News Obituaries |

Former longtime Courant reporter dies after ‘a life well-lived.’

Barbara W. Carlson of Branford, wife of the late Lawrence Rasie, died peacefully on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2024.

She was 95.

Barbara, (Bobbie, Barcar, Barbie) and Larry, who predeceased her in 2016, were veteran reporters for the Hartford Courant who lived in Middletown before moving to their seaside home in Branford more than 30 years ago.

Born and raised in Middletown, Barbara was the daughter of Arthur and Hester Carlson and sister to her brother, Jack.  As a child she knew she wanted to be a writer.  She attended the city’s then Woodrow Wilson High School, earned high honors, was named to the National Honor Society, served as editor of the school newspaper and became a high school correspondent for the Hartford Courant.  She went on to study her craft, hone her skills and graduated from Wellesley College in 1950 with a B.A. in English. She continued her connection to Wellesley throughout her life by regularly contributing to the college’s monthly magazine.

Following graduation, she lived in Paris and traveled through Europe and returned to the U.S. to work briefly in radio, advertising, and publishing before turning her sights to newspapers. She joined the Hartford Courant in 1957 to work as a general assignment reporter covering breaking news, investigative stories and features.

While working for the Courant, she expanded her news perspective by taking on overseas assignments in the Middle East and Southeast Asia among other areas. Figures she interviewed ranged from Israel’s First Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to dinosaur expert John Ostrom to lion tamer Gunther Gebel-Williams. In 1966 the New England Women’s Press Association honored her with its annual Newspaper Woman of the Year award.  After leaving the Courant, she worked as a general assignment reporter for several years at the Louisville Times, where she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series on prisons.

She left the daily news business and became a regular contributor to The New York Times Connecticut Weekly section and for more than a decade filed stories on topics ranging from soup kitchens in the suburbs to the lives of nuns in a cloistered monastery.  She also worked as a correspondent for Business Week reporting locally on national stories, and was a contributing editor to New England Business magazine writing profiles, stories on issues and trends, and a monthly feature on unusual entrepreneurial companies. In addition, she wrote for The New Republic, the National Observer, the Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and the Miami Herald,  Modern Maturity, New England Monthly, and the Courant’s Northeast Magazine among many others. Her overseas reporting included writing stories from Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Afghanistan, China and the Soviet Union. She interviewed figures ranging from famous to familiar with ease.  Her last assignments were at the Shoreline Times weekly when she was 90 years old.

Her longer term projects included writing the book Food Festivals: Eating Your Way from Coast to Coast, co-authoring the book Holidays and Festivals Dictionary, and serving as an editor for a synonym dictionary entitled The Synonym Finder, published by Rodale.

Barbara’s was a life well-lived. She enjoyed an enduring and expansive reporting career, travel to some of the world’s farthest reaches (especially Africa as seen by her large collection of giraffes), living in a  century-old cottage on Long Island Sound, a long happy marriage to her beloved Larry, sharing conversations, laughter, and toasts with her close friends, and, of course, the company of the dogs she cared for and loved – the last one being her dear Kipling.

She leaves her niece Joanne (Bill) Kilmartin and faithful friends.

A private gathering to celebrate her rich life and to bid her a fond farewell will take place in the near future.

Memorial donations in the form of checks may be made out to The Community Foundation for Greater New Haven (memo line – Bambi Bailey Fund), 70 Audubon St., New Haven, CT 06510.

Online gifts may be made using the link below:

https://www.cfgnh.org/funds/bambi-bailey-scholarship-fund

All information provided by her family.