earned less than their male colleagues.
Their complaints led to a federal discrimination lawsuit that resulted in changes to Newsday's hiring practices. "We all put our jobs on the line, and she was with us every step of the way," said friend Marilyn Goldstein, a former Newsday columnist and reporter.
Amon balanced her love of Long Island with a wanderlust that led to travels across Europe and the Soviet Union - trips she shared with readers of Newsday's travel section. Amon continued traveling after her husband's death in 1992, visiting Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, South Africa and Australia, and wrote a travel column for seniors that ran in hundreds of newspapers. She also taught journalism at Long Island University's C.W. Post campus in Brookville for a number of years.
"She was low-key, never a showoff," said former Newsday editor Howard Schneider. "She just came to work every day for 40 years and did her job. And she made a major contribution to Newsday and to Long Island."
AP Reporter Hugh Mulligan Dies at 83
1991 AP file photo
By RICHARD PYLE
NEW YORK (AP) November 26, 2008 — Hugh A. Mulligan, who in a half-century with The Associated Press covered everyone from presidents and popes to astronauts and combat soldiers, reporting the news in eloquently crafted, fact-packed dispatches laced with wry humor and humanistic touches, died Wednesday. He was 83.
Mulligan died at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Conn., his brother John Mulligan said. He had been recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, according to his family.
Tom Curley, president of The AP, called Hugh Mulligan "a legendary storyteller. His wit was as penetrating as his humor was revealing. He was a friend and mentor to many at AP around the world. He will be missed immensely."
Insatiably curious and able to find story potential in almost anything, Mulligan roamed the globe, visiting nearly 150 countries from Europe to equatorial Africa to Tibet. He made 28 trips with the pope and covered more than half a dozen wars, including three reporting tours in Vietnam.
In 1970 stories about war's sudden impact on Cambodia, he described a novice army that "rode to war on Pepsi-Cola trucks" and the naive courage of a young soldier who "walked down the road carrying the big red and blue flag, and came home in a body bag."
In Mulligan's words, the riverboat Delta Queen wasn't just plying the Mississippi, she was "spinning rainbows from her stern wheel." The streets of Saigon before the war were "a whisper of bicycles."
Visiting the biblical city of Sodom, he found the modern-day version "without sin," although "one might see a Bedouin three sheets to the wind" in a sandstorm.
"Hugh's beat was mankind," former AP President Louis D. Boccardi said. "He had a love affair with the world, and we of the AP loved him for it. There won't be, there can't be, another Hugh Mulligan."
Born in New York City on March 23, 1925, Hugh Aloysius Mulligan served in World War II as a rifleman in the Army's 106th Infantry Division, after that unit was decimated in the 1944 Battle of the Bulge. After the war he completed a bachelor of arts degree at Vermont's new Marlboro College and was the only member of its first graduating class in 1948, addressed at commencement by poet Robert Frost. He later earned simultaneous degrees — journalism at Boston University and a master's in English literature at Harvard — and taught Greek and Latin at Boston Latin prep school.
Mulligan joined AP in December 1951 in Baton Rouge, La., and after 1956 was based in New York, except for a 1970s stint in London. He retired in 2000.
Having studied early for the priesthood, Mulligan was more than prepared for his favorite assignments — trips with Pope John Paul II. Meeting the pontiff for the first time, he was so nervous that he dropped a bag of rosaries. But the pope blessed them, "even the broken ones," Mulligan wrote later.
Colleagues joked that Mulligan could find a way to mention the Catholic church in any story, no matter the subject. He said the first person he visited in any new place was the local priest, because "they always know what's going on."
In all, Mulligan visited 146 countries on assignments that included wars in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Ireland, Cyprus, Angola and the secessionist Nigerian region of Biafra. He covered President John F. Kennedy's Cold War visit to the Berlin Wall in 1963 and was there again in 1989 when the wall was torn down.
He wrote about space shots and political conventions and was in a blimp overhead when a nuclear submarine flashed its historic message from the North Pole: "Nautilus 90 degrees north."
During the October 1973 war between Israel and Egypt, he was the only American correspondent with Maj. Gen. Ariel Sharon's surprise tank counterattack across the Suez Canal.
Among those he interviewed were Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher, the shah of Iran, John Glenn, Joe DiMaggio — during a baseball game in Rome — and a bevy of writers including Brendan Behan, Tennessee Williams, John Steinbeck and James Jones.
He went to Ireland with presidents Kennedy and Ronald Reagan and to China and Russia with Richard Nixon, toured with jazz great Louis Armstrong and comedian Bob Hope, carried a spear at the Metropolitan Opera and rode a camel caravan in Oman.
He covered the royal wedding of Charles and Diana in 1981 by invitation and her funeral 16 years later. The princess, he wrote, "seems destined ... to enter the elysian fields of eternal celebrity that already enshrines Marilyn, Jackie O and Elvis."
In a quest to report from the planet's most remote datelines, he visited the south Atlantic island of Tristan de Cunha, which claims to be the point on earth farthest from any other land, and finally made it to Antarctica in 2004.
