Obit. Page #3

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Stretching all of these cabinets are pictures,

but not really, because there's also clips on top.

Ninety percent of the subject photographs are in here.

Biographical photographs, 90 percent are out there.

Biographical pictures, five people to a folder.

Sometimes if it's like a big deal person it's one number.

As I tell everyone, this is not rocket science.

This is very straightforward, but there's no rhyme or reason

really to, like, why there's a picture somewhere.

So next to City Planning Commission, France housing.

So this picture's of houses.

U.S. Navy Marine, ships, the ZuiderKruis,

Central Intelligence Agency.

Key thing is put it back on the right spot.

If you misfile it, man, it's gone.

You misfiled it, it is gone.

And so now, specifically with obituaries,

what happens a lot of times is that, you know,

we'll have a picture that's like 50 years old.

It's kind of the typical thing where, okay,

you're thumbing through the card catalog,

and I might've been looking for some other Seeger.

And I see Charles Seeger, and I know Charles Seeger,

"Oh, that's Pete's pop."

So I was looking through it just purely for my own interest,

and...

wow.

There's, like, the Seeger family.

"Professor Charles Lewis Seeger with wife and children

giving an open air concert at camp in Washington

in their tour like minstrels of olden time."

June 4th,1921.

So there's Peter.

That's Pete Seeger.

I always kept saying,

"Hey, when he dies,

you should use--or you should look at that picture,

because no one's gonna have that,"

and no one did have it, because we paid ten bucks for it.

Times, wide world, 1921.

You know, once it ran in the paper and on the website,

the whole world sees it, and so,

it changes the story,

and it changes your perspective.

Here's Pete, two years old and his family is already

going down South trying to figure out

old songs, and so that's--

literally his life is there

from the very beginning.

You always have somebody check to see

if there's stuff in the morgue.

You know, the fear of missing something

is sort of a defining aesthetic.

Every researcher knows that the thing you're looking for

leads you to the thing you weren't looking for,

and is much better than the thing you were looking for.

You know, it's like water on the roof, you know,

you just don't know where it's gonna come through.

It just--it's a story, you know,

and you follow the story to where

it has its greatest power.

In the research of any obituary,

I'm always looking for,

for striking details,

'cause A, they're fun to write, B, they're fun to read,

and C, they tell you stuff about people's lives

that may seem like off the, off the main narrative

of why you're writing the obit,

but it bolsters the narrative.

Bill Haley and his Comets!

I wrote the obituary of the bass player

for Bill Haley and the Comets

when they recorded Rock Around the Clock.

Rock Around the Clock was recorded

the year after I was born,

and it's been a staple of my lifetime.

I wrote a little bit too much and they were cutting,

they were cutting my obit, and there was something

in there that I really wanted to keep, and the thing

that I wanted to keep was that his father was a hog butcher.

He grew up poor in North Carolina during the Depression,

and his father was a hog butcher, and I thought,

"You know, that's a detail that's worth keeping."

It contributes to a narrative, it somehow tells you

about the life that this guy lived.

Thinking of obituaries as something

that can make you laugh as well as cry,

I think that's a fairly recent development.

Like many other kinds of stories at the paper,

they used to be dull, dry, responsible,

very well fact-checked,

but not terribly thrilling to read.

In the old days, there was no part of an obit

more formulaic than the lede paragraph.

John Doe who died when, who died of what,

who died where, who died at what age.

Those facts can often be very intrusive,

stop the narrative.

You're always wrestling with a way of folding them in

without interrupting the flow.

Clearly, you can't throw it out, but you're trying to write

a story, not just deliver a resume.

What I strive to do and try to get our writers to do

is to think big picture in a sense.

There is a kind of form that we adhere to,

but we also like to bend it,

and we like to experiment where we can.

We try to even inject humor.

You have to walk a very fine line,

because you're talking about dead people,

and you don't want to offend,

but you're also there to somewhat--

you know, you're there to educate and illuminate,

and even entertain your readers.

You know, it needs to be sort of seductive.

I don't know if you would be automatically inclined

to read the obituary of the bass player on Rock Around the Clock,

and it's therefore my responsibility

to try and persuade you to do so.

If you're interested in rock and roll,

what does that word "percussive" mean?

Why was that important?

You're trying to weave a historical spell in a way,

and enchant the reader, and do justice to a life.

You have the chance that you can't repeat.

It's a once-only chance to make the dead live again.

"Irving Cohen, who was known as King Cupid of the Catskills

for his canny ability to seat just the right nice Jewish boy

next to just the right nice Jewish girl

during his half-century as the matre d'

of the Concord Hotel, died on Monday.

He was 95."

"Candy Barr, an exotic dancer whose hardscrabble life

became Texas legend as she befriended Jack Ruby,

who killed President John F. Kennedy's assassin,

dated a mobster, shot her husband,

went to prison for drug possession, and starred--

unwillingly, she insisted-- in a famous stag film,

died on Friday in Victoria, Texas.

She was 70."

Well, hello.

I have two daughters, Phyllis...

Cocktail sauce in the fried shrimp...

"Eugene Polly, an inventor whose best known creation

has fostered blissful sloth,

caused decades of domestic discord,

and forever altered the way consumers watch television,

died on Sunday in Downers Grove, Illinois.

Mr. Polly, the inventor of the wireless

television remote, was 96."

"Her three successive names were signposts

on a twisted, bewildering road that took her

from Stalin's Kremlin where she was the 'little princess'

to the West in a celebrated defection,

and finally to decades of obscurity,

wandering, and poverty.

At her birth on February 28th, 1926,

she was named Svetlana Stalina,

the only daughter and last surviving child

of the brutal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin.

After he died in 1953,

she took her mother's last name, Alliluyeva.

In 1970, after her defection and an American marriage,

she became and remained Lana Peters.

Ms. Peters died of colon cancer on November 22nd

in Richland County, Wisconsin.

'You can't regret your fate,' she once said,

'although I do regret my mother didn't marry a carpenter."'

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