Obit. Page #2

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to the Slinky first to read about it.

Hello there.

"He crossed the Atlantic because it was there,

and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat

because it too was there,

and because the lure of sea, spray, and sinew,

and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans

without steam or sail proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic

battling storms, sharks, and encroaching madness,

John Fairfax, who died this month at 74,

became the first lone oarsman in recorded history

to traverse any ocean.

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax's seafaring

almost pales beside his earlier ventures.

Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh and blood character

out of Graham Greene with more than a dash of Hemingway

and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At nine, he settled a dispute with a pistol.

At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide by jaguar."

- Thank you! - Very well done.

How does it feel to be--

I take property of this little bit.

Well done, John, well done.

The explosion that ensued,

readers just went nuts.

"This is the original most interesting man in the world."

"This is the most bad-assed obit I ever read,"

which is fascinating for two reasons.

One, when does anyone ever use

the adjective "badass" to preface anything

that appears in the pages of The New York Times?

And two, it's kind of a tacit commentary

on this old but still prevalent

Victorian sensibility that obits

have to be demure, respectful,

lachrymose, God knows not funny.

Heaven forefend if there's a laugh line in there,

and this was an obit that broke all the rules

and proudly announced obits in the 21st century

can be just as rollicking and swaggering

as their subjects.

Okay.

Was he married before he was married to you?

And how many times?

Okay, and that marriage ended in divorce?

Huh, and what was her name?

Not the daughter, the first wife.

Okay, on to survivors.

Your name is Melody with a Y, right?

Do you want the Jean in there or no?

One daughter, and her name is?

Does she go by Miller as well?

We usually draw the line at names of--

you know, 'cause some people have 26 grandchildren.

So three granddaughters, okay.

Any great-grandchildren, okay.

Unlike a beat writer who is used to covering, say,

Congress or the Supreme Court,

or the New York Philharmonic,

we don't have this bristling Rolodex of sources.

You spend your day juggling phone calls

to families, friends and associates,

speed-reading clippings printed out from online sources,

and tenderly handling these yellowed,

crumbling clippings from the morgue.

God willing, the families who've contacted us

have provided a phone number so that we can call them

and do the basic leg work of confirming the death.

Where, when, the cause, who were the survivors?

Sometimes in their exhausted grief, quite understandably,

families forget to provide contact information.

So you spend precious hours with the clock ticking down

working public records databases

to try to find a phone number for someone

or even a phone number of a neighbor.

It was a weekend, it was a Sunday,

I think, that we found out.

I got a call from the office that said,

"David Foster Wallace has died,

and we don't have an advance, and we need an obit,

can you do it?" and I did.

You know, I'd read a little bit of him.

You know, I didn't know his oeuvre,

but one of the things that

I thought was important was that since

he was only in his forties to find out

the circumstances of his death.

We'd heard he committed suicide, but we didn't know for sure.

He was living in California at the time.

But I knew--I'd found out that his parents

lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois,

and so I went to the--

I just dialed all the Wallaces

um, until I found his parents.

I didn't expect them to talk to me, but they did.

And his father explained that, you know, his son

was suffering from serious depression.

It had gone--he'd had electro-shock therapy.

It was a horrifying,

horrifying story.

But, you know, it was...

...it was really explanatory,

and I think, and I think

it worked well for readers,

I mean, to explain why this immensely talented

and obviously--

if you read his work, you know he's obviously--

this is a guy who obviously lives inside his own head,

you know, with a great intensity.

And I hope the obit explains

some of--explains some of this to people.

We got an email from somebody saying that

his father had helped save

the Spacelab, I think--Skylab.

It was such a preposterous claim, I thought,

"This is just ridiculous."

Many times, people send in notes about their loved ones

that grossly exaggerate their accomplishments,

because maybe that's the way Daddy used to tell the story,

or maybe they heard the story that way.

This just seemed ridiculous,

but when Dan finished the morgue run

and brought back the clip file,

there was an article about how this guy,

who had never been to college but was sort of a tinkerer,

saved this mission.

There was some failure of heat shields

that threatened this whole mission in space,

and he basically helped come up with

this sort of ingenious tinkerer's fix.

A parasol that could be shoved through

this hole and then opened up.

You know, he bought fishing rods,

and he assembled this thing with a team of people

in two or three days and it worked.

It was the article in the morgue that convinced me

that this preposterous claim was legitimate,

was actually true.

We could document it.

Yeah, Jack Kinzler.

In the morgue, we found a drawing

of how this thing worked, and this was on the front page.

That just made it that much stronger of a story.

You ready?

So this is the Times Morgue.

At the height of it, it was manned by 30 people.

Now one person.

Three shifts a day, seven days a week,

almost 24 hours till 3 A.M.

You had the cutters, the indexers,

the filers, the refilers.

We clipped from about 28 different publications

along with the Times.

Before we moved, there were approximately

10,000 drawers of clippings.

If it went into the new Times building,

all the floors would pancake.

It couldn't stand the weight.

So how much have I actually seen here?

Virtually nothing, I mean, it's not even a question.

I mean, look.

I mean, how could you read all that?

It's just one drawer, there's thousands of those drawers.

And it's just--it's impossible.

Yeah, I mean, when you come in here, it looks...

it looks pretty chaotic, but no.

Everything is organized specifically in certain areas.

Clippings generally over here.

You've got people clippings, you've got subject clippings,

you've gut geographical clipping;

This is the 36 volumes of the Iran Contra hearings.

I don't know, we like to keep the paper copy

because we don't know if the online is gonna work.

Card catalog for the clippings, card catalog for the pictures,

stretches over here still and over there.

People have to figure it out for themselves to a certain extent.

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