Sally Reston, 89; Journalist, Widow of N.Y. Times Columnist

Sally Reston, a writer, photographer and publisher who was the widow of New York Times columnist and Washington bureau chief James B. “Scotty” Reston, died of brain cancer Saturday at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 89.

The daughter of a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, she was born Sarah Jane Fulton in Sycamore, Ill. She met her future husband when they were students at the University of Illinois.

In his autobiography, “Deadline,” her husband described how they met on a double date with his fraternity brother, Freddie Lindall. But Scotty Reston was paired with the other girl.

“By the end of the first Coke, I could tell we had the wrong partners,” he wrote. “After the melted-cheese sandwiches, I had reached the firm conclusion that Sally Fulton was the prettiest and brightest girl on campus, and this was before I even knew she played the piano. By the end of the evening, I had developed an intense dislike for Freddie Lindall.”

There were unwritten rules about stealing away a fellow fraternity man’s girl, so the future columnist wrote a tortured note to her saying they must not see each other. But apparently she had broken up with Lindall about that time, making the matter moot.

Washington Post columnist David Broder, in a 1991 column reviewing “Deadline,” wrote: “The devotion of Scotty and Sally Reston is the central and unchanging theme of the book. She is always there when he returns from his wanderings among the presidents and the princes, the scoundrels and the sages with whom he spent his working hours.”

The Restons married in 1935, and in those early years she accompanied him first to New York and then to England. She moved to Washington in 1941.

After working for Associated Press, Scotty Reston joined the New York Times in 1939 in London. During the next 50 years, most of which were spent in the Washington bureau, he was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes. He died in 1995.

Over the years, Sally Reston was an editor for Junior League Magazine, worked for Mademoiselle magazine and undertook writing and photographic assignments for the New York Times. She also contributed articles to the Saturday Evening Post.

In 1968, she and her husband bought the Vineyard Gazette, a weekly paper on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. She was active in the paper’s management before turning it over to her son Richard and his wife, Mary Jo Reston, in 1975.

Sally Reston was a member of the Sulgrave and Chevy Chase clubs and of the Cosmopolitan Club of New York.

In addition to Richard, of Edgartown, Mass., she is survived by two other sons, James Barrett Reston Jr. of Chevy Chase, Md., and Thomas Busey Reston of Washington, D.C.; and five grandchildren.