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KLMNO OBITUARIES
A LOCAL LIFE: JANE PESCI-TOWNSEND, 51
A ‘monumental, spiritual, majestic voice’ F
by Matt Schudel
or years, Jane Pesci-Town- send taught a required course for first-year musical
theater students at Catholic Uni- versity. The course was called “body movement,” but that sug- gested only the barest outline of what Ms. Pesci-Townsend brought to the classroom. She taught students how to sit in a chair, how to move across a stage and how to interact with other actors, but those theatrical basics were not what made the class so memorable. On the very first day of each new school year, before her students had even learned their way around cam- pus, Ms. Pesci-Townsend deliv- ered a performance that left them gaping in awe. In her powerful mezzo-sopra- no voice, she would sing “Unusu- al Way,” from the Broadway musi- cal “Nine.” It wasn’t just her phrasing or diction that im- pressed the students: It was the way she inhabited the song, the way it became a vessel for acting, storytelling and connecting with the human heart. Many of Ms. Pesci-Townsend’s students recall the body move- ment class — and her perform- ance of “Unusual Way,” in partic- ular — as nothing less than a life- changing experience. “It felt like she was a force of
nature in the room, like she had her own gravity,” said Dunbar Dicks, who went to Catholic be- cause of her. “She had a rare com-
over-the-top performance of a song called “Pheromones” invari- ably brought the house down. In the 1990s, she and Dori Legg ap- peared in another popular revue, “Parallel Lives.” “From the first note out of Jane
THOMAS RADCLIFFE
Musical theater performer Jane Pesci-Townsend was nominated for four Helen Hayes awards.
bination of gifts. She was forceful and empathetic, a performer and a teacher.” Ms. Pesci-Townsend, who died
Aug. 6 at her home in Wheaton after a six-year battle with kidney cancer, spent all of her 51 years near Washington. Besides teach- ing, she appeared in dozens of plays and musical revues, was an unforgettable cabaret singer and directed productions at theaters throughout the region.
“She was such a phenomenal
performer,” said N. Thomas Pe- dersen, who co-chaired the musi- cal theater department at Catho- lic with Ms. Pesci-Townsend. “She was funny, poignant and had a voice like no one else.” She first gained attention in the 1980s in a satirical revue called “Mrs. Foggybottom and Friends,” in which her bawdy,
HAROLD CONNOLLY, 79 Won Olympic gold in hammer throw by Matt Schudel Harold Connolly, 79, who won
a 1956 Olympic gold medal in the hammer throw and who remains the most dominant American in the history of his sport, died Aug. 18 at an exercise gym in Catons- ville. He collapsed while riding a stationary bicycle, his son Adam Connolly said, and died of a heart attack. He had lived in Catons- ville since February. Mr. Connolly held the world record in his event for nine con- secutive years, 1956 to 1965, set- ting six separate world marks during that time. After his athlet- ic career, he became a top official with Special Olympics in Wash- ington and was an assistant track coach at Georgetown University. After winning his gold medal
at the Melbourne Olympics in 1956, Mr. Connolly became in- volved in a much-publicized Cold War romance with Olga Fikotová, a gold-medal-winning discus thrower from Czechoslovakia. Their engagement became noth- ing less than an international cause celebre, as their efforts to marry were repeatedly rebuffed by the Czech bureaucracy and Fi- kotová was denounced as a trai- tor in her Communist-controlled country for wanting to marry an American. Mr. Connolly sought assistance from the U.S. State De- partment and traveled to Prague in 1957 to make a personal appeal to the Czech president for per- mission to marry. When the marriage finally
took place, more than 30,000 people attended their public cer- emony in Prague. Olga Connolly went on to compete for the Unit- ed States in four Olympic Games before they were divorced in 1974. Mr. Connolly, meanwhile, maintained his pre-eminence as a hammer thrower for years. He participated in the Olympics in 1960, 1964 and 1968 and contin- ued to throw the hammer in international track meets until his late 40s. He was one of the first world-class athletes to admit to using steroids, which were not illegal for most of his career. “For eight years [1964 to 1972]
I would have to refer to myself as a hooked athlete,” he told a U.S. Senate subcommittee in 1973. He said anabolic steroids were unknown in 1956, but by the ear- ly 1960s elite Western athletes were following the example of athletes of Eastern Europe. “By 1968, athletes in every
event were using anabolic ster- oids and stimulants,” he testified. “I knew any number of athletes on the 1968 Olympic team who had so much scar tissue and so many puncture holes in their backsides that it was difficult to find a fresh spot to give them a new shot.”
