SUNDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2010 ALOCALLIFE:WILLIAMADDAMS REITWIESNER,56 Genealogist tracked roots of substantive family trees BY TIMOTHY R. SMITH William Addams Reitwiesner
discovered that presidents War- renG.Harding,
RichardM.Nixon and Jimmy Carter were cousins; that thesingerMadonnais related to Camilla Parker Bowles, consort to Prince Charles; that President Obama had ancestors who were slaveowners; andthat at leastone U.S. senatorwas related to Elvis. Mr. Reitwiesner (RITE-weez-
ner),who held a series of low-pay- ing jobs at theLibrary ofCongress to be near the source of his re- search, spent almost all of his spare time devotedly cataloguing the pedigrees of U.S. political fig- ures,Europeanroyalsandcelebri- ties. Almost every day the library
wasopen,hewoulddoresearchin itsgenealogy readingroom,work- ing at a long wooden table as he single-mindedly entereddatainto a laptop computer. “Some stay for 10minutes,” said
one reference librarian in the ge- nealogy reading room. “He stayed all day.” On Saturdays, Mr. Reitwiesner
worked the entire day at the li- brary.Weeknights,hewouldoften
stayuntilclosingat9p.m.Thenhe would take his work home to his apartment on Capitol Hill, where he moved so he could always be close to the library. “Iwork eight hours a day, sleep
JOHNE.DUPONT,72 Heir killed Olympic gold medalist BY EMMA BROWN John E. du Pont, an heir to the
DuPont Co. chemical fortunewho wasknownas a generous if eccen- tric patron of amateur wrestling before he inexplicably shot and killed Olympic gold medalist Dave Schultz in 1996, died Dec. 9. He was 72. The Associated Press reported
thatMr. du Pont was pronounced dead at a hospital in Somerset, Pa., after being found unrespon- sive in his cell at Laurel High- lands state prison. The cause of death was not disclosed. Mr. du Pont was the great-
great-grandson of E.I. du Pont, a French industrialistwhofounded the company that introduced the world to now-ubiquitous modern materials such as nylon, Teflon and Lucite. Mr. du Pont’s fortune was esti-
mated by Forbes magazine to be about $200 million, which he had used to indulge his twin passions: natural history and athletics. He built a museum in Delaware to house his collection of 66,000 birds and 2 million seashells and spent millions of dollars to pro- motesports, includingswimming and the pentathlon. His foremost passion was
wrestling, and he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to USA Wrestling, the sport’s gov- erning body. He also spent generously to aid
the efforts of top individual wres- tlers, paying them a monthly sti- pend to live at Foxcatcher, his sprawling estate near Philadel- phia, and train at a 14,000- square-foot facility he had built there. He called the wrestlers he sup-
ported “Team Foxcatcher” and envisioned them filling the roster of the 1996 U.S. Olympic wres- tling team. Schultz was one of Mr. du
Pont’s beneficiaries. Having won Olympic gold in 1984, the 36- year-old father of two was living at the du Pont estate, hoping to qualify for the 1996 games in Atlanta and serving as a Team Foxcatcher coach. On Jan. 26, 1996, Mr. du Pont
drove to the guesthouse where Schultz was living with his wife and two children. The heir fired three shots from a .38-caliber handgun out the window of his Lincoln Town Car. Schultz lay in the driveway, dying in his wife’s arms. Mr. du Pont barricaded himself
in the steel-lined library of his three-story Greek-revival man- sion. SWAT teams descended as negotiators tried to persuadeMr. du Pont to surrender. Mr. du Pont,whowasknownto
have an arsenal of high-powered weaponry, held police at bay for 48 hours until he was tricked outside to check on a faulty heat- er, which officials had disabled in aneffort to freezehimout.Hewas taken into custody without any shots fired. The case captured the nation’s
attention.Thequestionwasnever who had killed Dave Schultz, but why?
FAMILY PHOTO
James
M.Newmyer, shown in the 1980s, helped his brother and father startNewmyerAssociates, a low- profile supplier of information on political and regulatory news and trends to Fortune 500 companies.
BILL FITZ-PATRICK/ASSOCIATED PRESS
John E. du Pont, left, and Olympic wrestler Dave Schultz,whomthe heir to the DuPont Co. chemical fortune shot to death in 1996.
