Writer

Mary-Virginia Allen Geyelin, 95, of Villanova, a society writer for the Evening Bulletin and a travel agent, died Tuesday at her home. Mrs. Geyelin was born into the society she chronicled. She graduated from Agnes Irwin School in 1924, and that year made her debut at a tea in her home in Rittenhouse Square and at a dance given by her parents at the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. A lifelong tennis player, she won the women's doubles tennis championship at the Penn Athletic Club in 1931 and also won tennis tournaments at Mount Desert Island in Maine, where her family summered every year.

Greg Walter, an award-winning investigative reporter whose stories frequently churned up controversey and indictments in their wake, died yesterday of an apparent heart attack. He was 55 and lived in Penobscot, Maine. A talented writer and relentless investigator, Walter was a major player in the world of Philadelphia journalism in the 1960s and 1970s. His frontal assaults on powerful individuals and institutions began in the late 1960s, when newspapers in Philadelphia showed little substantial commitment or continuing interest in investigative reporting.

Raymond E. Kelly, a premier sports writer for the defunct Evening Bulletin whose superior knowledge of baseball set him apart from most of his contemporaries, died yesterday of a heart attack. He was 74 and lived in Northeast Philadelphia. Kelly worked for the Bulletin for 50 years, retiring in 1979. He made it to the seventh grade before hard times in the Kellys' Kensington household forced him to quit school and go to work. He landed a job as a copy boy on the Bulletin and tried to absorb everything he could.

Edward Kean, 85, primary writer for The Howdy Doody Show and credited with creating the exclamation "Kowabunga!," 85, has died. Mr. Kean also wrote the theme song to which millions of children sang along each week during the show's run on NBC from 1947 to 1960. Family friend Del Reddy said Monday that Mr. Kean died Aug. 13 at a nursing-care facility in West Bloomfield Township, Mich., from complications of emphysema. Reddy said the New York native wrote the song "It's Howdy Doody Time," sung during the show's opening.

Hal Kanter, 92, an Emmy-winning comedy master who wrote for Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, directed Elvis Presley in Loving You , and created Diahann Carroll's groundbreaking TV sitcom, died Sunday from pneumonia complications at Encino Hospital in California. His three Emmys included back-to-back wins for 1991-92 as a writer for the Oscars, a ceremony on which he contributed material on 32 separate shows over the decades. He also won an Emmy in 1955 for The George Gobel Show and received four other nominations, including one as executive producer of All in the Family in 1976 and one for outstanding comedy series for Carroll's Julia in 1969.

WEST BLOOMFIELD, Mich. - Edward Kean, chief writer for TV's old "Howdy Doody Show," has died at age 85, a family friend said yesterday. Kean was the primary writer for the show and penned the theme song to which millions of American children sang along each week during the show's run on NBC from 1947 to 1960. Family friend Del Reddy said yesterday that Kean died Aug. 13 at a nursing-care facility in Oakland County's West Bloomfield Township from complications of emphysema. Reddy said the New York City native wrote the song "It's Howdy Doody Time," which was sung during the show's opening.

'I'm in a one-day-at-a-time mode for most things right now. " Ayana Mathis might well be. Recently the Philly-born, Brooklyn-based Mathis, 39, learned that The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Alfred A. Knopf, $24.95), her first novel, the first piece of substantial fiction she'd ever published, had been chosen by Oprah Winfrey, goddess of all media, for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. Mathis will read at the Free Library of Philadelphia at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 24. It's free. On vacation in Paris, "I picked up the phone," says Mathis, "and there she was at the other end of the line.

RE letter-writer Jim Crown on "slackers": It's OK to be critical of adults who aren't productive members of society, but don't attack our children. How dare you have the audacity to say that children "who don't care about school not attend"? Children's cognitive abilities at birth are limited. They have to be nurtured in order to blossom. If they aren't given the proper guidance, they'll eventually become a menace to society. You talk about the problem but have no desire to be a part of the solution.

Frank Pierson, 87, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon and Cool Hand Luke, died of natural causes Monday in Los Angeles after a short illness. Mr. Pierson won an Academy Award for writing 1975's Dog Day Afternoon and was nominated for his screenplays for Cool Hand Luke and Cat Ballou. He also wrote and directed 1976's A Star Is Born. Perhaps his most famous line was from Cool Hand Luke : "What we've got here is failure to communicate," ranked No. 11 on the American Film Institute's list of Hollywood's 100 most memorable quotes.

Boris N. Strugatsky, 79, a prolific writer who used the genre of science fiction to voice criticisms of Soviet life that would have been unthinkable in other literary forms, died Nov. 19 in St. Petersburg. The cause was heart failure, his biographer, Boris Vishnevsky, said. Employed as an astronomer at a state observatory, Mr. Strugatsky began collaborating on science fiction with his older brother, Arkady, in 1956. Together they produced rich, often bleak allegorical landscapes that ranged from a dysfunctional institute for the research of magic in Mondays Begin on Saturday to a postapocalyptic "zone" littered with deadly extraterrestrial objects in Roadside Picnic , adapted for Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky's revered 1979 film.