By LAURA VOZZELLA, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
She had spunk enough at age 19 to go to the courthouse in rural Montana in 1938 to change her name to match a movie star’s. In her 20s, she ditched her job teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and headed solo to Oregon, for office work at a shipyard gearing up for World War II....So it seemed possible that at age 100, plucky Patricia Weissenborn might just get the better of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. She appeared to be turning the corner on May 1, 10 days after her diagnosis, when she got out of bed and sat in a chair all day, eating lunch and reading the newspaper.
By JOHN LELAND, The New York Times (No paywall for coronavirus articles)
There was the time, about 25 years ago, when a bat flew into Mary J. Wilson’s home in Baltimore. Picture the scene: pandemonium. Ms. Wilson calmly raised an arm, snatched the bat in mid-flight and tossed it back outside. “I never saw anything like it,” her grandson, Felipe Herrera, said. Ms. Wilson was a sports fan, a trash talker, a fearless woman who stood 6 feet tall. But mostly, Ms. Wilson, the first African-American senior zookeeper at what is now the Maryland Zoo in Baltimore, had a way with animals, especially loose ones.
By STEVEN KURUTZ, The New York Times (No paywall for coronavirus articles)
Throughout his childhood, Liam St. John would watch his mother, Evelyn Caro, start and stop her education, unable to follow through on her plan to become a nurse. Ms. Caro was a divorced single mother struggling to support three children. At one point, the family had no home of their own and briefly lived out of a car. Completing her nursing degree was not something she could afford. Ms. Caro worked a string of low-wage jobs to provide for her sons. Inevitably, the jobs were in the health field: in long-term care facilities and nursing homes, and hospitals as a phlebotomist. She kept herself associated with the medical world the way an aspiring actor might hang around the theater.
By PENELOPE GREEN, The New York Times (No paywall for coronavirus articles)
Hecky Powell had a deal with one of his longtime employees, a woman who had struggled with a drug habit. Every time she attended a rehab meeting, he paid her $15. If she worked a full week, she got a bonus. But if she flaked, she lost the entire week’s wages. Mr. Powell, whose South Side Chicago-style barbecue restaurant was an institution in Evanston, Ill., liked to say that he didn’t want to give people handouts — he wanted to give them skills. From his office, chockablock with awards, newspaper clippings, banners and plaques in his name, he mentored the young and the disadvantaged as well as the powerful.
By SAMANTHA SCHMIDT, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
It was not unusual for Alyce Gullattee to wander alone down alleys in Northwest Washington, at the height of the crack epidemic of the 1980s, searching for a patient she feared had overdosed. In one of those alleys one night, a man started mugging the psychiatrist, her daughter recalled. But Gullattee did not run away. She looked the man in the eyes and talked to him. “Wait a minute,” Gullattee told him. “Before you do all that, we need to get to the root of why you need to rob me.”
By STEVEN KURUTZ, The New York Times (No paywall for coronavirus articles)
On the streets of New Haven, Conn., Margaret Holloway was known as the “Shakespeare Lady,” a tall, striking woman in ragged clothing who recited dramatic monologues for spare change. Her stage, often, was outside Willoughby’s coffee shop, a hangout for Yale students and professionals. Her repertoire included “The Tempest,” “Macbeth” and the Greek alphabet, which she acted out letter by letter. Many regarded Ms. Holloway as an eccentric local fixture; in the view of some business owners, however, she was an aggressive panhandler and public nuisance. But for those who knew her personal history, her life had tragic dimensions not unlike the material she performed.
By LAURA VOZZELLA, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Sterling E. Matthews and his wife were already busy raising their young son when they decided to take in a baby niece whose own parents weren't able to care for her. “He just brought her on in, no fuss,” Alice Matthews recalled Wednesday, a day after her husband died of covid-19 at a suburban Richmond hospital. “He just was that kind of a man. He saw a need.” Sterling Matthews, 60, who lived south of Richmond in Chester, Va., died Tuesday at Bon Secours St. Francis Medical Center.
By AARON RANDLE, The New York Times (No paywall for coronavirus articles)
In the final hours of his life, a frail Yves-Emmanuel Segui lay in a hospital bed as the time ticked toward midnight. It was the night of April 5, the birthday of his younger daughter, Chloe. By 3 a.m. on April 6, his heart had stopped beating. Mr. Segui, who was 60, had died of the coronavirus, his older daughter, Dr. Morit Segui, said. “I think he held on because of my sister,” she said, to avoid Chloe’s birthday becoming forever synonymous with his death. If she was right, it would have been a fitting last act from a man who had dedicated his life to his two daughters.
By MATT SCHUDEL, The Washington Post (Metered Paywall - 3 articles a month)
Henry J. Abraham, a Holocaust refugee who became a leading historian of the U.S. Supreme Court and was an inspiring teacher during nearly 50 years on the faculties of the University of Pennsylvania and later the University of Virginia, died Feb. 26 at a hospital in Charlottesville. He was 98. Dr. Abraham was 15 when he came to the United States from his native Germany in 1937, without speaking a word of English. As a U.S. Army intelligence officer during World War II, he helped uncover documents used to prosecute Nazi war criminals during the postwar Nuremberg trials.
