[ad_1]
Mary Judice Finney, a Times-Picayune business reporter who was celebrated for her dedication to her work over three decades and to her family, died Wednesday night at her French Quarter home. She was 73.
The cause of death has not been determined, relatives said.
“Mary was kindness personified,” her stepson, Brady Finney, said. “You couldn’t leave her house without a bag of cookies. She loved her grandkids as well as all her nieces and nephews.”
Finney, whose maiden name Judice was her byline, covered the energy industry and wrote a personal finance column.
“She was extremely dutiful,” said Charley Blaine, who was her boss in the newspaper’s Money section. “She was on topic and knew everybody in the game. … She never stopped wanting to learn more.”
Blaine, who worked with her for 10 years, said: “She hated being wrong, and I don’t ever remember having to write a correction about anything that she wrote. … You couldn’t help but like her. If you said, ‘You’re not asking the right question here,’ you’d tell her the right question, and she’d go get the answer.”
Grew up in Lake Charles
A native of Lake Charles, Finney was class valedictorian at St. Charles Academy there and earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and biology education at McNeese State University. She wrote for the college newspaper and worked part-time for the American Press.
She went on to LSU, where she obtained a master’s degree in journalism and political science. While in graduate school, she worked in the Louisiana Legislature.
Finney was a reporter for The Associated Press in Jackson, Mississippi, before joining The Times-Picayune in the late 1970s.
The energy crisis of 1979 hit shortly after she started writing about the oil and gas industry. She kept busy writing front-page stories about developments in that vital sector of the state’s economy and about ways to use energy wisely.
Finney, a former president of the National Association of Petroleum Writers, was part of The Times-Picayune’s team that won the 1989 Frank Allen Award – the highest writing honor from the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Association – for coverage of a deadly explosion at the Shell Oil Co. refinery in Norco.
She also was part of the newspaper’s team that won two Pulitzer Prizes in 2006 for coverage of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She left the newspaper in 2007.
A former president of the Women’s Professional Council of New Orleans, Finney was a member of the Special Events Committee for the Archdiocese Catholic Cultural Heritage Center and a minister of hospitality at St. Louis Cathedral, where she volunteered at Masses and concerts. She also volunteered at the New Orleans Museum of Art and with Parkway Partners.
Survivors include her husband, Thomas M. Finney; two stepsons, Patrick Finney of New Orleans and Brady Finney of Boston; a brother, Jack Judice of Lake Charles; two sisters, Anne Trapp of Baton Rouge and Aimée Monk of Lake Charles; and two grandchildren.
Jacob Schoen & Son Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements, which are incomplete.
[ad_2]
Source link
