Washington-area obituaries of note
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Version 0 of 1. Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia. Daisy Fields, 100, who advocated an increased role for women in the workplace as a founding member and later president and executive director of Federally Employed Women, a nonprofit group, died Sept. 4 at a hospice center in Rockville, Md. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Barbara Ochsman. Mrs. Fields, a resident of Silver Spring, Md., was born Daisy Bresley in Brooklyn. She settled in the Washington area in the late 1940s and did administrative and human resources work for federal agencies such as NASA and what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs. She helped start Federally Employed Women in 1968 and later formed a human resources consulting firm specializing in women’s issues. She wrote a book, “A Woman’s Guide to Moving Up in Business and Government” (1983), and was a board member and adviser for groups such as the National Woman’s Party. Garland O. Audilet, 83, who retired as a Navy commander in 1973 and later was a business consultant specializing in international data communications, died Sept. 29 at his home in Bethesda, Md. The cause was leukemia, said a daughter, Elizabeth Stanmeyer. Cmdr. Audilet was born in DeWitt County, Tex. He joined the Navy in 1949 and spent the bulk of his career working on submarines. He settled in the Washington area after his military retirement. Robert E. Fritts, 81, a Foreign Service officer who served as ambassador to Rwanda in the mid-1970s and to Ghana in the mid-1980s, died Sept. 28 at a nursing home in Williamsburg. The cause was lung cancer, said a daughter, Susan Herzog. Mr. Fritts, who lived in the Washington area between postings, was born in Oak Park, Ill. He joined the Foreign Service in 1959 and was an economic officer. After retiring in 1991, he moved to Williamsburg and taught foreign affairs at the College of William and Mary. He was also a senior fellow at the Joint Forces Staff College and a member of the Washington Institute of Foreign Affairs. Anne C. “Chris” Canham, 64, who spent 20 years with the Montgomery County school system as a science teacher and then an administrator, died Sept. 2 at a hospice center in Harwood, Md. The cause was breast cancer, said her husband, Bruce Canham. Mrs. Canham, a resident of Annapolis, Md., was born Anne Santry in Bethesda, Md. She taught at Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Md., from 1988 to 2006, then spent two years developing science curriculums for the school system. She retired in 2008 after her cancer was diagnosed and volunteered for cancer awareness and recovery groups. Myrna Gordon, 77, a clerk at the Jamaican Embassy in Washington from the late 1960s until the late 1980s, died Sept. 20 at a nursing home in Rockville, Md. The cause was artery disease and kidney disease, said a granddaughter, Regenea Hurte. Mrs. Gordon, a resident of Wheaton, Md., was born Myrna Thompson in St. Mary Parish, Jamaica. She moved to the Washington area in the late 1960s. Dorothy Shankle, 98, who spent about 25 years as an administrator at what is now the National Institute of Standards and Technology, died Sept. 4 at an assisted-living home in Montgomery Village, Md. The cause was a stroke, said a son, Daniel Shankle Jr. Mrs. Shankle, a resident of Gaithersburg, Md., was born Dorothy Fewell in Middletown, Va. She retired from the technical information division of the National Bureau of Standards about 1980. She was also a painter and gardener, and she sometimes was hired by rose distributors to test newly cross-bred roses before they were sold to the general public. Alan S. Rosenthal, 88, a Justice Department lawyer from 1952 to 1972 who then spent 16 years chairing a Nuclear Regulatory Commission appeals panel, died Sept. 25 at his home in Rockville, Md. The cause was a heart attack, said a son, Edward Rosenthal. Mr. Rosenthal was born in New York City and lived most of his life in Kensington, Md. With the Justice Department’s Civil Division, he argued more than 200 appellate cases, including multiple U.S. Supreme Court cases. In the 1990s, he chaired an appeals board of what is now the Government Accountability Office. Mr. Rosenthal held leadership positions at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, Md., and volunteered at the North Chevy Chase Swimming Pool Association, refereeing swim meets until he was 82. Thomas J. Hickman, 80, a former official at the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and a labor mediator, died Sept. 28 at a hospice center in Colorado Springs. The cause was cancer, said a son, Scott Hickman. Mr. Hickman, a Colorado Springs resident, was born in Lexington, Neb., and lived in Fairfax City, Va., from 1977 to 2000. He worked for his grandfather’s electric company in the 1950s and joined the IBEW in 1965, working as an international representative and rising to the position of executive assistant to the president. After leaving the union in 1990, he worked for William J. Usery, once called “the world’s most expensive labor mediator,” as a consultant until retiring in 2000. With Usery, he negotiated an end to the 1994-1995 Major League Baseball players’ strike, the longest strike in league history. Pearle Thompson, 72, who catalogued German books and materials at the Library of Congress, died Sept. 16 at a hospital in Washington. The cause was breast cancer, said a sister, Rita Thompson-Joyner. Ms. Thompson, a lifelong Washington resident, worked at the library from 1964 until her retirement in 2005. For 20 years, she played piano for a children’s choir at Metropolitan Baptist Church, now based in Largo, Md. Anne K. Ainsworth, 91, who worked for Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) from 1970 to 1984, becoming office manager for the Washington office and the California field offices, died Sept. 7 at a nursing center in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a daughter, Martha Ainsworth. Mrs. Ainsworth was born Anne Kidder in White Bear Lake, Minn., and grew up in Berkeley, Calif., where as a young woman she was a peace activist with the World Federalist Movement. She moved to the Washington area in 1953 and was a 43-year resident of the Levitt & Sons housing development in Bowie, Md. She was member of the Bowie High School human relations committee, which in the mid-1970s was formed to welcome students bused to the school from other parts of the county in compliance with mandated racial desegregation. She later was a volunteer at the Clinton White House. Charlene Pass Blumenthal, 90, who spent 20 years as a budget and program analyst with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration before retiring in the early 1990s, died Oct. 4 at a care center in Olney, Md. The cause was pneumonia, said a son, Michael Pass. Mrs. Pass Blumenthal, a resident of Silver Spring, Md., was born Charlene Eisenberg in Chicago and came to the Washington area in 1952. She was a former president of the Montgomery County branch of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and helped start in the late 1980s a NAMI affiliate called Jobs Unlimited, a program of retail jobs for people in recovery from mental illness. She worked in the Jobs Unlimited thrift shop in Rockville until 2014. — From staff reports |