Byrd, Bookman celebrate longest Club tenures -- 73 years

Seen in hindsight, 1938 seems a very, very long time ago. German troops annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia that year, even as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain promised "peace in our time."

Thornton Wilder's classic "Our Town" premiered on Broadway, Walt Disney's ground-breaking "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" enthralled movie audiences and Orson Welles' infamous broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" terrified radio listeners.

Oil was discovered for the first time in Saudi Arabia in 1938, the minimum wage was
introduced in the United States, and the 75th and last reunion of veterans of the Battle of Gettysburg was held.

In Washington, the National Press Club marked -- without fanfare --the 30th anniversary of its founding that year. The news media's importance and influence were rapidly expanding, along with concern about the lingering Depression and the threat of a new global war.

Among those who joined the still relatively new Press Club in 1938 -- 73 years ago -- were the new editor and publisher of The Winchester (Va.) Star and a young reporter for The Washington Post.

Today, those two men -- Harry Flood Byrd, Jr. and George B. Bookman, respectively -- are the Club's longest serving members, still on the rolls after almost three quarters of a century. Both will celebrate their 97th birthdays in December and both will be recognized in absentia when the Club's Silver Owls gather for their fall "hoot" at
noon on Saturday, Nov. 5.

Byrd, who later served 18 years as a U.S. senator from Virginia, took note of his being the Club's most senior member in a recent letter to Club President Mark Hamrick.

He said his recognition of that status was "brought to mind" by reading the fall edition of the "Who's Hoot" newsletter.

"It's a fine club," wrote Byrd, who joined the organization on Feb. 1, 1938.

Educated at the Virginia Military Academy and the University of Virginia, Byrd mixed journalism and politics throughout his career. He remained chairman of the board of
The Winchester Star until 1990, seven years after leaving the Senate, and he only stepped down as publisher of The Daily News-Record in Harrisonville, Va., in 2001. He still lives in Winchester.

Bookman, who joined the Club in November 1938, only some nine-plus months after Byrd, is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Haverford College who was a Washington Post reporter before World War II.

After the conflict ended, he was a writer and reporter in Washington and the Near East for what became U.S. News & World Report and later a prominent economics and business correspondent for Time magazine in Washington and New York.

Bookman, who lives in retirement in New York City, was among the regular panelists in the first years of NBC's "Meet the Press" in the 1950s.