From Newsgroup: alt.obituaries
On 2/16/2026 2:16 PM, Louis Epstein wrote:
Former Congressman Richard Ottinger,born January 27th 1929,
died February 16th 2026 according to local media.
I was a child when he showed up at a rally my family hosted
for his reelection campaign in 1968...we elected him (a
Democrat) only for the district lines to be changed in
1970 when we elected John Dow (1905-2003) to succeed the
Republican we'd been handed,and then again in 1972 to
give us the third Hamilton Fish(1926-1996) who
represented a district to the north of us,and
beat off all Democratic challengers until retiring
in 1994...we did not elect another Democrat to the House
until John Hall in 2006,after his defeat by Nan Hayworth
in 2010,we eventually replaced her with Sean Patrick
Maloney,but another redistricting gave us Mike Lawler,
who I am hoping will lose to a Democrat this year.
After losing a U.S. Senate race in 1970 Ottinger won
a different House seat in 1974 and served for another
10 years but we remained in Fish country.
I was 14 when I met him at one of his campaign stops
for that 1970 Senate race, not near our Westchester
home (of now 67-1/2 years) but up at the Concord Hotel
in the Catskills where I was spending the summer.
With all the subsequent remappings and renumberings
I'm not sure which House district we were in in the
60s (we're now in the 16th) but he must have been
representing us then since his name was familiar to
me and that's why I went to see him. If I go dig
through the boxes in the bottom of my closet I
probably still have at least one of the buttons from
that and/or another of his campaigns. (I now have
to go upstairs and report this news to my father--
who it turns out was born a month after Ottinger and
IYH will be 97 on Feb 28--since it won't hit the
printed NYTimes until tomorrow.)
--- Synchronet 3.21b-Linux NewsLink 1.2