This upcoming Sunday marks one year since the death of former White House press secretary Tony Snow. His successor Dana Perino pens this piece "Remembering Tony Snow's life" in today's Politico. An excerpt:

He had his finger on the pulse of what Americans were thinking, and his fan base grew quickly. His coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks as a reporter gave him the foundation to argue forcefully and convincingly about the importance of keeping our country safe and for supporting our troops. As my predecessor as press secretary, he was brilliant at the podium, with a star quality the White House briefing room had never seen.

Tony didn't always sweat the details, which sometimes left us scrambling to fill in the gaps. He was almost always a few minutes late, and that wasn't the easiest thing to be in our punctual White House. Needing to keep his weight up after the cancer treatments, he liked to eat pancake sandwiches for breakfast — getting a stack of cakes and a side of sausage and putting it all together before smothering it in butter and syrup. He loved vanilla lattes and had his assistant, Ed Buckley, run down to the mess to get him several in a day - Ed made it clear he was "picking up for Tony."

He had dreadful taste in ties, and so we kept spares to switch out before he went on TV. He was charmingly forgetful, regularly losing his wallet and his BlackBerry, sometimes both in one day. One of his BlackBerrys was actually found in a winter boot a few weeks later - it was summer.