Margaret M. Dowd, 97; Featured in Daughter’s Newspaper Column

Margaret Meenehan Dowd, 97, whose colorful observations on life were a recurring feature in the New York Times column of her daughter Maureen, died of kidney failure Sunday at her home in Chevy Chase, Md.

A prolific letter writer full of wry advice, Dowd mused about such newfangled inventions as the control-top panty -- “Who does it control?” she asked -- the health benefits of Soup in a Cup and the ill effects of married suitors, whom she referred to as “long-tailed rats.”

Born in Wilmington, Del., Margaret Meenehan moved to Washington, D.C., at age 2 and recalled seeing Civil War veterans march in parades. After high school, she applied to be a reporter at the Washington Post but was told it was no job for a young woman because it involved night work and distasteful assignments.

She married Michael Dowd, a police detective and fellow champion Irish step dancer, in 1934 and became a full-time mother, a role she did not mind.

“Your father thought women belonged in the kitchen,” she told her daughter. “But I didn’t mind ‘cause I liked the kitchen. I just wish mine had been bigger.”

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Hastings Keith, 89; ‘Quadruple Dipper’ Opposed Pension Plan

Hastings Keith, 89, a former congressman who crusaded against the federal pension system that gave him a six-figure retirement income, died Tuesday in Brockton, Mass., his family announced.

Keith co-founded the National Committee on Public Employee Pension Systems in 1982 to combat what he called “ruinously high” federal pensions.

The “quadruple dipper” was open about how he benefited from cost-of-living adjustments on his pensions, and he calculated he had put about $34,000 into the system and received more than $134,000 a year as of 2001.

He attributed his stance partly to guilt: As a Republican congressman from Massachusetts, Keith had voted to increase pensions of federal employees but later said, “We’re mugging our children and grandchildren.”

After he gave the U.S. Treasury a check for $974 -- the equivalent of one month of his military pension in 1982 -- he said he would use his military pension to fund his lobbying group.

Born in Brockton in 1915, he graduated from the University of Vermont in 1938 and served on the staff of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower during World War II. He became a life insurance salesman and a one-term Massachusetts state senator in 1952 before serving in the House of Representatives from 1959 to 1973.