Without apologizing for his use of steroids, Mr. Connolly said the muscle-building drugs should not be used by young ath- letes and were no substitute for skill, training and competitive fire.
“I can’t think of another ath- EUGENIA SEAMANS, 88
Philanthropist served 20 years with group that runs Mount Vernon Eugenia Seamans, 88, a former
regent of the Mount Vernon La- dies’ Association, which owns, maintains and operates the home of George Washington, died Aug. 12 at her home in Beverly Farms, Mass. She had multiple or- gan failure. Mrs. Seamans was born Euge-
nia Ayer Merrill in Madrid, where her father was serving as U.S. con- sul. She grew up in Washington and attended the Potomac School before graduating from a board- ing school in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. She was the niece of Gen. George S. Patton and the granddaughter of Frederick Ayer, the owner of one of the country’s largest wool mills.
She spent summers as a child
on Massachusetts’s North Shore and was married there in 1942 to Robert C. Seamans Jr., a scientist and public official who went on to serve as secretary of the Air Force, deputy administrator of NASA and administrator of the old En- ergy Research and Development Administration. The couple raised their chil- dren in Beverly Farms before
FAMILY PHOTO
Eugenia Seamans, pictured with one of her grandchildren, was the daughter of a diplomat and niece of Gen. George S. Patton.
moving to Washington in about 1960. Mrs. Seamans served for 20 years with the nonprofit Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association, in- cluding from 1986 to 1990 as re-
gent. In 1989, she traveled to Paris to present to Francois Mitterrand, then the president of France, an iron key to the Bastille prison. The key had been a gift to George Washington and was offered as a
lete of his stature who has talked as openly about steroids,” his son Adam, who was once the No. 3- ranked hammer thrower in the United States, said Saturday. “His general view was that the health consequences were overblown, and that if you’re an adult there’s nothing wrong with it.” Mr. Connolly’s tolerant stance was contradicted by that of his second wife, Pat Winslow Con- nolly, a three-time Olympian who later coached gold-medal-win- ning sprinter Evelyn Ashford and was an outspoken opponent of performance-enhancing drugs. “The overwhelming majority of the international track-and- field athletes I have known,” Mr. Connolly said in 1973, “would take anything and do anything short of killing themselves to im- prove their athletic perform- ance.” Harold Vincent Connolly was born in Somerville, Mass., on Aug. 1, 1931. He weighed 13 pounds at birth, and his left arm was broken and sustained nerve damage during delivery. His left arm was frequently fractured in childhood and was four inches shorter than his right arm. His left hand was two-thirds the size of his right. Nonetheless, he participated
in sports and tried the shot put at Boston College before switching to the hammer — a 16-pound metal ball at the end of a rigid, four-foot-long twisted wire. Mr. Connolly, who was 6 feet tall and weighed between 235 and 250 pounds at his peak, soon mas-
Pesci-Townsend’s mouth,” critic Pamela Sommers wrote in The Washington Post in 1997, “I began wondering why this mega-talent- ed performer isn’t a major player on local or national stages.” Over the years, Ms. Pesci-Town- send was nominated four times for Helen Hayes awards, the Washington area’s top theater honors, but she never left her hometown to try her luck in New York. “That was a conscious choice,”
said Brad Watkins, producing di- rector at the Olney Theatre and a longtime friend. “She had oppor- tunities galore to go to New York. Jane knew early on that she wanted a home and a family.” She was married for 21 years to
Kevin Townsend and had two children, George and Rosemary Townsend, all of Wheaton. Other survivors include her parents, Frank and Dorothy Pesci of Crof- ton; three sisters, Cecilia Finstad of Severna Park, Barbara Rosen- berg of Foster City, Calif., and Marianna Judy of Silver Spring; and two brothers, James Pesci of Leesburg and Frank Pesci Jr. of Boston. In her cabaret shows, Ms. Pes-
ci-Townsend could distill a centu- ry of Broadway laughter and tears within the emotional arc of a three-minute song. She some-
SUNDAY, AUGUST 22, 2010
times had a bowl containing 100 show-tune titles and would sing any song an audience member pulled out.