Stories circulated in the media
andatMr.duPont’s trialabouthis increasing instability in the months before the killing. Always odd, he had begun to frighten employees and wrestlers at Fox- catcher. He said that he was the Dalai
Lama of the United States, that the trees on his property could move and that tooth marks made by horses in the barn were com- muniques fromMartians.He had blown up a family of newborn foxes on his estate, ordered wres- tlers to help shoo ghosts out of the walls and drove a car into a pond —twice. He had razor wire installed in
his walls to keep intruders out, threatened one wrestler with a machine gun and evicted three others, all African American, from his property. “It was part of his madness,” Kanamti Solomon, one of the evicted wrestlers, told the Phila- delphia Inquirer in 1996. “He thought he was dying and didn’t want anything black to be near him.” In 1997, a jury deliberated for
seven days before convicting Mr. du Pont of third-degree murder. Thejury rejected his claim thathe was legally insane at the time of the shooting but ruled thathewas mentally ill. He was sentenced to 13 to 30
years in prison for the killing. He expressed remorse in court, say- ing that he was “very sorry for what happened” and that he was “ill” at the time of the murder. He later lost repeated attempts
to appeal his case on grounds of insanity. In 1999, Schultz’s widow won a $35 million settlement in a civil suit againstMr. du Pont. John Eleuthere du Pont, who
was born in November 1938, was one of four children raised on the same Pennsylvania estate where he lived as an adult. He grew up mostly with his mother after his parents divorced when he was young. He was voted both “lazi-
est” and “most likely to succeed” at the private Haverford School near Philadelphia. Mr. du Pont swam on the varsi-
ty team at the University of Mi- ami, where he received a biology degree. He was a good but not world-class swimmer, and he eventually turned his sights on qualifying for the Olympics in the modern pentathlon, which in- cludes horseback riding, shoot- ing, fencing, swimming and run- ning. He built a 50-meter pool at his
estate, which became the venue for the 1968 pentathlon champi- onships. Mr. du Pont did not qualify for the Olympics. He was married for a year in
the mid-1980s to GaleWenk, who later accused him in a lawsuit of choking her, threatening her with a knife and gun and trying to push her out of a moving car. Other survivors could not be con- firmed. Mr. du Pont, who was among hundreds of heirs to the family fortune, said he became en- thralled with wrestling despite his family’s feeling that it was a sport for “ruffians.” In 1986, he founded, endowed
and named himself head coach of a wrestling program at Villanova University in Philadelphia. After two years, the school eliminated the program and ended its rela- tionship with Mr. du Pont, who was accused in a lawsuit of mak- ing unwanted sexual advances toward a Villanova coach. The suit was settled for an undisclosed sum. The following year, Mr. du Pont published a book of essays, “Off the Mat: Building Winners in Life.” “As a member of a prominent American family with wealth,” he wrote, “all my life I have tried to demonstrate—probably because I had to — that I could achieve and win onmy own as thoughmy last name weren’t du Pont.”
browne@washpost.com
JAMESM.NEWMYER,91
A founder, leader of esteemed government, public affairs firm
BY ADAM BERNSTEIN James M. Newmyer, 91, who
helped lead one of Washington’s most venerable public affairs and government relations firms, a low-profile family business whose heavyweight clientele was the envy of many competitors, died Dec. 10 at his home in the District. He had congestive heart failure. Mr. Newmyer worked with his
brother,ArthurNewmyer Jr., and their father to start Newmyer Associates in 1943. The two brothers worked as equal part- ners over the next four decades and made the now-defunct busi- ness one of the city’s most re- spected suppliers of information on political and regulatory news and trends. Their clients — many on the
Fortune 500 list—included Ford, IBM, Exxon, Citibank, AT&T, CBS, Gillette, InternationalNick- el, Consolidated Foods and the credit reporting company Dun & Bradstreet. TheNewmyersneither lobbied
nor generated press releases for clients. Arthur Newmyer Jr. once told The Washington Post, “I think if Ford wants to express a viewaround here, they can do it a hell of a lot better by having Henry Ford do it than me trying to do it.” Instead, Newmyer Associates’
office — for years on K Street — was staffed with many veterans of journalism and government servicewho reported on develop- ments in pension regulations, labor relations, antitrust laws and consumer affairs. The firm provided strategic advice for clients and also coun-
seled executives on their testimo- ny before Congress and regulato- ry agencies. The Newmyer siblings retired
about 20 years ago, and the firm later merged with another con- sultancy. Mr. Newmyer said clients of-
ten asked for seemingly arcane but vital information, and the secret to achieving that goal was cultivating friendships and con- tacts in government andmedia. “There’s no reason you can’t
have it,” he said of the material a client might seek. “It’s not confi- dential. It’s not a disclosure. It’s just that no one else has asked for it. And when you live here and work here as long as we have, no matter how dumb you are, you sort of learn over a period of time where to ask for things.” James Morton Newmyer was
born Nov. 16, 1919, in New Or- leans. His father, Arthur, was a longtime executive for Hearst newspapers. The family settled inWashington in themid-1930s. “Jimmie” Newmyer, as he was
widely known, was a 1937 gradu- ate of the private Sidwell Friends School in the District, where he captained the tennis team and, decades later, chaired its board of trustees. The school’s Newmyer Award honors distinguished vol- untary service at Sidwell. In 1941, he graduated from
Yale University’s Sheffield Scien- tific School, now called Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science.He served in the Navy in the Atlantic and Pacific during WorldWar II. In 1951, he married Elsa Hut-
zler, an heiress of the Hutzler department store family in Balti- more. She died three years later of cancer.
