Silver Owls elect McCartney as first woman Head Hoot

The National Press Club’s Silver Owls group has elected Molly Sinclair McCartney as its first woman Head Hoot, along with Jerry Zremski as the deputy Head Hoot, a new position.

They were unanimously chosen by the governing Council of Wisest Owls at a Jan. 31 meeting at the Club. McCartney formerly was a reporter for the Washington Post and Miami Herald, and Zremski is the Washington bureau chief of the Buffalo News and a former Club president.

The Silver Owls, which operates as something of a club within the Club, is comprised of Club members with 25 or more years of continuous membership. Those with 50 years or more are Gold Owls and those with 60 or more years are Platinum Owls. Membership is automatic when any member passes the 25-year mark.

McCartney replaces Frank Aukofer, who was Club president in 1978. He temporarily substituted as Head Hoot after Arthur Wiese, the 1979 Club president, fell ill and was disabled in 2012. Aukofer became Head Hoot after Wiese’s death in 2016. The Head Hoot is the Owls’ chair person.

The Silver Owls was founded in the administration of President David Hess in 1985. A veteran member, Bernie Goodrich, proposed the Owls as a way to bring older members together, including those who had retired, for fellowship and fuller use of the Club’s facilities.

In recent years, the organization has sponsored two events a year, a Spring Hoot and a Fall Hoot, which are open to all Club members. With the new leadership, the Wisest Owls Council will be considering additional event formats.

McCartney worked as a reporter for more than 30 years, including 15 at the Post and 10 at the Herald. In 2012 she was appointed as a Woodrow Wilson Public Scholar in Washington to do the research and interviews needed to finish America’s War Machine: Vested Interests, Endless Conflicts, a book her husband, national security reporter James McCartney, was writing when he died in 2011. The book was published in 2015, and McCartney has made presentations and done radio and television interviews about it in Florida, New York City, Montreal and around Washington.

McCartney was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1977-1978. She has a liberal studies degree from Georgetown University with a concentration in foreign relations. She currently is a board member of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Committee for the Republic, which opposes unconstitutional wars and is the program chair of the Women’s National Democratic Club.

Zremski was Club president in 2007. He also chaired the Speakers Committee in 2014 and 2015. Starting as a business reporter for the Buffalo News in 1984, he has been a Washington reporter for the News since 1989.

He has traveled the country and the world on stories of importance to Buffalo. Assignments have included coverage of the last five presidential elections and seven national political conventions. In 2019, he won the Club's Washington Regional Reporting Award and, in 2018, the Washington Press Club Foundation’s David Lynch Award for excellence in congressional reporting.

In 1999-2000, Zremski was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He earned a newspaper journalism degree from Syracuse University and a master’s degree in political science from American University. In addition to his reporting duties, Zremski has spent more than seven years as an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Maryland.