Katharine

Katharine Eareckson Latrobe, a homemaker and resident of Lutherville for nearly half a century, died Monday of congestive heart failure at the Wesley Home in Baltimore. She was 83. Katharine Dudley Eareckson was born and raised in Baltimore and was a 1938 graduate of Western High School. Her Eareckson ancestors emigrated from Sweden in 1645. In 1938, she married Ferdinand Claiborne Latrobe III, who headed a construction company and was a descendant of seven-term Baltimore Mayor Ferdinand C. Latrobe.

Katharine Hepburn, who died yesterday at age 96 in her Old Saybrook, Conn., home, won four Academy Awards and held the record for Oscar nominations with 12 until Meryl Streep reached 13 last year. No other movie star, male or female, made so many different roles her own - and made them seem not just her own, but ours, as part of American culture. Her achievement is even more astonishing because she was a natural aristocrat in the rough and tumble of the movies. With her slashing figure, bone structure and voice, Ms. Hepburn could have become a caricature of "class."

On April 4, 2003, KATHARINE M. (nee Neuschaefer); beloved wife of Robert L. Skillman, Jr.; devoted mother of Elizabeth Taylor, Robert L. Skillman III, Katharine Sindall, Richard Skillman and Karen Goetz; dear sister of Patricia Petrik. Also survived by twelve grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and numerous cousins, family and friends. Relatives and friends may gather at Miller-Dippel Funeral Home, Inc., 6415 Belair Road, on Sunday and Monday 3 to 5 and 7 to 9 P.M., where a Christian Wake Service will be held on Monday at 8:30 P.M. Mass of Christian Burial will be celebrated at St. Matthew Church on Tuesday at 10 A.M. Interment Parkwood Cemetery.

Katharine Merryman, an energetic horse trainer who raised thoroughbreds and was a member of a well-known Maryland family, died Friday at her Sparks farm of Alzheimer's disease. She was 79 and had lived 55 years at the farm, known as The Orebanks. Born Katharine Lee Warfield, she was the oldest of five children born into a prominent family that lived on a 3,000-acre estate in the Woodbine section of western Howard County. Known as Oakdale, the farm had been in the Warfield family for generations.

Spencer Carter, co-owner of a downtown Baltimore insurance firm, died Friday at St. Joseph Medical Center of complications after surgery. The Roland Park resident was 78. Mr. Carter retired in 1990 as president of the family-owned insurance firm, Mason & Carter, on South Street. He had joined the firm in 1952. Born in Baltimore and raised on Calvert Street in Charles Village, he was a 1941 graduate of McDonogh School. After studying agriculture at Cornell University, he received a degree from the University of Maryland in College Park.

The Simian Line Rated R (profanity, sexuality) SUN SCORE *** The curious title of Linda Yellen's The Simian Line, a blithe but tart romantic comedy with a supernatural twist, refers to what the dithery psychic Arnita (Tyne Daly) discovers when she reads the palm of her elegant neighbor Katharine (Lynn Redgrave). The line suggests that Katharine's heart and head are "tied up together" so that her head short-circuits the promptings of her heart. It is a painfully accurate reading of Katharine, a lovely, radiant woman who lives in a splendid turn-of-the-20th-century house on the promenade in Weehawken, N.J., which has a glorious view of the Manhattan skyline across the Hudson River.

WASHINGTON - Katharine Graham used to say she liked to "turn out the town" when she threw one of her fabulous parties at her Georgetown mansion. Yesterday's monumental funeral for the publishing legend, who died last week at age 84, turned out not only the town - her town - but many of those who have powered the nation for the last half-century. Among the more than 3,000 people who filled Washington National Cathedral were luminaries from the media, politics and government, business, the arts - glittering testimony to the rarefied circles in which Mrs. Graham traveled and the vast, worldwide network of friends she built along the way. Most of those who attended, including hundreds of employees from her newspaper, The Washington Post, waited in the sweltering heat for the doors to open, forming lines that snaked around the cathedral grounds.

BEFORE BEING HIRED by the Washington Post in early 1969 to write editorials and columns, I was asked to meet with Katharine Graham, the publisher. We talked mostly about writing. She had read some of my articles in The New Republic, then a liberal magazine, and ones I had free-lanced for the Post. She gave no hint of her political bents, nor made any suggestion that she was or would be a publisher hovering over the printed views of her columnists. Her sole, and understated, request of me was to write well and argue forcefully.

U.S. NEWSPAPERS are better and stronger because of what Katharine M. Graham did at the Washington Post. Her death at 84 deprives the industry of a giant. The core of her achievement was in three gut-wrenching, high-risk decisions made from 1971 to 1975. In the first, she agreed over legal advice that the Post would print the Pentagon Papers, prepared from government documents detailing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, after the New York Times was enjoined from doing so. Other papers followed, and the precedent of prior censorship was undone.

KATHARINE Graham, not Bob Woodward and not Carl Bern- stein, was the patron saint of a generation of women journalists. For those of us who entered this male-dominated field in the early 1970s, the publisher of The Washington Post, not the scruffy police reporters and not their cuff-shooting boss, Ben Bradlee, was the role model, the one worthy of emulation. It was Mrs. Graham, who died yesterday at the age of 84, who gave the order to defy the courts and print the Pentagon Papers, the secret chronicle of the Vietnam War. And it was her unwavering support for her editors and reporters that allowed them to pursue a "third-rate burglary" at the Watergate hotel to the highest reaches of government.