Competing with AP colleagues in New York for choice feature assignments, Mulligan drew the short straw — a weekend in a Pennsylvania nudist colony. "Oh, great," his hostess-to-be said by phone. "You'll be here in time for the square dance." Mulligan later described her as "5-feet-2 in any direction and barefoot all the way up to her harlequin sunglasses" and said the July 4 barbecue was "about the same as any other place except that people tend to stand a little further away from the fire."
Though celebrated most for feature writing, Mulligan was proudest of his war reporting, especially his three years in Vietnam and one in Cambodia. He rode on a helicopter mission to rescue a downed Navy pilot in North Vietnam and was one of three AP staffers covering the last American POW release in Hanoi in March 1973.
Among his favorite Vietnam stories, Mulligan said, was one that consisted of a single paragraph:
"SAIGON (AP) — Rama Dama Rau, Premier Ky's personal astrologist who predicted five years ago that the war would be over in six months, was drafted today."
"That explained more of the war than any other story I wrote," he said later.
In a 2005 interview about his career, Mulligan said he was "most happy that I never became an expert on anything — I never became a space writer, a science writer, a political writer — not being anything allowed you to cover everything."
An intellectual without pretense, Mulligan was a voracious reader and diligent researcher who gloried in finding obscure nuggets of fact and history. His home in Ridgefield, Conn., which he named "Hardscribble House," featured a wall-size bookcase with the works of Irish writers. Despite a lifelong stutter, he also was a brilliant raconteur, delighting audiences with witty observations drawn from his journalistic adventures.
With other AP staffers he co-authored books on the Kennedy assassination and the 1967 Six-Day War, and he wrote his own books on Vietnam, the racehorse Kelso and Sherlock Holmes.
In 2005, he published a memoir, "Been Everywhere, Got Nowhere," drawn in part from a lifelong diary.
Survivors include his wife of 60 years, the former Brigid Murphy, whom he married in her home parish in Armagh, Ireland, in 1948; brothers Andrew, of Las Vegas, and John Mulligan, of Saugerties, N.Y., a former AP reporter and New York City assistant fire commissioner who is a Board member and past President of the New York Press Club; and several nieces and nephews.
Copyright (c) 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Edith Evans Asbury (1910-2008)
Edie Asbury whose long career as a reporter began in 1929 and never really ended, died October 30th at her Greenwich Village home.
She had been in declining health for the last two years, according to former Press Club president, Rich Lamb, who was a friend.
Born June 30th, 1910, in New Boston, Ohio, Edie was an eldest child and survived all but one of her 16 brothers and sisters.
Her jounralism career began in 1929 and briefly interrupted her formal education when she left Western College for Women after a summer job on the Cincinnatti Times-Star (later earning an undergraduate and master's degree in American history from the University of Tennessee).
She was a reporter on the Knoxville News Sentinel in the mid 1930's before moving to Manhattan where she found work as a writer for the New York City Housing Authority and as a reporter for The New York Post, the Associated Press and the The World-Telegram and Sun.
Edie joined the New York Times in 1952 and found a home there until her retirement in 1981 though, according to colleagues at the paper, she was known to regularly phone various desks, well into her 90's, to suggest coverage of stories that she felt had been overlooked.
After retirement she continued a prolific stream of articles and stories for the Times and other publications, including the New York Press Club's Byline magazine.
During her Times career, Edie won acclaim and numerous awards for reporting on topics and issues such as urban housing, problems of the elderly, desegregation in the South post-Brown v. Board of Education, interracial adoption and reproductive rights.
A member of the New York Press Club for many years, Edith Asbury was also a regular participant in productions by the Inner Circle, a troupe of New York City reporters who stage an annual satire show for charity.
photo of Edie Asbury taken on her 90th birthday, June 30th, 2000.
Former Press Club President Dead at 74
Vincent Lee died Saturday evening, October 4, 2008, at his home in Somerset, New Jersey. He was 74.
Born in New York City, Vinnie lived in Jackson Heights, Queens, before moving to Somerset in 1966.
He was a reporter for the New York Daily News from 1955 to 1993. He was a long-time member of the New York Press Club, serving as president from 1978 to 1980.
Vinnie received numerous awards for journalistic accomplishment during his career as a reporter. His "beat" - whether officially or unofficially - was the New York City Fire Department. Well known to a succession of commissioners, chiefs and members of the FDNY rank and file, Vinnie was a familiar presence at fire scenes and also behind the scenes. Speaking of scenes, in a case of art imitating life, Vinnie was sought out by the producers of the motion picture, The Paper, as a consultant. He also made a brief appearance in the film.
A parishioner of St. Matthias Roman Catholic Church in Somerset, Vinnie was a dedicated member of the Knights of Columbus.
An avid football fan, Vinnie rooted for Notre Dame, Rutgers, and the New York Giants.
Vincent Lee is survived by his wife of 42 years, Barbara Weber Lee; his daughter, Barbara DuPree and her husband Philip of Haymarket, Va., and his grandchildren, Allison Csepli, Grace DuPree, Sam DuPree and Ben DuPree.
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