Two Winners, Lost Too Soon
On a gray day in a black week for government service, many of the town's impeachment-tossed met to say goodbye to two surpassingly splendid public servants, who, in their separate ways, had shown us how it should be done. Toni House was a blithe spirit who spoke for the Supreme Court. Kirk O'Donnell, a rock of decency and good judgment, spoke generally for Democrats and particularly for former House speaker Tip O'Neill. They both died young last month.</br></br>Toni, who succumbed to lung cancer at the age of 55, was a radiant blonde. I knew her from the days when we both worked at the Washington Star. In the paper's last days, she was like a bright banner flowing around us. She wore one of those square paper caps that only printers know how to make, and she was everywhere. She carried news about people who had landed jobs and those who hadn't; she knew about morale in classified; and she gauged the rage of our overlords at Time, Inc. A photograph of her mourning as the Star's final edition rolled off the press said it all.</br></br>When she went to the Supreme Court in 1982, Toni's fans wondered what kind of a fit it would be. Here was an institution more reserved than the Federal Reserve, stuffy and huffy and never explaining itself. When its members ventured out of their marble temple, they sometimes dropped speeches like hand grenades in the provinces. And there was Toni, who had been a police reporter, accustomed to trading expletives with recalcitrant desk sergeants who were trying to withhold information. But the match worked wonderfully well. Toni charmed the justices into some acknowledgment of the needs of the Fourth Estate.</br></br>Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said of his place of business, "We are very quiet there, but it is the quiet of a storm center." Toni was at the eye of the storm. On decision day, she presided over the distribution of the latest edict from the bench. It was always a mad moment, and Toni loved it. At her memorial service at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Lyle Denniston, a famously crusty Supreme Court reporter who now works for the Baltimore Sun, told about it through tears: "Toni was quite at home amid that chaos; indeed . . . she was quite capable of adding to the chaos, but then {also} uniquely gifted at bringing everything back to order."</br></br>All who spoke at her service conveyed Toni's greatest quality: an obligation to be delightful. She took pride in her job, but she was also a fashion plate, a gourmet cook and an impassioned gardener. She brought picnic hampers into the office from home. She filled her office with flowers. She fed her cats lobster thermidor.