The Memorial Wall

David Richards, a theater critic whose lively and accessible prose style made him a Pulitzer Prize finalist at The Washington Post and who had a brief stint as the New York Times’s chief drama critic, died June 24 at a hospital in Warrenton, Va. He was 82.

The cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease, said his husband, theater director Leonard Foglia.

As a child growing up in a stoic New England family in the postwar years, Mr. Richards often said the rule at home was to cloak all emotion and “never make a scene.” His eventual introduction to community theater in his teens was a revelation — people making scenes for a living, eight times a week. “I was hooked,” he liked to say. “I learned about life from the theater.”

After a varied early career, including a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa, as a French instructor at Howard University and as a writer for the Voice of America, Mr. Richards worked as drama critic at the Washington Star for a decade until the newspaper folded in 1981.

Mr. Richards spent the next nine years at The Post and was disinclined to stay within strict boundaries as a theater critic. He covered cultural news stories and profiled stage luminaries such as director Jose Quintero, playwright Edward Albee and actors Julie Harris and Carol Channing. Some of them may not have relished his revealing dive into their off-the-clock personalities.

“Channing does not indulge in introspection eagerly,” he observed in a 1984 article. “She would clearly prefer to dwell in the shallows of her show business anecdotes. … If you try to get behind them, you encounter stiff resistance. She has always given every bit of herself on a stage, and any implication that there is, perhaps, another Channing, a private Channing, under the feathery eyelashes and extravagant wigs and generous dollops of rouge, makes her profoundly uneasy.”

With some “raw-nerve” touched by his line of questions, Mr. Richards reported, Channing began a sour but telling soliloquy: “Nobody likes to take himself dead-on seriously, like we’re doing now, laboring over my innermost thoughts. I can be as funny as a crutch, and we could laugh and have a good time. But if you don’t want me to be lighthearted and amusing, fine!”

Mr. Richards was a Pulitzer finalist in 1989 and was lured the next year to the Times as Sunday drama critic. He relished the position, which allowed him the freedom to write at length about whatever play appealed to him. The Sunday job was also considered a rejoinder at times to views expressed by the show-making/show-breaking chief theater critic Frank Rich, especially when the latter was displeased with a production.

Where Rich torpedoed “The Will Rogers Follies” in 1991 as “the most disjointed musical of this or any other season,” Mr. Richards praised the “sumptuous production numbers, exquisite chorus girls, phosphorescent rope tricks in black light, a dog act, songs you actually want to hum, a stairway to paradise (or somewhere thereabouts), close harmony, shapely legs in kaleidoscopic patterns, and a thoroughly engaging star performance by Keith Carradine, as the laconic cowboy-philosopher from Oklahoma.”

“The Will Rogers Follies,” an audience hit, ran for two years. In 1993, Mr. Richards replaced Rich, who left his longtime perch covering theater to become an op-ed columnist at the Times. Foglia said his husband felt he could not refuse the offer to take over the main position, but it was an ill-suited fit almost from the start.

Mr. Richards quit after a year. There were varying reports about the circumstances of his leaving, all of which amounted to his general unhappiness in the job in which he suddenly was the most influential theater critic in the country and had significantly less autonomy in the shows he could choose to spotlight.

“It struck me as a very isolating job,” he told The Post at the time. “It’s one of those jobs that look enviable from the outside, less enviable from the inside. People resent the Times’ theatrical power and therefore resent the person who wields it.”

He noted that he had seen 5,000 plays during his career and was tired of the overwhelming amount of mediocrity. “You end up having to write about nebulous, gray, shapeless, formless plays,” he said, “and it’s a hard thing to do and be interesting about it.”

Of solitary disposition to start with, he found himself increasingly wary of invitations from boldfaced figures in New York journalism and society. As Foglia recalled, “He used to say, ‘They don't want me. They want the critic of the New York Times to fill up the spot on the table.’”

