Mr. McAllister, widely known as “Buddy,” joined The Post in 1975 with an assignment to rove Virginia for stories. He later served eight years overseeing statewide news coverage before moving to the national staff as a general-assignment reporter.
Besides writing about political and policy developments across many federal agencies, he cultivated a journalistic specialty focused on the Postal Service and had a column about stamps and coins published in the Weekend section.
In one column from 1997, he visited Pittsboro, N.C., the farm town where he had grown up and where the centrally located post office had been shuttered in favor of an updated mail-sorting facility a mile outside of town. He wanted to illustrate the “conflict between the Postal Service as profit-making company and the Post Office as community center.”
“Excitement,” he wrote, “would come twice a day to Pittsboro, my North Carolina hometown of 1,875: Once in the morning and again in the afternoon, folks would gather at the town’s post office to watch the incoming letters slide into their mailboxes.”
“The mail doesn’t come to most residents of Pittsboro. They go to the mail,” he added. “As in many small towns across America, a daily trip to the Pittsboro Post Office … is a ritual, a necessity of life. Urban dwellers, accustomed to the convenience of door-to-door delivery and the blue collection boxes that dot the street corners of America’s cities, cannot begin to imagine the importance of the Pittsboro Post Office to the people who live there.”
“If you’re poor, or a downtown merchant, or elderly like my parents, the new post office is a calamity,” Mr. McAllister continued. “Unless you want to walk along the red clay shoulder of a busy two-lane highway, the only way to get there is to drive. … It’s difficult for officials in Washington to calculate the cost of a tear in the fabric of a small town’s life.”
After retirement from The Post in 1999, he wrote for Linn’s Stamp News, a publication for stamp collectors.
William Howard McAllister III was born in Raleigh, N.C., on Nov. 6, 1941. His father, a banker, went overseas as a Navy signalman during World War II. In those wartime years, Buddy was raised by his mother and aunts, one of whom later gifted him a small mimeograph machine on which he published a neighborhood newspaper for a penny.
In his teens, he became a regular freelancer for several newspapers in his home county and was paid 10 cents a column inch. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1964 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also completed a master’s degree in journalism in 1966.
He spent his early career at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, rising to city editor, and was a San Francisco-based reporter with the Wall Street Journal. He spent 26 years in the Navy Reserve as a public affairs officer, rising to the rank of captain before retiring in 1993.
In 1965, he married Rena “Polly” Farrell. In addition to his wife, of Fairfax City, and his son William, of Newport News, Va., survivors include three other sons, Christopher F. McAllister of Alexandria, Va., Jonathan T. McAllister of Narberth, Pa., and Benjamin J. McAllister of Chapel Hill; a sister; a brother; and seven grandchildren.
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