Bill McAllister, a Washington Post national reporter in the 1980s and 1990s who wrote a long-running column on coins and stamps, died May 1 at a hospital in Fairfax County. He was 81 and a resident of Fairfax City.

The cause was pneumonia and complications from covid, said his son William H. McAllister IV.

Mr. McAllister, widely known as joined The Post in 1975 with an assignment to rove Virginia for stories. He later served eight years overseeing statewide news coverage before moving to the national staff as a general-assignment reporter.

Besides writing about political and policy developments across many federal agencies, he cultivated a journalistic specialty focused on the Postal Service and had a column about stamps and coins published in the Weekend section.

After retirement from The Post in 1999, he wrote for Linn's Stamp News, a publication for stamp collectors.

William Howard McAllister III was born in Durham, N.C., on Nov. 6, 1941. His father, a banker, went overseas as a Navy signalman during World War II. In those wartime years, Buddy was raised by his mother and aunts, one of whom later gifted him a small mimeograph machine on which he published a neighborhood newspaper for a penny.

In his teens, he became a regular freelancer for several newspapers in his home county and was paid 10 cents a column inch. He received a bachelor's degree in political science in 1964 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he also completed a master's degree in journalism in 1966.

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