Friends in Washington encouraged him to return to The Post, which he did for two years as a national cultural affairs writer before leaving journalism.

David Bryant Richards was born in Concord, Mass., on Oct. 1, 1940, and spent his early years in Lexington, Mass. He was 9 years old when his father, a home builder, died. His mother, an interior decorator and real estate agent, remarried and settled with David and his younger brother in Scottsdale, Ariz.

In Arizona, his mother took him every week to the local playhouse, and Mr. Richards soon found himself entranced. “Good theater stretches our notions of people and events,” he once observed. “And a stretched mind never returns exactly to its original shape.”

He graduated in 1962 from Occidental College in Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in French, followed by a master’s degree in French from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1963.

In addition to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, he spent two years in the Ivory Coast with the Peace Corps, where he taught French. He completed a master’s degree in speech and drama from Catholic University in 1969 and acted with the university’s touring theater group.

Mr. Richards had published articles in Arizona newspapers starting at 17 and had long considered a career in journalism before his interest in drama led him to the critic’s seat at the Star.

In 1981, he published “Played Out,” a biography about the troubled movie star Jean Seberg, who had been targeted by the FBI for her support of the Black Panther Party and died by suicide two years earlier.

Mr. Richards and Foglia became a couple soon after meeting in 1993. They married in 2014, when same-sex marriage became legal in Virginia. They co-wrote suspense novels and lived many years in Mexico, where Mr. Richards received a master’s degree in art history from the Universidad Autónoma de Queretaro.

In addition to his husband, survivors include a brother. In 2010, Mr. Richards and Foglia settled on a 21-acre property in rural Washington, Va., near Shenandoah National Park, and he grew tomatoes. His visits to the theater became infrequent as his physical condition worsened.

“The theater allows us to encounter a far greater tangle of human behavior than we ever do in the course of daily living,” he once wrote of his driving motivation as a critic. “It is a celebration of our multiple possibilities as human beings. At its best, theater leaves us with one sure thought: There but for the whimsies of fate, go I.”

By Adam Bernstein

Warren McGraw, a former West Virginia Supreme Court justice who spent five decades in public service, has died at age 84, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said Thursday.

Court spokeswoman Jennifer Bundy said McGraw died Wednesday. Blue Ridge Funeral Home & Memorial Gardens in Beckley said it was in charge of funeral arrangements, which were incomplete.

McGraw had retired as a county circuit judge in 2021, citing the physical impairments due to Parkinson’s disease.

Mike Pushkin, the state Democratic Party chairman and a member of the House of Delegates, said Warren was “a tireless advocate for working people and those who are too often left behind.”

”Warren McGraw never forgot that a society is measured by how it treats its weakest members. From the school board to the legislature, to the halls of the supreme court, he fought with every ounce of his ability to improve the lives of the poor and those struggling to make a better life for themselves and for their families,” Pushkin said.

McGraw earned a bachelor’s degree from Morris Harvey College and a law degree from Wake Forest University. He served five terms in the Legislature as a Democrat, including four years as Senate president.

After losing in the 1984 primary for governor, McGraw later was elected to the Wyoming County school board. He also was the prosecutor in Wyoming County from 1996 to 1998 before being elected to fill an unexpired six-year term on the state Supreme Court in 1998.

McGraw lost his bid for a full 12-year term to Republican Brent Benjamin in a hotly contested election in 2004. Advertisements financed largely by then-Massey Energy President and CEO Don Blankenship targeted McGraw.

During an annual Labor Day picnic and rally that year, McGraw warned the largely union crowd that corporate interests were focused on him because of his lifelong support of “the working man.” McGraw said he believed the attacks stemmed not so much from his six years on the Supreme Court, but on his push as a legislator to tax coal in the 1970s.

“It’s been this underlying factor,” he said. “I was the sponsor of the coal severance tax in West Virginia. Millions and millions of dollars have been paid on that tax, and I’m sure the coal industry has never forgotten.”