“She had that monumental, spiritual, majestic voice,” Watkins said. “She was a large woman, but she was always the sexiest wom- an on the stage.” After years of revues, character
parts and understudy roles, Ms. Pesci-Townsend got a chance to step to center stage in 2002. She was a last-minute stand-in for an ailing Christine Baranksi in the starring role of Mrs. Lovett in a Kennedy Center performance of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd.”
She was using props, including bread dough, flour and a rolling pin, for the first time and had to be directed on and off stage by stagehands using flashlights. With her parents and husband
watching the performance, Ms. Pesci-Townsend pulled it off with polished assurance and aplomb. She received a standing ovation. “It’s the kind of thing that thea- ter stories are made of,” she told The Post afterward. “It was just amazing — queen for a day, that’s all I can say.” Jane Frances Pesci was born in the Districton March 4, 1959, and grew up in New Carrollton as the second of six children. Everyone in her family sang and played in- struments; Ms. Pesci-Townsend sometimes performed in pit or- chestras on the string bass. By the time she graduated from
Elizabeth Seton High School in Bladensburg, she was a skilled
STAN BAROUH/ROUND HOUSE THEATRE
Ms. Pesci-Townsend, left, and Sherri L. Edelen perform in the 2004 Round House Theatre production of "The World Goes ’Round."
singer and stage performer. At the University of Maryland, she became a protégé of theater pro- fessor Ronald O’Leary’s and adopted many of her classroom methods from him.
She was giving singing lessons while still in her teens and later began teaching at the Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts (now Imagination Stage). She started to fill in as a voice teacher at Catholic, and since 1994 she was on the faculty of what has be- come a nationally recognized mu- sical theater program. She taught until two weeks before she died. At Catholic, she led her stu- dents by example, by nuts-and- bolts training and by giving them the freedom to fail. In class, Ms. Pesci-Townsend often made up inspirational aphorisms that had the ring of time-worn truth and
remain fixed in her students’ minds: “You never sing a song without
hope.” “You’re never a better actor than you are a person.” Several of Ms. Pesci-Town-
send’s students have appeared on Broadway, one was a contestant on “American Idol” and another — Dunbar Dicks — performs and directs for the Second City com- edy troupe in Chicago. “She was direct, she had an
ego, but she had an incredible heart,” recalled Dicks, who was 16 when he first studied with Ms. Pesci-Townsend. “She could make you feel like you were the only person in a room, but she could command a room of 150 people. “She was just unrepeatable.”
schudelm@washpost.com
1957 WASHINGTON POST FILE PHOTO
Olympic champion Harold Connolly and Olga Fikotová, greeted by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Because Olympic athletes of
tered the fast-spinning technique of the event. He wore smooth- soled ballet shoes to increase his foot speed. In 1955, he became the first American to throw the hammer more than 200 feet. A year later, he broke the world record by more than 13 feet with a toss of 224 feet, 10 1
⁄2 inches. He would
not relinquish the record for nine years, and at one time had seven of the eight longest throws in his- tory. His personal best was 233 feet, 9 1
⁄2 inches in 1965. No other
American has won a gold medal in the hammer throw in interna- tional competition since Mr. Con- nolly’s Olympic victory in 1956.
