March 29, 2024

Marcia Chambers, 78, Who Exposed Discrimination in Golf, Dies

Early on, she spotted a book in her apartment about the Elizabethan stage by E. K. Chambers and adopted the surname legally.

Ms. Chambers was hired by The Associated Press in 1971. On one of her first days there, she covered the attempted assassination of the reputed Brooklyn Mafia boss Joseph A. Colombo Sr., who was gunned down at a rally in Columbus Circle in Manhattan. (He died in 1978.)

At The Times, which hired her in 1973, her beats included politics, education and federal and state courts. She was part of the reporting team on the Son of Sam serial-killer case, and she covered the trials of Bill and Emily Harris, who kidnapped the heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974, and John N. Mitchell and Maurice Stans, two former members of President Richard M. Nixon’s cabinet, on criminal conspiracy charges.

She worked out of the Times’s Los Angeles bureau for two years before leaving in 1987 to write a column for The National Law Journal. She went on to pursue a master’s degree in the study of law at Yale Law School, where she met her husband, Stanton Wheeler, who taught there.

She returned to writing for The Times in the 1990s as a freelance journalist, contributing articles about golf and issues in sports law.

Ms. Chambers is survived by her sister, Janice Kabel, a retired lawyer; two stepsons, Warren and Steven Wheeler; and five step-grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007.

Over the last 12 years, Ms. Chambers worked for The Branford Eagle, a digital-only news outlet in Connecticut, as the editor and a reporter. She wrote about politics, zoning board meetings and flower shows in Branford, a shoreline town just east of New Haven. She also lived there.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/obituaries/marcia-chambers-78-who-exposed-discrimination-in-golf-dies.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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