Virginia Mason Blackford Morris, 83, was one of the two namesakes of Seattle's Virginia Mason Hospital Medical Center. This oddity has a complicated explanation: Morris' dad, Dr. John Minor Blackford, co-founded the hospital with Dr. Tate Mason. Mason already had a kid named Virginia when the Blackfords gave the same name to their own kid. In 1920, the two doctors officially christened the hospital after both Virginias. On her own, Morris was a socialite and a leader in dozens of community groups over the years. She died March 24 of complications from emphysema.

Albert F. Canwell, 95, was Washington state's most notorious Red-baiter from 1946 into the early '60s. As a Republican state legislator from Spokane, first elected in 1946, he formed the Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities (everyone called it simply the "Canwell committee"), and got a law passed requiring loyalty oaths from all state employees (struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1963). From his bully pulpit, he started claiming Communists had infiltrated the University of Washington. This led to five days of raucous hearings at the Seattle National Guard Armory (now Seattle Center House), rife with accusations and counter-accusations. Canwell claimed to have a list of 150 commie professors. Eleven profs were called to the hearings. Three professors lost their jobs; the Seattle Repertory Playhouse (the city's first professional theater company) was evicted from its UW-owned space and had to disband. Critics called the hearings a witch-hunt, and said Canwell's disregard for due process of law could damage democracy more than Communists ever could. Still, Canwell's tactics (including highly selective evidence-handling, forbidding defendants' attorneys from cross-examining witnesses, and accusing anyone who dared to criticize him of being a Communist) were adopted on a national level by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. (Slightly toned-down variants on what became known as "McCarthyite" name-calling and demonizing can still be found today on conservative talk radio.) Canwell tried to parlay his notoriety into runs for the state senate and the U.S. Congress, all unsuccessfully. From there, he had successive careers running a security company and a bookstore. Through the subsequent decades, he continued to gather information on people he thought were Reds. In 1963, in a friend's small-town newspaper, Canwell Red-baited state Sen. John Goldmark. Goldmark and his attorney William Dwyer, who died this February after long careers as a trial lawyer and federal judge, attained a libel verdict against Canwell and the paper. Dwyer himself got called a commie during the trial; in 1987, the Reagan White House used the accusation as an excuse to stall Dwyer's federal court nomination for a year and a half. To his last days, Canwell insisted his cause and tactics had been just, and that all the people he'd called commies really were commies. Canwell died April 1 after a long period of physical decline.

obits@thestranger.com