Martin Tolchin, 93, Dies; Times Reporter Was a Founder of The Hill

Martin Tolchin was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 20, 1928. He attended the University of Utah, earned a law degree from New York Law School and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War.

The Times hired him as a copy boy in 1954, and his first reporting assignment was for what was then known as the women’s page. On the metropolitan desk in later years, his reporting on problems in New York City’s hospital system led to investigations and several criminal convictions, and he covered local politics and was City Hall bureau chief.

Mr. Tolchin was transferred to the Washington bureau in 1973. Over two decades his assignments in the capital included covering President Jimmy Carter’s White House.

The books he and his wife wrote, starting in the 1970s, include “To the Victor: Political Patronage From the Clubhouse to the White House” (1971), “Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate” (1983), and “Glass Houses: Congressional Ethics and the Politics of Venom” (2001).

A memoir, “Politics, Journalism and the Way Things Were: My Life at The Times, The Hill and Politico,” was published in 2019.

In addition to Ms. Rosenfeld, Mr. Tolchin is survived by a daughter, Kay Rex Tolchin, and a grandson. A son, Charlie, died of cystic fibrosis in 2003 at 34.

Mr. Tolchin had the distinction of being one of the few reporters to be credited as the source of an urban legend. He was a young member of The Times’s metropolitan staff when, in 1966, exactly nine months after the great Northeastern blackout of November 1965, he began phoning hospital maternity wards around New York City, several of which said they had experienced a sudden uptick in births.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/17/business/media/martin-tolchin-dead.html