Bulletin

An old familiar name reappeared on some city newsstands yesterday. The Bulletin's logo in its familiar Old English typeface graced the front of the Philadelphia Press and Bulletin, a paper launched by a former Bulletin staffer who says he will publish a weekly, and eventually daily, newspaper, despite his shoestring budget and tiny staff. Raymond Berens, editor and publisher of the paper and the writer of many of its stories, said he has no financiers behind him and is bankrolling the venture himself.

When we first saw the urgent "PM-TV-CBS-CHUNG" on the Associated Press wire, we thought, Oh, my God. She's announcing her pregnancy. She got the network to release the news for her. Clearly, Connie Chung has had an urgent attitude toward having a baby for years. She and Maury Povich have done shows on it, and detailed the anguish of fertility testing for anyone who had the misfortune to tune in. Why, this month in Good Housekeeping magazine, she confides that she's still trying - at almost 47. Hope does spring eternal.

IT WOULD BE the final issue of a newspaper that had been a Philadelphia tradition for almost 135 years. Instead of the usual series of editions all day long, the newspaper would "lift" only once, just to correct or update wherever needed. The day before, I was one of the editors preparing that final edition of the Bulletin. Across the top of Page 1 was what we called a hammer head: Goodby, in big black letters, followed, in somewhat smaller type, by After 134 years, a Philadelphia voice is silent.

Preservationists who fought to save the former home of The Evening Bulletin were angered yesterday when they learned that the historically certified building at Juniper and Filbert streets had been demolished in 1985 for nothing. "It certainly saddens those of us who were working so hard to save it," said architect and preservationist Gray Smith, after learning the city had dropped its plans to build a criminal justice center complex at the site. Mary Lou McFarland, executive director of the Preservation Coalition of Greater Philadelphia said, "I hate to say that we told you so, but we did. "That, and other buildings on that block, shouldn't have been torn down," McFarland said.

IWANT TO add my name to the list of people who will vote against President Bush. He has done absolutely nothing but send this country backward in terms of economic stimulus, job creation and worldwide negativity. If this is the ideal leader, then I must be missing something. He did not support the extension of the assault-weapons ban, which is an affront to police officers and their families. Though he's a wartime non-duty respondent, he cast a pall over Sen. Kerry's war record.

Robert E. Lee Taylor Jr., 96, of Bryn Mawr, a former publisher of the Bulletin and a longtime champion of a free press, died Thursday at his home. Born in Norfolk, Va., and raised in Baltimore, Mr. Taylor graduated from Princeton University in 1935, and went to work for his uncle Robert McLean, then publisher of the newspaper. Mr. Taylor worked in circulation and then joined the Navy, where he was captain of a submarine chaser in the Pacific through much of World War II. Returning to the Bulletin, he rose quickly through the ranks on the business side.

The corner bar, with its promise of camaraderie and the sharing of advice and sob stories, has a new competitor - the personal computer. Can this be true? Can the PC, with its bleary array of accounting programs and beeping high-tech games to play in isolation, really bring people together? You bet. And the price of this high-tech watering hole is often less than the cost of a few beers on a Friday night. Throughout the world, PC enthusiasts - and there are many - have made it their mission to provide computer-age versions of the conversation salon.

Miles Cunningham, 59, who was an award-winning reporter and editor at the Bulletin, Gannett News Service and the Washington Times, died Monday night in his home in Alexandria, Va., after a three-year bout with stomach cancer. At the time of his death, Mr. Cunningham was employed at Insight magazine in Washington. Born in South Dakota, Mr. Cunningham grew up in Arlington, Va., where he graduated from Washington and Lee High School; in 1955, he earned a journalism degree from the University of Tennessee.

Francis J. Burke, 84, of Drexel Hill, who worked as a reporter for the Bulletin, International News Service and Yank magazine during World War II, died of kidney failure May 16 at Delaware County Memorial Hospital. Mr. Burke spent 46 years as a journalist, and friends were not surprised by his choice of careers. His father, Stephen, had been the city editor of the Philadelphia Record. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1936 from St. Joseph's College, Mr. Burke joined the Philadelphia office of INS, the news service started by publisher William Randolph Hearst to compete with the Associated Press.

T. Bayard Brunt Jr., 95, the Bulletin rewrite man whose 1981 class-action lawsuit prevented the last owner of the newspaper from using some of its employees' pension funds for its own purposes, died Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Samaritan Hospice in Marlton. On Sept. 14, 1983, U.S. District Judge John B. Hannum approved a $1.2 million settlement for 1,500 former Bulletin employees who had sued to recapture up to $2 million in overfinancing of their pension plan. The result of the suit was a windfall, making reporters, photographers, editors, and others eligible for payments ranging from $200 to $4,300, depending on seniority, The Inquirer reported at the time.