In 1955, he married Virginia
“Ginger” Wilner. Besides his wife, of Washington, survivors include a daughter from his first marriage, Elsa Newmyer of the District; a daughter from his second marriage, Lory Newmyer of Hull, Mass.; and nine grand- children. A son from the second mar-
riage, Robert F. “Bobby” Newmy- er, died in 2005.Hewas a produc- er whose company made films including “Sex, Lies and Video- tape” (1989) and “Training Day” (2001). James Newmyer and his fami-
ly lived near Washington’s Rock Creek Park ina home designed by Hugh Newell Jacobsen. The con- temporary-style house, with a brick facade, tennis court and swimming pool, earned praise from Architectural Record in 1967 as one of the year’s best architect-designed houses. In addition to his volunteer
work at Sidwell, Mr. Newmyer was a past board chairman of Recording for the Blind and Dys- lexic, and served on the board of theWashington Tennis & Educa- tion Foundation. Like the company they ran, the
Newmyers flew below the public radar, but they socialized in prominent circles. James Newmyer was among
the few guests present in 1965 whenHenry Ford II, board chair- man of his family’s car company, married Italian-born socialite and divorcee Cristina Austin in a civil ceremony at a Washington hotel. Ford had been a Newmyer
client since 1945, and it fell toMr. Newmyer to provide details of what the bride and groomwore.
bernsteina@washpost.com
six and spend the rest ofmy time doing genealogical research,” Mr. Reitwiesner told the New York Times in 1983. He did it for fun, receiving no
remuneration for his hours of work. By culling books, newspa- per clippings, census records and the occasional family Bible, he wouldchart the family treesof the influential and prominent in thorough detail. Mr. Reitwiesner, who was 56
when he diedNov. 12 of complica- tions from rectal cancer at the Washington Home hospice in the District, documentedmany of his findings on his Web site. He me- ticulously annotated where the information came from, such as slave shipment schedules, genea- logical registers or baptismal re- ports. During presidential election
cycles,Mr. Reitwiesner traced the lineages of candidates, and his findings often made news. For- mer senator Fred Thompson, a Tennessee Republican, is related to Elvis, he found. Former presi- dent George H.W. Bush’s family tree branched into three separate royal lines. Inone connection,Mr. Reitwiesner said Bush and James A. Baker III, his secretary of state, were distant cousins. “I’ve always been suspicious of
far-out claims of kinship,” Baker wrote in his 2006memoir, “Work Hard, Study . . . and Keep Out of Politics!,” “and there’s no way for
me to judge the accuracy of Reit- wiesner’s work, other than to say that the bottomof his twelve-gen- eration chart of my ancestry is consistent with Baker family re- cords.” When investigating Obama’s background, Mr. Reitwiesner found the future president’s fa- milial ties to a Virginia slavehold- ing family. Mr. Reitwiesner was also an
authority on continental Europe- an ancestry, especially Armenian and Syrian influences in the Ger- man noble houses. His seven-volume “Matrilineal
Descents of the European Royal- ty” has more than 5,500 pages of genealogies, including French and German royal lines. Some of the families he recorded went backtothe turnof the firstmillen- nium. William Addams Reitwiesner
was born in Havre de Grace,Md., onMarch 8, 1954, and grew up in Aberdeen,Md., and Silver Spring. He came to genealogy when he
was 5. His grandfather, a board member of the National Genea- logical Society, would conduct re- search in a narrow, book-filled study at his home in Covington, Va. On visits, William would ex- plore the study, thumbing through the Encyclopaedia Bri- tannica. “I think it was a passion for
facts,” said Gary Roberts, a Bos- ton-based genealogist who co-
wrote “American Ancestors and Cousins of the Princess ofWales” (1984)
withMr.Reitwiesner. Shortly after graduating from
Silver Spring’sMontgomery Blair High School in 1972, Mr. Reitwi- esner joined the Library of Con- gress’s Congressional Research Division as a cart pusher who fetched books for congressional offices and eventually became a computer technician. Sometimes, Mr. Reitwiesner
found that he was related to the subjects he was investigating. Take the case of Reubin Askew, who was governor of Florida in the 1970s. They were both de- scendedfromaBritishimmigrant who settled in Virginia’s Henrico County. He traced his direct family line
back 14 generations to the late 16th century, listing more than 16,000 relatives. One of Mr. Reitwiesner’s dis-
tant ancestors was Edward I of England. Another ancestor was elected to Congress on the Know Nothing ticket, an American na- tivist political movement before the CivilWar, and another branch of Mr. Reitwiesner’s family came from Bavaria in the early 20th century. Though consumed by ge- nealogy,Mr. Reitwiesner had oth- er interests, including contra dancing, a folk dance done in pairs. Survivors include his mother, Homé McAllister Reitwiesner of
KLMNO OBITUARIES
EZ SU
C7
FAMILY PHOTO Robert Addams Reitwiesner was consumed by his research.
Gaithersburg; three brothers,An- drew Reitwiesner of Ellenton, Fla., John Reitwiesner of Freder- icksburg and Henry Reitwiesner of Colorado Springs; a sister,Dor-
othy Reitwiesner of Gaithers- burg; nieces and nephews; and countless distant cousins, many times removed.
smitht@washpost.com
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