| # | Fact |
|---|
| 1 | Ex sister-in-law of character actor Oskar Homolka, who married Katharine's older sister, Florence Meyer, in 1939. The marriage produced two sons, Vincent Homolka and Laurence Homolka. Oskar and Florence were divorced in the mid to late 1940s, sometime after World War II. Florence, a celebrated photographer, died in 1962, aged fifty-one. Some of her portraits are in the permanent collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. |
| 2 | Half-Sister-in-Law of former US Senator (served 1987-2005) and former Florida Governor (served 1979-1987) Bob Graham. Her husband Philip Graham was Bob Graham's half brother. Her husband Phil Graham was both a fraternity brother and college roommate of future US Senator George A. Smathers (served 1951-1969) whom he had been close to since attending Miami High School together. In 1986, Bob Graham was elected to the same US Senate seat which Smathers retired from in 1969. |
| 3 | In 1970, seven years after the suicide death of her husband, Philip L. Graham in 1963, she changed the call letters of the Miami television station owned by The Washington Post Company (through its subsidiary Post-Newsweek Stations) from WLBW to WPLG to honor her deceased husband's memory. Katharine Graham, as CEO of the Washington Post Company, purchased the station, in her husband's hometown of Miami, in 1969. The successor company to the Washington Post Company, Graham Holdings, contracted for the sale of WPLG to family friend Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway in March 2014. |
| 4 | Daughter of Eugene Meyer, who first made a name and fortune for himself in the stock market. President Woodrow Wilson appointed him head of the (World War I) War Finance Corporation, serving there long after the end of the war. President Calvin Coolidge named him Chairman of the Federal Farm Loan Board in 1927. President Herbert Hoover gave him a promotion when he appointed Meyer as the fifth Chairman of the Board of Directors (Board of Governors after 1935) of the Federal Reserve System in 1930, where he served until just after the inauguration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, before resigning on May 10, 1933. His final major presidential appointment was as the first President of the World Bank by President Harry S. Truman in 1946, serving just six months. |
| 5 | She first attended Vassar College, located in Poughkeepsie, New York, before transferring to the University of Chicago, from where she received her bachelor's degree in 1938. |
| 6 | Her son Donald Graham succeeded her as Publisher of the Washington Post, a position he held from 1979-2000, and also succeeded her as CEO of the Washington Post Company in 1991. |
| 7 | She is buried next to the Chapel of the Oak Hill Cemetery, in Washington, D.C. |
| 8 | In 1975, the Jefferson Awards for Public Service made her the 1975 honoree of their "S. Roger Horchow Award for Greatest Public Service by A Private Citizen.". |
| 9 | Also good friends with Truman Capote, who gave his legendary November 1966 Black & White Ball in her honor, held at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. |
| 10 | In 2002, she was the posthumous recipient of The Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President George W. Bush. |
| 11 | During the Watergate Crisis in 1973, which the Washington Post was instrumental in exposing, she was the recipient of the Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award as well as an honorary Doctor of Laws degree, both from Colby College in Maine. |
| 12 | Longtime friends with Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway fame. She tapped Buffett for his financial advice, and Berkshire Hathaway became the largest non-family owner of Washington Post Company stock for over thirty-five years. |
| 13 | Graham's acclaimed autobiography "Personal History" (1997), published by Alfred Knopf, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1998. |
| 14 | Attended the 1994 Hawaiian wedding reception of Microsoft's Bill Gates and Melinda Gates where the 100+ guests included Warren Buffett, Paul G. Allen and Craig McCaw, etc. |
| 15 | Mother of Lally Weymouth and Donald Graham. |
| 16 | Attended The Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut, before her father moved the family to Washington, DC in the 1920s. She graduated high school from The Madeira School, a private school located in McLean, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC. |
| 17 | She was a Republican until college (where she switched to the Democratic Party). |
| 18 | Published the Pentagon Papers and made the decision to proceed with the Watergate investigation. |
| 19 | She took over the reins of the Washington Post when her husband shot himself to death (he was suffering from manic depression). |
| 20 | Inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2002. |
| 21 | Publisher of the Washington Post from 1969-1979, President of the Washington Post Company from 1963-1973, CEO and Chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Washington Post Company from 1973-1991, and Chairperson of the Executive Committee of the Washington Post Company from 1991 until her death in 2001. |
$900,000