Benjamin become the first non-incumbent Republican to win a state Supreme Court seat since the 1920s. Judicial elections in West Virginia became nonpartisan in 2016.

“As the son of a disabled coal miner, McGraw knew the struggles that faced coal mining families in West Virginia, and he dedicated his life to fighting for miners and their families,” United Mine Workers of America President Cecil E. Roberts said in a statement. “We have lost a warrior. We have lost a friend.”

After his defeat, McGraw was elected as a circuit judge in Wyoming County in 2008 and reelected in 2016 before retiring in 2021. His brother, Darrell V. McGraw Jr., also served in the Supreme Court and was a five-term state attorney general.

Bill Pinella, a guiding force behind The Press Democrat’s sports section for nearly two decades and a beloved editor over his 45-year career in newsrooms, where close friends called him “Sweet,” died November 15, 2023.

He was 76 and had lived for years with Parkinson’s disease.

At The Press Democrat, as assistant sports editor from 1994 until his retirement in 2012, Pinella was chief among the PD’s many unsung heroes. He was the brace behind writers — and at times the brains — but was content to remain in the background.

He stayed late on Thanksgiving night to read copy about night games, and he helped lay out the sports pages because daily newspapers don’t take a day off for holidays. He worked New Year’s Eve because someone had to be in charge. He was honored to do it.

“For many years Bill and I worked in a tiny office, face-to-face with our desks jammed together,” said former Press Democrat sports editor George Manes. “You learn a lot about a person that way and I learned to admire his humor, calm demeanor and steady commitment to our work. He was a whiz on deadline, corralling recalcitrant, and sometimes ornery, reporters, banging out headlines, editing copy and transforming the often-chaotic mess of daily journalism into a coherent, respected seven-day-a-week sports section.”

He was “a man of soft edges” in a profession where elbows and egos can dominate, said retired PD columnist Chris Smith. He was a salve and support, especially, for his reporters.

“One thing people need to understand about writers and reporters: We tend to get stressed out,” said Press Democrat staff writer and former sports columnist Phil Barber. “Managing workload is hard. Interviews can be hard. Deadlines are VERY hard. If you sense that your editor is wound up about a story, it adds to the anxiety. Bill was the opposite. I never saw him stressed on the job. If something was amiss, he’d tell you, but he always lowered the emotional temperature. That unflappability was confidence inspiring.”

His tenure at the PD came with numerous national awards for sports coverage, and he helped elevate the careers and work of many journalists, among them football writers Matt Maiocco (now with NBC Sports Bay Area) and Eric Branch (now with the San Francisco Chronicle), baseball writer Jeff Fletcher (now with the Orange County Register), Brian Murphy (now with KNBR radio), longtime PD columnist Bob Padecky — and the writer of this story.

He was a fount of story ideas and had a sharp eye for sports trends, spotting them before almost anyone.

When the Oakland Athletics, among the cheapest teams in the big leagues, played a postseason series against the New York Yankees with a gigantic payroll, he ran a chart showing the salaries of all nine starters for each team. The A’s came across like a minor-league outfit and the innovative and humorous chart was a favorite among readers.

In 1996, he suggested to the writer of this story that something strange was going on in baseball. Batters were hitting tons of home runs, and no one could explain why. Bill assigned this writer to investigate the balls. Were they juiced — hopped up?

The search for an answer led to UC Berkeley, where a famous physics professor dropped an old-style ball and a so-called new, juiced-up ball off the Campanile. Luckily no one got beaned. The juiced ball — wound more tightly to fly farther off bats, we would later learn — bounced higher after hitting the ground. (The resulting article won The Associated Press’ award for best sports story in California that year.)

Years later, Bill and the whole world learned it wasn’t only the balls that were juiced. It was almost certainly the players, too, some notoriously taking performance-enhancing drugs. Bill, taking in that controversy, offered his wonderful laugh — which meant life plays tricks on all of us and that’s part of the glorious spectacle.

