Washington-area obituaries of note - The Washington Post

Obituaries of residents from the District, Maryland and Northern Virginia.

Shirlee Settles Franklin, school speech therapist

Shirlee Settles Franklin, 79, a speech and hearing therapist for D.C. public schools for more than three decades, died Dec. 22 at her home in Burtonsville, Md. The cause was complications from lung cancer, said a daughter, Kathleen Franklin.

Mrs. Franklin was born Shirlee Settles in Greenwood, S.C., and grew up in Washington. The elementary schools she worked at included Bruce-Monroe, Takoma and Shepherd. After her retirement in the early 2000s, she taught speech skills at group homes for the developmentally disabled in Washington and Maryland. She belonged to Shiloh Baptist Church in the District.

Dorothy Lipka, volunteer nurse

Dorothy Lipka, 93, a registered nurse who provided in-home hospice care as a volunteer in the Washington area in the 1990s, died Dec. 17 at a hospice center in Harwood, Md. The cause was pneumonia and lung failure, said a son, Peter Lipka.

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Mrs. Lipka, a Temple Hills, Md., resident, was born Dorothy Boyd in Barrie, Ontario. She was a nurse in the Canadian armed forces during World War II and settled in the Washington area in 1973. She volunteered with Meals on Wheels and at the Oxon Hill Food Pantry in the Temple Hills area.

Notable deaths of 2015 and 2016

A look at those who have died.

Arthur ‘Jay’ Phelan, S&L executive

Arthur “Jay” Phelan, 81, former president and board chairman of Government Services Savings & Loan, who also was an art collector and real estate investor, died Dec. 9 at a hospice center in Rockville, Md. The cause was complications after a heart attack, said a daughter, Anna Phelan.

Mr. Phelan was born in Washington and grew up in Chevy Chase, Md., where he lived in the same house for 80 years until his death. He joined the Bethesda, Md.-based savings and loan in the mid-1960s and resigned in 1978. Since then, he had operated three businesses of his own, Phelan & Co.: Financial Consultant; Phelan & Co.: Art Collector; and Phelan & Co.: Real Estate Investor. He was a member of the Metropolitan Club and the Chevy Chase Club, and he was one of the early organizers of the Strathmore Hall arts center in North Bethesda.

Elizabeth Rock ‘Betty’ Higbie, Junior League member

Elizabeth Rock “Betty” Higbie, 96, a member of the Junior League in Washington who also was an area real estate agent in the 1960s and 1970s, died Dec. 18 at an assisted-living center in Issaquah, Wash. The cause was lung cancer, said a son, Bobby Rock.

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Mrs. Higbie was born Elizabeth Blood in Exeter, N.H., and grew up in Manchester, N.H. She settled in the Washington area in 1952. She was a member of St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Bethesda, Md., and Chevy Chase Country Club, and she did volunteer work at the private Potomac School in McLean, Va., and St. Albans School in Washington. A former Bethesda resident, he spent most of the past 30 years in retirement communities in South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.

Thaddeus A. ‘Ted’ Ripa, State Department Officer

Thaddeus A. “Ted” Ripa, 86, a a retired State Department officer who was senior policy adviser in the Bureau of Consular Affairs and director of the systems staff in the foreign and domestic divisions, died Dec. 8 at his home in Gaithersburg, Md. The cause was heart and circulatory ailments, said his wife, Charlotte Ripa.

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Mr. Ripa was born in Warsaw. He came to the United States at 10 and settled with his parents in Chicago. He retired in 1994 after 27 years of federal service, 15 years of which were with the State Department. Earlier, he was a project manager with the Office of Management and Budget. He relocated to the Washington area in 1971 after serving as a postal official in the Midwest, and he worked for what then was the Department of Health, Education and Welfare before joining OMB.

Geza Cseri, civil engineer

Geza Cseri, 79, a civil engineer who retired in 2005 after nearly four decades with the Army Materiel Command, died Dec. 10 at a hospital in Fairfax County. The cause was lymphoma, said a daughter, Kathy Bishop.

Mr. Cseri, a resident of McLean, Va., was born in Cegled, Hungary. He came to the United States in the early 1950s. He became a U.S. citizen, served in the Army and worked on the Minuteman missile project before settling in the Washington area in 1967. With the Army Materiel Command, he had been a science adviser to the U.S. European Command in Germany in the late 1990s and early 2000s. He belonged to the American Hungarian Federation.

Tain Pendleton Tompkins, Foreign Service officer

Tain Pendleton Tompkins, 72, a 30-year veteran of the Foreign Service who was chief of the economics sections at the U.S. embassies in Beirut and Harare, Zimbabwe, died Jan. 3 at his home in McLean, Va. The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Grace Muller Tompkins.

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Mr. Tompkins was born in Philadelphia and joined the Foreign Service in 1969. He was a cease-fire observer during the Vietnam War and later was an economic counselor in Canberra, Australia, and Tel Aviv. In retirement, he founded Pendleton Investments, an investment advisory firm in McLean. He received several State Department honors and belonged to the Johns Hopkins University Alumni Council and was a member of the Army and Navy Club and the Foreign Policy Discussion Group, both in Washington.

Pamela Bigart, procurement policy expert

Pamela Bigart, 67, a procurement policy expert who specialized in international development during a 40-year career, died Jan. 6 at her home in McLean, Va. The cause was ovarian cancer, said her husband, Jim Bigart.

