Longtime Hill Resident Craig Leonard D’Ooge died on August 11, 2026.
The eldest of four, Craig D’Ooge was born in Detroit on September 10, 1950, to Macsene and Martin Leonard D’Ooge before the family later settled in Ohio. On rare trips back to the Midwest with his own daughters, Charlotte and Justine, and his wife of 35 years/ex-wife of 20 years, Fran D’Ooge, he would fondly say, “Thank God I got out of here.”
Despite the horror at his culture-of-origin, Craig was always grateful to his father for connecting him with a management training program at a Singer factory in France, where he developed a love of travel, “walked around pretending to know what I was doing while trying to practice French”, and was once chastised for fraternizing with the workers during a strike.
Craig managed to flee the Midwest and pain of his mother’s recent suicide by the grace of a swimming scholarship to the UC System; first Santa Barbara (“too much of a party school”) and then Berkeley, where he edited their literary magazine. Craig, who only a few years earlier had turned around before getting to Woodstock since it would be “too much mud and naked people”, somehow managed to find at Berkeley a cohort who would become indelibly woven into his life and who he was.
Settling in DC after receiving a masters in American Studies at the University of Sussex, D’Ooge was a Capitol Hill resident and employee of the Library of Congress for over 40 years. Even a few months before his death, he was still praising the exhibits and programming the LOC put on over the years, as well as the accomplishments of the American Folk Life Center. His home was always open to researchers and students in need of a base on The Hill.
A lover of Spratling silver design, poetry,
various aesthetic movements and folk art, and an excellent chef, Craig spent most of his life driven by curiosity, creativity, and cutting humor. Despite his occasional ornery ways, Craig leaves behind many friends and family, including the daughter who wrote this obituary, knowing full well he would have had a critique for every turn of phrase, but is still grateful for the curiosity and creativity she inherited from him. Many thanks to the Capitol Hill Village for their support.