William Pinella was born March 16, 1947, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He spoke often and fondly of his upbringing there with his dear sister, Claudia, and he loved to tell stories of their close-knit Italian community.

After graduating from West Virginia University, where he studied journalism, Bill began his 45-year career as a sports journalist, including as sports editor of what was then the San Diego Evening Tribune, where he worked for about a decade, starting in 1983.

In 1982 he met the love of his life, Judy Tuttle. They married in 1984 and raised three children.

His close friends called him Sweet, and that requires an explanation. Between 1986 and 2010 one of the most famous major-league baseball managers was Lou Piniella. People called him Sweet Lou. Although his name is spelled differently from Bill Pinella’s both names are pronounced the same — Pin-nel-la.

Hence, Bill became Sweet.

“Sweet was the best sports editor I ever worked for. His nickname was perfect. He was one of the sweetest men I ever met,” said baseball journalist and senior Sportico writer Barry Bloom, who worked with him in San Diego from 1984 to 1992. “We had a great staff at the Tribune from top to bottom. His job was putting people in the right place and utilizing us. He did that with great calm and tremendous humor. I’ll never forget it. Those days were an incredible foundation for my career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience and without Bill.”

He had a nose for good stories.

“In fact, he suggested two of the most satisfying pieces I ever wrote for our sports section,” said Barber. “One was about the time Rocky Marciano trained for a heavyweight title fight in Calistoga. The other was along the lines of ‘Who was Ernie Nevers and why is a Santa Rosa athletic field named after him?’ They were stories some editors would have seen as old news, or not splashy enough. Bill encouraged his writers to pursue the unexpected.”

He had special affection for the accomplishments of local high school athletes whose efforts often go unrecognized. He spent hours organizing and staging The Press Democrat’s annual high school student-athlete award ceremonies. His love for that work and the job shone through.

“We’re sure not doing this for the money,” he’d say.

Former Press Democrat sports editor Jim Barger, who grew up near Pittsburgh, recalled Pinella grew up a Yankees fan.

“The first time I met him, I’m emptying my stuff to put in the office, and I have a Bill Mazeroski bobblehead,” Barger said. (Mazeroski had ended the 1960 World Series with a game 7, walk-off home run that gave his Pittsburgh Pirates the victory over the Yankees, one of the most famous homers in baseball history.)

“Bill goes, ‘Oh my God!’ He was horrified. But we got over that,” Barger said.

“I counted on him so much. He made out the schedules, a thankless job. He did the night hours. He was a prince,” he added. “A few Christmases ago he sent me a T-shirt for the Grafton Bears — Grafton is a town in West Virginia (population 4,651) and I had covered those guys. I still wear that shirt. God, he was such a good guy.”

He was a devout Catholic and felt great pride in never missing Mass. He was a parishioner at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Santa Rosa.

As the limits imposed by Parkinson’s disease weighed on his later life, he remained active, walking miles a day, still maintaining his warm disposition, friends said.

“Before I moved out of Sonoma County in 2021, we’d meet for lunch,” said retired Press Democrat copy editor Robert Rubino. “He never wanted to dwell on his illness. We talked about our shared nostalgia for sports and about how rewarding it had been to work at The Press Democrat in the 1990s when newspaper journalism still thrived. In the last two years, we’d talk by phone. Bill was always positive, always receptive to humor, even with his health failing. He set such a dignified example of how to deal with illness.”

He is survived by his wife Judy Pinella of Santa Rosa, their sons Willie of South Lake Tahoe and Timothy of Santa Rosa, daughter Christine Pinella of Santa Rosa, grandson Billee, sister Claudia Randolph of Clarksburg, West Virginia, and by nephew Christopher Edwards of Morgantown, West Virginia, niece Caryl Banks of Bowie, Maryland, grandnephews Chase and Dominic, and grandniece, Lizzy.