Mrs. Bigart was born Pamela Falls in Spokane, Wash. She began her procurement career in the mid-1970s with the Naval Sea Systems Command. During her husband’s Foreign Service career, she worked with the U.N. Industrial Development Organization in Vienna, the U.S. Agency for International Development in Jakarta and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. She retired from the World Bank in 2010 and later did consulting work, most recently with the African Development Bank.

Ann D. Miller, administrative assistant

Ann D. Miller, 84, an administrative assistant who retired in 1993 from what is now the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, died Jan. 4 at a nursing home in Georgetown, Tex. The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said a daughter, Susan Akard.

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Mrs. Miller, a former Herndon, Va., resident, was born Ann Dolores Laughlin in Washington. She began her career in 1950 with the FBI and later worked at the Library of Congress and the Naval Facilities Engineering Command and as a procurement clerk for the General Services Administration. She moved to Texas in 2008.

Sally Bucklee,volunteer

Sally Bucklee, 85, who advocated an increased role for women in the Episcopal Church as a member of diocesan and national church committees from the late 1960s through the 1980s, died Jan. 8 at a retirement community in Mitchellville, Md. The cause was a bone marrow ailment, said a son, Andrew Bucklee.

Ms. Bucklee was born Sally Mitchell in Auburn, N.Y. She moved to Laurel, Md., her home for the next 40 years, about 1960, and volunteered at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Laurel.

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In the late 1960s, she became president of Episcopal Church Women, a diocesan organization that advocated the ordination of women in the Episcopal priesthood. She later helped form the national Episcopal Women’s Caucus and served as its president. She was an executive assistant at the Health Department in Prince George’s County, Md., from about 1970 until her retirement in the mid-1980s.

Frederick W. Joyce,high school coach

Frederick W. Joyce, 74, who from 1966 until his retirement in 2007 taught physical education and coached track and field and football at Gaithersburg High School in Gaithersburg, Md., died Jan. 9 at a retirement community in Gaithersburg. The cause was a heart ailment and Alzheimer’s disease, said a son, Doug Joyce.

Mr. Joyce was born in Cumberland, Md., and played football for the University of Maryland. He served as head coach of the Gaithersburg High track and field team from about 1975 to 1985, and as an assistant coach for the team until his retirement. He served as defensive coordinator for the football team until 2001. In retirement, he volunteered as a senior adviser to the football team at Northwest High School in Germantown, Md.

Cleopatra Curtis, restaurant owner

Cleopatra Curtis, 87, who ran Cleo’s Motel and Restaurant, one of the first racially integrated restaurants in Upper Marlboro, Md., from 1953 until her retirement in 2005, died Dec. 23 at a hospital in Clinton, Md. The cause was congestive heart failure, said a niece, Gabriella Teh.

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Ms. Curtis was born and lived in Upper Marlboro. In 1969, she added a 12-unit motel to her soul food restaurant, becoming one of the few motels along Route 301 that accepted blacks at the time.

The restaurant “evolved into a local meeting place, where politics was often discussed,” The Post wrote in 1989. The regulars included Parris N. Glendening, then the Prince George’s county executive and later Maryland governor, and Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., president of the Maryland Senate. Ms. Curtis volunteered and sang in the choir at St. Mary of the Assumption Catholic Church in Upper Marlboro.

Philip N. Davison Jr., private investigator

Philip N. Davison Jr., 95, a private investigator in the Washington area for more than five decades before his retirement in 2004, died Dec. 27 at a nursing home in Harrisonburg, Va. The cause was kidney failure, said a daughter, Billie Bready.

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Mr. Davison was born in Washington and served in the Marine Corps and the Marine Corps Reserve in the 1930s and ’40s. He worked with firms including Bradford Investigation Service before co-owning and operating Van Will Associates in Silver Spring, Md., in the 1960s, and he later worked with International Investigations and Joan M. Beach Ltd. He was a longtime Montgomery County resident and helped found the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad, his daughter said. He moved to Massanutten, Va., in 2006.

Betty Than Tin, reading specialist

Betty Than Tin, 74, a Prince George’s County public schools reading specialist for 35 years before her retirement in 2006, died Jan. 9 at an assisted-living center in Silver Spring, Md. The cause was complications from dementia, said a daughter, Annie Tin.

Mrs. Tin was born in Rangoon during the Japanese occupation of Burma in World War II. She was raised by her mother with the help of Seventh-day Adventist missionaries and received the name Betty Than as a young child.

She settled in the Washington area in the mid-1960s, becoming a U.S. citizen, and she taught at the Francis T. Evans, Thomas Claggett, Carole Highlands and Ardmore elementary schools. Mrs. Than belonged to Burnt Mills Seventh-day Adventist Church in Silver Spring, where she lived. She did missionary work in Burma, South Korea and Japan, and she organized relief efforts for Burmese refugees in the Washington area.

Joseph S. Handler, research scientist

Joseph S. Handler, 86, a research scientist at the National Institutes of Health from 1960 to 1988 who then was director of nephrology at the Johns Hopkins University medical school in Baltimore for 15 years, died Dec. 20 at his winter home in Miami Beach, Fla. The cause was cancer, said his wife, Joan de Pontet.

Dr. Handler, a Washington resident, was born in the Bronx. His research specialty was understanding the way kidneys and other organs function. His avocations included playing tennis and collecting Asian art. At 74, he took up playing the cello, which he practiced almost daily.

— From staff reports

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