Journalist Excelled at Human-Interest Tales

Nicholas Blatchford, 89, a Washington journalist who was considered a master chronicler of local residents whose names seldom were in the news, except when awful events changed their lives, died Feb. 1 at his home in Fairfax County. He had heart and lung disease.

Mr. Blatchford spent much of his career at the Washington Daily News, which the onetime Harvard oarsman joined as a copy boy in 1940. He advanced to feature writer and held top executive positions in the newsroom at the tabloid, which was swallowed by the Washington Star in 1972. He then was the "Our Town" columnist for the Star before that paper went defunct in 1981.

It was the human-interest tale, filled with shattering detail, that most intrigued Mr. Blatchford and abetted his quick rise to editorship at the Daily News.

His 1950 story "Death and a Small Boy" was about Bernadette Stibli's agony two weeks after the death of her 4-year-old son, Johnny. The child was playing ball with friends and ran into the street, where he was hit by a truck.

In interviewing the mother, Mr. Blatchford retold the incident through the mother's eyes:

"My first prayer was, 'God, don't hurt his little brain,' " Mrs. Stibli said. "He was so bright. I really began to pray fast. Just as fast and hard as I could. . . . I got in the ambulance with him, and the doctor was working on his lungs. We were just turning down 19th Street when I saw his ears were turning blue.

" 'He's not going to die, is he?' I asked the doctor.

" 'All right now, mother,' he said.

"I knew what that meant. I'd have to keep my head if I wanted to stay with him. The siren was going but I didn't hear it."

It was around this time that Mr. Blatchford claimed the best-remembered scoop of his life, an expansive interview with anti-communist writer Whittaker Chambers, who had fingered his onetime friend and State Department employee Alger Hiss as a spy for the Soviets. The accusation led to one of the more sensational trials of the early Cold War and ultimately a perjury conviction and prison sentence for Hiss.

Accompanied by a photographer, Mr. Blatchford said he went to Chambers's farm in northern Maryland because no one else had bothered.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked Chambers.