Kemal Dervis, a Turkish economist who left the World Bank to return home in 2001 as a crisis manager with Turkey’s economy collapsing, helping calm the fiscal storm but stirring protests over austerity measures and international oversight, died on May 8, 2023 at 74.

The death was announced by the U.N. Development Program, which Mr. Dervis led from 2005 to 2009. No other details were given. Mr. Dervis, who lived in Potomac, Md., had been treated for Parkinson’s.

Mr. Dervis’s personal roots were in Turkey, but his professional life was in international economic affairs in support of globalized trade and finance to lift developing countries. As Turkey’s economy modernized and grew in the 1980s and ’90s — along with its aspirations for possible European Union membership — Mr. Dervis watched from afar in executive roles at the World Bank, where he spent more than two decades.

That distance became Mr. Dervis’s strength. He filled a specific niche in Turkey, seen as someone above the political clashes that had helped push Turkey’s economy over the brink.

For years, Turkey’s growth had been underpinned by massive foreign investment, seeking to ride an expanding economy bridging Europe and the Middle East. But a series of rise-and-fall governments, each leaving the economy a bit more frayed, fed international jitters.

Investment money started to pour out of Turkey. Turkish stocks plummeted and the banking system was effectively paralyzed with interest rates hitting 3,000 percent or more. Inflation pushed beyond 55 percent, bringing steep devaluations of the Turkish lira.

In 1990, $1 brought about 2,500 lira. By 2001, the exchange rate was more than 1.2 million lira for a dollar.

“We all should tighten our belts,” Mr. Dervis said at a news conference in April 2001 shortly after accepting the call for help from Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. “Don’t expect me to produce policies to save us just for today. We can’t dynamite our future in order to save today.”

Some Turkish columnists called him a “savior” in his new role as minister of economic affairs. He quickly became known for his blunt, and often dire, assessments of what was needed to rebuild the economy. He cut state subsidies in agriculture and other industries. Government spending was rolled back and hiring for civil service jobs slowed to a trickle. “We just have to tell it like it is,” Mr. Dervis said in 2001.

The biggest lifeline came from the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Dervis negotiated an $8 billion loan package. It came with strict IMF rules on management of the Turkish economy and public spending, which would open the door to further funding from institutions such as the World Bank.

Mr. Dervis threatened to resign if Ecevit’s government stalled on the IMF-ordered changes. The rescue plan was put in place even as Ecevit and Mr. Dervis became the target of protests.

“IMF equals unemployment and hunger,” demonstrators chanted in Istanbul. When Agriculture Minister Husnu Yusuf Gokalp was asked about slashing wheat subsidies, he took a dig at Mr. Dervis. “You should pose that question to those having breakfast at the Hilton [with foreign bankers],” he said.

The political fallout collapsed Ecevit’s government in 2002, but the changes spearheaded by Mr. Dervis widely stayed in place and were credited with underpinning the growth that lasted until the global economic crisis in 2008. (Turkey’s central bank introduced a “new lira” in 2005 that lopped off six zeros, making the former 1 million lira a new 1 lira.)

Mr. Dervis was elected to the Turkish parliament in the 2002 elections. He had always deeply embraced the secularist values of the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Mr. Dervis often said he preferred to be called a “pro-secular figure” instead of a politician.

Yet Mr. Dervis and his political allies were increasingly challenged by the rising Islamist-style populism of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who became prime minister in 2003 and president in 2014. Mr. Dervis left parliament in 2005 to head the U.N. Development Program, which oversees anti-poverty and community-building projects.

Mr. Dervis saw an advantage in his perspectives from Turkey, growing up during military coups and political upheavals and later confronting corruption and mismanagement of the economy. Previous heads of the UNDP were American or European.

“Crisis, lack of security, failure in government mechanisms breed disease, breed terror, breed environmental degradation,” he told a Yale University forum in 2005. “Increasingly, the citizens of the world realize — I think the young people more than the others perhaps — that their future is interlinked.”

