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Liz Donovan's Facebook profile photo; tributes are building there.

Miami Herald obit: Liz Donovan, researcher on Watergate, dies. She was 63.

When we first met online, this blog was a handmade html page, and Liz was writing WeBlog at the Miami Herald. After she retired from The Herald in 2004 as director of newsroom research, she moved with her husband Joe to Murphy, in the mountains of western North Carolina, and continued blogging independently at Infomaniac. Over the years, we've linked to each other and emailed occasionally.

In 1968, just out of college, Liz joined the Washington Post as a researcher in their library. (Here's her obit at the Washington Post.) Her obit in the Miami Herald, linked above, details her role in the Watergate story. But my favorite part of the obit is personal:

After leaving the Post, Donovan ran a health-food store then came to Miami. She met boatyard manager/motorcycle racer Joe Masellis in 1980. The couple were togther from then on.

''We were involved with the sun and the water,'' he said. ``We had sailing yachts. We were casual fishermen and we loved to snorkel and dive.''

They once spent a month on a boat lazing around the Bahamas, without plan or destination.

''The most intelligent woman I ever met,'' Masellis said.

This year Liz decided to write a series, "An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968", that begins with how she got her foot in the door at the Post.

It was the year I began my adult life. It was 40 years ago.

In the beginning of 1968 I was 22. I had graduated, from Marymount College, with a major in political science and a junior year spent at the London School of Economics, the previous June. Over the past few months I'd picked grapes near my home in upstate NY to make some money, and decided to move to Washington, DC.

My cousin and I moved in with a friend of hers near Calvert St and Columbia Ave, and we started looking for jobs and an apartment. She found a job as an art school receptionist first, and we got a basement apartment in the Mt. Pleasant area, on Lamont Street. It was a slightly dicey neighborhood but with some touches of gentrification. At night we could hear the animals in the National Zoo.

I answered several ads for various types of office work, nothing I looked at was interesting nor were they interested in me. Finally I went to the Washington Post where they were offering jobs taking classified ads at a rate of $135/week, higher than anything else I'd seen. The personnel counselor said I was overeducated, and sent me to the Promotions department where they had a temporary opening.

For 6 weeks or so I would visit the newsroom library, looking for clips of stories that were to be submitted to various journalism prizes, including the Pulitzers. I clipped copies of the stories and pasted them in booklets. I had a job, of sorts, in Washington

She included this photo of herself and her family at Thanksgiving that year:

For Thanksgiving, I likely flew from Washington to Rochester, to spend the holiday with my family: here in our backyard, my mother is wearing a poncho I knitted, in multicolor stripes that reminded me of a Gene Davis painting. I'm wearing a coat that I think I bought at Casual Corner, near the Post's building. The fourth young man is a German exchange student who lived with my family part of this year. It was probably my first visit home after moving to DC the previous late December or early January.

Our emails were casual and chatty. In March, after I'd mentioned I was pulling all nighters coding our Movable Type blog upgrade, she wrote,

We have forsythia, periwinkle, peach blossoms, grape hyacinth and daffodils now. I planted lettuce a couple weeks back but no sign. Planted more this week. We had a hard freeze last week and a day of heavy snow that didn't stick. Our last frost date is a month off, although earlier every year so who knows.....it's a hard month to get through.

I think my biggest surprise about Hillary is her endurance, and her sense of humor! I never expected that.

Hope you've gotten thru coding hell. Sometimes I'd like to be back and learning this stuff.....

In September, after she'd blogged that some medical treatments were slowing her blogging, Liz emailed,

As for me, well, it's lung cancer, a total shock. But although it's a bit advanced there is hope, and the treatments so far not terrible, although after three days of chemo I am a bit zombie-like and shaky. Can't type very well. Radiation every day for three weeks, three days of chemo this week and same in three weeks. Then I may be candidate for surgical removal of what's left of original tumor.

All going well so far, surgeon, hospital and cancer center seem to be top quality, even living way out here in the boonies....feeling pretty confident.

Liz developed pneumonia after that surgery, and died Tuesday.

In her very last blog post, ink still in her blood, she linked to Stuff journalists like.

I miss my virtual friend a great deal; we were sisters who had never met.

Update: Liz's brother, Alan Donovan, a musician known as Rochester Slim, emails from Palm Springs, Calif., "I've tried to compile links to all the various sites that have noted her passing on my personal webpage. "

 Tags  1968 bloggers Elisabeth Donovan Liz Donovan obit

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5 Comments

pat said:

Hi - Sheila,

I share your loss and sadness.

I read all the obits and info from various links and also read her blogs.

It's very sad...such an intelligent, capable and 'kind for the sake of kindness' person.

At least you get to know her in the virtual world.

Link | December 12, 2008 1:52 PM
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Sheila Lennon said:

Thank you, Pat. Liz lived an adventurous, full and free life. I wish she'd stayed around for the last act.

Link | December 13, 2008 7:09 AM
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Eileen Hult said:

The Marymount Class of 1967 will miss Liz. We kept in touch through our Marymount67@yahoogroups.com. We are proud of Liz and all her accomplishments and of her truth-seeking spirit. She added to the beauty of our world and her world of Marymount friends will miss her.
May she watch us from above and guide us in our friendships to be more open with each other.
Eileen Hult
Class of 67 Representative

Link | December 13, 2008 12:31 PM
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Harry Haller said:

@Eileen. Do you really think the dead watch over us or are you just sounding pious?

This woman sounds like she's sailing and asking lots of questions about where she is, not guiding people she went to college with around their own mortal lives.

Link | December 13, 2008 1:16 PM
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Hussein Hafezi said:

Condolences on the loss of Liz.
I never met Liz Donovan personally, but I knew her through her great blogs, first on MiamiHerald.com and then on Blogger. She had a deep impact on her friends and she will live on forever through our memories...
Requiescat in pace

Link | January 31, 2009 9:45 AM
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