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| Pye was
born in 1938. He was a news
correspondent or reporter -- the terms mean the same thing -- from 1953 to 1999. He worked for his hometown papers in Richmond, Virginia and helped pay his way through UVA by covering the various police forces in Charlottesville. He was bi-lingual in French, because he went to French schools in Paris for four years while his father was the news editor of what then was the Paris edition of the late, much lamented New York Herald Tribune. When he got his B.A. in English he went back to Paris and spent two years at Agence France-Presse (AFP). Back in the States he spent a disastrous summer with a bunch of nasty fools at the Associated Press in Milwaukee. After telling them several times what he thought of them they fired him. He moved to Washington, went to work for UPI in 1962 and stayed until he retired when UPI imploded in 1999. He covered the White House for a little more than two years and spent most of the rest of the time covering Congress and National Politics. He worked mainly as a radio correspondent but did a lot of newspaper work and a little TV. His work was at one time carried on thousands of radio stations literally all over the world. At one point UPI estimated that on any given day he was probably heard by several hundred million people. He still writes for a newspaper in Clarke County sometimes. This is his fiftieth year in journalism. The story on the upper right ran in the Clarke County Times-Courier: The Times-Courier is the biggest newspaper in the Clarke County Metropolitan Area. (OK, it's the ONLY newspaper in the Clarke County Metropolitan area ... and it's not much of a metropolitan area, although the county seat, Berryville does have several stoplights and county's population runs into the THOUSANDS [13,000, give or take])
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Below is part of a piece UPI got Pye to write: half of an analytical election scene-setter commentary by a UPI employer who functioned as a conservative columnist offset by a visiting liberal: in this case, me. It ran just before the 2002 Congressional election.
War is at stake in the elections two weeks from next Tuesday. So is the economy, health, Social Security and issues including abortion, gun control, taxes and possibly whether a conservative abortion opponent, Dr. W. David Hager, who prescribes prayer as a headache remedy joins the FDA panel on reproductive health. He recommends that women read scripture to ward off premenstrual syndrome. He and his wife have written books saying prayer heals. War seems inevitable. It is popular now, but unless it is as quick and easy as the Gulf War was, it will lose support with each body bag landed at Dover, Delaware, where they landed by the tens of thousands in the Vietnam War. If it festers, as wars can, it’s popularity will fade with every scream from a wounded boy in a hospital bed and every disfigured veteran limping down a street or hallway. If Republicans retake control of the Senate and keep control of the House, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld will have a blank check to run the war as hard and for as long as they want. The war will hurt the economy. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says a three month war will cost about 75 billion dollars in this fiscal year. That would boost the deficit to about $225 billion this year: and that is assuming that the White House was right when, in July, it forecast a NON-WAR deficit of $150 billion. This White House, as most White Houses are, is a little casual about math: in February it said this year’s deficit would be $106 billion.
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Mary majored in art
at Hollins and with her new degree found herself employed at the Virginia
Museum in Richmond by light-footed men who disliked, distrusted and
misunderstood women in particular and people in general. This was back in 1965. It's a better place with better people in charge. It is a good museum and was back then too. It really is better now. She quit and went to work for an ad agency in Richmond. While there she met Pye and they soon married and moved to a beat-up old 1815 -- read: eighteen-fifteen -- house in Old town Alexandria. It cost $33,000 in 1967 |