Anne Daly Heller

By USAE Staff

Anne Daly Heller, Publisher and Executive Editor of USAE died September 12, 2021 at her home in Chevy Chase, MD. She was 78 and suffered from complications of pneumonia.

For her entire professional career Anne Daly Heller was the was the editorial heartbeat of USAE weekly newspaper.

In 2003 when she received ASAE’s Academy of Leaders Award – their highest business partner honor – the association said of her: “She has been a dedicated provider of news and information relating to the association community for more than 20 years. “Over the years [her] publication has entertained and enlightened many, and at times probably upset a few, but it has defined itself as a community mainstay.”

Nothing could have summed up Anne’s professional accomplishments more succinctly.

A terrific reporter with sources throughout all segments of the CVB, hospitality and association industry, Anne was indefatigable when she got her journalistic “hooks” into a story.

Examples of her doggedness in “the chase,” (as she referred to the pursuit of a story) are numerous as current and former staff attest. Over the phone – in her inimitable and unmistakable voice and her preferred method of work – she tracked down reluctant news-makers in bars, on the highway, and in other equally unlikely locations; frequently right on deadline.

The tiny acorn that became USAE fell to earth at the Place d’Armes Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana in January 1982. Anne and her husband Ross E. Heller were publishing a CustomNEWS show daily for a medical society. Ross woke Anne up in the middle of the night with the words: “We’re going to start an association newspaper.” “That’s a great idea,” Anne murmured, only half-awake: “Now let’s go back to sleep. We can talk about it in the morning.”

Talk they did, she hired a staff, created a mailing list and published her first issue September 14, 1982 – by pure coincidence one day after the first issue of USA Today hit the newsstands. (In later years, Anne joked while both papers started on virtually the same day, it was only USA Today that lost $100 million over its first few years in business.)

From its first issue to the present day, Anne’s vision for USAE has been fulfilled. She saw it as a community newspaper in every sense of the word; however, a community defined not by geography but by common interest in the meetings industry; associations, hotels and destination marketing companies.

USAE is a newspaper providing hard news; fires and firings, deeds and misdeeds, the bizarre and even the occasional murder, as well as all the routine stuff; ribbon cuttings, weddings, births, pet pictures, obituaries. Plus, for editorial comment as well as the lighter side; HOTS’ words each week on page three.

Wearing her reporter hat, Anne had the uncanny knack, having gotten her subject on the line, to get them to open up, on the record: On reading their quotes subsequently in USAE many must have wondered: “Why did I tell Anne Heller all that?”

At the same time, she functioned as managing editor for her reporter-editors; keeping up with – and ahead of – the news, assigning stories, reading copy, choosing photos and signing off on each issue’s lead and front page headlines.

None of her staff like it, but she was always willing to remake the front page if a breaking story warranted. In the mid-1990’s when Steve Carey, CEO of what was then known as the International Association of Convention & Visitor Bureaus (now Destinations International) ceased being employed at 5 o’clock on a Thursday night – USAE’s deadline – the story, reported in great detail, lead the front page. And the paper was still on its way to the printer by 7:30 p.m.

Also in the 1990’s, when she learned the foreperson of the Monica Lewinsky grand jury was a DC hotel manager who had been fired for being off work too much due to her federal service commitment and was suing her hotel bosses, she not only named names but broke the story nationally. This effort “beat” the AP, got USAE mention in Washington Post and New York Times and earned the paper a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize.

Anne was once asked about the best story she never got to published. “It happened not long before USAE came into existence,” she said. “A prominent association executive got fired for paying a close relative’s funeral expenses with association funds. And as a parting gesture for the board’s temerity in terminating his employment took home as a souvenir his private washroom’s custom-decorated door!”

Heller served as “volunteer fund-raiser-in chief” and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars serving on the ASAE Summit Awards dinner committee since its inception in 2000 and on the dinner committees of the foundations associated with PCMA, and Destinations International.

As an adjunct activity, she always provided, without charge, numerous pages of USAE print and ‘e’ advertising to promote industry events such as ASAE Annual Meeting, MPI- WEC, PCMA Convening Leaders, and IAEE Expo! Expo!, NYSAE and Association Forum one-day trade shows, HSMAI's Affordable Meetings and Destination International’s Destinations Showcase event.

In addition to being an ASAE’s Academy of Leaders honoree, Heller was been honored by the Events Industry Council as a member of its Hall of Leaders in 2019 and by Destination Marketing Association International (now Destinations International) with their highest honor– The Spirit of Hospitality in 2009. She was the first and – to this day – only person to win these three highest meetings industry honors.

An inveterate reader of Washington Post classifieds and a shopper extraordinaire, her greatest shopping “coup” was the purchase of her 100+-year-old “Sears Four-Square- style” Chevy Chase, Maryland home.

How she and husband Ross came to buy the house is a classic Anne Daly Heller tale. It happened the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1976. She and Ross flipped a coin to see who would go to an estate sale around the corner and who would watch their three rambunctious sons – aged 4, 3 and 1 1⁄2.

Anne won the toss – went to the sale – and returned telling her husband the contents of the sale were, to quote her precisely: “dreck. But we’re going to buy the house.”

Buy it they did – that very afternoon – and Ross has always expressed gratitude it was she who, at the estate sale, unconventionally saw the box and not the contents.

In the late 1960’s and into the 1970’s, Heller and her husband were the nation’s preeminent purveyors of antique brass beds. They scoured the Mid-Atlantic states for the best examples which they then re-sold throughout the DC area. One summer Saturday in 1971 they drove 600 miles roundtrip to an advertised auction in New York’s Hudson Valley to see an extraordinary porcelain and brass one. The price was right and it ended up on top of their car and then in their bedroom where it resides to this day.

She was an inveterate traveler; until recently not missing an ASAE annual meeting nor a PCMA, MPI-WEC or Destinations International conference. She and Ross took journalist trips to Europe, the Philippines, Japan and Hong Kong as well as to almost all 50 states.

Very proud of her Irish heritage, she was the daughter of the late James J. Daly, Vice President and General Manager of The Washington Post and the late Catherine Adams Daly a banker and homemaker. From her dad she inherited her love of the newspaper business; from her mom, her sense of style. And from both, her Irish spunk and gift of gab.

Anne Heller was mother to three sons, James, Christopher and Patrick and grandmother – known as Grannie Annie — to James’ son Brandon and Patrick and Jennifer’s daughters, Madison and Morgan. All, with her husband of 54 years, Ross E. Heller, survive her.

In her final days Anne expressed the wish that in lieu of flowers – much as she loved giving business to Caruso’s, her favorite Washington, DC florist – donations in her name should be made to the newly established “Destinations International Foundation Anne Daly Heller USAE ’30 Under 30’ Scholars Fund.”

Of this Fund, created by a recent endowment from her husband, she said: “I am blessed beyond words to have my name forever associated with such a worthwhile purpose. Nothing gives me more pleasure than knowing younger colleagues will have the chance to benefit, year-in and year-out, from the kinds of experiences the DMO community has given me.”

A wake will be held at Joseph Gawler’s Sons Thursday September 16. The funeral Mass will be at Blessed Sacrament Church in Washington, DC September 17with internment at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Silver Spring, MD immediately following. The family will host a celebration of her life dinner at LaFerme Restaurant in Chevy Chase, MD on September 16.

Anne, who never found it difficult to resist purchasing a beautiful piece of jewelry, a unique sculpture, or a wonderful painting, was once asked: What is the one possession she most cherished?

She responded: “The most beautiful things are not seen or touched; they are felt with the heart. So, this is an easy question to answer: It is my knowledge of Ross’s enduring love for me and mine for him.”