Kemal Dervis was born on Jan. 10, 1949, in Istanbul and spent part of his boyhood on Buyukada Island near the city. He father was involved in business and his mother fled Europe during the Nazi rise to teach English in Turkey.

He graduated from the London School of Economics in 1968 and stayed to earn a master’s degree in economics in 1970. Mr. Dervis received his doctorate from Princeton University in 1973.

At the World Bank from 1977 to 2001, he served in roles including vice president for the Middle East and North Africa and vice president for poverty reduction and economic management.

After leaving the United Nations, Mr. Dervis joined the Brookings Institution, leading the global economy and development program from April 2009 to November 2017.

Throughout his career, he remained steadfast in his support of international institutions and globalization. He noted, however, that there can be an image problem with groups such as the IMF or World Bank, which can be seen as arms of the global powers and their policies.

“Whether it’s in Turkey or in Brazil or in Argentina or in Indonesia or in India, there’s no real trust,” Mr. Dervis said. “And for these institutions — which have resources, which have staff, which have technical knowledge — to really be useful, fully, and to do what they could do, I think we have to make them more legitimate.”

Mr. Dervis’s marriage to Neslihan Borali ended in divorce. He married Catherine Stachniak in 1997. In addition to his wife, survivors include two sons from his first marriage.

When Mr. Dervis dove into the Turkish economic crisis, he shared a family story about another attempt to straighten out the books. An ancestor with a flair for economics was asked by Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid I to help turn around a sagging economy in the late 18th century. The sultan then felt that plots were brewing to topple him. Mr. Dervis’s forebear was beheaded.

UCLA broadcaster Chris Roberts, who called the football and men’s basketball play-by-play for 23 seasons before retiring, died May 12 at his Glendora, Calif., home at age 74. He had complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to the university.

Born Robert LaPeer on March 23, 1949, in Alhambra, CA, Roberts played baseball at Cal Poly Pomona and began his career in broadcasting at KCIN in Victorville. He spent time on the air at KREO in Indio and KWOW in Pomona, where he announced high school and junior college sports.

Roberts began calling games in the fall of 1992 through the spring of 2015, in the process setting a local record for calling NCAA Division I games on Los Angeles radio. His final season with the Bruins was in 2014-15, when Roberts equaled Fred Hessler’s record for the longest tenured play-by-play broadcaster in UCLA history.
 
Roberts called 16 bowl games, including the Bruins’ Rose Bowl appearances on January 1, 1994 and January 1, 1999. Roberts also broadcast the men’s basketball team for 19 trips to the NCAA Tournament. That included the 1995 NCAA Tournament Championship.
 
The author of two books, Stadium Stories: UCLA Bruins and UCLA Football Vault, which he co-wrote with Bill Bennett, Roberts was an eight-time nominee for the SCSBA’s Play-by-Play Broadcaster of the Year Award and a voter for both the Heisman Trophy and the John R. Wooden Award. He was a four-time Golden Mike Award winner and a Hall of Fame member in the Southern California Sports Broadcasters Association (SCSBA).

Roberts was at KFXM in San Bernardino in 1970 when the program director at the station asked him to change his name. He later moved to Los Angeles and worked at KUTE-FM, KFI and sister station KOST, and later at KMPC. He served as the play-by-play voice at Long Beach State for 10 years before UCLA.
 
During his 23-year tenure as UCLA’s play-by-play broadcaster, Roberts worked alongside former quarterbacks David Norrie, Matt Stevens and Wayne Cook. With the men’s basketball team, Roberts’ radio analysts over the years had included Marques Johnson, Mike Warren, Bob Myers, Don MacLean and Tracy Murray.

Roberts is survived by his wife Ann LaPeer, son David LaPeer and daughter-in-law Yvette LaPeer, daughter Nichole Hijon-LaPeer, son-in-law Octavio Hijon and grandchildren Andrés, Santiago and Carmen.