Fund Trustees
Front Row: Fund President Candice
Bryant, Carol Melamed, Martin Cohen.
Back Row: Lionel W. Neptune, Theodore C. Lutz, Donald
E. Graham.
Martin Cohen, Treasurer
Martin Cohen served The Washington Post Company for nearly 30 years until 1998 in a number of capacities, some of them simultaneously. These included as vice president and member of the board of directors; chief financial officer; head of Human Resources, and director of the cellular telephone division. He was also responsible for a number of the company's joint ventures. He continues to serve as a director of Bowater Mersey Paper Company, Ltd. in Nova Scotia. Before joining The Washington Post Company in 1966, Cohen, a CPA who served as a Marine Corps officer from 1953-1955, worked for the U.S. Treasury, specializing in income tax legislation and regulation, and before that for PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Cohen's current civic activities include serving as president of Frenchman's Creek Club, and he has served as vice president/finance and as chairman of the finance and audit committees for Washington's Children's Hospital. He has worked with the Montgomery County, Md., Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the National Medical Museum Foundation and served the Hofstra University MBA program as an adjunct professor of taxation.
Donald E. Graham
Chairman of the board and CEO of The Washington Post Company, and chairman of The Washington Post newspaper, Donald E. Graham was the publisher of The Post for more than two decades until September 2000.
He was born in Baltimore in 1945, a son of Philip L. and Katharine Meyer Graham. His father was publisher of The Washington Post from 1946 until 1961 and president of The Washington Post Company from 1947 until his death in 1963. His mother, Katharine Graham, served in a variety of executive positions from 1963 until her death in 2001. Eugene Meyer, Graham's grandfather, purchased The Washington Post at a bankruptcy sale in 1933. After graduating in 1966 from Harvard College, where he was president of the Harvard Crimson, Graham was drafted and served as an information specialist with the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. Before he joined The Post as a reporter in 1971, Graham was a patrolman with the Washington Metropolitan Police Department. After holding several news and business positions at the newspaper and at Newsweek, he was named executive vice president and general manager of the newspaper in 1976.
Graham serves as a director of BrassRing, Inc., and as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board. He is president of the District of Columbia College Access Program and a trustee of the Federal City Council in Washington, DC. Graham is a member of the board of directors of The Summit Fund of Washington. He and his wife, Mary, have four children and live in Washington, D.C.
Theodore C. Lutz, Secretary
Theodore C. Lutz retired in 2005 from his position as Vice President of Communications for The Washington Post, responsible in that post for overseeing and maintaining the newspaper's relationship with the metro Washington D.C. community, including leading The Post's community support initiatives and charitable contributions program.
Lutz joined The Post in 1981 serving first as vice president/controller, then in 1984 as vice president/personnel. From 1986 to 2003, he was vice president/business manager and had oversight responsibility for the newspaper's circulation function from 1986 through 2000.
Before joining The Post, Lutz was appointed by former President Jimmy Carter to serve as administrator of the Urban Mass Transportation Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation from 1979 to 1981. Prior to that, from 1976 to 1979, he was the general manager of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (METRO). From 1973 to 1976 he was deputy undersecretary for budget and program review at the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Lutz is currently a trustee of the Philip L. Graham Fund and has served as a community advisor to the Junior League of Northern Virginia for more than a decade. He is a member of the board of directors for both the American Press Institute and Green Door, a District of Columbia non-profit organization that prepares people with severe and persistent mental illness to work and live independently. Lutz was a trustee of the Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation from 1983 to 1995 and was chair of the foundation from 1993 - 1995. He was honored as a 1978 Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine.
Lutz graduated in 1967 from Carleton College in Minnesota and obtained a master's of public administration from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University in 1968.
Carol Melamed
After more than a decade as vice president of government affairs for the The Washington Post, Carol Melamed now serves as a consultant to The Washington Post. As government affairs VP, her responsibilities included handling federal, state and local legislative and regulatory matters and serving as The Post’s representative to local press associations and other organizations.
Melamed joined The Post in 1979 as assistant counsel and became associate counsel the following year. She practiced law at the D.C. firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering from 1975 and clerked at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. for a year prior to that. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Brown University in 1967 with high honors in English and was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She earned a Master’s degree in 1969 from Harvard Graduate School of Education and a JD from the Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.
Melamed lives in Chevy Chase, Md., with her husband, Doug, and their two daughters. She also has two grown daughters.
Lionel W. Neptune
Lionel Neptune is The Washington Post's vice president of affiliates. After working as an intern for the newspaper in the summer of 1985, Neptune joined The Washington Post full-time the following year. He spent his first year working in each of the major operating departments before becoming a permanent outside sales representative for the Advertising department in 1987. Neptune was promoted to the assistant to the publisher position in 1990, where he co-authored speeches and worked on ad hoc projects for the publisher, Don Graham.
Neptune joined the newspaper's Budget Unit as its manager in 1991 and was promoted to director of the unit in 1993. In 1998, Neptune became the director of affiliates, and assumed responsibility for newsprint acquisition and production of the newspaper's outer-county, weekly, community tabloids. In September 2000, Neptune was promoted to vice president/affiliates, assuming responsibility for several of the newspaper's subsidiaries. These include the Robinson Terminal Warehouse, the Capital Fiber paper recycling facility, the National Weekly paper, and the Los Angeles Times/Washington Post News Service.
Neptune has served on the board of directors for Prevent Child Abuse of Metropolitan Washington, the Metropolitan YMCA, the Anthony Bowen YMCA, and the African Continuum Theater Company. Neptune also served on the board of the Calvary Women's Shelter, an organization for which he has volunteered for the last 14 years. He has mentored area high school students for more than a decade and served as co-chairperson of The Post's annual United Way campaign since 1995.
An avid runner who completed the Marine Corps Marathon in 1998 and 2000, and the New York Marathon in 2005, Neptune was born in New York City and raised in Plymouth, N.C. He is a 1982 graduate of Duke, earning a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering, and a 1986 graduate of Harvard Business School, where he received a Masters in Business Administration. He lives in Bowie, Md., with his wife, Kelli, and sons Devin and Jalen.
Vincent E. Reed, Trustee Emeritus
When he came to The Post in 1982, longtime educator and former Washington Post vice president for communications Vincent E. Reed had been the D.C. schools superintendent for five years until 1980, and had subsequently served President Jimmy Carter's administration as U.S. assistant secretary of education for elementary and secondary education. Born in St. Louis, the 14th in a family of 17 children, Reed was a 1952 graduate of West Virginia State College. He joined the D.C. school system as a teacher in 1956 and held a variety of teaching and administrative assignments before the Board of Education appointed him superintendent in 1975. As a Post vice president, he oversaw the newspaper's community involvement and its charitable and educational endeavors.