Memorial 1 pm Nov. 13 for Charles McDowell

A memorial service for Charles Rice McDowell Jr., a Fourth Estate Award winner and longtime Club member, will be at the Club at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13. He died Nov. 5 at his home in Virginia Beach, Va., of complications from a stroke. He was 84.

A political columnist who spent his entire 49-year career at the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, Mr. McDowell also was a panelist of PBS’s Washington Week in Review, an inductee into the Virginia Communications Hall of Fame and a narrator of Ken Burns’ “Civil War” documentary. He won the Fourth Estate Award in 1996 and was an NPC member since 1986.

Friends, family, colleagues and subjects of his sometimes sharp pen described a man who was an honest and humorous broker of political insights that put Virginia’s interests at the forefront.

“He always left open the possibility that he could be wrong, and people trusted him because of that,” Bill Milsaps, an editor at the paper during much of Mr. McDowell’s tenure, told the Times-Dispatch on Friday.

Mr. McDowell began work at the Times-Dispatch in 1949, where he stayed until retiring in 1998.

In addition to his wife, Ann, Mr. McDowell is survived by two daughters, Jennifer M. Pelligrini of Potomac, Md., and Catie McDowell of Boulder, Colo.; a son, William C. McDowell of Missoula, Mont.; and six grandchildren.

-- Peter Gartrell, [email protected]