that era were held to a strict ama- teur code, Mr. Connolly spent 29 years as a high school English teacher and vice principal in San- ta Monica, Calif. He moved to Sil- ver Spring in 1988 to become di- rector of U.S. programs for Spe- cial Olympics. He was a volunteer coach at Georgetown, where one of the athletes, Kevin McMahon, made two U.S. Olym- pic teams. From 1999 to February 2010,
Mr. Connolly lived in Radford, Va., where his wife was head track coach at Radford Univer- sity. During the past decade, he established a Web site for his
Cynthia L. Clark CHURCH MEMBER
Cynthia L. Clark, 87, a member
loan to the people of France in cel- ebration of the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and the beginning of the French Revo- lution. The couple moved back to Bev-
erly Farms in the late 1970s. Mrs. Seamanswas the crew and cook on the 40-foot sailboat she shared with her husband. In 1985, the couple won a race from Mar- blehead, Mass., to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Mrs. Seamans was a philan- thropist who supported many causes, including the Deafness Research Foundation, the Nation- al Cathedral and the Hospice of Mission Hill, the first AIDS hos- pice in New England. Her husband died in 2008 after 66 years of marriage. Survivors include five children,
Katharine Padulo of Philadelphia, Robert C. Seamans III of Beverly Farms, Joseph Seamans of Pitts- burgh, May Baldwin of Cam- bridge and Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., and Daniel Seamans of Berkeley, Calif.; 11 grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren. —Emma Brown
of St. George’s Episcopal Church in Arlington County for more than 50 years who was among the first women to serve on its vestry, died of complications from Hodg- kin’s disease Aug. 16 at the Cap- ital Hospice in Arlington. Mrs. Clark, who also sang in the choir, earned certificates in theology from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and Oxford University in England. She wrote a history of St. George’s that was published by the church in 2008.
She was a technical editor at the federal Office of Personnel Management from 1971 to 1980. Cynthia Hyde Landry was born
in New Orleans, where she was a 1943 languages graduate of Tu- lane University. Her husband of 36 years, Keith
Clark, died in 1981. Survivors include three chil-
dren, Thomas Clark of Durham, N.C., Charles Clark of Arlington and Martha Franks of Santa Fe, N.M.; a brother, Stuart Landry of Binghamton, N.Y.; a sister, Anne Landry of Falls Church; and sev- en grandchildren.
— T. Rees Shapiro
sport and was youth coordinator of the hammer throw for USA Track & Field, the national gov- erning body for the sport. Survivors include his wife of 35 years, Pat Winslow Connolly of Catonsville; four children from his first marriage, Mark Connolly of Las Vegas, James Connolly of Marina de Rey, Calif., Merja Freund of Corona del Mar, Calif., and Nina Southard of Temecula, Calif.; two children from his sec- ond marriage, Adam Connolly of Silver Spring and Shannon Pod- duturi of New York City; a step- son, Brad Winslow of San Jose, Calif.; and five grandchildren.
schudelm@washpost.com
Frank W. Loops OAS OFFICIAL
Frank W. Loops, 95, who re- tired in 1981 from the Organiza- tion of American States as direc- tor of the office of international conferences, died Aug. 8 at Ar- leigh Burke Pavilion assisted liv- ing center in McLean. He had complications from a
broken hip suffered in May at his home in Arlington County. Mr. Loops joined OAS in the
late 1940s initially as an engineer. He later moved into conference work. Frank Webb Loops was born in Richmond and raised in Wash- ington, where he graduated from Central High School and attend- ed George Washington Univer- sity.
During World War II, he served as an Army pilot in North Africa and Italy. He enjoyed spending his win- ters in Barbados. Survivors include his wife,
Marian Farley Loops of Arling- ton, whom he was married to for 63 years; three daughters, Nancy Breaux of Moraga, Calif., Barbara Kuhlmann of Englewood, Colo., and Kathie Weinberg of Beth- esda; and seven grandchildren. — Adam Bernstein
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