Cheer up. It’s Spring!

By Gene Meyer | April 25, 2025 |

A walk in my suburban neighborhood as well as a peak at our own azaleas in bloom yields a revelation. Whatever chaos, uncertainty, fear and bad news overwhelms us, there is this: Finally, at long last, it is Spring. They say this season is a time of renewal, or rebirth, after the long, dreary winter of our discontent. Let it be so.

Meanwhile:

Here a few items of interest. On Sunday, April 27, I’ll be at Kensington’s 18th Annual Day of the Book Festival, meeting, greeting, selling and signing books from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.. You will find me in the tent on Howard Avenue by the Kensington Row Bookshop. There will be much more: music, panels, food trucks, and the promise of a good weather forecast for the day. In preparation, under the auspices of MoCoCommunity, I produced a short “Author Spotlight” video.

To watch the video, click here.

A few weeks ago, Ken Rossignol, publisher of Chesapeake Today, interviewed me live at Sotterley Plantation, in St. Mary’s County, Southern Maryland, about my book Five for Freedom: The African American Soldiers in John Brown’s Army, and my long career covering slavery and its legacy in Maryland. In the 36-minute video I am sitting on a bench in front of the only remaining slave cabin on the former plantation with sweeping views of the Patuxent River. Ken, whose controversial tabloid I wrote about for the Washington Post in the 1990s, landing him on the front page, had many questions I tried to answer.

To watch the video, click here.

Shepherd.com (“Books Are Magic”), is an amazing effort by book lover Ben Fox to share with readers the recommendations of authors in a particular area of interest. Fox asked me to recommend the five best books on slavery and the Civil War era and then posted this. I hope you will take a look. The site also promotes the author’s work as well, and that has given me another opportunity to write more about Five for Freedom.

There’s more:

While working on my biography of Cousin Andre Previn (his grandfather and my great-grandfather were brothers), I’m also looking forward to editing several stories due soon for the 2025 issue of B’nai B’rith Magazine, and writing occasional book reviews, most recently of Fear No Pharoah: American Jews, the Civil War, and the Fight to End Slavery, for the Washington Independent Review of Books. To read my review click here.

Looking back. Farewell to a news bureau

The Washington Post has closed its Fairfax County, Virginia bureau, another nail in the coffin of suburban coverage. But bureau alumni recently held a reunion and posted a picture on Facebook. Many comments ensued. Here is some of what I wrote:

When I came to the Post in 1970 (Yikes!), there were no suburban “bureaus.” Inner counties had courthouse pressrooms all the papers shared. In Prince George’s County, when I arrived in Upper Marlboro in late 1976, it was on the top floor until the chief judge commandeered it for other purposes. By then there was a new County Administrative Building with its own press room. But I told the judge we regarded the judiciary branch as highly as the legislature and we deserved a courthouse space. He gave us a basement room with one desk and a phone. David Maraniss, who was also assigned to PG, could never find it, but I did.

One day I arrived to find men moving walls. I somehow convinced Post management to rent the second floor of a small commercial building for the paper’s first suburban bureau, of which I was made the bureau chief. My job included “pre-editing” the drafts of new reporters, who included Michel (Martin) McQueen, Leon Wynter and Sandee Gregg. The bureau subsequently had two other Upper Marlboro offices but an esprit de corps that moved with us, even when the Post abandoned the county seat for an office close to the Beltway.

My last duty assignment before I left the paper in January 2004 was in the Southern Maryland Bureau, in the Charles County seat of LaPlata, focusing on St. Mary’s County, 75 miles from my home in Silver Spring. The commissioners began streaming their meetings, so with a few early morning phone calls to sources I was able on some days to work “remotely” from my basement office. The bureaus were great morale builders and also well served the metropolitan readers of their hometown Washington Post.

The PG bureau cast included many future super stars and just plain great reporters including John Feinstein, Ruth Marcus, Gwen Ifill, Jackson Diehl, Courtland Molloy, Peter Osnos, Elizabeth Becker, Mike Abramowitz, Phil Pan, Jackie Spinner, Rochelle Riley, Lisa Frazier Page, Hamil Harris, Ovetta Wiggins, Victoria Churchville, David Montgomery, Karen DeYoung, Sara Kehaulani Goo, Michelle Singletary, Michelle Norris, Marilyn Thompson. Also: Jamie Stockwell, Krissah Thompson, Ruben Castenada, Keith Harriston, Sue Anne Pressley. Avis Thomas Lester.

I could go on and on, but enough is enough. Someone should write a book.

Posted in Blog, history and tagged azaleas, Civil War, Festival of the Book, Jews, Josiah Henson, slavery, spring, Washington Post

Eugene L. Meyer

Journalist & Author

Cheer up. It’s Spring!

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