Obit. Page #6

---

saw word of this woman's death

in one of the European papers.

She was an eminent Russian dancer.

It was Friday night, too late to reach anybody in Europe,

so he wrote up a very reasonable obit.

When our story ran, the switchboards lit up

with hysterical calls from this woman's family.

Not only was she not dead,

she was in a nursing home in Manhattan.

So, after that, in the second paragraph

we have to not only say that the person is dead,

we have to say how we know, and we'd better be damn sure.

That can often be the most anxious moment

in writing an obit, which is trying to find--

waiting for the phone call or the email

from the person who actually will allow you

to nail this one fact down

and let the thing go to press.

I have very little patience with people

who don't want to tell me what the cause of death was.

I don't see what the embarrassment is

if somebody died of AIDS or if somebody had dementia

or if it was, I don't know,

cancer of the what-- cancer of the pancreas.

I don't know why people find the idea of illness

that causes death embarrassing.

But if somebody's younger, there is a real curiosity

about why someone died, and I'll...

I'll be a little bit of a pest about that.

God, I can't believe these are her clips here now.

Man, what a drag.

These are all the clips on--man!

On Gertrude Berg.

Someone was asking for this recently.

Believe me, this is the first--

I didn't even realize it was here.

I didn't--I didn't think to look here, truthfully.

For some reason, and I don't know why we did this,

we removed famous people, some famous people,

and put 'em all together in this cabinet.

Why? I don't know.

I have no idea.

There was some kind of rhyme to it,

but what happens is that...

as the years and generations of people

working in this facility go on,

the person who knew the reason for that is gone.

See, it's out of order from the sequence over here,

so it just says "VIP," and that was me writing "VIP,"

reminding myself that it was there.

But I rarely look through it,

and I should've looked through it because,

I'm tellin' ya,

I really wish that I would have known that this was here.

Who's the one who does the maintenance

and maintains everything?

Me, I mean, I'm the last person running it.

Am I the one who knows...

where everything is?

No, 'cause I just showed you that I'm not.

Do I know more than anyone else here at this point?

Yeah, but that's just because I spent some spare time

rooting around and trying to figure out

why things were where they were, and how it happened,

and why it was created certain ways.

So that's the only reason why

I know more than anyone else,

because I opened all the drawers, so to speak.

Not all the drawers!

What did I want to be?

You know, I went through various things.

I wanted to be an airplane pilot.

Then I wanted to be an architect.

First I thought I wanted to be a musician.

I was a fairly serious cellist

from about the age of 12 through college.

I wanted to be a ballplayer.

After that I wanted to be a mathematician,

and after that I wanted to be a musician.

It never once occurred to me that I was gonna end up

writing for a daily newspaper.

An obituary editor? Now, who' da thunk that?

We all have the great pleasure of being able

to come out of the closet in this day and age

as obit writers.

Only a generation ago, maybe even more recently than that,

obits were very stigmatized.

The obits section has always been a kind of Siberia

at the paper, you know.

A place where people who were getting on in their careers

were parked as a, sort of, last stop on their way out.

The obits section was where newspapers

typically sent writers whom they were trying to punish

but didn't quite have enough on to fire.

They were where you traditionally got sent

if you were deemed to be a heartbeat away

from needing an obit yourself.

Happily that has changed in the last 20 years or so.

If you think about one of the slang ways

of saying that somebody's died, we say "He's history."

And what an obit actually does,

which I find very compelling and very moving,

is it captures that person at the precise point

that he or she becomes history.

It reminds you-- you're opening the paper,

or if you're online,

and suddenly came upon somebody you haven't thought about,

probably, in 20 years.

It evokes a whole different set of memories,

brings you back to the Kennedy administration,

or it may be your parents--

your parents used to watch this show all the time,

and it drove you crazy!

But you see the obit of the actor

who died from that show, and it brings you back,

and you remember Mom and Dad watching it.

You get retrospectively to see how people got

from A to B to C in their lives.

And you get to interrogate history,

and if you're lucky you get to interrogate fate,

and the question we writers tacitly ask is,

"If someone had an idea,

invented something, started a movement,

wrote a book that changed the world,

what occasioned that?"

Was it the slow, deliberate accretion of free will?

Was everything in the life geared to that?

Or was it, as makers of film noir

would have us worrying about,

the intervention of pure blind fate?

Did someone take a different route to work

one day in 1947 and, as a result,

had an idea that changed the world?

How did people get to be where they are?

How did people get to be the way they are?

How did the world get to be the way it is?

"At 8:
15:17 A.M. on August 6, 1945,

Colonel Ferebee, then a 26-year-old major,

pushed a lever in his B-29 bomber,

the Enola Gay, making sure an automatic system

he had activated seconds earlier had functioned."

I could clearly see the city of Hiroshima

within my bombsight.

Then I clutched in and took the run,

and I felt the bump of the airplane.

"He watched as a single, 9,000-pound bomb

turned nose-down and fell toward its target, Aioi Bridge,

which he had personally selected from aerial photographs.

He said, 'Bomb away!'

Forty-three seconds later,

when the bomb had fallen from 31,000 feet

to 1,890 feet above the target,

the sky erupted in dazzling light,

and the earth soon seemed to seethe like boiling liquid.

The bomber, also called a Superfortress,

veered away from the swirling explosion

in a steep, 150-degree turn."

"At least 80,000 Japanese were killed instantly

or would eventually die as a result of radiation

from the explosion.

And the atomic age was born."

"Thomas Wilson Ferebee, the third of 11 children,

was born in 1918

and grew up on a farm outside Monksville,

a town in central North Carolina

about 20 miles southwest of Winston-Salem.

He attended Lees-McRae College

in Banner Elk, North Carolina,

where he won letters in track, basketball and football."

He's just a guy, you know.

He was so ordinary, I mean, he was just a guy who grew up,

played sports, um, went to the little college,

and, um...

and um, ended up in the Army Air Force.

Rate this script:0.0 / 0 votes