As a graphic designer, Mike Dew is inspired by what he sees - especially while tooling around on the Internet. "I come across things that I want to cook, or stuff for my apartment, or things for work like type, design, architecture. " Now, it all gets tacked on his Pinterest page. Get ready to embrace the newest social media darling - because along with your Facebook wall, Twitter handle, and LinkedIn profile, now you must have a Pinterest page. That is, if you are the creative, visual type.

T. Bayard Brunt Jr., 95, the Bulletin rewrite man whose 1981 class-action lawsuit prevented the last owner of the newspaper from using some of its employees' pension funds for its own purposes, died Tuesday, Feb. 28, at Samaritan Hospice in Marlton. On Sept. 14, 1983, U.S. District Judge John B. Hannum approved a $1.2 million settlement for 1,500 former Bulletin employees who had sued to recapture up to $2 million in overfinancing of their pension plan. The result of the suit was a windfall, making reporters, photographers, editors, and others eligible for payments ranging from $200 to $4,300, depending on seniority, The Inquirer reported at the time.

T. BAYARD Brunt Jr., 95, the Philadelphia Bulletin rewrite man whose 1981 class-action lawsuit prevented the last owner of the newspaper from using some of its employees' pension funds for its own purposes, died Tuesday at Samaritan Hospice, in Marlton N.J. On Sept. 14, 1983, U.S. District Judge John B. Hannum approved a $1.2 million settlement for 1,500 former Bulletin employees who had sued to recapture up to $2 million in overfinancing of their pension plan. The Bulletin closed in January 1982.

HARRY TOLAND was a most unlikely labor reporter. Chestnut Hill born and bred, Episcopal Academy, Yale University English major. But when Stanley Thompson, the Evening Bulletin 's city editor, broached the idea to him on, oddly enough, Groundhog Day in 1952, Harry mumbled an uncertain yes. Tall and gangly, impeccably mannered and gracious, Harry was no Vic Riesel, the labor activist and columnist. Nobody was going to throw acid in his face. Besides, this was Philadelphia.

In the late 1960s, Nessa Forman would show up at 7 a.m. in the composing room of the Evening Bulletin, the only woman there. As the first-edition deadline neared, she directed the men who moved columns of metal type into the forms that produced that day's feature pages. Though not long out of graduate school, Ms. Forman was already respected. On Saturday night, Ms. Forman, 68, vice president of corporate communications and public affairs at WHYY Inc. from February 1983 to July 2007 and arts and leisure editor of the Bulletin when it closed in January 1982, died of pancreatic cancer at Penn Hospice at Rittenhouse.

IT WAS no longer true that nearly everyone read the Bulletin. The famous slogan - for many years displayed in New Yorker cartoons and elsewhere - gave way to two major forces: the ascendancy of the competition and the arrival of TV news. "To this day, I feel we really did a fine job, and gave the public a straight story," former publisher and editor William L. McLean III said in an interview when the Bulletin closed in January 1982. "That's the greatest source of satisfaction I have.

William L. McLean III, 83, of Wynnewood, the last of his family to run the Bulletin before it was sold in April 1980 and closed in January 1982, died of kidney failure Saturday, Aug. 27, at Lankenau Hospital. Mr. McLean was editor and publisher of the newspaper from 1975 to 1980. His grandfather, William L. McLean, bought the Evening Bulletin in 1895, when it was the smallest of the city's 13 newspapers. By the 1950s, it was the largest-circulation afternoon newspaper in the nation.

Michael B. Coakley III, 69, of Blackwood, a throwback to the nights of competitive newspaper journalism at the Evening Bulletin and later at The Inquirer, died of complications of Alzheimer's disease Tuesday, July 26, at his home. If any night reporters, phoning in stories to the city desk, uttered that old cliché, "Hello, sweetie, gimme rewrite," they often got Mike Coakley. And what they got in the 1970s and 1980s was an echo of an even earlier time, before college graduates became the norm instead of high school-educated reporters.

Andrea Mitchell, now chief foreign-affairs correspondent for NBC News, walked into the Philadelphia City Hall newsroom in the 1960s on the first day of her first job as a reporter for KYW-AM. The only woman in the room. A minnow among barracudas. Except for Philadelphia Daily News reporter Bill Fidati. "He reached out and mentored me," Mitchell said in a Wednesday phone interview. "He really made it acceptable for many of the other veteran male reporters to accept a young, eager, but inexperienced woman.