Naaman Seigel, 45-year Club member, dies at 94

Naaman Seigle, a former reporter, editor and economic researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture who for 45 years made the National Press Club an important part of his life, died on Aug. 5 in Georgetown University Hospital of respiratory and heart failure. He was 94 and had been hospitalized in July after suffering a fall in his apartment in Southwest D.C.

Naaman, who preferred to be called Seigle because of his unusual first name, enjoyed the comradeship he found at the Club and its Reliable Source bar. "Anytime I want to find him," he told author Adam Langer, "I should come to the (National) Press Club."

Langer and other chroniclers of the World War I veterans' Bonus March on Washington, interviewed Seigle for his eyewitness account of the disbandment of the marcher's camp by the U.S. Army under Gen. Douglas MacArthur on July 28, 1932. Only seven at the time, Seigle and his father, a D.C. pharmacist, were tear-gassed while shopping downtown when troops dispersed the marchers who were demanding promised bonuses for their World War I service. He later viewed with dismay the destruction of their campgrounds near his home in Anacostia.

A 1946 graduate of Anacostia High School, Seigle earned a degree in political science from Emory & Henry College in Emory, Va. He worked as a regional reporter before becoming a writer and researcher for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service.

Club member and "White House Chronicle" producer and co-host Linda Gasparello met Seigle when she edited Llewellyn King's newsletter Food and Drink Daily. "I loved calling him, for example, about the economic impacts of a farm bills," she said.

"Seigle knew his job and, even better, he knew mine because he had been a regional newspaper reporter. When the newsletter folded the early 1990s, Seigle lamented, 'Now what am I going to read?'"

Gasparello recalls that Seigle, who wore thick eyeglasses, "endured years of painful eye treatments at the National Institutes of Health with great and quiet dignity." She said he loved to talk about politics and history, particularly the history of his native Washington.