Sandy Rovner, a Washington Post reporter and editor who spent about 15 years as a health columnist and liked to quip that her interest in that speciality owed to being a “quasi-professional hypochondriac,” died Aug. 4 at an assisted-living group home in Bethesda, Md. She was 88.
Mrs. Rovner’s early career included stints in activism and politics in addition to journalism. In the early 1960s, she was a part-time reporter at the Sentinel, a community newspaper in Montgomery County, Md., and she also picketed against racial segregation at Glen Echo Park near her longtime home in Bethesda’s Bannockburn neighborhood. Her husband was a pivotal leader of that successful effort.
Mrs. Rovner became a press aide to Rep. Carlton Sickles (D-Md.) and was active in his unsuccessful 1966 gubernatorial primary campaign. The next year, she joined the Baltimore Sun, where she worked as a reporter and assistant city editor, among other jobs.
She joined The Post in 1972 as a deputy editor in the Style section, for which she eventually began writing the Healthtalk column. The Post created a separate health section in 1985, and Mrs. Rovner took up residency there as a reporter and columnist, covering an array of topics but focusing especially on cancer, aging and mental health.
In 1988, the American Psychiatric Association honored her for her coverage of domestic violence, including a column about women who kill their abusers.
After her Post retirement in the early 1990s, she grew increasingly active with Gilbert and Sullivan light opera troupes, including the Washington Savoyards. She was on the board of the Leisure World retirement community’s Democratic Club.
Naomi Elinor Stern, who went by the nickname “Sandy,” was born in St. Louis on Jan. 29, 1928, and grew up in Washington. She was a 1945 graduate of Woodrow Wilson High School and a 1949 graduate of the University of Michigan, where she was editorial page editor of the student newspaper. She attended the University of Paris and spent a few years as a researcher and writer at the U.S. Information Agency.
In 1953, she married Edmond F. Rovner, a union activist who became chief of staff to Maryland Gov. Marvin Mandel in the early 1970s and later served as a top aide to two Montgomery county executives, Charles W. Gilchrist and Sidney Kramer. He died in 1992.
Besides Julie Rovner, of North Bethesda, Md., survivors include a son, Mark Rovner of Takoma Park, Md.; a sister; and two grandchildren.
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