[Newbie] Search-and-delete text processing problem...

[Todd_Calhoun]

I'm trying to learn about text processing in Python, and I'm trying to 
tackle what should be a simple task.

I have long text files of books with a citation between each paragraph, 
which might be like "Bill D. Smith, History through the Ages, p.5".

So, I need to search for every line that starts with a certain string (in 
this example, "Bill D. Smith"), and delete the whole line.

I've tried a couple of different things, but none seem to work.  Here's my 
latest try.  I apologize in advance for being so clueless.

##########################
#Text search and delete line tool

theInFile = open("test_f.txt", "r")
theOutFile = open("test_f_out.txt", "w")

allLines = theInFile.readlines()

for line in allLines:
    if line[3] == 'Bill':
        line == ' '


theOutFile.writelines(allLines)
#########################

I know I could do it in Word fairly easily, but I'd like to learn the Python 
way to do things.

Thanks for any advice.